Called to Serve: Creating and Nurturing the Effective Volunteer Board

Called to Serve is for people with questions about creating and maintaining a successful nonprofit board. How can the board of a nonprofit organization work best? Now that I'm on such a board, what should I do? How can we find the best trustees? How should I think about my work for nonprofits? What kind of relationship between a board and the staff will work best? How can we organize and develop the service of busy, committed people?

Internationally renowned CEO and best-selling author Max De Pree packs his many years of experience on nonprofit boards into these short letters directed to busy folks active in nonprofit life. Brief, clear, and -- above all -- useful, Called to Serve notes the marks of an effective board, lays out the proper work of boards, gives choices for structuring a nonprofit board, and covers the roles and relationships of board chairpersons, trustees, and presidents.

Today there are more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in America, with 109 million people working in this important sector of society. In spite of this surprising fact, very little training exists for this kind of service. Called to Serve is valuable not only because it fills this need but also because it comes from the pen of one of America's most experienced and respected business leaders.

Max De Pree (1924–2017) was the chief executive officer of Herman Miller, Inc., a Fortune 500 company based in Zeeland, Michigan. During his career, he was lauded by Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal as one of the most compassionate and successful leaders in the business world. Under his leadership, Herman Miller, Inc. nearly tripled its sales and was awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for dedication to design excellence. De Pree was the author of several highly regarded books on leadership, including Leadership Is an Art, Leadership Jazz, and Called to Serve.