What you get
Six commitments.
Six decisions govern what these books contain, and what has been deliberately left out of them.
- 01Case studies, not encouragement
Every chapter closes with a case study: an organization that got something wrong, the decision as it appeared at the time, and what it cost. The failures are presented as reasonable decisions, because that is nearly always what they were.
- 02Nothing in here goes out of date
The books do not print figures subject to change: no contractor test, no overtime threshold, no audit trigger. They explain the underlying structure and direct you to verify the current number. A book that prints those figures is inaccurate within two years, and the reader has no way of telling which parts.
- 03No book repeats another
Each subject is treated once, in the book that owns it. Where an answer belongs elsewhere, you are given the chapter reference. Ten books, and no duplicated material in any of them.
- 04Three organizations, followed throughout
A literacy nonprofit, a diaper bank, and a community kitchen. The same people, budgets, and mistakes appear across all ten books, so that every document and figure arrives with its history attached.
- 05Figures that reconcile
Every budget in the set balances, and every figure in a table appears in the text beside it. Published sample budgets frequently do not reconcile, which teaches founders that a budget is a formality.
- 06It stops where your judgment starts
Where an answer depends on your board, your community, or your funders, the book says so and returns the decision to you. You hold information about your organization that no author can have.
Every organization that stopped being useful had a reason at the time. The reason was almost always reasonable.
Inside every chapter
What every chapter contains.
Why it works that way
The reasoning first, then the procedure. Instructions without reasoning fail as soon as your circumstances differ from the example.
One of the three, doing it
One of the three organizations carrying out the work under discussion, with its actual figures: Dana declining a $94,000 county contract, Aisha making a first hire, Ray restructuring a volunteer role.
Something you can copy
A budget, a table, or a worksheet, drawn from figures that appear in the chapter itself.
A failure worth learning from
An anonymized case study, closing on what the organization could not have known at the time.
Ground rules
What this is not.
Not inspirational. Commitment is not sufficient. The sector contains a great many dissolved organizations founded by people who cared a great deal.
Not a complaint. These books are critical of the structure, not of the people working inside it. Nothing described here requires anyone to be acting in bad faith.
Not a substitute for your judgment. Ten books of structure. The decisions remain yours.
Get the complete set
All ten books, plus the toolkit.
Passion Turned Profession is available as a complete set for $149: all ten books in PDF and EPUB, plus the forty documents printed in Book X as editable Word files. The books are not sold separately.