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The Leadership Engine, by Noel Tichy, is devoted to describing how great leaders push and lead their corporations toward success. Using case studies and research, this book shows that leader driven organizations are more successful, rather than mere manager led. In so doing, the author shows how leader led organizations have traits that lead them towards achievement of their goals.
Leaders are so intertwined with the concept of reproducing themselves that they become known for their teaching skills as much as anything else. The author points out that former General Electric CEO, Jack Welch, would spend several days a month teaching managers. While rarely showing up on the bottom line of organizations, the development of fresh leadership and the growing ability for junior leaders to make decisions on their own without direct supervision are constantly cited as reasons for success in organizations.
Over the past generation the occupation of consultant has arisen in virtually every field. From businesses, to churches, to university athletic departments, consultants work where there were previously only outside blue or white collar outside contractors. This book makes the case that consultants exist today because people simply do not want to lead. They have chosen to make their work much more complicated that it had to be by refusing to be teachers of those underneath them. And as a result, leaders have no time to research developing trends or to look long term for their organization.
Tichy emphasises that a great leader will teach others to be great leaders, not great followers. It is much easier to gather followers around an organization; people who have a passion to just follow one person’s vision for the organization. This is the recipe for failure. The right people are the center of any organization, so therefore goals must be accomplished through taught people who are willing to take smart aggressive risks within the scope of an organizations mission with a constant eye towards integrity and the leading of the hand of Providence.
Peach pies are wonderful things to create from scratch at home. Living in the real “Peach State”, I have spent the summers of my life in the overflowing presence of peaches. In lots of ways, a peach pie says a lot about the world we live in, in a real, hard, concrete, non-abstract way.
The phrase that is often used to describe our world, our present, at least Western, culture is post-modernism. This can mean lots of folks to lots of different people, not surprising since the end of the modern age has meant a loss of certainty and confidence. Big words and big concepts are used to describe how we relate to each other and understand the world around us. The small things though, that we take for granted, define our daily life, most of all how we eat.
Bear with me for a moment, as I dig back in time to bring us back to a point. In ancient Greece, cooking was reserved for slaves, even worse, lavish meals were not considered virtuous. Even the enjoyment of varied foods, even pies, was considered a sign of moral weakness. The acknowledgement of the body’s material needs was an acknowledgement of weakness. Further south from Plato and his compatriots, the ancient Hebrews built an entire culture around ritualistic cycles of feasting and fasting. Food, and its enjoyment, were central to the Hebrew experience that we read of in the Old Testament, largely because they lived in expectation of divine revelation, in the midst of a real, material world.
Fast forward a few thousand years, to, well, now. Modernity has given us cheap, plentiful and standardized forms of food, and in the process is eliminating lots of variation in the types of food, food preparation and food culture that have been the norm for most of the history of the West since Rome. With the availability of plentiful and cheap food, perhaps the #1 technological problems in history, a post-modern world has given us a less human experience with our food, our most basic material, daily need.
It seems as if urban and suburban life has more or less cut off people from the experience and reality of where their food comes from. With eating more of a process and consumption, it would seem that it also has cut off the communal aspects of eating as well, cutting us off from each other, and making us less fully human. While we may not live or even be aware of Plato’s views on food, a post-modern life more or less agrees with his assessment on how eating and feasting is to be approached.
So what should we do? Or what should we eat? Or maybe the question is how should we live? First things, first principles should tell us to live a life of gratitude and respect, with an appreciation of our dual role as being a spirit and a body. Eating can be an appreciative, grateful thing, in a community, even if its a simple meal. Wendell Berry says this:
On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.
Family recipe books are treasured by us. They represent, partly, a real wisdom of past ages that simply cannot be replicated. Stephen Shapin says, to emphasis the extent to which cooking skills are scarce and how the world getting smaller is not necesarily a good thing:
Urbanisation and industrialisation disrupted the traditional chains by which indigenous skills had been transmitted from hand to hand, largely from mother to daughter, and what everyone knew how to do eventually became what very few people knew how to do. In the main, the skills just disappeared or are on their way to disappearing: for many households, the cooked-from-scratch sit-down meal is a rarity, and few people will now be at all familiar with the look and taste of a genuine free-range egg.
The danger is totally embracing a consumerist approach to eating, food and community is not a loss of nostalgia in the past, but that it makes us, in the end, less human, more of the worst of post-modernism, and less able to relate to the real, living world around us and real, living people who we are in relationship with.
Oh, and peach pies, made from fresh, end of season, South Carolina peaches, filo layers making up a crust and a family recipe make a great thing to share with friends and co-workers.
Over the past few months, two projects have come open for me to participate in from a web design and blogging opportunity.
I have been assisting in the development and strategy of the internet side of a Charlotte, NC based ministry, CSO, or Church Sports Outreach. The site is not yet fully functional, but enough is complete to where you should get an idea about what all is involved. CSO is a discipleship ministry, using sports, that is focused on assisting the local church to use sports to carry out the “Great Commission”, to teach the gospel and to make disciples. CSO is unique in its approach to developing long-term relationships with local churches, in order to assist them in setting up sports specific programs that have ministry uses.
Check it out: Church Sports Outreach (CSO).
Also, in recent weeks, I have become a fan blogger fo America Online’s (AOL) Fanhouse. Essentially, AOL has recruited blogging fans of NFL and college football teams, who were previously blogging about their teams independently, and has given them tools and massive amounts of exposure to blog exclusively on their site. I will be blogging about the Clemson University Tigers (3-1 so far this season, and ranked in the top 20), and ACC football more generally.
Check that out too: Clemson on AOL Fanhouse
Clemson running down the hill before last Saturday’s game vs. the University of North Carolina, and the day to honor the 25th anniversary of the 1981 National Championship team. The Tigers won 52-7.
Jim Collins groundbreaking leadership book, Good to Great, Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t attempts to answer the question of how an organization can be led to resounding success and to the achievement of all its goals. The author’s premise is that being simply good enough is acceptable to most individuals and that organizations need determined and focused leadership to grow into a great organization that maximizes all the potential that its members can muster. Good to Great was the result of a five year study into what makes effective leadership and organizations.
Within this book, Collins attempts to profile exactly what type of leaders lead the transformation from a merely good to a great organization. In the process, he dismisses some common fallacies and assumptions about what is needed to advance an organization to a great organization. While Collins mostly uses case studies of large American businesses, he proposes that the principles he has studied can be used by any organization; government, school or church.
Collins strongly advocates that the central element to move an organization forward is not delineating goals or policies, but discovering individuals with talent who can lead an organization from all levels. The common assumption that an inspiring leader who takes an organization further is charismatic and is able to make sudden changes to push an organization are shown by his research to not be consistent with the profile of great leaders. Most great leaders, showing what he calls Level 5 Leadership, are humble, quiet, disciplined, placing the organization above their own personal egos, and have a relentless search for outstanding subordinate leaders.
Great leadership requires passion and discipline that are constantly looking to improve today and to slowly move towards the future. No one charged in an organization’s turnaround can look for a quick fix, or some other event that lacks real substance. Tools, like technology, are never solutions; but are simply products that aid the discipline process.
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It is common practice in today’s organizational structures to create metrics; things by which success of agreed upon goals can be met. The nature of the church as a spiritual body, concerned with often-unseen results makes the development of measuring metrics difficult if not impossible. Presbyterian pastor, Harry Reeder, in From Embers to a Flame, is concerned with showing the church leader what the church can do to achieve its mission; but shows that the metrics for the church are best measured not by particular achievements, but by always coming back to where the church draws its strength. Building success in the church is always linked to the concept of returning to a Biblical source. Innovations come and go, and can be important as tools, but a living church is always marked by how close it is to its source.
In today’s Western world, much of the church has slowed not only in numerical growth, but in drifting away from its mission. Even in conservative churches, it is not uncommon for needs other than centering the congregation on grace, or evangelizing and serving the community to be addressed. Sick churches, with focuses on personalities and programs (the seen things) often lose the heart for the gospel that grew them in the first place. Revitalizing a dying church body forces the members to be active and to take ownership of the ministry that the whole body has been called to. When a church gets to the point where a pastor must be the one who leads, but does the work; then there has been a terrible disconnect among the membership and the pastorate about the necessity of communal ministry.
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