Dealing with the Silence

Peter Bregman, who's one of my favourite writers on the Harvard Business Review site has written a piece called How to Handle Silence, the Worst Kind of Feedback.

It’s a follow-up to an article he published the week before called, When Your Voicemails and Emails Go Unanswered, What Should You Do? In both pieces he discusses the problems – and insecurities - that arise when you’re trying to get a response from someone who doesn’t regard responding as essential to a business relationship.

While one person feels that it’s merely good manners to respond, the other thinks ‘just’ responding for the sake of letting someone know you’re still out there and working on the issue is a waste of time.

Both these pieces make good reading, in terms of relationships in general.

It's Church, Jim, but not as we know it.

Some stats from Mark Brown's paper, The Bible in the Digital Space:

In just a short period of time the net has grown to around 35 billion pages with some 1.6 billion people using it.
There are around 55 trillion links between all the web pages in the world.
Every day there are some 100 billion mouse clicks made.
Every second, 2 million emails are sent.
Every two seconds in terms of data size, the equivalent of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, is moving across the web.
The internet is massive and growing at an extraordinary rate. It’s predicted that this year more information will be created on the Web than in all previous years combined.

And this phenomenal growth it isn’t simply limited to western nations, with Africa as an example, experiencing more than 1,000% growth in net users in the past 8 years. There is also a big push happening at the moment to make available internet access for all people, including those in the two-thirds world, with such projects as the Google backed O3B network (The Other 3 Billion).

Mark asks: What if we were to move into this digital space and offer an experience of church, of the Bible in the language and the culture of the digital environment?

Like it or lump it, this is a huge harvest field....to paraphrase: It's Church, Jim, but not as we know it.

How Rick deals with criticism

Rick Warren on dealing with critics and criticism.

1. Turn your critics into coaches by hearing what they are saying and humbly considering if there is any truth in their criticisms to learn from.

2. Never engage the critics on their terms because it only escalates the conflict and is not productive.

3. Be very careful with firing off emails or leaving voicemails and responding out of anger in a way that you will later regret.

4. Shout louder than your critics to define yourself and do not allow them to define you. [This last might have an element of tongue-in-cheek!]

Source Neoleader blog