The assumption that boards aren't engaged seems really strange to me.
Of the two nonprofit boards I've been on (one very well functioning, one not so much), both have had highly engaged board members.
He also seems to be assuming mid-sized or larger nonprofits. For nonprofits with very few employees, or low budgets, board members often are brought in for their expertise, and their willingness to get in and do the work that would be done by employees in a larger nonprofit. If you can't pay them as employees, and they are volunteering their time and expertise and are highly engaged, it makes sense to put them on the board. Why wouldn't you?
> He also seems to be assuming mid-sized or larger nonprofits
I think that's it in a nutshell. Or super ambitious nonprofits gunning for Effective Altruist funding by having the most Silicon Valley approach to operating and expanding possible.
In the rest of the nonprofit world, the board member with the legal background is there for legal advice, the one with the media background to help promote its work; if both of them think performance metrics is one for the board member with the accountancy background to look into rather than for them to study and challenge, that's fine And firing the CEO (an experienced middle manager who took a massive pay cut to get involved) for not hitting KPIs is wayyy down the list of useful things they could be doing
> He also seems to be assuming mid-sized or larger nonprofits.
I think that's really the kind of org he's trying to talk about, even if he doesn't spell it out as well as he could. Some of these small orgs tend to be more tight-knit and the board is more of a formalism, overlapping in large part with the operations. There are certainly some small orgs that I think you can hold his analysis up to, though.
Mostly paying attention to large nonprofits aligns with his experience founding one of the best-known charity evaluators in the world and then spinning off to co-found a multi-billions-backed grantmaker which is giving out hundreds of millions a year and trying to ramp it up.
I was involved with a non-profit with a low-eight-figure (USD) budget. The board members were chosen because they either had money or had influence over people with money. In other words, busy people. Over the years the CEO reduced the amount of information that got to the board, in part by replacing competent staff with lackeys, and the reality of the organization diverged ever further from the stated objectives and value.
Of the two nonprofit boards I've been on (one very well functioning, one not so much), both have had highly engaged board members.
He also seems to be assuming mid-sized or larger nonprofits. For nonprofits with very few employees, or low budgets, board members often are brought in for their expertise, and their willingness to get in and do the work that would be done by employees in a larger nonprofit. If you can't pay them as employees, and they are volunteering their time and expertise and are highly engaged, it makes sense to put them on the board. Why wouldn't you?