Giving Compass' Take:

• The Bridgespan Group offers five recommended readings on scaling social change and transformational impact across many industries such as social entrepreneurship, charter school education, and international nonprofits. 

• How can we continuously contextualize scale and impact for those who are in the social sector? Why is measuring impact and continuously looking at transparency important for social change to occur? Who are other thought leaders that we can follow when it comes to measuring scale?

• Read PhilanTopic's book review of Social Startup Success: How The Best Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up And Make A Difference. 

We're constantly looking for resources that bring new insights to the pursuit of impact at a transformative scale. Here are five interesting pieces we came across recently:

1. Shooting for the Moon, Missing the Point: Courtney Martin warns of the limitations of "moonshot" thinking and metaphors—a warning that can be easily extended to "big bets" and "transformative impact." This shouldn't cause those of us working on transformative scale to abandon the core concepts or the powerful language.

2. Impact India blogs: Our colleagues Soumitra Pandey, Rohit Menezes, and Swati Ganeti (who until recently worked at Bridgespan and is now in business school) have written a five-part series on mindset changes required for scaling.Each blog focuses on a different aspect of how Indian nonprofits have scaled, from their "dignity mindset" to their adoption of a "radical frugality mindset" to service provision.

3. Social Enterprise Is Not Social Change: Although social enterprise and social entrepreneurship (SEE) attract great attention as vehicles for social change, they are woefully inadequate to deal with major social problems, write Marshall Ganz, Tamara Kay, and Jason Spicer in the latest issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

4. Girl Effect rides on technology to empower poor adolescents: Girl Effect is a fascinating NGO, spun out of Nike three years ago, that focuses on empowering girls by shifting the public's perception of them.

5. Lessons in Flexibility from the Nation's Largest Charter School Network: I'm a big admirer of Richard Barth, who has led KIPP, the nation's largest and most successful charter network, for 12 years. Over the course of his tenure, when he observed initial approaches breaking down, he had the flexibility to alter course and make big adjustments.

Read the full article about transformational social change reading list by Jeffrey Bradach at The Bridgespan Group