JOLLYBLOGGER

Whatever the Problem is, It's Not Me

Here's some wisdom from Wendell Berry via Patrick J. Deneen by way of Mere Comments.

The last thing we will consider is altering our own behavior—because, surely, someone else is at fault. The Oil Companies, the Saudis, Dick Cheney—anyone but me. As has been described by Jason Peters, editor of a fine volume on Berry, it’s like heavy traffic. Heavy traffic is always other people. When you say “traffic was terrible,” you’re never talking about yourself.

Wendell Berry asks us to understand how we are a cause of the terrible traffic we complain about. His basic argument is that we must become more thoughtful about what we are doing. We must seek to understand the ways in which we are ourselves complicit in bad work, and seek to avoid that complicity where possible and, better still, to do good work instead. He does not advise withdrawal from the world, but full and active engagement in it. He fully acknowledges that we are technological creatures: to survive and thrive we must use nature. But again, “we must know both how to use and how to care for what we use.”

I'm going to have to be careful here before I start throwing stones, since this is the story of my life.  But let me give a couple of examples of how I have seen this and even been party to it.

"We're having trouble in our marriage," not "I'm nagging him to death," or "I'm a lazy slob who expects her to wait on me hand and foot."

"We're having financial trouble," not "you know, maybe it wasn't such a good idea for me to buy that boat after all."

"Our church has problems," not "I and my fellow church members come to church with a consumeristic mindset every Sunday and expect to have it our way," or "my own leadership failures have led to lots of the problems we are now experiencing."

Other examples anyone?

Reading is the Trait of Leaders

So I was looking up something on my old friend Rusty Lopez's blog and just started looking through some old archives.  Came across this little snippet from John Mark Reynolds that I wanted to post here:

Reading is the trait of leaders. Why? Arguments cannot be made in any other way over time. [Hugh Hewitt says, "If you read, you lead."

I get kidded about how much I read and sometimes I feel like I am out of touch with reality because I gravitate toward reading - for instance - unless it's a Gator game or a show I really, really like, I'll often take a book with me to watch TV.  I just get bored because it's a passive medium.  I know the TV muddles my ability to comprehend what I am reading, which is why I don't take Calvin's Institutes into the TV room, but it's nice to be able to glance down at a book and get a snippet of a sentence or two here and there that engages my mind.

I'm also very aware of the arguments against the priority of reading (see this post) but it seems to me we ought to heed the words of John Mark and Hugh.  I can't understand why you wouldn't want to always be reading, especially if you are in leadership.  If you are always reading you are always growing and always exploring new worlds and never getting bored.  For me the question isn't "why read?" it's "why would you not want to read?"

Also, check this out from Brandywine Books - Reading is Real Life.

Are You Awesome, Bold, or Awesomely Bold?

In my last post about coach John Gagliardi I compared and contrasted his leadership style with that of Urban Meyer, coach of the Florida Gators.  Gagliardi is very laid back and Urban is very intense.  What both have in common though, is that they are both winners.  Urban is the hottest up and coming young coach, which makes me grateful he is at my alma mater, and Gagliardi is the all time winningest coach in college football history.  Which shows that you can win with either laid back leadership or high intensity leadership.

What I neglected in that post was to tell you of a third and greater form of leadership - "Awesomely Bold "leadership.  Some leaders are awesome, some are bold, but only a rare few are "awesomely bold."

My new leadership mentor/guru is "Coach Brant Hansen" who has written "The 417 Rules of Awesomely Bold Leadership."  Through Brant I have . . .

-- learned how to give a hurting world what it's been waiting for:  My Vision Statement.

-- Been equipped and empowered to enhance my Bold Leadership by using words like "equip" and "empower"!

Some of the rules are:

Rule #84:  The Enemy of Awesomely Awesome is "Pretty Awesome"

...and as I ascended the feared north face of K2, without climbing equipment, I couldn't help but notice:  There are some frozen dead people up here.

Friend, let me tell you something:  When you see some frozen dead people, life comes into focus.  I realized right then:  These people were pretty awesome, to make it that far.  But they were entombed in ice.  They were also deceased. . . . And I heard myself say, right then and there:  For awesomely bold leaders, the real enemy of being truly awesomely awesome was being "pretty awesome."

Rule #94 -- Be Awesomely Manlier than Everyone Else

...and so there I was, and Mr. Norris wouldn't even get off the floor.  I said to him, "Chuck, it's okay.  You lost.  But stand up and be a man."  And I think he would have, but he was still unconscious. 

Rule #95:  Win at Everything

...so there's no getting around it:  God is a winner.  Therefore, to be a Godly man, you have to win...at everything.

Rule #112  Awesomely Bold Leaders Lead the Leading Leaders of Visionary Leaders

Rule #401:  Awesomely Bold Leaders Know How to Breathe

...and, as I said in that infomercial, the key is breathing.

I've successfully taught awesomely bold leaders for years:  When under pressure, under stress, you must breathe.  You must inhale, then exhale, repeatedly.

Everytime I read one of these rules I take my leadership to the next level.  In fact by simply copying and pasting them into this blog post I jumped to the next level five times.  And you dear friend, just jumped to the next level simply by reading this - isn't it amazing how well this works.  The more rules you know the more levels you get to go to.

So, I invite you to join me on this journey of becoming an awesomely bold leader.  Remember, leadership is nothing more than a process of learning the rules from Coach Hanson, following the formulas and using the jargon.  Do this and you will become a dynamically influential catalytic change agent for exponential times like these, . . . er, I mean you will become an awesomely bold dynamically influential catalytic change agent for exponential times like these.

All Hail Coach Gags!

I know this may come as a surprise to some of you because I tend to keep my team loyalties under wraps here, but I am a big Florida Gator fan, being a grad and all.  And because of this, when it comes to sports and coaching I revere Urban Meyer.  I cannot come up with enough superlatives to describe what he has done and is doing with the Gators and I read everything I can find on him.  Maybe I'll blog about urban some other time, but today I want to mention my other favorite football coach - John Gagliardiof St. Johns University in Collegeville, MN.

I became enamored with him when i read the book "The Sweet Season" by Austin Murphy.  I never thought I would say this, but that book has vaulted over books written by the venerable Rick Reilly to become my favorite sports book. Because of this book, I dragged my wife away for a day on our trip to Minneapolis last year just so I could see the campus and the field where John Gagliardi coaches the St. Johns Johnnies. 

so, imagine my delight in finding the video below on YouTube where Coach Gags talks about his coaching philosophy.  He is an anachronism and has a coaching philosophy which should be guaranteed to bring failure to any program.  But somehow it doesn't.  Did I mention that he is the winningest  college football coach of all time.  He left Bear Bryant in the dust years ago, Bobby Bowden and JoePa will never come close to him in terms of wins, and in recent years he has surpassed even the great Eddie Robinson.

I love what he says here - he just does what he thinks is right for them.  He doesn't even know what other football programs do.  I loved the question about why he doesn't have a whistle and other things.  His answers are basically somewhere along the lines of Napolean Dynamite - "because I felt like it." 
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He doesn't micromanage his players - there is no compulsory weight training.  He encourages them to lift weights, but only if they want to.  And he says there first rule of thumb is that there is no single way to coach football - there are many different ways to get the job done.

This is refreshing to me.  I am not a high intensity person and I don't respond well to high intensity leaders.  I do know it works though - Urban is the epitome of high intensity leadership.  And he gets players who respond well to that and he turns them into champions and for that I give him the highest respect. But Coach Gags is a welcome example for people like me who aren't built that way.   

 

Jesus didn't aspire to leadership??

Ruth Tucker says Jesus was a failed leader, (not a failed Messiah, mind you) but that's ok - He never aspired to leadership, He aspired to legacy, and in that He is and was incomparable.

That Jesus was a failed leader both by example and by teaching is something we already know—at least unconsciously. Jesus taught that the first shall be last; take up your cross and follow me; to be a minister or to be great in the eyes of God is to be a servant. His teaching on leadership was upside-down and backwards. Indeed, it was no leadership teaching at all. We all know that, but we easily try to fix Jesus’ teachings or put the prefix servant in front of the word leadership. But the effort falls short.

Read the rest.

The Five Why's

Kottke had a link today to the Five Why's?  I'm not sure I understand enough about it to comment on it, but the "five why's" is a method used to find the root of a problem.  The idea is that if you ask the question "why" five times you will usually get to the root of a problem.  Here's an example from the Wikipedia entry.

    My car will not start. (the problem)

1. Why? - The battery is dead. (first why)
2. Why? - The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
3. Why? - The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
4. Why? - The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and has never been replaced. (fourth why)
5. Why? - I have not been maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, root cause)

As for me I usually get bugged when people ask too many "why" questions and I usually go Napoleon Dynamite after the second "why?"  "Because I feel like it - gosh!"

But this may work and may be worth considering - it's worked for Toyota, maybe it works elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: five why's, 5 why's, troubleshooting

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The Law of Unintended Consequences

There's a great discussion of the law of unintended consequences going on in several places and it's a discussion that has resonance with the church and the Christian faith.  Before commenting let me give you the players in the discussion.  I may not have all the relationships in proper order here as far as who is responding to who, but if you check these posts out you'll get the gist (the posts aren't too long so you can read them and it will be worthwhile).

The Freakonomics guys did a column for the New York Times Magazines on Unintended Consequences where they looked at three examples of unintended consequences - how the Americans with Disabilities Act has harmed Americans with Disabilities by leading to a sharp drop in employment for them, how Jewish seventh year sabbatical laws got corrupted and came to harm the poor they were created to protect and how the Endangered Species Act has led to the destruction of habitats of endangered species.

This causes Andrew at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science to wonder exactly what kind of "law" the "law of unintended consequences" is?  He points to another post where he argues that often the "unintended" consequences were in fact "intended."  I suppose that would be like the woman who never intended to blow the week's budget on new clothes, but somehow found herself in a department store or some pastors who intend to quit buying books they don't read but somehow often find themselves in bookstores and don't know how they got there.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution comes through with a definition of the law of unintended consequences that the Freakonomics guys like:

The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system.   The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives.  Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system.  When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.

I like that, but speaking only for myself, I was hoping for more definition on the difference between a simple and a complex system.  The comments on Alex Tabarrok's post are almost too many to read, but there is one comment by Stephen Downes that I think helps on my question:

A 'simple system' is a system where linear cause-and-effect relations hold. A 'complex system' is one in which the same cause may have multiple effects.

This clarification is important because the 'contrast' in the quote cited above in fact includes a number of simple systems. 'high-feedback' and 'incentive-driven' systems are types of simple systems - they suppose that a certain cause - feedback, or incentives - will produce the desired result.

I am also wondering if Mr. Downes might say that in a complex system a single effect may have multiple causes?  It seems to me that this is the case.

Which leads me to speculate on how this applies to the religious realm.

John Maxwell and the Millennials and Leadership

I understand that most of my readers probably don't read John Maxwell very much and many would even consider him suspect. I also realize and agree that "generational theory" is very limited in it's ability to explain the world around us.

So now that I have begun by causing you to question the reliability of the source and the content let me recommend this article by John Maxwell on the Millennials.  For some of you this will be more of the same, but I think it does reinforce things many of us have been noting.

Maxwell asks the right question which is worth pondering when he says:

While most literature has focused on how to manage Millennials, author Jim Heskett poses a question one step down the road in his article, “How Will Millennials Manage?”

And Maxwell does a nice job of outlining how this generation will lead.  The article reinforces the ideas found in The Starfish and the Spider, among other places, that heavy-handed, top-down, hierarchically-driven, command and control structures of leadership aren't going to win the day in the future.  Of course, having said that I am now left dazed and confused, wondering how in the world Tom Coughlin has taken a team to the Super Bowl, but that's a discussion for another day.

And, if the Starfish and the Spider is even remotely on track, it appears this top-down, command and control style of leadership has historically been a weaker form of leadership than the more decentralized, collaborative style of leadership.  In other words, the millennials may not just be a quirky generation that older folks need to tolerate, they may be recovering important principles and ideas that have served well throughout history.

So, with that, let me encourage you to read the whole article by Maxwell.  And here's a link to the article he references by Jim Heskett.

Starbucks, Home Depot, Tom Peters, Pogo, Molding Innards and Total Depravity

I doubt that Tom Peters would agree and maybe not appreciate it, if I called him a Calvinist, but his post called We Have Met the Enemy is an outstanding illustration of Christian doctrines of original sin, indwelling sin, total depravity and the like.

Tom is most famous for his book In Search of Excellence, and his career as a consultant/speaker/author/business-guru. In the above post he opines on Starbucks, a company sailing in a wide open Blue Ocean yet whose stock is "in the tank." Along the way, he compares Starbucks struggles to those of Home Depot and says that basically, Pogo was right - "we have met the enemy and he is us."  In both cases, the decline of Starbucks and Home Depot cannot be explained in terms of overwhelming competition, it is something within the companies themselves that caused them to decline.  Here's a quick summary that could easily be translated into theologi-speak:

Yes, to use the oft repeated Walt Kelly quote (from his comic strip, Pogo): "We have met the enemy and he is us." "Innovation" is the business topic du jour. Of course, it's really the "topic du always"—even for 5-year old companies that started with a bang, and took advantage of said bang to undertake expansion. Or, for that matter, those choosing not to expand and graying in place. To use an even more oft used quote by the ubiquitous whomever: "Get thine own house in order first, dude." That is, in, conservatively, eight out of ten cases, I'd judge after 35 years of close observation, it's not a surging competitor with a "disruptive" strategy that generates a star's tailspin, but the star's inherent entropic (remember Newton) drift, away from innovativeness and toward mediocrity; such companies, almost all companies, do not have to learn how to innovate ... they have to learn how to not not innovate. "Data drawn from the real world," said Norberto Odebrecht, founder of the remarkable Brazilian heavy construction giant, Odebrecht, "attest to a fact that is beyond our control: Everything in existence tends to deteriorate." It's the molding innards, not the lousy strategy or uppity competitor, that cause most of, if not all of, the decline. And addressing said molding innards must, simply must, be the new or extant CEO's Job #1.

Tim Keller on the Right Kind of Leaders

Tim Keller on leadership - this is too good not to share:

Most churches make the mistake of selecting as leaders the confident, the competent, and the successful. But what you most need in a leader is someone who has been broken by the knowledge of his or her sin, and even greater knowledge of Jesus' costly grace. The number one leaders in every church ought to be the people who repent the most fully without excuses, because you don't need any now; the most easily without bitterness; the most publicly and the most joyfully. They know their standing isn't based on their performance.

Ht - Bill Kinnon & Daryl Dash