Getting it wrong - dead wrong

We must reject the idea - well-intentioned, but dead wrong - that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become 'more like a business.' Most businesses - like most of anything else in life - fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?

So says Jim Collins, in the opening paragraph of his monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors. Yet so much of the church continues to think that being 'businesslike' is a good thing.