One of the blogs I regularly track is The Harvard Business Review. Actually, it's a collection of multiple blogs all under one roof. Last week, one of the articles that caught my attention was this one: "12 Things Good Bosses Believe." Here are the highlights: I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not…
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Thanks to Guy Kawasaki, I just discovered this site called "Letters of Note." It's a collection of "correspondence deserving of a wider audience." The following quote is from Thomas Edison who is writing a letter of congratulations to a former colleague. What caught my eye was this passage: "The worst is to come, for it takes about seven years to convert the average man to the acceptance of a solved problem." Was Edison being sarcastic, pessimistic, optimistic, or realistic?
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I'm reading a white paper on creativity by Hugh MacLeod. Some you may know him as the guy who draws cartoons on the back of business cards (gapingvoid.com). In the paper, he shares his tips and advice on how to be creative. One of those was this: "Merit can be bought. Passion can't." While MacLeod was talking on the creative level, I'd like to venture out into leadership issues. If you're the leader of an organization and need an accountant who can keep the dollars and cents straight, that's about finding merit -- or competence. If you're looking for an accountant who is competent AND believes in what you're doing so much that he or she will work long hours and evangelize any vendor that comes within twenty feet ... that's about passion. Passion is an intangible. Passion is an internal fire in the belly that can't be contained. It's…
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After writing a previous post about using sandboxes in church, I got to thinking about another topic that piques my interest: open source software. For years, I have been a big fan of open source software. In web development, the first content management system (CMS) I used was Mambo -- an open source CMS that used PHP and MySQL. When Mambo transformed into Joomla, I followed along. The componenets, extensions, and modules were created by fellow Joomla users who made their work available free of charge. Open source software is simply software where anyone can contribute to its development. Many projects may feature a core team of developers who do much of the heavy lifting. However, one of the great benefits of open source software comes through the community that is created around the software. With the best software, its often the community that surrounds the software that finds bugs,…
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The other day while leading a collaboration meeting with our ministry leads, I mentioned that we needed to create a sandbox where people could experiment with new ideas without a fear of failing. The idea of a sandbox is familiar to those with a technology background -- it's when users are allowed to go in and put new software (or systems) through the paces. Users become comfortable with features, bugs are found, and the product gets better (hopefully!). The beauty of a sandbox is that you can test and experiment without the pressure of producing results. Users are typically forgiving of beta releases; not so much with final versions. What if your church had a sandbox budget that allowed ministry folks to test and experiment ideas -- gaining input, confidence, and creativity along the way. From my experience, the usual way a new ministry gets rolled out is in "final"…
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