Church

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…

"Can Geico really save you fifteen percent or more on your car insurance?  Is Ed 'Too Tall' Jones too tall?" That's the line from a new Geico commercial.  For years, I have loved watching Geico commercials ... the gecko, the cavemen, and now this guy who has his hair slicked back and looks a bit like Pierce Brosnan. Why can't the church be as creative as Geico?  We're not peddling insurance; we sharing the good news that Jesus Christ has come to redeem people from darkness and bring them into the light. Yet, in many churches we avoid the heavy-lifting required to be creative.  We offer up to those who find their way to our pews something we have warmed up from another church.  Or worse, we don't even bother to warm it up. God deserves better.  People's eternal destinies hang in the balance.