The nonprofit board governance literature has suggested that boards are unclear about their roles and responsibilities. In response to this issue, boards have been presented with more and more detailed and restrictive job descriptions. For William Ryan, a consultant to foundations and nonprofit organizations and research fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University, the lack of clarity isn't the only culprit for the rampant lack of enthusiasm for governance among board members. Ryan suggests that boards find their work neither personally meaningful to them nor consequential for the organization and analyzes board disengagement as a problem of purpose.

To remedy this situation Ryan offers a new conceptual framework for helping nonprofit organizations maximize the effectiveness of their boards called Governance as Leadership. Working in collaboration with noted consultants and researchers attuned to the needs of practitioners, Ryan redefines nonprofit governance and advocates for the enrichment of boards' work: more macro-governance in exchange for less micromanagement.

Ryan argues that boards need to be governing in three modes:

• The traditional fiduciary mode where legal, security, and liability questions ought to be addressed
• The strategic mode where a wide range of issues from market positioning to organizational image are raised
• The generative mode, a new and highly subjective area of intervention dealing primarily with the institution's identity, its preferences and values.

Building on concrete examples of questions addressed to boards, Ryan walks his audience of nonprofit leaders through fresh approaches to familiar territory and a lucid guide to important new territory, and provides a road map that leads nonprofit trustees and executives to governance as leadership. He speaks at the 2006 Nonprofit Institute convened by the Center for Social Innovation's publication, the Stanford Social Innovation Review.