Leadership books are common and often seem to be written for the aspiring leader, lacking serious content for the actual practicioner of leadership in the arena. The Longview by Roger Parrot is an outstanding exception. Filled with great insight for those who lead organizations, it touches on some issues that aren’t often spoken of in off-the-rack leadership books.
1. Lead as if You’ll be There Forever. My mentor Dr. Fulton Buntain was a big believer in consistency and exampled it by remaining pastor of Life Center church in Tacoma, WA for forty years. Watching him I saw first hand the power of making decisions with the idea that you’re going to be there to see you’re decisions come to bear fruit. Obviously however, this isn’t as common as it should be. Leaders come to see themselves a “turnaround artist” or a “transitional leader” largely because they don’t make decisions with their eye on the longview of history. Instead they rush it, pushing reforms before the nameplate off their predecessor is taken off the door.
2. Planning Will Drain Life. In a well-reasoned chapter, Parrott suggest that typical long term planning is hard to do well because of the unpredictability of the future. Instead he highlights a few great concepts that allow for planning to be more responsive and meaningful.
3. Renewal. Clearly this is the backbone of long-lasting leadership. Parrott shares great clues on how to get emotional and spiritual renewal so that you’ll be effective for years to come.
There are many solid tips for experienced leaders in this book beyond what I’ve mentioned here. I recommend you give it a look next time you’re thinking about a book on leadership.
YOU’RE SHOCKED THAT I WOULD SAY THAT I LOVE PROSTITUTES, but I’m hoping when I’m done explaining why, you might say you do too.
I want to be like Jesus. I’m not there, I’m not even close, but I want to love the things he loved and love as he loved. Jesus loved the forgotten, the broken, the abused, the lonely, the hurting, and the worldly. He loved them unconditionally, with a love we will never be able to understand perhaps, but one that we can model by following his example.
Strangely, although many Christians want the loving forgiveness of Jesus, they struggle to see the value in those who do not measure up to their standard. I want to be like Jesus: So I love the hurting, the drug addict, the broken hearted, the prostitute, and whomever Jesus loved.
I also love those that are hurting because I know that I’m in need of unconditional love myself. To say that “I’m not perfect” would be a cliche. It’s more than that: it’s that I was lost and am lost without Jesus and I’m no better or worse than anyone else. To love those that are addicted, selling their bodies, lying, cheating, stealing and committing other sins isn’t an act of pity or charity for the follower of Jesus. Instead it is an act of obedience and a recognition that this is the condition in which Jesus found me.
Every believer should follow the example of Jesus by:
Loving and caring for the poor
Reaching out to the hurting and lonely
Sharing Love extravagantly instead of measuring it out with judgement
Give and live the message of the hope of forgiveness through Jesus.
I love unconditionally because I was loved unconditionally.
The Rescue Mission is about seeing the lives of the homeless, hurting and lonely transformed into healthy, happy people. Our New Life Program accepts women seeking to escape drug abuse, physical abuse, prostitution and more. In addition, here are some great ministries that work in this arena:
Within the next few months the Rescue Mission is going to be upgrading our technical equipment to be able to stream classes from our Challenge Learning Center at our New Life Sq. Campus in downtown Tacoma to two of our other campus’ on Tyler Sq and Adams St., and vice versa.
These valuable classes cover issues such as Genesis Drug Recovery Classes, Life Skills Classes and basic education classes. We are doing this for a number of reasons.
1. Quality of teaching. Like all Rescue Missions I imagine, We have to teach a number of classes daily to the men and women in our programs, but we do not have a resources to hire enough teachers that would allow for the instructors to go deep in one or two particular subjects. With the ability to stream the classes from one site to another we can use each teacher within their one or two strongest subjects and stream it to the other sites.
2. Quantity of teachers/teaching. Right now we are limited by resource constraints on how many teachers we can have on staff. This new strategy will effectively multiply the quantity of teaching we have available to our students at each location because the classes will be available to them live and saved on our site for future viewing.
3 Better Stewardship. Our plan to stream our classes live will allow us to expand our reach without adding significant more staff positions at our new family campus. Our goal is always to see lives transformed through our work at the Rescue Mission, but in pursuing that goal we make a promise to our donors, that we will be effective and efficient with their charitable investment. This will allow us to fulfill both of those goals.
4. Partnership. While I dont’ know of any other Missions that are streaming their daily classes, as time goes on we will be able to seek partnerships with other Missions, schools and ministries. There are endless possibilities for expanded learning opportunities for those we serve in future use of this technology.
I’m curious what you think. Are there other potential uses, advantages and partnerships that we’ve not yet thought of? Do you know of other missions that are streaming their daily drug rehabilitation classes that would be open to partnership? Give me your feedback.
One of the sites I check regularly is TRENDWATCHING.com this months issue is particularly interesting as it has some video interviews with consumers that will surprise you.
In particular, I loved the first video of the series on The Next Big Thing and the video on CAR v. PHONE.
Every so often I like to write a blog or two about the great stuff I’ve run across in publishing, on the web, or on television that has challenged, inspired, or taught me something.
Here’s a few past blogs on What I’m Learning that will give you some background: Video’s, Sites, Misc.
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of great history books on my kindle. As I’ve state in past blogs, I love reading about the great people of history in biography and in well-told narrative. Around Christmas I took a leap on an author I’d not read before, Paul Johnson, and I’ve now read four of his history books and loved each one.
Creators: This book is a compilation of some of the greatest creative personalities in antiquity and semi-modern history. Ever wonder what made Bach great? I’ve never been too interested in him, but Johnson brings his creative genius into tight perspective and gives great lessons in the process. The book is full of characters that you ordinarily wouldn’t want to read a whole biography on, but he just breathes life into these characters. People such as: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Jane Austen, Mark Twain and more. An excellent book to challenge the creative instinct in you by viewing creative through the prism of the greats of long ago.
Intellectuals: much in the same vein as Creators, Intellectuals highlights those pivotal thinkers who have pushed the ideas and ideals of revolutionary thought. A much more critical book, it is helpful in illuminating the gap between the thinkers of enlightenment thought and the application of their ideals and standard to their own life. Some of these great thinkers come under particularly tough scrutiny, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was among the first of his age to assert that his own personal ethic and thought was enough to overturn societal standards based on Judeo-Christian tradition. Highly critical of both church and state, he espoused truth and love. In real life however, he was a monster. This dichotomy is dramatic. If you wonder about the who, what, when and how of ideology and new age enlightenment thinking, you’ll enjoy this book.
Heroes. Again a brief anthology of historical figures, this time with an eye on those who have conquered and reshaped the world through the ages. Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Winston Churchill, and more. A great book and very uplifting.
In my estimation, when a new opportunity or responsiblity that will expand your leadership/influence/experience comes along you ought to give real serious thought to saying YES!
Most people don’t say yes because they’re already busy. I get this, I understand it, but I also know it’s a trap. Time management is not just filling your day and being efficient. It’s being effective, which is all about doing the RIGHT things. If you’re knee-jerk reaction is to say NO because you’re busy, then you’ll never be open to filling your days with more interesting and effective tasks.
Here’s what I know about saying YES
1. It Almost Always Means More Work Initially: At the very minimum, it stretches your brain because it’s not what you’ve done before and it requires more emotional energy. This alone shouldn’t be a reason to say NO.
2. It Forces You to STOP Something Else: I’m a big fan of making a list of things that you dont’ need to be doing anymore. We’re people of habit, that’s a good thing, but it also means we carry on with tasks, assignments, regularly scheduled events that don’t have meaning or purpose. When you add some new responsiblity/opportunity it’s a great time to evaluate: Do I need to be doing this anymore?
3. It Keeps You Young: My boys are forever asking me to do stuff that I’ve not done since I was a teenager. That’s great. It also means I pull a muscle every now and then. Fact is many of the reasons we say NO are rooted in just plain inflexibility. Stay mentally limber by saying YES to new challenges and opportunities.
What an outrageous, idiotic and judgemental thing to say! Maybe, but hear me out.
There was once a day when a leader became a leader because she/he was a voracious collector of books. Think Thomas Jefferson, who I discovered while touring his house a few years ago was more than just a casual collector of books; he was a uber collector. He had books not because of their value, although they later became the centerpiece of the University of Virginia and part of the Library of Congress, but because books at that point in history were the only way to advance your learning fast enough to keep pace with change. Going to school until the 7th grade wasn’t going to cut it for a leader. Jefferson read on a wide range of issues, often natural sciences, which he found interesting because they were discovering new worlds, expanding west and needed a guess-work road map of what they’d find. While leaders will always need to be readers, physical books are not the tool of change anymore, technology is.
Now leaders are faced with a future that looks dramatically different than the past, and not just because of the uncertainty of the geopolitical world and the economics of age-old businesses such as publishing, automobiles, music, newspapers being turned on their head. The future is different because the tools are changing the way people live life, and we must respond quickly to adapt our methods of communication and interaction to keep up.
Frankly, having a smart-phone is the least of your worries now. That ship has already sailed, which is why I referenced it in my title. But I could have also put in IPAD in the title, and those haven’t even come out yet! (more about that in a minute)
If you don’t have a smart-phone you have no clue how 100% of your donors, clients and staff (kids or grandkids) will interface with you just a few years from now. Mobile devices are how people socialize, read email, watch content, read books, play games, surf the web, get GPS readings, and more. Great smart-phones, like the IPHONE and some of the DROID phones, can be personalized with apps that make it totally geared to your interests and tastes. This is affecting non-profits now, but in a couple years if you aren’t developing your charities/ministries content for mobile apps you’ll be out of business.
Here’s some ways charities/non-profits must be moving regarding mobility:
Web content for mobile devices, apps for droid/iphone devices that will deliver your content, strategy for social networking, geo-locating for donor events/connecting activities, live streaming of services/emergencies to your donors and the world, donating by text (after Haiti, it’s not going backward), and more.
As I was thinking about this blog I anticipated a few of the questions/statements you might make in rebuttal:
1. I don’t have a smart-phone because I can’t afford it. If you’re not a leader of an non-profit organization, or have no desire to be in the future, please feel no shame in waiting out the smart-phone game (or KINDLE, or IPAD game) until it comes into your price range. But if you ARE a leader (you have responsibility for a group, church, business, charity) you have no excuse. Under what scenario is your non-profit going to avoid the common leadership tension of lack of resources v. need to create, innovate and build? It’s not going to happen. More than that, you’re likely loosing opportunities for resources if you’re not actively thinking of ways to incorporate mobility into your non-profit. (and if you don’t own one yourself, you’re definitely not thinking about how others might be using it)
I hasten to add that I’m not a theorist, I have resource constraints as well, yet I think this is the growth element for the next decade: The understanding of how technology is changing how we communicate. It’s not fundamentally different than when Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark west to explore the new country.
2. I’m not in the kind of non-profit business that needs one. Really? As the CEO of the Rescue Mission I can’t imagine a future where we’ll be able to avoid these trends and our ministry is as straight-forward as it gets. This trend is going to affect everyone. I’m by no means an old man, but I can remember when people argued that they weren’t going to give up their typewriter for a computer. Now my kids don’t even know what a typewriter is! They’ve never seen anyone who has one!
3. I can’t keep up. Please understand, the organization you lead or will lead in the future needs you to be willing to grow in this way. In my case, I’m passionate about solving homelessness and seeing lives transformed through God’s love. It motivates me to make sure that I’m fulfilling the responsibility I owe the organization to look down the road and see where the potential challenges and opportunities exist. Jump in and start asking some creative questions about how the new technologies might apply to you.
Briefly, let me encourage you to begin thinking about why you’re non-profit needs to consider how it might use the IPad and like technologies that will be rolling out in the next 16 months. The IPad is like a large ipod touch so many people think it will not work in the marketplace. But I think it has the potential to impact non-profits/charities and ministries in a few key ways.
1. It’s the first, but not the last, computer to be APP-centric. Charities are going to need to get creative about developing innovative apps that will either help their client or donors connect. An app on a larger screen will have different expectations than an app on a smaller screen, requiring more video elements and better graphics.
2. It’s going to make communicating multi-function. The challenge for every non-profit is how to get your donors and the community to read your material and build interest in your important cause. These type of reading devices (KINDLE is opening up to apps too) are going to challenge us to adapt our newsletters and websites to connect. You’ll likely need text, video and audio in the newsletters of the future. Better jump in and start using it to figure out and dream up ways it could help your cause.
3. Increase the importance of Visual. I love watching video on my iphone because it’s handy. But the IPad and like devices will likely make portable video viewing even more prevalent. Start thinking about how you are going to capture video, package video and present video of your ministry.
To lead is to get out front. I encourage you to use the technology out there to creatively craft the future of your organization.
What parts of this argument do you find most challenging, disagreeable or inspiring? Let me know.
Here’s an extra, a clip of my comments on this blog from USTREAM
Some months ago I was given a galley addition of the new book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. I am a reader- I love to read, have learned a lot from reading. But for some reason I read the first couple of chapters of this book and set it down, only to finally pick it up 7 months later. I shouldn’t have waited so long because it’s great.
Here’s the gist of the book: change is hard for people to internalize, but there are ways that we can break down changes so that they are less intimidating and more likely to be lasting improvements. As with the previous book from the Heath brothers, Made to Stick, the book is well written and made to be applied by leaders everywhere.
Here are a few of the lessons I found to be most useful:
Appeal to both the rational and emotional: the book uses the illustration of a human RIDER on top of an ELEPHANT as an example of the relationship between our rational, reasoning mind and our emotional self. The Rider of reason may be on top, but the Elephant of emotion is much bigger and can easily override our reasons. This explains why you can set a rational goal of change in diet, habit, self-discipline, but the next morning your emotions easily override it. To deal with this balance you’ve got to institute changes that are both rational and have a motivational component
Break Change into small bites: It’s not that we can’t change, it’s that we are slow to get started and then often drop the new habits quickly. The book shows with repeated examples how this can be overcome by breaking the change into small bites that can be built upon.
Instill a Growth Mindset: It’s so much easier for us to change, both collectively and individually, when we have a mindset and identity that believes it can change and that is always in the process of growing. Yet as this book points out effectively, many people instead have a “fixed mindset” which makes it difficult to change. A fixed mindset is simply a belief, articulated with phrases such as: “This is just the way I am”, that people have a set biology, personality, and talent base that cannot be expanded. A growth mindset, which they prove can be developed, looks at abilities as muscles which can be developed with repeated use.
I’d recommend the book to leaders who are trying to manage change and to people who individually want to develop their abilities but lack an understanding of how to motivate themselves.
So often we think of creativity as dreaming up something totally new and unusual. Creativity is much more than that! Yet, this definition leads most people to think they’re not creative when actually have creatively pouring through their veins every minute of the day.
Here’s a couple of ideas to expand your definition of what CREATIVITY IS:
APPLYING THE OF ADVANCEMENT OF OTHER DISCIPLINES TO YOUR JOB/LIFE. So often the challenge that ministries and social services face in being creative (in addition to cultures that try to reward conformity) is that they don’t apply the learnings of the arts, technology, engineering and so on, to their work until those learnings have been previously digested by the greater population and watered down. Instead, get on the front line and look for new things that are happening in these areas RIGHT NOW and imagine who those developments can affect your work. How can developments in architecture change the ways churches share community? How will technology change the way RESCUE MISSION’S connect with their ALUMNI? How can we use therapeutic art to bring spiritual healing? What changes in employment law on the horizon will allow us to create a super innovative culture in social services and ministry? The exciting advances that could be possible for you are endless and will help make you super creative in your field and position. Don’t be afraid to learn from an area that has seemingly no relation to your work. Just ask the questions and see what happens. You might be surprised what improvements you cold make by applying the learnings of others.
Doing a “360″ on the NEW THING to se if it applies to your work. Here’s the usual pattern we’ve seen throughout history; a new development in technology, communication, learning, etc, comes out and the masses don’t reject it as “not useful” A handful of creatives take the new technology and instead of rejecting it out of hand they do a “360″ on the new innovation. By 360 I mean they look at it from all angles, turning it upside down, left, right, front and back to examine who it might possibly be a benefit to their work both now or in the future. The handful of creatives then take the learning from their 360 degree review and make some astounding advancements, and so it goes. In this age of technological advancement we think that masses just aren’t ready for this speed of change, but it’s more than that.
I was recently reading a book about CREATORS and came across the great artist Turner. Apparently Turner was known for always looking for new colors. He would be among the first to try bold new colors and it greatly benefited his work. The masses were shocked at the vibrancy of his paintings because they were great, yes, but also because they were slightly different in their shades and vibrancy.
So you see it’s not just about technology and communication, it’s been happening since the beginning. The masses adapt to technology once it has been proven. The problem for you and I is that the masses often miss critical profit, benefit, and blessing from the months, or even years between the development of a concept and it mass acceptance because they don’t examine and 360 for themselves. Not everyone has the sensibility to desire to do a 360 on new technologies and methods, but more people should.
For example, how many of you are thinking and looking at ways to use IPad technology in your work? Yes, I know that it’s not out yet, but just imagine for a moment. How would this change the way you share information? Would you benefit from an App on a larger screen device such as an IPAD? Would this change the way you need to develop your website interactivity? How would you change the way you record and plan your teaching, newsletters, communication with supporters? Now that the KINDLE is opening for apps as a response to the IPAD, how would that affect your literature development and book budget? There are are probably about 1000 other questions you could ask on this subject alone, yet most people still don’t wan to commit to even using smart phones even through the next advancement has already begun.
Let’s push oursevles and each other to ask the great questions that will bring us to a place of developing creatively. It’s not just about dreaming up things that have never existed, it’s about using things that now exist in new ways.
The revolution is underway. While the 70’s promoted ‘free love’ as a way of highlighting the sexual revolution, I’m starting a different FREE LOVE revolution. I’m recommending that the RESCUE MISSION and other social services and christian ministries promote FREE LOVE as a way to highlight that we are going to actually live out the teachings of Jesus and LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY.
So why the dramatic announcement of promoting FREE LOVE? Because it’s so shamefully rare for people (regardless of faith) to actually love the poor, addicted, homeless and mentally ill unconditionally. It flies in the face of our sensibilities and challenges our ethic that the homeless should just “get a job” and “pull themselves up by the bootstraps”.
Here’s what I mean by FREE LOVE
1. Believe EVERYbody has value. Do you believe this? What if this person doesn’t contribute to society? What if this person is a “taker”, always using people and things without regard for others? Does this person have value? I believe so.
2. Don’t GIVE UP on people. Most people don’t blink on writing off those who’ve wronged them or short changed them in someway. While I understand a wise and discerning approach with people who aren’t safe, as a society we need to be open to seeing RESTORATION in those who are ready to turn their lives around and to live in a different way.
3 So often we find it easier to love those who look like us or that we can associate with in some way. But sometimes God calls us to love those who are not like us. Those who aren’t clean, aren’t beautiful and who might even smell bad. Love anyway.
Clearly, I’m being slight provocative to awaken you to the fact that we often put a price on our love. Don’t do it, God has loved us freely and without condition and we need to do likewise. Loving freely doesn’t mean you lack healthy boundaries, it means you stop judging the worth of others by what they can do for you and for society.
What do you think? Do you think most Christians, Churches, republicans, democrats, etc. would agree to this kind of FREE LOVE? Do you think you could live to this standard? Give me your feedback.
DC
Fact is many of the reasons we say NO are rooted in just plain inflexibility. Stay mentally limber by saying YES to new challenges and opportunities.