When Rick Santos became CEO of Church World Service, it was a homecoming.

He had spent his first 13 years in international development there, left for more than a decade, and returned to succeed the leader he had once worked for. That leader had led the organization for 27 years.

Some of the furniture was the same. So were some of the systems, and so was the CFO. The organization “had been functioning really well for about 20 years, but it hadn’t really changed much in those 20 years,” he says.

He faced the question every new CEO faces: “What do I keep? What do I change?”

He spent six months listening. Then he brought the staff and board a package of strategic priorities: one program team in place of two silos, a more nimble organization, a broader funding base, and transparent collaboration.

Rick brought in outside consultants so his leaders would share an understanding of the problem, and he gave the leaders facing the biggest changes control over the pace.

One answer never satisfies him when he asks why something is done a certain way: “'That’s how we’ve always done it.' For me, that’s never the right answer.”

He also talks about the merger he previously led at IMA World Health, why nonprofit mergers are more complicated than corporate ones, why a 1% overhead rate would worry him, and the underrated work of being the bridge between the board and the staff.

Rick Santos is President and CEO of Church World Service, which works in refugee resettlement, disaster relief, and long-term development in the US and overseas. Church World Service reported $279.9 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025.

In 2021, YouVersion’s Bible App passed half a billion devices. The team celebrated. Bobby Gruenewald knew growth was barely above flat, and the milestone “felt very hollow.”

He decided that if he wasn’t going to steward it well, someone else should. He started looking for a CEO who had led at that scale.

When he asked one of his closest advisors who it should be, the advisor said, “Well, it needs to be you.”

Bobby pushed back: “We need a real CEO.”

But two other people he trusted agreed with the advisor. So in January 2022, Bobby stepped into the CEO role full time, “reluctantly and uncomfortably.”

Then, in his words, “nothing actually went well that year.”

The right candidates didn’t come, the numbers stayed flat, the team was in flux, and for the first time the ministry was spending money it didn’t have. By December, the leaders he needed arrived and the numbers began to turn.

This conversation covers why he labeled YouVersion’s first website a failure three months in, why he re-risked the work, and why he believes organizations lose speed and flexibility unless a leader pushes for them.

Bobby Gruenewald is founder and CEO of YouVersion, the ministry behind the free Bible App, which launched with Apple’s App Store in 2008 and is now on more than a billion devices. YouVersion is non-commercial and supported entirely by donors.

In six months, the Community Food Club grew by 47 percent. AJ Fossel had six people on staff. She was stocking onions in the back because there was nobody else. A trusted teammate told her she was going to leave.

AJ sat in her office after hours and cried.

She knew she needed to hire. She also knew that meant dipping into reserves, having a hard conversation with the board, and asking for help in a way that felt like admitting she didn't have all the answers. She took her board chair — who came from grocery — out to breakfast, because she couldn't leave the store at lunch.

This conversation covers what she brought to that board meeting, why being transparent with donors about exactly where the food club stood built more trust than a polished plan would have, and what the board authorized that finally let her lead without second-guessing every dollar.

She also talks about a member advisory council that makes calls she would not have made herself, and why charging a monthly fee matters — it turns members into customers.

AJ Fossel is Executive Director of the Community Food Club in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a nonprofit grocery store serving households across Kent County, with $4.5 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025.

Three days into his tenure, Will Jones was asked to sign a letter moving $150,000 from Thompson's endowment to cover a $200,000 payroll.

Two weeks later, the same letter was back on his desk.

Thompson was spending about $5 million a year more than it brought in, and its leaders were telling staff the model could not work any other way.

Will concluded the organization had more people than work. On a three-day beach trip with his family, he told his wife, "I know what I need to do." He would take a reduction in force to the board, and if they would not back him, this was not the right mission for him.

A board member asked whether it could wait six months. Will said it could, but in six months the number would be 50. The board backed him.

This conversation covers what it cost him to be "the heavy" in a leadership team that was "okay with the mission shutting down," and how Thompson innovated to serve more kids that were falling through cracks in the system elsewhere.

He also talks about why he stopped his executive team from voting on decisions, why leaders who can grow but don't want to are the worst fit for a growing organization, and why nearly all his peers are for-profit leaders.

Will Jones is President and CEO of Thompson Child & Family Focus, a 140-year-old youth-serving organization in the Charlotte area that works in five states. Thompson reported $49.4 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025.

The hard calls, the ones that are 51/49, are supposed to land on the CEO's desk. Romanita Hairston warns that without a clear escalation framework, you'll be doing the wrong work.

"You can be making 51/49 decisions, but not the most consequential ones," she says.

One of her first moves after becoming CEO of the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust in 2022 was a strategy decision. The Trust affirmed its identity as a capacity-building institution and cut the sectors it served in half, from about 80 to 38. A second review narrowed that list by roughly half again.

Her reasoning runs through the whole conversation: "Strategic intent always exceeds strategic capacity, no matter how large you are as a foundation."

We talk about how she builds strategy from principle-level choices down to business plans, and why decision speed depends more on business rhythm than on layers of management. She also explains how her team deals with a question that no guideline covers, and why feedback runs all year long.

She also shares what she tells new CEOs, and what books she re-reads.

Romanita Hairston is CEO of the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, a 50-year-old foundation that invests in nonprofits across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. She has also led her own consulting practice and previously served at World Vision.

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes had worked the same way with high school and college athletes since 1954.

Then someone asked a question in a leadership meeting that nobody could answer well, and it started a decade of change.

Shane Williamson became the CEO in 2017. The reset came down to three words: engage, equip, empower.

I was surprised that the vision and the mission then changed to match, not the other way around. And it was a radical expansion of their work to new age brackets, and many more types of sport. They began working with leagues for six-year-olds, as well as surf camps and motocross, radically different from their first 60 years.

That smells like mission drift to some people.

Shane says the why never moved, and the how and the where are supposed to.

Shane Williamson is President and CEO of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which has 3,500 staff and about 1.5 million volunteers. FCA reported $262 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025, up 138% since the reset.

Heather Rice-Minus walked out of a board meeting without an important approval.

She had presented a new mission and vision for Prison Fellowship, built over a year of listening in prisons and long work with her leadership team. The lawyers wordsmithed. Her board chair asked whether people would understand it. The words went back on the shelf.

She went home and sat with her husband, wondering what she had signed up for.

Four months later, at her first board meeting as CEO, she put the same words back on the screen. She had sent a memo in advance explaining why each one was chosen. The vote to approve was unanimous.

This conversation covers what happened in between, including the January meeting where she asked her leadership team to tell her what to change in the draft, and the cascading decisions that followed the vote.

She also talks about the board selection process she has been rebuilding, why she would rather have 13 board members than the maximum of 21, the parental leave policy she announced in her first all-staff meeting, and why the people slightly askew from your vision are the hardest ones to see.

Heather Rice-Minus is President and CEO of Prison Fellowship, the nation's largest Christian nonprofit serving people in prison, their families, and those coming home. Prison Fellowship reported $70.3 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025 and is celebrating its 50th year in 2026.

Barry Corey is starting his twentieth year as president of Biola University. He says he is on his third presidency at the same institution.

Early on, he hired a senior leader he liked and respected. Years later the university had moved and the role had moved with it. Barry agonized for weeks over a decision he already knew was inevitable, and when he walked in to deliver it, the office started to spin and he nearly passed out.

That decision, and what it cost to make, sits at the center of this conversation.

Barry has also written a book, Necessary Burdens, with contributing author John Townsend, on the fourteen burdens carried by the one person at the top of an organization. His argument is that those burdens turn into assets once a leader stops reading them as evidence of weakness.

This conversation covers why the top leader personifies the organization and absorbs its criticism as personal rejection, the distinction he draws between wanting to "be president" and wanting to "do president," and how fifteen years of retreats with a small group of other presidents has sustained him in the work.

He also talks about the T.S. Eliot line he leads by, the five things he told his board he would do himself and delegate to no one, and why he calls it the president's office and never his own.

Barry Corey is president of Biola University, a 5,500-student university in Southern California. His book Necessary Burdens, written with John Townsend, releases today.