Nature's Keepers: The Remarkable Story of How the Nature Conservancy Became the Largest Environmental Group in the World [Hardcover]

Bill Birchard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 2005

With more than $3.7 billion in assets and annual revenue of $800 million, the Nature Conservancy has generated staggering growth that would be the envy of any business.

Incorporated in 1951 by a small circle of concerned ecologists, the Conservancy has grown financially into the world's largest environmental organization. It has one million members--up from 500,000 in 1990--and 3,500 employees operating in 50 states and 28 countries across the world.

Nature's Keepers offers readers an inspirational leadership tale and management chronicle, as it goes behind the scenes and details the inner workings of the Nature Conservancy. Highlighting the efforts of nine extraordinary leaders, Nature's Keepers examines the organization's culture and management, strategy and decisions, and courageous and ingenious individuals who have dedicated their lives to conservation.

Author Bill Birchard reveals how the Conservancy's sometimes controversial business practices--entrepreneurial approaches to preserving ecosystems while meeting human needs--have earned the praise of management gurus such as Peter Drucker. The Conservancy's way of operating, though not free of failings, is both widely emulated in the nonprofit community and greatly respected by business scholars and CEOs nationwide.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

This generally admiring portrait of the Nature Conservancy, the organization that preserves genetic material and uniquely functioning ecological systems, emphasizes the inner workings of the organization, focusing on nine personalities within its ranks. Journalist Birchard outlines the history of the group from its birth pangs in 1950 to the 2003 natural-gas scandal that led to a series of stories in the Washington Post. Most of the profiles are of upper management, including ecologist Robert Jenkins, who changed the conservancy's directive to a qualitative, rather than a quantitative approach; president Patrick Noonan, who made corporate America an environmental partner; and Gregory Low, who encouraged the organization to work on "landscape-scale" operations. The narrative isn't entirely linear, as many of those profiled overlapped in service; manager John Sawhill, for example, is profiled in two separate places within the book. Ultimately, Birchard, by combining interviews, meeting minutes, speech transcripts, and reports, does a remarkable job of providing a coherent picture of "the largest environmental organization in the world." Rebecca Maksel
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Nature’s Keepers is a remarkable book about a remarkable organization—and a ripping yarn about groups and people who make a difference against all odds. Beyond that, it is a matchless tale of a half century of organizational growth and renewal—replete with missteps and subsequent vaults upward. Told as a series of nine fast-paced sagas of extraordinary leaders, it holds lessons of the utmost importance for every variety of reader."
--Tom Peters

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (March 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787971588
• ISBN-13: 978-0787971588
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #446,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

BILL BIRCHARD is an author and book consultant. He has written a dozen books for his own and other author's bylines, including a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book for his own byline is Merchants of Virtue (Palgrave/Macmillan, in press). Other books include Nature's Keepers (Jossey-Bass, 2005) and, with David Nichol M.D., The One-Minute Meditator (Perseus, 2001). See also billbirchard.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A decent (selective) history but a disappointing analysis of strategy, January 27, 2006

By 

Arthur Digbee (Indianapolis, IN, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Nature's Keepers: The Remarkable Story of How the Nature Conservancy Became the Largest Environmental Group in the World (Hardcover)

This is a book about business strategy in a non-profit corporation, The Nature Conservancy (TNC). The book begins and ends with a scandal, a series of articles by the Washington Post that uncovered failures of governance in this non-profit organization. These revelations came after a series of scandals concerning corporate governance in companies such as Enron, and the Nature Conservancy very much needed to keep its image distinct from those kinds of businesses.

When evaluating this book, it's important to keep in mind what Berchard intends it to be (a book about strategy) as well as what it might have been (a history of the Nature Conservancy). In light of some of the other reviews, I think it's also important to remember whether we like the book or not is a separate question from whether we like the Nature Conservancy or not.

Berchard does not intend this book to be a history of the Nature Conservancy, and it isn't. However, it presents selected strategic challenges of the organization in chronological order, so it looks as if it might be a history. There is much left out, in particular, the events between strategic challenges. These make up most of the growth of the organization. I wish Berchard had given us more of that history, since the supposed success of TNC's leadership must be evident in that growth - the proof of the pudding is in the eating, after all. Even so, Berchard has done enough research into TNC's files, and conducted enough interviews, so that this book would be a useful source for someone else who wanted to write a history of the organization.

Berchard *does* intend this book to be about business strategy, even if the business is a non-profit. The structure of each chapter is similar: TNC faces some challenge that reveals the limits of its previous way of doing things. A leader either changes what s/he is doing to meet the challenge, or a new leader comes along who finds a way to meet the challenge.

In other words, the book gives a series of descriptions of successful changes in an organization. But the book is remarkably short of analysis. What were the choices available, and why was this particular response chosen? Would other choices have worked better? Why or why not? Why weren't the changes made earlier? What were the constraints on the leadership that kept it from addressing these challenges earlier than it did?

All in all, the story is remarkably voluntaristic, conveying the sense that any leader can change any organization if he or she has a good strategy. Maybe that's true for some organizations, but it sure isn't true of the one where I work. It also begs the question of why other leaders did not succeed in addressing these challenges. Adding a case study of failure would help round out the book considerably.

These failures to analyze strategy more deeply made for a pretty disappointing book in terms of its own objectives. As a first draft of a history of TNC, it does a decent job.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First clear picture of a complicated organization, May 19, 2005

By 

S. Hamblin (wye mills, maryland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nature's Keepers: The Remarkable Story of How the Nature Conservancy Became the Largest Environmental Group in the World (Hardcover)

He gets it. Birchard did a remarkable job distilling what and who made the Conservancy tick at every stage of its development. He captures the genius and passion of stars like Noonan and Jenkins. The dramatic struggles in the formative years were news to me, even though I worked at The Conservancy for 20 years. Others have tried before to penetrate this extremely complicated enterprise and capture the essence of the organization but nothing I have seen captures the pearls of organizational development like this book. Recommended reading for every charity's staff and board. I hoped the book had room to show how much fun we had- such as the hilarious story of the Aggassiz Glacier, a ficitious land project that staff almost got through the Board of Governors. Maybe in the next book. And I thank the author for re-inforcing my own pride in having worked so hard on the Conservancy's mission.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great success story, April 20, 2005

By 

David Greco (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nature's Keepers: The Remarkable Story of How the Nature Conservancy Became the Largest Environmental Group in the World (Hardcover)

You don't need to be an environmentalist to love this book. The Nature Conservancy is not only the world's largest environmental organizations but one of the most effective. Having worked at other environemtal groups, watching the Conservancy's tremendous growth over the years, I was just amazed and wondered what they were doing to achieve such success. Now Nature's Keepers explains it all. What I really liked was that it was a real honest appraisal about the organization including the mistakes it made and the troubles it faced. It is a great lesson about how to face and overcome challenges to ultimately make your organization stronger.