In 1985 Michael Kaiser sold his management consulting business and ended up taking over a troubled Kansas City Ballet Company. That experience started him on a career path working with arts organizations that needed help.

He shares his experiences in a recently published book, The Art of the Turnaround.

And while Michael Kaiser's experience is with arts organizations, his book offers lessons for all nonprofits. In these turbulent times, Mr. Kaiser's ten rules for turnarounds make sense for any organization facing a crisis of confidence.

The ten rules are:

1. Someone must lead
2. The leader must have a plan
3. You cannot save your way to health
4. Focus on today and tomorrow, not yesterday
5. Extend your programming planning calendar
6. Marketing is more than brochures and advertisements
7. There must be only one spokesman and the message must be positive
8. Fund-raising must focus on the larger donor, but don't aim too high
9. The board must allow itself to be restructured
10. The organization must have the discipline to follow each of these rules

While many of these rules seem self-evident, I was struck by the fact that I have often seen them ignored. If I look back over my thirty years in the nonprofit sector I can trace every organizational crisis that I've seen back to one of these ten rules.

Perhaps the deeper message in Mr. Kaiser's book is that any organization can find itself in need of a turnaround if it ignores these rules.

Take, for example, the first two rules: Someone must lead and the leader must have a plan. In his discussion of these two points Mr. Kaiser observes that boards of directors are often have no training to deal with the most critical issue they face: hiring an executive director.

Too often search committees and boards fail to take the time to reach a common understanding about what kind of leader the organization needs. Sometimes this happens because a great executive director has done the job so well that the board doesn't really understand all the work that goes into running the organization. The board takes fund raising for granted or expects that earned income will continue, but fails to bring in a new leader with the skills to tap those resources.

In other cases, organizations are in trouble, but the board fails to act, either because board members hope things will work out or because the board fails to understand that there really is a crisis.

The Art of the Turnaround is an important book for anyone active in the nonprofit sector. As Michael Kaiser says in his introduction "The sad fact of life is that there is a very slim line between sickness and health in the arts."

I would offer that all nonprofits exist either just above or just below that slim line. The time to understand those rules for the turnaround is while an organization is still healthy. Because more than a cure, those ten rules can immunize organizations against failure and the need for a turnaround.