Church

I began preaching before I was old enough to drive. The church I grew up in was a fantastic place to preach my first sermon.  I was fifteen years-old the first time I preached.  It was on a Sunday night and I can still remember surveying the crowd and seeing the faces of Sunday school teachers who had taught me when I was still in diapers.  Honestly, it was a bit intimidating. Our pastor took a special interest in me and encouraged me to try preaching (I think he enjoyed having a Sunday night off every now and then).  Looking back, I am so thankful to have had a church and a mentor that encouraged me to get in the game. This weekend I will be concluding our current series with a message about how you will grow spiritually when you move from spectator to participant.  Why settle for a…

In a Harvard Business Review article entitled "Rebuilding Trust: Why Capping Salaries Isn't Enough", author Diane Coutu talks about how a leader goes about rebuilding trust.  Among the four values she lays out, I thought I would pass along this one: Consistency is the real engine of trust. Even if a leader shows competence, integrity, and respect, but fails to behave consistently, she won't capture people's hearts and minds. No one wants to follow a leader who is trustworthy one moment and unpredictable the next. Without reliability, there can only be pseudo trust between people - especially in relations where the power is asymmetrical.

Have you ever noticed ... we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and judge others by their behavior. In other words, we're quick to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, even when our actions don't match what we set out to do.  But we're slow to grant that same favor to others.

“Vision, sure.  Strategy, yes.  But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time.  In other words, you must win through superior logistics …” (Tom Peters).

Many of you know that I'm a big fan of all things Google.  Google.com is my home page, Google Maps is my default mapping software, and I recently bought my wife a phone with Google Android as the OS.  So, it should come as no surprise that the following blog post about how Google sets goals caught my attention.  Read and learn ... How Google sets goals and measures success Google sets impossible bodacious goals…and then achieves them. The engineering mindset of solving the impossible problem is part of the culture instilled in every group at Google. Tough engineering problems don’t have obvious answers. You need to invent the solution, not just optimize something that exists. Every quarter every group at Google sets goals, called OKRs, for the next 90 days. Most big companies set annual goals like improving or growing something by x%, and then measure performance once a…