by Eddie Thompson | Feb 1, 2013 | Donor Communications
As a student at Vanderbilt University over thirty years ago, I served as a graduate assistant to the Department of Educational Leadership. Vanderbilt was hosting a meeting of university presidents to discuss funding issues. In the late 1970s, and early 1980s, our...
by Eddie Thompson | Jan 10, 2013 | Development Management
This is part two of my review of the book by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen — Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All (See part one: Donor Pinging). My objective is to suggest a few ways the principles in Great by Choice can be...
by Eddie Thompson | Nov 25, 2012 | Donor Communications
I’ve spent thirty years meeting with donors from each non-profit institution I serve as a charitable estate planning consultant. Setting up estate plans that contain advanced structures and procedures is the easy part — almost incidental to the process. The most...
by Eddie Thompson | Oct 30, 2012 | Donor Communications
In their recent book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen published the results of a nine-year research project in which they identified three characteristics of what they called “10X leaders.” These were CEOs who led their companies to achieve ten times...
by Eddie Thompson | Sep 30, 2012 | Charitable Estate Planning
In 1785 a French mathematician named Charles Joseph Mathon de la Cour wrote a parody of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac in which he mocked the unbearable spirit of American optimism represented by Franklin. The Frenchman fictionalized about “Fortunate...
