Maybe leadership isn't biblical but business-focused..

Following on, as it were, from the last post relating to a leadership conference, David Fitch has this to say in his latest blog post:

There’s been much ranting and raving on the inadequacies of leadership in the church. ....I must admit I recoil whenever I hear people say “Leadership is Biblical.” For a lot of reasons, I find it erroneous to say “leadership is Biblical.” When I say “leadership” I am talking about the way the term has become adopted into the vernacular of evangelical leadership conferences and books.... Last night at our “leadership meeting” (wink wink) I went off on a rant on this very topic (I have since had to repent of said rant – to me repentance is the best way of leading I know).

I posted something on Facebook and a lot of brothers and sisters set me straight. So, after learning much on Facebook (see it’s good for something), I feel like I need to put out there why I think leadership in this mode “is not Biblical,” why we might need to find a new word when we are talking about what leaders do in a church, why if we are ever going to truly “lead” a gathering community into the Kingdom it simply requires a skill quite a bit different than what many in the church have come to describe as “leadership.”

David follows this introduction up with five points....not saying that he's come to a full conclusion on the topic, but at least giving some substantial food for thought...

PS - 20.12.10 (that's the 20th Dec, for you USers): Len Hjalmarson writes more on the leadership concept.

Business or Spirit?

Many churches struggle between two extremes: whether to run a church on a business model, or whether to run it by relying primarily on the Holy Spirit. And there have been some great business model books that have seemed entirely applicable to the church. In an article on Leadership Journal online entitled Good to Great to Godly, Mike Bonem discusses the value of Jim Collin’s classic book, ‘Good to Great’ for churches. He notes that while it was of great value to him in his work in the business world, and still had good things to say when he moved onto a church’s staff, he also had to redefine his thinking in the light of another classic, Jim Cymbala’s Fresh Wind, Fresh Spirit.

This is an excellent article discussing the implications of taking the innumerable business models and adapting them for the church.

Mike Bonem is executive pastor at West University Baptist Church in Houston, author of Leading from the Second Chair and Congregational Change, a Harvard MBA. and a former business consultant.

Good and Evil

Umair Haque has written an article entitled, The Case for Being Disruptively Good.

In it he discusses the way in which businesses who used to get away with bad practice are now far more exposed than they used to be, due to the information age - news travels fast, in other words. Purely from a shareholding viewpoint, he notes: being a good guy pays. The best corporate citizens list, which includes Hewlett-Packard, Intel, General Mills, I.B.M. and Kimberly-Clark, had a total return on shareholder value of 2.37 percent over three years. But the 30 worst had a negative 7.38 percent return".

But this is far more than an article about shareholders. It's about the fact that big businesses that are thriving are doing so more because they have decided to follow 'good' practices more than 'evil' ones. But even those who are doing good vary in the extent to which they're doing good.

He lists a ladder with five steps and shows how various well-known companies are learning the ropes of doing good: Pepsi's on the bottom rung, having done a "marginal bit of good"; Nestle is on the next rung, having got itself a 'black eye' for not being as open and honest as it claimed (thanks for Facebook!).

Google's just got itself back on the third rung by pulling out of China, avoiding the compromises that would have been required of it, if it had stayed. Apple's on the fourth rung - though Haque doesn't seem convinced it'll stay there, and Wal Mart (surprise!) is on the fifth rung due to its Sustainability Index which 'lays down new rules for every single supplier in its vast, globe-spanning ecosystem.'

Haque doesn't see anyone on the top rung as yet, but is waiting.

The ladder image is only part of what he has to say. Check out the rest: the historic viewpoint, the revolutions, the changes.

Not so Godly business?

In an article entitled, Good to Great to Godly, Mike Bonem looks at the way in which Jim Collins' business principles have been extensively applied in the church. However, his concern is that the church isn't a business, and running it on business lines rather than God-led lines will ultimately cause it to fail. (He isn't denigrating Collins, by the way, whom he obviously admires.)

At one point in his article he writes:

There are also congregations that make no pretence of seeking God in their decisions. The leadership core may have been selected by virtue of tenure or financial contribution rather than spiritual sensitivity, or the church's culture may simply be "all business."

If you don't read anything else in the article, reflect on this one paragraph alone. It says a huge amount about how many churches are run - and possibly exposes why eventually they fail.

Doing Good

Peter Cappelli writes:

My colleagues and I recently completed a study of Indian businesses based around interviews with the leaders of 100 of the biggest companies in India (the basis of our book The India Way.) Every executive we interviewed described the main objective of their company in terms of a social mission. They expected to make money, but they expected to do so while doing good.

In the case of Bharti Airtel, the mission was to get cell phones into the hands of people who have no means to communicate; for ICICI Bank, it was to provide financial help to those with no access to banking; for Dr. Reddy's, the pharmaceutical company, it was to address the health care needs of the poor the world over; for Infosys, it is to show that Indian business can lead in technology. Business strategy rests on the social mission. And the corporations put charitable money behind social missions at a level that dwarfs anything we'd see in the US: Sixty-five percent of the profits of the Tata Group companies, for example, go to charities. Infosys has built and staffed entire hospitals in different regions of the country, rolling out a national curriculum to develop IT skills at the same time. Dr. Reddy's provides for the health care needs for 40,000 children. The list goes on and on.

There is every reason to believe that these companies have done well precisely because they are doing good. Helping poor people pays off when those people get money and become consumers, as millions of Indians have done every year. It also helps in a still regulated economy to get government permissions and approvals.

As Cappelli adds later in his article, serving all those involved in a business rather than just the shareholders, has big advantages. Does this have any connections with the way we 'do' church?

Trends in Mission

Prior to his current role as Leadership Community Director, Eric Swanson was part of Campus Crusade for Christ for 25 years. Most recently, he served as director of charitable giving for Tango, a private investment company. Eric holds a bachelors degree in social science from the University of California at Berkeley and is a DMin candidate in Transformational Leadership for Ministry in the Global City. Eric is co-author of The Externally Focused Church (Group Publishing, 2004).

In a recent article in Leadership Network, Eric writes of eight trends that he believes will shape the future of missions. He writes in detail about these in the article, so in this post I'll list the trends with only a small note about each.

The eight trends are:
mutuality - East and West sharing the gospel with each other - no longer a one-way street.
partnering - beginning with what indigenous leaders already have
investing in leaders - using the passion of local leaders
combining good deeds and good news - not a new concept, but heightened
greater financial accountability - not just relying on money from churches otherwise uninvolved
business as mission - entrepreneurial people starting businesses in mission countries
focus
technology - these last two speak for themselves

You may not agree with everything Swanson says, nor how he says it, but these points remain worth considering.

Management by Imagination

The perennial argument between those who need to control stuff and those who are okay with not controlling turns up in this article:

The perception that good management is closely linked to good measurement runs deep. How often do you hear these old saws repeated: "If you can't measure it, it doesn't count"; "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"; "If you can't measure it, it won't happen"? We like these sayings because they're comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it.

But however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What's more, we won't see what we're missing because we don't know what it is that we don't know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world in which we are prisoners of a "reality" that is in fact an edifice we've unknowingly constructed around ourselves.

Written, as you might have guessed, for a business audience. It could easily have been written for a church one. Photo from flickr.com, taken by a photographer who goes by the name of 'The Truth About..' Which might be ironic...!

No unhappy staff

"There’s an equation in business that many organisations and managers use involving profits, goods and services, and people. It appears to me that most businesses get this equation wrong because they put profits first, then goods and services, then the people who work for them. But the most successful organisations, the best places to work, the world’s greatest leaders will all tell you the same thing – put people first."

"It’s one thing to say you do it, but do you behave like you do, and do your people believe it."

After a survey in which 68% of the staff said they were happy, Kendall’s firm decided to find out where they were going wrong with the other 34% - and then put them in charge of getting it right. The latest survey shows that their new approach works: no unhappy staff.

Kendall says "staff are asked to categorise their issues, and the decisions they want made, into one of four areas:

• Management makes the decision. No questions asked.
• Everyone has input; management has final say.
  
• Everyone has input and we all agree on the outcome.
  
• Everyone has input and staff decide the outcome. Management butts out."
  

Extracts from a piece in NZ Management (Sept 09): On People Ahead of Profit, by Annette Kendall.

Presenteeism

In the August edition of NZ Management, there’s a one page article called, Why Health = Wealth. It's written by Peter Tynan.
We’re all familiar with the word, absenteeism, but in this article a similar word, presenteeism, is introduced. It relates to people who come to work sick, and the impact on productivity associated with having them there in that state. The biggest cost to businesses in relation to their staffs’ poor health is presenteeism.
It’s not a matter of making sure people stay away when they’re unwell, but ensuring that people are more healthy in general. According to some stats, 70% of workers have a “state of health equivalent to an older person, with 20% rated as having the health of someone a decade older. Nearly a third were rated as obese while stress levels were poor to bad for 43%.” As recession stress only adds to ill-health.
At present it’s estimated that “two thirds of New Zealand companies offer employees health and wellness interventions. “ But further investment in this area is needed, particularly as the workforce ages.

Changing work trends

In the recently released report, Workplace Age and Gender: Trends and Implications, we discover that:

- A total of 63% of bus drivers were aged 50 years or more in 2006, and 80% were men.

- The age profile of HR professionals is younger than that of the total workforce and has become intensely female – in 1981, 28% of HR professionals were female, but by 2006 that had risen to 69%.

- Relatively few women work in engineering, ranging from 2% in industrial and mechanical to 8% in civil, 15% in electronic and communications and 36% in chemical.

- A third of the dentistry and social work professions were aged 50+ in 2006.

- In the police force, women tallied 9% of the workforce in 1991 and 22% in 2006.

- One in three firefighters was aged over 50 in 2006. Overall, 95% of firefighters are male.

- The peak age for labourers has been falling, and was 15-19 in 2006.

Your gut instinct probably told a good deal of this, but it's always helpful to have it confirmed...

Remembering Ethics

In a recent opinion piece in the Otago Daily Times, Ian Harris noted that business schools, particularly in the USA, have been criticised for not doing more to prepare graduates for the ethical challenges of the business world. Now, teachers at Harvard and elsewhere say students are demanding courses on social ethics and responsibility to round out their business studies.

The students are now able (but not obliged) to take an oath along these lines.
The swear to:
• Act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.
• Safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.
• Manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behaviour that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.
• Understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my enterprise.
• Take responsibility for my actions, and represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.
• Develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the wellbeing of society.
• Strive to create sustainable economic, social and environmental prosperity worldwide.
• Be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.

See the full opinion piece here.

Four posts

I mentioned Westwinds Church a few posts back, and since then have been keeping an eye on their (five) blogs. A couple of these are okay, but more the personal kind of blog than something that I'm looking to for mission inspiration. But one of the blogs, Vertizontal, has some strong writing on it, and is worth reading.

Most recently - over the last few days, by the looks of it - it's been discussing The Target (the Cue Philosophy). Okay, I have no more idea what that means that you do, but the actual posts are well worth reading. They're about how Westwinds does church, who it does church for, and why. The fourth post has concerns about the business model (the 'target audience') that is often used in churches. (Our own church went through this kind of thing a few years back, and it wasn't particularly healthy, long-term. Fortunately, the core congregation stuck through it, and came out the other side.)

The third post talks about the difficulty Westwings has in defining a 'mission statement' - in fact, whether they should define one at all. You'll note from this post that Westwinds is a fairly arty, technology-focused church. The second post concerns itself with seeker-services, and their value - or lack of it, and in this post is the following quote:

Westwinds’ methodology is not an attempt at being “relevant” which is usually ghettoized to mean “look and speak cool.” It’s about incarnation and a particular offense to mediocrity.

More than that, it’s a deep rooted belief that God has called us to act upon the stuff in our heads. The thirst for the sacred, the mysteries of God, the magic of the sacraments, the otherworldliness of corporate worship, the tears spent on broken people—they call us to act. We act by creating. By making stuff. We incarnate our thoughts into visual art and music and poetry and film. Projects, proposals and petitions. Moments and movements. The Cue is a main venue for this creativity.

The first post (sorry to be doing this backwards, but I don't think Westwinds would be bothered) is their 'philosophy of ministry,' a phrase that's less Westwinds than something 'imposed' upon them. I've been so impressed with these four posts that I'm going to print them out - so that I don't skim them (which is my habit when reading online), but think about them, and how they relate to my own church setting. You may find it useful to do the same.

Incidentally, on Facebook, Mark Broadbent is advertising a meeting called Jesus for the non-religious. Sounded good to me, but when I click on the information about it, this is what I find:

Do you like Jesus but not the church?
Are you sick and tired of religious hypocrites?
Have you ever wondered why the kinds of people who once ran to Jesus are now running from the church today?

ERWIN MCMANUS SAID...
“My goal is to destroy Christianity as a world religion and be a recatalyst for the movement of Jesus Christ…Some people are upset with me because it sounds like I'm anti-Christian. I think they might be right...the greatest enemy to the movement of Jesus Christ is 'Christianity.”'

Well, good on you, Erwin. Just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, eh?

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.

How will churches react?

How will your church react?

Nearly one fifth of New Zealanders in employment fear they may lose their jobs this year and half of those worry they may not quickly find another. That was the outcome of a survey commissioned by the NZ Business Council for Sustainable Development that polled 2852 respondents online and found the worry about job loss was greatest amongst those in low-paid jobs and in hard-hit areas like construction,
transport and storage, and forestry/agriculture. Those feeling most secure are farm owners and managers, followed by police, nurses, teachers, service workers and
public servants.
By age, those most worried about their future work prospects are in the 25-34 and 55-64 age groups.

from the NZIM Managers’ Update, March 2009

Networking

In his book, Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi wrote about the safety net provided by a robust network of social connections.

"Experience will not save you in hard times, nor will hard work or talent. If you need a job, money, advice, help, hope, or a means to make a sale, there's only one surefire, fail-safe place to find them - within your extended circle of friends and associates."

The same might well be said of the church. It wasn't because he thought the phrase had a good ring to it that Paul said, 'Forsake not the gathering of the saints'. He knew the value of being 'networked' within the church family, the body of Christ.

Justin Pinkerman writes about keeping up with your network in a Leadership Wired article online.
He's talking about the business network, seeing it as a kind of safety net in these difficult economic times. But the church is the same, and more so - in all times. The congregation may annoy the hell out of us (which might not be a bad thing!) but it's also a place where our particular bit of the body grows best.

Spiritual business

In a kind of going-against-the-flow post, Seth Godin notes:

Spiritual business is an interesting concept. Is what you do all day at work part of who you are? Is it possible to be a deceitful crook all week but a good person on the weekend?

Can you succeed financially by acting in an ethical way?

He goes on to explain that though there are even more unethical business people out there than ever, they don't necessarily succeed - people with ethics will progress.

In a competitive world, then, one with increasing light, the way to win is not to shave more corners or hide more behavior, because you're going against the grain, fighting the tide of increasing light. In fact, the opposite is true. Individuals and organizations that can compete on generosity and fairness repeatedly defeat those that only do it grudgingly.

I like the idea of increasing light - wonder where he got that from?

I'm still officially on holiday - back next week - but this particular post caught my eye.

How applicable is this to mission?

Seth Godin on Selling Ideas

On his blog today, Godin talks in terms of selling ideas to companies (book companies in particular), but what he has to say is interestingly applicable to the job of enabling mission.

Two points he notes:

1. They have to be in the business of buying ideas. Thus a Trust that has money may be interested in ‘buying’ the idea of a particular kind of mission, and then funding it.

2. They have to trust you. Some businesses that appear to be interested in buying ideas won’t necessarily trust you to be the person to present an idea. Entrepreneurial people who will see the big picture, who can grasp the vision, are more likely to be in tune with you.

Godin notes: A company that likes buying ideas has a process. They make it relatively straightforward and they have no upside in stealing from you. A company that isn't in that business puts up barriers. They troll around trade shows looking for ideas to take (and there's nothing legally or morally wrong with that, imho).

And:

if you have an idea for a company that doesn't know how to buy it, move on. And if you want to be in the business of selling ideas, find an industry that has experience buying those ideas.

Substitute your own mission funder, or your Presbytery, or even your congregation for 'business' and 'company', and see how Godin's points apply. The full blog post is here.

To Those Who Lead the Rural Church

I know where you live: in a nation ruled by the god of Business, where those who do not have the power to buy are shunted aside. The old and the very young are ignored. The few (who do not make up a critical mass, a niche market, a group worthy of attention) are dismissed.

Back in February, BuildingChurchLeaders.com considered how different expressions of Christianity could more faithfully embody the calling God has placed on them. They produced a series of letters patterned after the words of Jesus in Revelation 2–3. While they lack the authority of Scripture, they contain many convicting insights brought in the spirit of humility and love for the church. One letter, the introduction of which is printed above, was written by Susan Wise Bauer, who addressed to the churches she knows best: those in rural America.

For more resources about the small church, check out the new Training Theme download on Strengthening Small Churches.”

When growth is unsustainable

In a recent article in NZ Management, Sir John Whitmore talks about the possibility/rpobability that the way we do business is going to change radically.
Two paragraphs from the article. You can view the whole article here.

The ethos currently driving business is not sustainable and business leaders have to stop acting like adolescents in denial. That's the unequivocal message from world-renowned sporting and business coach Sir John Whitmore. "I would say that any leader who still believes in the holy grail of growth is irresponsible. They're living in a myth - living in the past," he says.

Although he acknowledges that consumerism is to some extent the lifeblood of capitalism, Whitmore describes it as an illness. "To me it is adolescent behaviour and I think that business in the way it is currently structured is quite tribal, very competitive. And in the state of the world at the moment what we need is more collaboration."

Harvard Business Review

Podcasts available from the Harvard Business Review. The HBR IdeaCasts are mostly a few minutes long, delivered right to the computer – and free.

Some provocative titles: The Power of Unreasonable People; Disruptive Innovation; Don’t bother with the green consumer; Thinking inside the Box. There are some 80 titles available.