John Pearson's Buckets Blog

Experiencing God (2021 Edition): Knowing and Doing the Will of God

Issue No. 496 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights an expanded 2021 edition of Henry Blackaby’s classic, Experiencing God. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #21 below.)


Henry Blackaby: “If Balaam lived in our formula-driven day, perhaps he would have written a book, Donkeys for Dummies…”

Donkeys for Dummies!

I predicted in January 2021, “I’m out on a limb here, but not really. Leadership Core: Character, Competence, Capacity will likely be my 2021 book-of-the-year. It will take a phenomenal book to jostle this pick off its perch.”

Did I speak too soon? Yikes! From May to December, I’ve read about one chapter every weekend from Experiencing God (2021 Edition): Knowing and Doing the Will of God, by Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, and Claude King. This powerful/powerful update of the classic book/workbook was published in May 2021 with seven new chapters and dozens of memorable stories that you’ll share with families and friends. (I shared one story around our Thanksgiving table last week.)

It's likely you spent time in the Experiencing God workbook years ago. Ditto. But…wow. This new edition (now with Henry Blackaby’s son, Richard, as the third co-author) is fresh, convicting, and so, so insightful. (How did I miss these truths on my first read-through?)

In more than 500 book reviews, I’ve featured only a handful of books that required two reviews. This book also requires two reviews, maybe three. Here’s Part 1 of 2:

FOUR MEMORABLE INSIGHTS (Part 1 of 2)

INSIGHT #1: The Two-Word Answer! Henry Blackaby shares the story of a couple who heard God direct them to take early retirement and serve overseas. Instead, they delayed until all their ducks were in a row and their dream home was built. But then… “a violent tornado swept right over their house, tearing it to splinters and leaving only rubble.” They asked Blackaby, “What do you think we should do?”

Blackaby’s two-word response: “OBEY IMMEDIATELY!”

INSIGHT #2: Mistakes! Blackaby writes, “Nowhere in the Bible does God promise to stop us from making mistakes!” He lists four inappropriate ways for discerning God’s voice. (Even well-meaning people make these mistakes! Yikes!) These are serious mistakes—because people are misunderstanding what the Bible teaches. They include:
1) Asking for a miraculous sign
2) Seeking a method
3) The “name it and claim it” method
4) Open and closed doors

On seeking a method, Blackaby comments, “Balaam heard God speak through a donkey even though he had never heard God talk through a donkey before. If Balaam lived in our formula-driven day, perhaps he would have written a book, Donkeys for Dummies, so people could discern when God was speaking to them through a donkey, too!”

INSIGHT #3: “See Where God Is Working!” When Henry Blackaby was a pastor, the church was located near a college campus. “One Sunday, I pulled our students together and said, ‘This week I want you to go to the campus and watch to see where God is working. If God shows you where He is working, immediately join Him!” (He explained that the Bible teaches that “people don’t ask questions about spiritual matters unless God is at work in their lives.”)

He writes, “That Sunday, I told the students, ‘If during the course of your day attending class, someone starts asking you spiritual questions, what else you may have planned, don’t do it. Cancel what you had planned and spend time with that individual to discover what God is doing.’ That week our students went onto the campus, watching to see where God was at work so they could join Him.”

What happened? “On Wednesday, one of our female students excitedly reported, ‘Pastor, a girl who had been in classes with me for two years approached me after class today. She said, ‘I think you might be a Christian. I need to talk to you.’ I remembered what you said. I had a class in a few minutes, but I skipped it. We went to the cafeteria to talk. She said, ‘Eleven of us girls in the dorm have been studying the Bible, and none of us are Christians. Do you know someone who can lead us in a Bible study?’”

Blackaby notes, “As a result of that contact, we started three Bible study groups in the women’s dorms and two in the men’s. For almost two years we had tried to do something for God and failed. Then for three days we looked to see where God was working, and what a difference that made!”

The authors remind readers not to look for a formula to experience God. Instead, they articulate seven key principles (realities) across the 26 short chapters—with dozens of memorable stories. The seven realities:

• Reality 1: "God is always at work around you.
• Reality 2: God pursues a continuing love relationship with you that is real and personal.
• Reality 3: God invites you to become involved with Him in His work.
• Reality 4: God speaks by the Holy Spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes, and His ways.
• Reality 5: God’s invitation for you to work with Him always leads you to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action.
• Reality 6: You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what He is doing.
• Reality 7: You come to know God by experience as you obey Him and He accomplishes His work through you.”

INSIGHT #4: “Please Cancel My Request!” In Mark 2, when the four entrepreneurial friends of the paraplegic man brought their friend to Jesus for healing, Jesus—instead—forgave the man’s sins. Meditating on that passage prompted Blackaby to weep and pray, “O God, if I ever give You a request and You have more to give me than I am asking, please cancel my request!”

Read this gem—slowly—and the truths will seriously whack you. Example: “Focusing on identifying [spiritual] gifts instead of determining what God’s assignment is can also be severely limiting for believers who base their future usefulness for God only on their past effectiveness.” Blackaby adds, “The common approach to spiritual gifts can easily become self-centered rather than God-centered.” Stay tuned for more whacks (Part 2 of 2) in a future issue.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Experiencing God (2021 Edition): Knowing and Doing the Will of God, by Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, and Claude King. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (11 hours, 3 minutes). (Note: The audio version is from the 2009 book revision.)



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) “When God speaks, it is important to write it down,” says Henry Blackaby. That’s from my short 2008 review of Experiencing God (click here). Why might you find value in reading an updated and expanded version of a book you’ve already read—and this time, making notes as you read (when God speaks).
 2) Glub. Glub. Glub? Henry Blackaby writes, “The affirmation comes after the obedience.” He notes: “When Jesus invited Peter to get out of the boat to walk on the water, He did not assure Peter he would stay afloat! The Lord simply said, ‘Come!’ (Matt. 14:28). Peter wouldn’t know he could walk on the water until he took his first step.” This past year or two, what have you learned about taking the first step?
 

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John’s “I’m trying” efforts were fruitless. “In trying to honor God as a college student, I wanted the fruits of the spirit to be evident in my life. But I focused on the fruits—instead of the spirit.” (See Mistake #21 in Mastering Mistake-Making.)

Mistake #21 of 25: Striving Really Hard to Walk With God
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #21: “’I can do this by trying harder’ was my failed strategy. ‘Just be more disciplined.’ I missed the simplicity of John 15—being connected to the Vine.”

Read this chapter to discover what John learned during his college days about the difference between human striving versus simply enjoying a relationship with the God of the Universe! And…learn what happened when he violated that semester’s evangelism training mandate, “Never say ‘TURN OR BURN!’”

For Mistake #21, John recommends two resources from Cru:
• Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?*
• Have You Made the Wonderful Discovery of the Spirit-Filled Life?*  
*See bulk pricing from Cru Press.

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake-Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

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"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you missed John's half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance," you can now order the 107-page workbook on Amazon. Click here.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Henry Blackaby suggests you conduct a personal inventory and ask, “’What am I presently doing that can only be explained by God’s activity in my life?’ If you cannot think of anything, spend time with the Lord and ask Him why.” Need help conducting both personal and organizational inventories? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers...into Lifelong Fans

Issue No. 495 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting includes a confession! John thought he could quickly sail through a new customer experience book. Not! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #20 below.)


Oh, my! Every chapter (honest!) packs a punch in this hot-off-the-press customer experience toolkit, From Impressed to Obsessed.

I Must Confess!

Yikes! I got carried away in the previous issue with my long (but fascinating!) review of Becoming Trader Joe. My penance: today’s short review!

I MUST CONFESS. While the title intrigued me, From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans…really, would there be any new or fresh thinking in yet one more book on the customer experience?

However…an endorsement from Horst Schulze of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company is high praise. (Ditto endorsements from Seth Godin, Marshall Goldsmith, and Chester Elton.) And the wheelchair story from the hotel’s Dubai property is a stunner! Their mantra “radar on and antenna up” will be your next weekly staff meeting sermon!

I MUST CONFESS. I’m fairly well read. I know about Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, and Hyundai…so really, I thought, I can speed-read through this book.

However…I’ve never linked those customer stories to actual principles. The author, Jon Picoult, just gifted me with a new mental filing system—12 slots for his 12 memorable principles. I switched from speed-reading to speed-learning.

I MUST CONFESS. I skipped the intro, looked for the most interesting chapter title—and thought I could judge the book by that chapter. One and done, I thought.

However…Chapter 17, “Deliver Pleasant Surprises,” hooked me in the first line! (No spoiler alert, but after you read it—you’ll share this “hook” and the principle with your colleagues dozens of times!) Pastor Picoult practices what he preaches!

I MUST CONFESS. Okay, I thought, I’ll read just one more chapter. No author on the planet can deliver 18 must-read chapters.

However…I was wrong again. Every chapter packs a punch:
• Chapter 9: the Expedia story in “Make It Effortless.” (“Answer questions before they’re asked.”) Plus, my favorite line: 

“Please waste my time,”
said no one, ever.

 

• Chapter 14: “Creative Relevance” and the question beneath the question, “What time is the three o’clock parade?”
• Chapter 18: the “Maggots on a Plane” incident in “Recover with Style.”

I MUST CONFESS. Honest. I tried to skip a few chapters. No crime in that, right?

However…the “Putting the Principles Into Practice” bullet points at the end of each chapter were just too much. I had to read the full chapter! Add in the “Key Takeways” (more bullet points!)—and Picoult ensured his book would be read. I mean, devoured. So don’t skip any chapter—especially Chapter 7—“Create Peaks and Avoid Valleys.”

I MUST CONFESS. I went back and did a proper read—even starting in the intro.

However…I should have read page one first (what a concept!). The first sentence of this powerful book is convicting: “If you’re aspiring to satisfy your customers, then you are aspiring to mediocrity.” Yikes!

I MUST CONFESS. After a very unsatisfying customer experience earlier this month, my wife and I labeled the 90-minute torture session, “From Impressed to Distressed.” I sent Jon Picoult’s book to the company’s CEO! (Maybe you should order two copies: one for you, and one ready to send to the Chief Offender of your next disappointing customer experience!)

To order from Amazon, click on the title for From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans, by Jon Picoult. Are you a listener? Listen to the audio book on Libro.fm (pre-order for January delivery).



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Pop Quiz! Write down 12 principles for converting our customers and employees into lifelong fans. You have 12 minutes. Go!
2) In the chapter, “Keep It Simple,” the author notes that Trader Joe’s made a conscious decision to limit the number of products it carries. Compare 4,000 SKUs (stock-keeping units) vs. the average grocery store count of 50,000 SKUs. Why might less products, programs, and services help create raving fans—versus adding more, more, and more? Read my review of Becoming Trader Joe.
3) Bonus Idea for Your Team. Offer a Chick-Fil-A gift card (free lunch!) to the team member who will read and report on the customer service stories in Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, by Dan Heath. (Read my review.)

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Ruth Haley Barton: “Like so many of us as leaders, Moses’ natural gifting was at the mercy of his unresolved past and the unexamined emotional patterns that drove him.” (See Mistake #20 in Mastering Mistake Making.)

Mistake #20 of 25: Trying to Fix Workaholism on My Own
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #20: “I did not understand—nor address—my workaholism and the harm it inflicted on my family and coworkers. I should have asked a counselor for help much, much sooner.”

Read this chapter to discover what John learned and how and when he got help. A gifted therapist was instrumental in walking John through what drove his workaholism, often called “the addiction that America applauds.” 

For Mistake #20, John recommends this book:
• Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry, by Ruth Haley Barton (Read John’s review of his 2009 book-of-the-year.)
• Order the 10th anniversary expanded edition of Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership. 

Ruth Haley Barton writes, “Like so many of us as leaders, Moses’ natural gifting was at the mercy of his unresolved past and the unexamined emotional patterns that drove him.”

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you missed John's half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance," you can now order the 107-page workbook on Amazon. Click here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Beware the “Lampshade Effect,” warns Jon Picoult in From Impressed to Obsessed. This is “the tendency for people to take a small error or oversight in the customer experience and infer from it that something bigger may be amiss.” (See also Ball #5 in “The Printing Bucket” chapter of Mastering the Management Buckets—a dozen typos in the airline emergency row’s safety chart! Yikes!) Are you overlooking your “small errors?” How would you know? Is it time for an objective assessment of your small and big errors? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

Becoming Trader Joe

Issue No. 494 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting is just an appetizer to inspire you to partake of the full meal: Becoming Trader Joe. It’s a leadership and management feast! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for almost 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #19 below.)


Trader Joe’s founder, Joe Coulombe, organized the central management’s operation around the “skunkworks” concept popularized by Tom Peters. Coulombe’s title: “Chief Skunk.” See the Operations Bucket. (Photo credit: Becoming Trader Joe.)

Chief Skunk!

I’ve rarely met a Trader Joe’s customer who is not a Trader Joe’s raving fan. How about you?

This past June, HarperCollins Leadership published a fascinating read by the founder of Trader Joe’s. And yes—it’s a leadership book, but you’ll also be fascinated by the delightful discoveries down every aisle of this memorable treat, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys, by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri.

Joe Coulombe (he died at age 89 in February 2020) gifted us with MBA-level thinking in leadership, management, retailing, economics, history, and humor—all in 288 fast-reading pages. Imagine Renaissance Man meets Peter Drucker meets The Galloping Gourmet. (And thanks to my long-suffering wife, Joanne, I taste-tested snippets from the book with her in recent evenings—and she agrees: this is a stunningly delicious read.)

Becoming Trader Joe checks the box in all 20 management buckets (core competencies) and the three arenas of Cause, Community, and Corporation:

THE CAUSE

#1. The Results Bucket. Trader Joe’s financial growth and results were stunning—but, as you’ll read, it was not about the money. When asked a product pricing question—“What percentage margin did you aim for?”—this inquiry launched Joe Coulombe into his “tirade about how you pay your bills with dollars, not percents.”

#2. The Customer Bucket. Trader Joe’s niche customer: the overeducated, underpaid, and well-traveled person. Not “the masses who willingly consumed Folger’s coffee, Best Foods Mayonnaise, Wonder Bread, Coca-Cola, etc.” Joe Coulombe adds, “…I saw an opportunity to differentiate ourselves radically from mainstream retailing to mainstream people.” He notes, “I believe in the wisdom that you gain customers one by one, but you lose them in droves.”

#3. The Strategy Bucket. Coulombe creatively names the three versions of Trader Joe’s: Good Time Charley (1967-1970), Whole Earth Harry (1971-1976), and the final version—Mac the Knife (1977 and beyond). Note: Joe Coulombe and Russia gave up Five Year Plans in the same year, 1988!

#4. The Drucker Bucket. Greatly influenced by Peter Drucker, Coulombe notes Drucker’s “seminal piece in the July 25, 1989, Wall Street Journal called ‘Sell the Mail Room.’” This was six months after Coulombe left Trader Joe’s—but he reminisces about his good and bad outsourcing decisions. (“We never took mainframe computing inhouse…” Another rule: “Never buy a computer you can’t lift.”
        
#5. The Book Bucket. Ironically, Joe Coulombe names the “best” book on management—but he actually lists three of them! (Even better!)
   • The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I, by Barbara Tuchman – “It’s the best book on management—and, especially, mismanagement—I’ve ever read.” (p. 14)
   • The Winning Performance: How America's High-Growth Midsize Companies Succeed, by Clifford and Cavanaugh – He notes his favorite quote “from my favorite book on management.” (p. xiv)
   • The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. – “…one of my favorite books on management.” (p. 204)
   • And one more: Coulombe said “the best economics book I ever read” was Seven Kinds of Inflation, by Richard Dana Skinner (1937).

#6. The Program Bucket. Coulombe was thinking supply chain and logistics well before our current crisis! Chapter 13, “Virtual Distribution,” includes two lists of products carried in 1976 versus 1988—and the percentage of sales for each product. The 1976 list included 19 categories. The top-four sellers: dry groceries, milk and ice cream, and cigarettes at 10% each. Wine was fourth at 8%. The 1988 list: wine (22%), dry groceries (12%), nuts and dried fruit (12%), and frozen foods (11%). The 1988 list was pared down to 14 categories. Read the fascinating rationales for every yes/no buying decision. This chapter reminded me of the book, Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decisions for Financial Viability.

 

THE COMMUNITY

 #7. The People Bucket. “…the most important single business decision I ever made was to pay people well.” Coulombe adds, “At a time when the minimum wage was $4.35, we often paid $13.00 per hour because these people were worth it. A distinction between full-time and part-time is a false dichotomy when it comes to productivity.” Plus, to enrich product knowledge of Captains (aka the top manager in each store), Trader Joe’s sent every Captain and spouse to Europe “to make a three-week grand tour of the wine and cheese regions in Germany, Switzerland, and France.”

 #8. The Culture Bucket. “…as Trader Joe’s became famous, the employees began earning something else: prestige. To be part of Trader Joe’s brought them instant recognition from their friends and families.” 

 
John’s granddaughter, Emelia Pearson (18), discerned that the Trader Joe’s crew member “uniform,” was such a unique and prestigious outfit—that she wore it for Halloween this year! (Note: she is not a crew member.) All Trader Joe’s employees continue to wear Hawaiian shirts, provided by the store (different shades to match the seasons, per Coulombe).

#9. The Team Bucket. Coulombe was not a silo thinker. Chapter 18, “Double Entry Retailing” is a crash course for every manager on what matters and the interrelationships of key areas. Team members influence and impact a whole system—with five variables on the “Demand Side” and 10 variables on the “Supply Side.”
   • Demand Side: assortment of merchandise, pricing, convenience, credit, and showmanship.
   • Supply Side: merchandise vendors, employees, “habits” and “culture,” systems, non-merchandise vendors, landlords, governments, bankers and investment bankers, stockholders, and crime.

Coulombe’s vision of teamwork found inspiration from Pierre Monteux, the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony (during Coulombe’s years at Stanford University). Much later, he read this in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner: “Monteux never tried to get a performance out of an orchestra. He was always giving one with them.”

#10. The Hoopla! Bucket. No surprise—it was a hoot (and still is) to work at Trader Joe’s. He writes, “There was a particular angle to the naming of our products. I wanted to create a silent conspiracy among the overeducated, underpaid people in town, so that as they moved down the aisles they would read secret messages on the products.” Examples: Brandenburg Brownies, Sir Isaac Newtons, The Bagel Spinoza, The Peanut Pascal. “My favorite of all the private labels was Heisenberg’s Uncertain Blend of coffee beans.” (I had to google it. See the “uncertainty principle.”)

Another Hoopla! seasoning: “Showmanship” is defined as “the sum total of all efforts to make contact with the customer. It’s the most ephemeral, the most difficult, and the most important of the Demand Side activities.”

#11. The Donor Bucket. As of 1988, Trader Joe’s was receiving 300 donation requests per year from nonprofit organizations. Coulombe had five policies that guided their giving, including: “1) Never give cash to anyone. 2) Never buy space in a program. That is money thrown away. 3) Give freely, give generously, but only to nonprofits that are focused on the overeducated and underpaid.” 

In 2020, Trader Joe’s also donated nearly $345 million dollars of food and beverages, which equates to approximately 69 million meals, through their Neighborhood Shares program. Every nonprofit fundraiser should read “Promoting through Nonprofits” in Chapter 9.

#12. The Volunteer Bucket. This is stunning! Joe Coulombe—personally—volunteered his time to write and record a one-minute broadcast for a Los Angeles classical music radio station. The opening line, “This is Joe Coulombe of Trader Joe’s with a word on food and wine.” He writes, “We needed the publicity in those days, and KFAC was right on our target of overeducated and unpaid people.” He recorded 3,300 unique scripts (as in…no repeats!) for “Words on Food and Wine” and he would record 50 or 60 broadcasts in a session that left him “pretty well burned out.” Oh, my. This discipline “forced me to study the field of food and wine.”

#13. The Crisis Bucket. “Hairballs” is the title of Chapter 10—and the first line cautions, “All businesses have problems.” Coulombe’s favorite management quote is from Tex Thornton of Litton Industries: “If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions.” The author writes, “Early in my career I learned there are two kinds of decisions: the ones that are easily reversible and the ones that aren’t.”

This must-read chapter includes the section, “The Worst Hairball of My Career: The United Farm Workers’ Secondary Boycott.” Whew! The boycott of Trader Joe’s—just before Thanksgiving in 1971—was actually organized by young seminarians from Union Theological Seminary in New York.

THE CORPORATION

#14. The Board Bucket. When he retired from Trader Joe’s, Coulombe served on the board of directors of several companies. He also consulted with companies, but didn’t have the highest view of consultants! He found board work and the writing of this book, “satisfying, challenging, and appropriate to my age.” His succession plan (selling the company, continuing to lead it for a few years, and then exiting at age 58) is instructive for board members and CEOs.

#15. The Budget Bucket. Did you know that Trader Joe’s is the largest retailer of maple syrup in the United States? Ditto wild rice. That—and more—is from the introductory chapter, “A Trader Joe’s Sampler.” While financial steps (and missteps) are discussed throughout the book, budget-minded leaders will find the list of “Some of the Best Deals We Ever Made” absolutely fascinating. That topic was asked and addressed during a lecture he gave in 1998 for the Culinary Historians Society—“a lecture that led to this book.” (You’ll also appreciate the author’s pre-modern references to adding machines and slide rules!)

#16. The Delegation Bucket. You don’t grow from one store in Pasadena, Calif., to 530 stores nationwide by being inept at delegation. I could write an entire review—just on Trader Joe’s delegation competencies, but I’ll spare you. Just this: “We fundamentally changed the point of view of the business from customer-oriented to buyer-oriented. I put our buyers in charge of the company.” See more in Chapter 11, “Mac the Knife,” and how reducing the number of products—and requiring every product to pay its own way—put the authority and the responsibility on the buyers. Fascinating.

#17. The Operations Bucket. Taking a cue from the skunkworks concept by Tom Peters (see In Search of Excellence), Joe Coulombe created three major skunkworks projects in his central management: Skunkworks I: Buying, Skunkworks II: Sales, and Skunkworks III: Accounting. “I had signs made with these titles to be hung in each department." Over his door was this sign:

CHIEF SKUNK!

By the way, the Trader Joe’s approach to operations (especially the art and science of selecting store locations) should be required reading in seminaries for Church Planting 101. (Hint: Trader Joe’s locations are situated closest to their niche customers: the overeducated and underpaid.)

#18. The Systems Bucket. Fascinating! (Have I used that word yet?) “Every full-timer was supposed to be able to perform every job in the store, including checking, balancing the books, ordering each department, stocking, opening, closing, going to the bank, etc. Everybody worked the check stands in the course of a day, including the Captain.” Note: When I met Jason Addy this week (a 21-year employee, and the new Captain at the San Clemente, Calif., store), he was working the check stands! The Trader Joe’s “system” builds upon “the medieval French verb, retailer, which means to ‘cut into pieces.’”

#19. The Printing Bucket (aka the Communication Bucket). Trader Joe’s launched the Fearless Flyer newsletter in 1970 (now also online here). They synchronized promotion with purchasing—similar to one of my Printing Bucket axioms to “use publication deadlines to fine tune organizational decision-making.” Coulombe writes that “the Fearless Flyer was an educational medium and hundreds of customers kept three-ring notebook collections of the issues so they could refer back to the articles. For years, we printed three rings on the cover.” Three cheers for three-ring binders! (See my Operations Bucket and read, “Bless Bob With a Binder: A three-ring binder will usher in world peace. Almost.”)
 
#20. The Meetings Bucket. Your approach to meetings (with staff, board, vendors, and others) spotlights your organizational culture—but retailing is unique. When to meet? Coulombe hosted two employee parties every year (summer and Christmas), but planned two nights for each—to accommodate those who worked nights. Perhaps the focus on buyers is best illustrated with this: “Whenever a vendor claimed to be truly desperate, we offered to meet him 6:00 p.m. on Friday night. That separates the wheat from the chaff!” (For more on the culture of meetings, read Made From Scratch, written by the founder of Texas Roadhouse restaurants.)

Sorry. I got carried away—this book is so good, but my review is way too long. Sorry, again! Suggestion: after you read Becoming Trader Joe, read the new book on creating superb customer experiences. Watch for my review of From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans, by Jon Picoult.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys, by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (7 hours, 32 minutes).



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Trader Joe’s founder, Joe Coulombe, was the classic Renaissance Man. His book oozes with insights and quotations from Scientific American, Smithsonian, Albert Camus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, and others. What do you read—or who do you listen to—to inform your leadership and management decisions?
2) When John Pearson reads a killer quotation or a memorable chapter, he mentally files it under one of his 20 management buckets/core competencies from Mastering the Management Buckets. What’s your mental filing system for all things leadership and management?

A Trader Joe’s Afterword: “King of Cardboard and Spoils”

On Feb. 4, 2008, Dieter Zander, a pastor and friend, suffered a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of his brain. No longer able to pastor, his new vocation was “King of Cardboard and Spoils” at Trader Joe’s (really!). Read my 2013 review of the 32-page book (photos and commentary), A Stroke of Grace, by Dieter Zander and LaDonna Witmer. And another must-read, Bill Gaultiere’s blog, “A Kingdom of Cardboard and Spoils (Dieter Zander’s Story).”

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Chuck Girard wrote the worship song, “Slow Down,” and notes: “Even today, this song receives more mail and comment than any other song I have ever written.” Read more. (See Mistake #19 in Mastering Mistake Making.)

Mistake #19 of 25: Experiencing Infrequent God Moments
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #19: “I believe Almighty God wants us to experience more frequent God moments, but I often moved way-too-fast on my own—and didn’t slow down for God to intervene.”

When John and Joanne celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2019, they began with a family breakfast at Dana Point Harbor. But halfway through the celebration, they were unprepared for a stunning “God moment” when their son, Jason, revealed what the Lord had orchestrated that morning—seemingly coincidental, but not really! 

For Mistake #19, John recommends two resources:
• Option #1: The One Year Bible (the entire Bible arranged in 365 daily readings – New Living Translation, by Tyndale) – Note: this edition was just published Oct. 19, 2021, by Tyndale. (Order from Amazon)
• Option #2: “Slow Down” (listen to this worship song written and sung by Chuck Girard) – Listen on YouTube
 
Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you live in Southern California, join John for the half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance.” Details here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Does your organization need a deep dive into your customer niche again—or a 2021 version of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

2 Books: Harsh Grief Gentle Hope & Oasis Bible Study

Issue No. 493 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features two books and two women who courageously address deep issues with the good news of HOPE. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for almost 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #18 in the eNews link below.)


“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Frederick Buechner) 

2 Women. 2 Books. 1 Hope!

Our world faces deep and destructive problems. Sadness soars. What can one person do? I urge you to read about two women authors in this issue, Mary White and Diane Schnickels. They both tackle tough challenges—and balance truth-telling with hope. Stunning!

[ ] BOOK #1: Harsh Grief Gentle Hope: From the Agony of a Mother’s Greatest Loss on Earth, Comes the Divine Comfort and Hope From Heaven, by Mary White. (Order from Amazon.)



I read the first edition of this poignant true story on an airplane in 1995. I sobbed uncontrollably—alarming my seatmates. “On a dark spring night, Jerry and Mary White’s only son became the victim of a brutal homicide.”

Gratefully, Mary White released a new edition of her book just 12 months ago. I urge you to read it. The White family’s story is still tragic. Still unfathomable. And now in 2021, many others (perhaps you) are experiencing devastating loss exacerbated even more by Covid-19. Words fail us. Deep questions perplex us. This book helps. We need the deep faith and example of the Mary’s and Jerry’s to point us to Heaven’s comfort and hope.

So today, 25 years after first reading Harsh Grief, Gentle Hope—I thought I could sail through this new edition, write this review, and move on. Check. Check. Check.

Oh, my. Mary White’s poignant, soulful narrative of the loss of their son (Steve was 30 when his life was taken) touched me deeply even more in my rereading of this sad, but hopeful account. She writes:

“As this book goes into republishing, many things have changed in Jerry’s and my lives. The piercing, relentless grief of the early years has changed to frequent, comforting memories of Steve. Sorrow and tears still hit us as unexpected moments when something reminds us of Steve and our grievous loss. Tender music brings tears.”

She adds, “Steve’s last gift to me was a bouquet of tulips, and seeing them brings tears along with precious memories. I don’t think one day has passed since Steve’s death when I haven’t thought of him. Sometimes only briefly, but he is always close to my mind and heart. No parent can forget their child whether alive or dead.”

Mary’s husband, Jerry White, adds an “Afterword” to this comforting book and quotes Proverbs 14:13, “Even in laughter the heart may ache, and rejoicing may end in grief.”

The appendix reminds us, “We can’t practice for grief; we can’t take lessons to prepare for it. Loss comes, and we’re suddenly, unwillingly, underway in a sorrowful pilgrimage. All of our life experiences, and our relationship with the loved one, will determine how we grieve.”

They share 10 short “suggestions” (recognizing that “there is no right or wrong way to grieve”) that may help readers on the grief journey, including “Look Beyond People’s Words. Be willing to tolerate people who are less than helpful.” The wisdom is practical and deep.

The power of friendship oozes across the pages. Amazing friends. (Am I that kind of friend?) This book reminded me of another gem that Mary and Jerry White wrote in 2014, To Be a Friend: Building Deep and Lasting Relationships (read my review). They quote Walter Winchell’s poignant line, “A friend is one who walks in when others walk out.”

I’ve prayed for 10 months—to discern the right time to share this review with you. I pray you won’t need this wisdom now, but maybe a friend, colleague, or co-worker needs it now. Likely, we’ll all need it during our earthly journey.

If you, or a friend, or a family member needs encouragement today, listen to the soothing lyrics of "Come Ye Disconsolate," sung by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. Click here.

Meditate on the soulful lyrics to "Come Yet Disconsolate." My favorite line: “Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.” Click here.

[ ] BOOK #2: A Woman's Journey: Healing from Domestic Abuse (Oasis Bible Study Book One: Restoring Hope and Dignity), by Diane Schnickels (Order from Amazon.)



Over the years, I’ve been so privileged to consult with leaders and board members of nonprofit organizations and churches. I’ve met women and men who care very deeply about niche problems. Many problems and injustices are so horrific that most people just walk by. Yet these leaders—called by God—stand in the gap. Their courage, their creativity, and their endurance is simply stunning—and I thank God for them.

Diane Schnickels, the founder of Living Waters of Hope, courageously said “yes” to addressing the “dark world of domestic abuse.” She was shocked to discover that “one in four women of faith are being negatively affected by this silent and destructive dynamic at some point in their life in America.” One in four!

And, sadly, she also discovered that “many churches are ill-equipped to guide these victims in a healthy way,” and “these women are being further harmed by churches.” She writes that “advice like ‘stay, pray, and submit’ to the husbands who are harmful cause these women to feel unheard, alone, and to fall deeper into despair.”

One result of her concern is this important Bible study/workbook.

How do you help someone suffering domestic abuse? Start by reviewing the resources in Diane Schnickels’ Oasis Bible Study. The “Power and Control Wheel” on page 29 (from the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project) is heartbreaking, but so, so helpful. The 20 bullet points, “Symptoms of a Narcissistic Personality,” are revealing. Ditto the best and clearest definition of “gaslighting” I’ve ever read (page 33).

In addition to this 212-page workbook, the Living Waters of Hope website offers an abundance of resources for both individuals and churches. And good news! A second Oasis Bible Study is now available. Click on the title to order the second book in the series, Finding Truth and Strength.

SAFE AND CONFIDENTIAL. Living Waters of Hope provides safe and confidential online Oasis Bible Study classes for women who want to go through the book with other women, especially sisters in the Lord. "We have three classes to choose from and women can join at any time, space permitting. There is a modest fee and scholarships are available to anyone in need." For more information and registration, click here.  

If your church has inadequate resources for vulnerable women trapped in cycles of abuse (and perhaps a blind eye to the horrific problem), I urge you to provide this resource for the pastoral care team. Help women find hope:

Lamentations 3:21-24 (The Living Bible): “Yet there is one ray of hope: his compassion never ends. It is only the Lord’s mercies that have kept us from complete destruction. Great is his faithfulness; his loving-kindness begins afresh each day. My soul claims the Lord as my inheritance; therefore I will hope in him.”

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) What niche or deep problem, or societal condition, has God called you to address?
2) What spiritual gifts have you been given to competently accomplish God’s plan? Do you feel guilty that you don’t care enough about everything—or are you faithful in doing your part of God’s work?
3) Do you agree with Frederick Buechner’s statement? “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Read more.)
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Mistake #18 of 25:
Not Understanding My Spiritual Gift Mix
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson

Bruce Bugbee quotes a colleague: “Why are you doing what others can do—and leaving undone what only you can do?” (See Mistake #18 in Mastering Mistake Making.)

John’s Mistake #18: “While I was confident in my faith and my calling, in my early years I did not understand or appropriate the unique spiritual gifts given to us by the Holy Spirit to competently accomplish God’s plan. But…once I connected the theology with spiritual gifts-in-action, I got it!”

As John learned to leverage “The 3 Powerful S’s” to understand others and himself (Social Styles, Strengths, and Spiritual Gifts), he read several books, attended training sessions, completed a spiritual gifts assessment, and met with a coach. (Click here for a free self-guided spiritual gifts survey.)

When you and others experience tragedy, crisis, and grief, stop and look for people with God-given spiritual gifts—especially Helps, Hospitality, Mercy, and Discernment. They are equipped to minister to you and others competently and thoughtfully.

For Mistake #18, John recommends two books:
• Option #1: What You Do Best in the Body of Christ: Discover Your Spiritual Gifts, Personal Style and God-Given Passion (revised and expanded—with assessment tools and discussion questions), by Bruce Bugbee (Read the review.)
• Option #2: Discover Your Spiritual Gifts: The Easy-to-Use Guide That Helps You Identify and Understand Your Unique God-Given Spiritual Gifts (includes the bestselling spiritual gifts inventory), by C. Peter Wagner (Read the review.)

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you live in Southern California, join John for the half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance.” Details here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Your team has identified a need. You have the passion. You’ve been called by God to address that need. But…how will you thoughtfully craft your mission and message? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
___________________________________________________________________________________

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, nap duration, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. PRIVACY POLICY: Typepad, Inc. hosts John Pearson's Buckets Blog. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform for Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews. By clicking (above) to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy policy here.

Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact

Issue No. 492 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a stunning book—just published today—comparing “Impact Players” to “Under-Contributors,” all based on feedback from 170 top professionals. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for almost 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #17 below.)

Liz Wiseman’s feedback from 170 top professionals identified “15 Credibility Killers,” including the lame response, “Okay, but I’m off work in 15 minutes!”
 
“Okay, but I’m off work in 15 minutes!”

Warning! Read just five pages in Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact—and you’re hooked! And a second warning: you’ll need extra copies of Liz Wiseman’s latest book—one for every team member.

The last page of each of the first five chapters describes “What Leaders Say About...” under-contributors and impact players. Example: how do impact players address messy problems? “It wasn’t her job. She just did it.”

Contrast that with the under-contributor’s response: “If this were Apollo 13 and there was a crisis and the engineering manager put the box of parts on the table and said, ‘Let’s figure it out’ he would say, ‘Okay, but I’m off work in fifteen minutes.’”

Wiseman’s research uncovered three categories of contributors:
• “HIGH-IMPACT CONTRIBUTORS: Those who are doing work of exceptional value and impact.”
• “TYPICAL CONTRIBUTORS: The vast majority of people, who are doing solid (if not great) work.”
• “UNDER-CONTRIBUTORS: Smart, talented people who are playing below their capacity level.”

Recognize anyone on your team? And…where do we find those high-impact players?

In Chapter 2, “Make Yourself Useful,” (I’m reminded of Peter Drucker’s counsel to a young Jim Collins), compare how team members address unclear roles:
• “If I ask him to do a project, he’ll want to know what’s in it for him.” (Contributor)
• “You don’t need to ask him to do something, he just starts.” (Impact Player)

The author’s research also looked at unforeseen obstacles—and what leaders need from the team:
• “She says the right thing in meetings, but it falls short on execution.”
• Versus: “She sees things to the end even if she gets no credit.”

What about moving targets? No contest!
• “She learns quickly from errors.”
• Versus: “He assumes that he is generally correct most of the time, he just needs to convince the organization.”

Work is often hard, challenging, filled with speed bumps and conflict. Leaders need as many high-impact players as they can find. Compare these two approaches to unrelenting demands (the perfect description of life-in-the-workplace-trenches):
• Impact Player: “He frequently comes to me and says, ‘What can I take off your plate? How can I make your job easier?'”
• Versus: “When I have to have a one-to-one with him, it’s an effort. It’s draining. I don’t look forward to it.”

MEET THE AUTHOR! Join the free online session with Liz Wiseman on Nov. 4, 2021, hosted by the Global Leadership Network. View the details. Register at GLN.


View Liz Wiseman’s invitation to the GLS session on her new book, Impact Players.

I’ve observed that there are authors who contribute great and truly helpful ideas—and then there are high-impact authors. Liz Wiseman is high-impact. Read her confessional in the chapter, “Ask and Adjust,” when she asked a mentor to read the early chapters of her first book, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.

The feedback stung! She blurted out, “Kerry that was so, so painful.” But maybe the feedback helped. Multipliers is a New York Times bestselling book. There’s more to this insightful learning experience.

She writes, “After the book was published, I wrote to Kerry and thanked him for having enough confidence in me to beat up my work (without a shred of mercy, mind you). He had the letter framed and hung in his office, apparently the only letter to receive this honor. Kerry hadn’t been giving me feedback, he had been critiquing the work.”

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need this book. In a perfect world, the story about the 3,122 origami cranes created by coworkers at Salesforce wouldn’t be a story (must-read!)—because heartfelt expressions would be routine, not headline news.

In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need the last three chapters on “Developing the Impact Player Mindset” (must-read: “The Coach’s Playbook”).

News Flash! None of us live in a perfect world—so read this book. In addition to the five pages above, ask a team member to prepare a teaser talk for your team on the two pages in the appendix, “Building Upward Credibility.” The big idea: “We asked 170 leaders (from first-line managers to senior executives) what their team members did that most frustrated them and eroded value.” Here’s a taste:

“CREDIBILITY KILLERS: Aka 15 Surefire Ways to Alienate Your Boss” including:
#1. Give your boss problems without solutions.
#8. Surprise your boss…with bad news…at the last minute…when nothing can be done.
#11. Blame others for your mistakes.

“CREDIBILITY BUILDERS: Aka 15 Ways to Earn Trust”
#7. Admitting your mistakes and fixing them fast.
#13. Getting to the point and telling it to your boss straight.
#15. Making your boss and the team look good.

Whew. There is SO much value in this significant book. While I sometimes judge a book by its cover, I usually judge a book by the endorsements. When I noted that Michael Bungay Stanier, the author of The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap (my 2020 book-of-the-year) high-fived this book—that’s all I needed to know. I was all in. And thanks to HarperBusiness and Fortier PR for providing a review copy. This is a must-read.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact, by Liz Wiseman. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (10 hours, 48 minutes), narrated by Liz Wiseman. 



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Liz Wiseman, in her discussion of “value decoys” (“an illusion of value lacking real substance” aka “shiny objects”), says that the “sacrosanctity of old rules” cause some people to “under-contribute by over-contributing. We can deliver too little value while working extremely hard.” OK—let’s be frank and honest: Is that disease prevalent in our organization?
2) Imagine you're one of the 170 leaders that Liz Wiseman interviewed. Share a recent example you've observed of an "Impact Player" and then an "Under-Contributor."
3) Let’s get really practical! One of the “Credibility Killers” (based on the research of 170 managers) in Wiseman’s book is #6, “Send long, meandering emails.” So…I need a volunteer to lead a 10-minute lifelong learning segment at our next staff meeting on “Save Time—With Shorter Emails.” (Add this: “I have a Chick-fil-A gift card for whoever volunteers and a second card for the person who sends me the best email in the next seven days!”)
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Mistake #17 of 25:
Failing to Leverage My Clients’ Strengths
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson


If you work or volunteer in a faith-based organization, you will deeply appreciate how Living Your Strengths integrates the StrengthsFinder assessment with biblical insights. Read more on discovering your CliftonStrengths in Mastering Mistake Making.

John’s Mistake #17: “I faithfully leveraged my Top-5 strengths in Gallup’s CliftonStrengths assessment, but I failed to focus on the God-given strengths of my co-workers, my board members, and my clients.”

As John learned to leverage “The 3 Powerful S’s” to understand others and himself (Social Styles, Strengths, and Spiritual Gifts), he began focusing on the Top-5 strengths of those around him—including family, colleagues, and clients. (Order the book and read John’s story about Eric Buehrer, the “ideation” leader at Gateways to Better Education.)

For Mistake #17, John recommends two Gallup Press books:
• Living Your Strengths: Discover Your God-Given Talents and Inspire Your Community, by Albert L. Winseman, Donald O. Clifton, and Curt Liesveld (Read the review.)
• StrengthsFinder 2.0, from Gallup and Tom Rath (Discover Your CliftonStrengths) – (Order from Amazon.) Note! The Wall Street Journal ranked this #4 on its Bestselling Hardcover Business Books list for the week ending Oct. 9, 2021—15 years after it was first published in 2007!

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you live in Southern California, join John for the half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance.” Details here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you asking the right people for brutally honest feedback on your communication ideas (books, videos, websites, email blasts, and more)? It might sting (per Liz Wiseman's example above)—but it will be good for you! Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
___________________________________________________________________________________

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, nap duration, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. PRIVACY POLICY: Typepad, Inc. hosts John Pearson's Buckets Blog. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform for Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews. By clicking (above) to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy policy here.

Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets: 5 Questions to Help You Determine Your Next Move

Issue No. 491 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting grabs your attention with five questions from Andy Stanley, including “the best question ever.” And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for almost 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #16 below.)

1993: “Sure, I could guest host a live radio program.”
2021: Andy Stanley asks, “Is that wise, John?”
 
A Voice for Radio Is Not Enough!

Many people have told me I have a good “radio voice.” I sang bass in school and church choirs—so I often fantasized about having a radio gig. Others have said, “You have a face for radio!”

In 1993 in the Chicago area, Dick Staub interviewed me live on his nationally syndicated afternoon drive-time radio program. The award-winning Dick Staub Show was carried on over 60 stations. The interview went great and so I just happened to mention to Dick that I had thought about being on the radio someday.

A few days later, Dick invited me to guest host his program for two days. Unfortunately, I said yes. Dick said he’d be in China that week—and even if I messed up—he’d be too far away to rescue me! So with a very brief orientation a week later with Dick, I had my assignment for my first on-air day: read a book about social welfare policy and prepare questions for the in-studio interview with the author.

Yikes! Upon arrival, the author said he couldn’t stay the full 60-minutes for the interview—but not to worry, he had questions I could ask listeners. They would certainly call in, he promised.

No one called in! No one called! No one called! Imagine—trying to fill dead airtime with 30 minutes of monologue on a forgettable topic. At a commercial break, the producer gave me several prizes I could offer to callers. They called but only to get the prize from the producer—unwilling to speak on air with me. Even my faithful wife, Joanne (listening at home), sensed the disaster playing out in Chicagoland radio history—and even this knowledgeable former social worker did not call in to rescue me!

Good news/bad news. In reality, few were listening or cared. That morning on Oct. 6, 1993, Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, announced his retirement from the Chicago Bulls. That’s what we talked about in the first hour of the program—and listeners did call in. But as the Jordan news swelled, by afternoon, no one was interested in discussing social welfare policy—including the author who left early! Oh, my.

Hmmm. You mean to tell me that just having a voice for radio is not enough? You also need a brain for radio? Who knew? And, please remind me not to take on roles outside of my skillset.

I mention this story because Andy Stanley writes in Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets, “Your decisions determine your story.”

My mistake back in 1993: Sometimes…ego and over-confidence in my abilities coaxed me into saying “yes” to opportunities and client projects—when I should have said “no.”

Have you ever said “yes” to something only to discover it wasn’t the right fit? Then it’s too late to back out and every hour or day on the project is torture, right? Whew! Why did I agree to this? Gradually, the unpleasant situation is compounded by procrastination, mediocre results, and zero joy. My radio gig was very short-lived, but it did leave a bruise. Sometimes ego trumps discernment. In my consulting years, for example, it took several rounds for me to realize my competencies were in the nonprofit space, not the for-profit (but more profitable) arena.

WHAT I LEARNED: I’m often asked, “What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year?” Some nonprofit leaders are looking for a gift book to send to donors. Others are being intentional about people development and want to bless their team members and board members. Sometimes I meet a serious lifelong learner. Leaders are readers.

I had missed the publisher’s hype when The Best Question Ever: A Revolutionary Approach to Decision-Making, by Andy Stanley, was published in 2004. But in 2007, Dick Towner encouraged me to read it. I bought the book and Joanne read it first and she agreed with Dick. When those two gang up on me, I just salute and do what they say. I read and savored it. We bought a case and named it the “Book-of-the-Year” for our clients. (Note: Stanley wrote an updated edition, Ask It, in 2014.)

GOOD NEWS! Just 12 months ago, Andy Stanley added four more questions and wrote Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets: 5 Questions to Help You Determine Your Next Move. At just 192 pages, it’s worth your time—and you’ll be sharing it with colleagues, friends, and family (and grandkids!). The five questions:
1. The Integrity Question: Am I being honest with myself? Really?
2. The Legacy Question: What story do I want to tell?
3. The Conscience Question: Is there a tension that deserves my attention?
4. The Maturity Question: What is the wise thing to do?
5. The Relationship Question: What does love require of me?

In Mastering Mistake Making, I focused on Stanley’s fourth question, “What is the wise thing to do?” That’s from Mistake #24, “Saying ‘YES’ Too Often.” Here’s the big idea from Andy Stanley: “We've all done dumb stuff in our lives. We all have regrets. Yet none of us plans to mess up our lives. Why, then, does it keep happening?” Stanley offers a very practical question to ask—and it’s applicable to all of our actions in all of life's arenas. The question: “In light of my past experience, my current circumstances, and my future hopes and dreams, what is the wise thing for me to do?”

The author of more than 20 books and the founder of Atlanta-based North Point Ministries, Stanley also notes the WORST question to ask: “Is there anything wrong with it?” He says the worst question is also the wrong question to ask. The best question: “Is it wise?” It’s simple, convicting, and demands discernment. For example:

• Sure, I could guest host a radio program. (Is that wise, John?)
• Well, my expertise is actually with nonprofit Christian organizations, churches, and associations—but yes, I could help your for-profit business. (Is that wise, John?)
• Joanne, we do have the money. Owning it would be fun! (Is that wise, John?)

If you’ve already nailed Question #4, “What is the wise thing to do?”—then discern if you’re gutsy enough to look in the mirror while you’re answering Stanley’s other four questions:

#1. The Integrity Question: Am I being honest with myself? Really?
• “Most people don’t learn from bad decisions because they’re convinced their bad decisions were somebody else’s fault.”
• “Decision #1: The Integrity Decision. I will not lie to myself even when the truth makes me feel bad about myself.”
• “Pardon my presumption, but you may need to write that down and put it where you can see it every day. For a while anyway. I suggest a mirror.”

This reminded me of the classic song, “Have a Little Talk With Myself,” performed by Max Q.


Listen to “Have a Little Talk With Myself,” performed by Max Q.

#2. The Legacy Question: What story do I want to tell?
• Learn about the story Joseph lived (20 years after his brothers sold him into slavery!) and why you’re writing your own story—“one decision at a time.”

#3. The Conscience Question: Is there a tension that deserves my attention?
• The story that King David chose not to write for his grandkids: “Grandpa David, tell us one more time about how you became king. You know, how you snuck up behind King Saul while he was using the potty and slit his throat!”
• This question prompted me to re-read A Tale of Three Kings: A Study in Brokenness, by Gene Edwards. Powerful!

#5. The Relationship Question: What does love require of me?
• Stanley’s mentor would ask him, “Andy, what do you hope I don’t ask you about?” (Andy’s response: “That’s cheating! You’re supposed to poke around and discover that for yourself!”)

Whew! If you’re gutsy enough—read and share this book with your team.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets: 5 Questions to Help You Determine Your Next Move, by Andy Stanley. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (4 hours, 9 minutes), narrated by Andy Stanley. And thanks to Zondervan for providing a review copy.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Raise your hand if you think John’s wife should have called into the radio show!
2) Think of a decision we made recently that didn’t turn out well. Could we have avoided the trauma if someone had asked the best question ever? “Is it wise?”
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Mistake #16 of 25:
Disregarding God-Given Gifts & Passion
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson


In How to Deal With Annoying People, Bob Phillips writes in the chapter, “How to Lead Annoying People,” that Drivers and Expressives find decision-making easier than do Amiables and Analyticals. Read more on the four social styles in Mastering Mistake Making.

John’s Mistake #16: “I naively and arrogantly thought that if family, friends, and co-workers could just function more like me (the right way), we’d all just get along. Yikes!”

John learned to leverage what he calls “The 3 Powerful S’s” to understand others (and himself): Social Styles, Strengths, and Spiritual Gifts. To understand social styles, he recommends the practical and indispensable “conflict resolution 101” book—and it’s fun to read. How to Deal with Annoying People: What to Do When You Can't Avoid Them, by Bob Phillips and Kimberly Alyn (order from Amazon).

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast.
___________________________________________________________

JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Before you launch your next “sure thing” marketing campaign—slow down and consult outside wisdom, especially on the question, “Is it wise?” Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
___________________________________________________________________________________

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, nap duration, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. PRIVACY POLICY: Typepad, Inc. hosts John Pearson's Buckets Blog. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform for Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews. By clicking (above) to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy policy here.

Made From Scratch: The Legendary Success Story of Texas Roadhouse

Issue No. 490 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting serves up a hot-from-the-oven AMAZING book with 91 lessons from the founder of Texas Roadhouse restaurants. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for almost 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #15 below.)

The chapter, “Service With a Heart, Six Feet Apart,” in the new book, Made From Scratch, is an insightful (and yes, out-of-the-box) 30-page playbook/case study detailing how Texas Roadhouse addressed the Covid-19 shutdown.
 
91 Lessons from Texas Roadhouse

I just read Made From Scratch: The Legendary Success Story of Texas Roadhouse. Written by Kent Taylor (1955-2021), founder, the book was an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller in August. Amazingly, I’ve never dined at a Texas Roadhouse—yet this out-of-the-box company operates over 647 restaurants system-wide in 49 states and 10 foreign countries.

So what should I order next week when I visit my nearest location in Oceanside, California? Hand-cut steak? Fall-off-the-bone ribs? The menu looks amazing: made-from-scratch sides, fresh-baked bread with honey cinnamon butter, and tempting desserts. (Did I mention free peanuts?)

This book is amazing. You’ll underline hundreds of examples from all 20 management buckets—especially the People Bucket, the Team Bucket, the Operations Bucket, and the Hoopla! Bucket. Taylor notes, “We had always said we were a ‘people company that just happened to sell steaks.’”

7 AMAZING MORSELS!

#1. AMAZING! 91 BULLET POINTS! Every chapter concludes with four to eight “What I Learned” bullet points from founder Kent Taylor. (I read those first. And yes, I counted them: 91 takeaways—bite-sized for your weekly staff meeting discussions.) Examples:
   • “The best business owners and executives I’ve ever met are voracious readers and students of leadership. Every year at our convention we bring in gurus—like John Wooden—to learn and stretch ourselves.” (With more than 70,000 team members, their annual Managing Partners Conference includes about 1,000 company leaders.)
   • “Find yourself a good coach who will give you honest feedback.” (See Mistake #15 below.)
   • “If you have a good idea, pitch it. If no one is listening, that tells you something about the culture you are in. You then have three choices: Put your head down and get along, try to change the culture, or get out of Dodge.”
   • “Be creative when finding talent. You never know if your next awesome employee will be helping you at the dry cleaner, or if your team’s heart and soul will be discovered rotating your tires. Positive attitude and a willingness to learn new things trumps experience.”

#2. AMAZING! COVID PLAYBOOK. Chapter 19, “Service With a Heart, Six Feet Apart,” is an insightful (and yes, out-of-the-box) 30-page playbook/case study detailing how Texas Roadhouse addressed the Covid-19 shutdown. Inside sales plummeted—and so Taylor reaching out to his “crazies” (the innovative managing partners) to learn what they were doing. Bingo! Creativity and curbside dining mushroomed.

“We had leaders who had been burning it up curbside with these new ideas. I called them our Big Dogs. And we had some managing partners who couldn’t seem to get off the porch, whom we affectionately termed our Puppies. By now [Week 4 of Covid-19], we had paired Big Dogs with the Puppies, and the Puppies started venturing off their porches, having fun, and making sales.”

#3. AMAZING! WILLIE’S CORNER. What’s not to like about a company that partners with Willie Nelson? According to Texas Roadhouse, “Willie’s contributions to country music earned him recognition at each of our locations with Willie’s Corner, which is a dedicated area of the restaurant that celebrates his legendary career. You will even find employees and guests around the world wearing our very own Willie Braids, which serve as a reminder of our laid-back atmosphere and fun with purpose!”

I couldn’t resist. While writing this review, I listened to “Willie’s Roadhouse” on Sirius XM and I also stumbled across this poignant rendition by Willie Nelson, “I Thought About You, Lord.”


Listen to “I Thought About You, Lord,” by Willie Nelson (4 min.).

#4. AMAZING MISTAKES! Founded in 1993, the early years were not without mishaps. Taylor writes, “Prominently displayed on the wall of my office are artifacts from each of the three stores I opened in 1994 and eventually had to close. There’s a fish from Sarasota, a cow skull from Clearwater, and a fish from Cincinnati. Under each is a plaque showing their open and close dates and how much money each lost. I’m proud of those failures because of the lessons learned.”

#5. AMAZING! FOUNDER EXITS FOR A MONTH! Have I mentioned “amazing?” Kent Taylor kept an empty office, next to his, with a sign on the door, “Office of the President.” Finally, in 2000, he hired the president. Taylor’s title became “Founder and CEO.” And get this: “I handed him the keys to our support center and said, ‘This is your playground.’” So they split up Taylor’s duties and the new president had a full plate immediately. (It reminded me of the fill-in-the-blanks organizational chart concept in the book, The E-Myth.)

“I told him I’d see him in a month, and I hit the road,” writes Taylor. “Why a month? Because for anyone in our support center who had issues—not liking someone else, for example—now G.J.’s door was open and my car door was closed as I headed down the highway, a couple hundred miles away. That’s called instant change, deal with it.”

#6. AMAZING! BEST-SELLING AUTHORS AS EDITORS! Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, bestselling authors of The Carrot Principle (2007), Anxiety at Work (2021), and other books, were recruited by Kent Taylor to edit his book! Amazingly—they agreed. (How’d he do that? Taylor must have read Trey Gowdy’s book on persuasion!). Even more amazing—read how Taylor texted hand-written pages of the manuscript every night to Gostick!

In January 2020, the two invited Taylor to a gathering of the Marshall Goldsmith 100, which featured Alan Mulally, the former Boeing and Ford CEO. I’m guessing “Learner” was in Kent Taylor’s Top-5 strengths assessments—because he read a book a week and was a voracious learner from other CEOs like Truett Cathy, Herb Kelleher, and others. He read Nuts! (the Southwest Airlines story) in 1996 and lists his Top-10 takeaways from the book, including:
• “Hire for spirit, spunk, and enthusiasm (and train for skill).”
• And my favorite: “Own mistakes, share mistakes, learn from mistakes (and move on).”

Confession: I skipped to the appendix first and read, “On Leadership.” He paraphrases The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey, and comments on “Mentors and Failures,” and culture. He noted that every book on leadership has their own “top three, five, or ten leadership ideas,” so he “figured why not join the club.” He lists 10 leadership insights.

“Books I Dig,” also in the appendix, features three- and four-line blurbs on 18 valued leadership books, including Built to Last, by Jim Collins, and a book I have not yet read, Leading With Gratitude, by Gostick and Elton.

#7. AMAZINGLY RELEVANT! With top recommendations from leaders I admire, including Marshall Goldsmith, this practical and often irreverent, contrarian, and hilarious book is worth your time.
   • My camp director colleagues will quote from this book often. (A camp director’s local influence is similar to how Taylor describes a Texas Roadhouse managing partner—a city’s ad hoc mayor.)
   • Business owners will buy it for their managers (read the story about the peanut trail to the next door restrooms at JCPenney!).
   • The bias towards people care (especially team members and vendors) will cause church and nonprofit leaders to look in the mirror.
   • And the unique sidebars with commentary from more than 65 people (investors, track coaches, co-workers, vendors, and Willie Nelson)—truly out-of-the-box and validating. Brilliant idea.
   • Would your team members identify with this testimonial?

“I had worked for Bennigan’s for seven years
prior to Texas Roadhouse
and it was miserable going to work every day.
Whenever you asked for anything, the answer was always,
‘It’s not in our budget.’
With Roadhouse, the answer is,
‘Yes. What’s the question?’”
(Greg Beckel, market partner)

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Made From Scratch: The Legendary Success Story of Texas Roadhouse, by Kent Taylor. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (8 hours, 32 minutes). And thanks to Simon & Schuster and Fortier PR for providing a review copy.

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Kent Taylor believed you should “Dance with those who brung you.” That axiom inspired him to identify the unique strengths and core values of Texas Roadhouse that would never change. (Read his list of 15 on page 192, including #13, “First-time-guest focus.”) IDEA: “OK, team…Let’s list at least 15 things we should never change in our organization—and then join me this weekend at Texas Roadhouse for dinner!”) 
2) “As soon as you make a profit,” wrote Kent Taylor, “find a way to give back. Cast your bread upon the waters.” Taylor gave up his salary during Covid-19 to help the chain’s frontline workers. He also donated $5 million to the company’s benevolence fund for employees. Would the general public consider us a generous and caring organization?
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Note: Sadly, according to the book’s afterword, “The former high school and collegiate track champion ended his life in March 2021 after struggling with severe and debilitating tinnitus, a result of contracting Covid-19. Despite many medical efforts, the condition—which affected both ears and worsened considerably over time—was one hurdle Kent could not overcome.” He was 65.

Today...I prayed that in his final days, Kent Taylor had found comfort and hope in the Gracious God of Willie Nelson’s song, “I Thought About You, Lord.” Today...I grieve for his family and team members.
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Mistake #15 of 25:
Assuming I Was Good at Getting Feedback
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson


Stephen Covey wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If he had written The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Mistake Makers, perhaps a chapter would have been titled, “Sharpen the Feedback Saw.” 

John’s Mistake #15: “Based on other nonprofit best practices I had observed, I erroneously assumed I was gifted at soliciting frank and fervent feedback from my team. Oops! Wrong assumption! My world was too narrow.” John adds, "The 'sin of niceness' in my nonprofit circles set a very low bar."

John recommends two books by Dennis Bakke that broadened his world:
   • The Decision Maker: Unlock the Potential of Everyone in Your Organization One Decision at a Time (read the review)
   • Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job (read the review)

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast.
___________________________________________________________

JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Have you aligned your core values and your list of “15 things we will not change”—with your communication strategy? Need help? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
___________________________________________________________________________________

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, nap duration, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. PRIVACY POLICY: Typepad, Inc. hosts John Pearson's Buckets Blog. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform for Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews. By clicking (above) to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy policy here.

Public Speaking Laws of Success for Everyone and Every Occasion

Issue No. 489 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a hot-off-the-press book that guarantees you can be in the Top-10 percent of public speakers—if you follow the author’s 50 laws of success. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book John wrote with his son, Jason, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #14 below.

Ask a colleague to use the “Public Speaking Laws of Success Scorecard®” to evaluate your next presentation using the rating sheet from the new book, Public Speaking Laws of Success.

5 Grandkids Join Me for a Zoom Review of Public Speaking Laws of Success

About 60 years ago (yikes!) during Youth Sunday at my home church in Seattle, I was the designated preacher for the Sunday evening service. It would have been very, very helpful if Rick Goossen had already published his book back then. The members at Elim Baptist Church might have appreciated a better-constructed and delivered sermon. Trust me.

But at least I got one thing right according to Public Speaking Laws of Success for Everyone and Every Occasion—the importance of practice, practice, practice. (Thanks to our youth pastor, Ray Bakke, I practiced on the grace-giving congregation!) So better late than never, I’m still practicing—and I’m still learning. On Nov. 18, I’m leading a half-day board governance training seminar for The Barnabas Group/Orange County. (More practice!) 

The good news/bad news: the 50 short-and-sweet chapters in Richard J. (Rick) Goossen’s book remind me that I still have room for improvement. But there’s hope!

“You only learn by doing—not by waiting to be perfect. You can be better than 90% of all public speakers by following and applying the laws of success in this book—guaranteed.”

Rick Goossen has taught these 50 public speaking laws of success to more than 1,000 college students—and he’s personally worked with over 200 of the world’s leading speakers. So…taking a cue from my youth pastor (practice, practice, practice), I inspired my grandkids to join me for a Zoom conversation (aka “public speaking”) on what they learned from reading Public Speaking Laws of Success for Everyone and Every Occasion. Click here to view the 25-minute video:

View the Zoom panel conversation with John Pearson and his five grandkids on the new book, Public Speaking Laws of Success for Everyone and Every Occasion (25 minutes).

Get your scorecard ready because our granddaughter, Helena (12), evaluated her four siblings as they presented their thoughts on their favorite chapters. (And what’s good for the Goossen is good for the Pearson, right?) I’m going out on a limb here, but at my Nov. 18 seminar, I’ll ask 10 people to evaluate my “public speaking” chops using the very practical scorecard in Goossen’s book (pages 179-180), “Public Speaking Laws of Success Scorecard®.” Listen to the video to learn more about the 10-topic rating sheet.

Listen to the big ideas on these four chapters:
• Chapter 3: The One-Minute Test (Emelia Pearson, 18)
• Chapters 45-46: Four Weddings...and a Funeral (Zuzu Pearson, 18)
• Chapter 43: The Interview (Anders Pearson,18)
• Chapter 24: Play to Your Strengths (Annika Pearson,14)

You’ll love this book! The 50 short chapters are spread across four sections: The Mechanics, The Key Principles, The Digital Environment (aka Zoom meetings), and The Applications. Goossen’s 10,000 hours of experience (per Malcolm Gladwell’s insights) deliver practical content wrapped in hilarious stories—with contrasting best and worst practices.

Rookies and veterans (including your pastor or priest) will find inspiration, helpful methodologies (like “the hook”), and humor. Goossen writes, “Years ago, my good friend Malcolm Gladwell and I spoke together at a conference for a combined fee of $100,000.” The rest of the paragraph clarifies that lead sentence in Chapter 25, “Embellishment.” Bottom line: don’t embellish!

Each chapter includes one of Goossen’s 50 laws. The “Big Mo” chapter summary:

“LAW #10: Always keep Big Mo on your side through the pace and momentum of your presentation, so the audience knows where you are going and how and when you are likely to get there.”

Listen to our Zoom panel—and you be the judge. Was “Big Mo” evident? For our presentation, my public speaking panelists each shared a favorite chapter. But we all agreed—it was tough to pick just one. I picked 20 favorite chapters:

THE HOOK
• The One-Minute Test (One minute after you speak, can people summarize your speech?)
• The Hook (Brilliant ways to “hook” your listeners at the beginning of a talk.)
• Story Time (Goossen’s story of arriving in hot and humid Hong Kong at age 25—sweating and interviewing at leading law firms. The big idea: how to tell your story in a compelling way.)
• Know Your Audience (A stunning example from Pat Williams, the co-founder of the NBA Orlando Magic basketball team—when he had to brush up on hockey to relate to his Canadian audience.)
• Be Present (Read how Mark Barnett, the producer of Survivor, Shark Tank, The Apprentice, and The Voice, allocates his time after he speaks. A superb example.)

DANGER AHEAD!
• The Most Dangerous 15 Seconds (what might happen if you go off script!)
• The Next Most Dangerous 15 Seconds (keys for ending well and not going off script)
• Play to Your Strengths (“…only speak on topics you know something about…don’t try to bluff your way through any topic.”)
• Murphy Is Your Friend (as in…Murphy’s Law: “What can go wrong, may go wrong.”)

THE KLEENEX OF VIDEO CONFERENCING
• When you’re on Zoom—what’s the same and what’s different? Plus, tips for conference panels, webinar presentations, business meetings, and board meetings.
• Warning, says Goossen: “Video conference technology has created the biggest dilution in company brand value since the dawn of the Internet.”
• Why your people may be ill-prepared (without serious training) to represent you well on Zoom (the author tags Zoom, “the Kleenex of video conferencing”).
• See my reminder from Bloomberg: “Zoom-call Blunders Led to Someone Getting Axed, 1 in 4 Bosses Say.”

SHUT DOWN YOUR OPEN MIC!
• Introductions (When asked to “Please introduce yourself and share something interesting about yourself,”—most people are not ready, and they’re boring. Be prepared and “treat it like a mini-speech.”)
• Open Mic (This is pretty funny. Learn why Goossen no longer has an “open mic” at the meetings he leads.)
• Spontaneous Combustion (What to do if you’re called on, without warning, to say a “few words” to the group. Memorize the author’s five helpful points.)
• Hands-On Presentation (Attn: Grandkids and Slow Learners! Here are eight “etiquette” rules.)

SHUT UP!
• The Interview (How to interview others: “A good question hits the mark; ask the question, and then shut up!”)
• Four Weddings…and a Funeral (You’ll love the savvy speaking tips and hilarious stories; plus what NOT to say at a wedding!)
• The Perils of Panels (How to moderate a Zoom panel, including “as a last resort, muting someone!”) I can hear it now: “Grandpa John, thanks for moderating this Zoom panel, but you SHOULD HAVE READ CHAPTER 48 before attempting this!”

Rick Goossen is founder and chair of the ELO Network (the Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization) with programs worldwide including Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford. He has organized more than 60 business conferences for entrepreneurs—and the best and worst public speaking stories from those events add color to this page-turner. Goossen is also the co-author of Entrepreneurial Leadership: Finding Your Calling, Making a Difference. Click here to read my review.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Public Speaking Laws of Success: For Everyone and Every Occasion, by Richard J. Goossen. And thanks to the author for providing an advance review copy.



BONUS VIDEO! Click here to view our Zoom panel discussion on the book, The Art of Writing (June 16, 2020).

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) In Chapter 7, “Structure & Symmetry,” Rick Goossen discusses the fundamentals of a good presentation. Don’t be a comedian, he warns. (Oops! See Mistake #14 below.) Goossen preaches, “Without the scaffolding of a good talk you merely have a collection of hard-to-remember points.” How many hours have you invested in the last three years—learning and practicing the art of public speaking? Plus, ask a colleague to evaluate your next public speaking gig—including counting the number of “filler” words, such as “uhh,” “uhm,” “like,” and “you know.”
2) What other books have you read to enrich your public speaking skills and/or delivery of relevant sermons? Check out these reviews:
   • 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations (read review)
   • How to Deliver a TED Talk (read review)
   • You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard: The Complete Book of Speaking…in Business and in Life (read review)
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Mistake #14 of 25:
Ignoring My Annoying Workplace Habits
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson


Don’t make this BIG MISTAKE! Read Mastering Mistake Making—especially Mistake #14. John confesses, “My ‘inner compass of correct behavior had gone out of whack.’”

Much too late in his career, John read the bestseller, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: Discover the 20 Workplace Habits You Need to Break, by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter. (Read the review.) John’s mistake:

“I did not create space for receiving feedback on my own work or behavior—which then prevented my giving authentic feedback and coaching to others.”

Read Mistake #14, “Ignoring My Annoying Workplace Habits,” to learn how a thoughtful wake-up call from Don Cousins, then the associate pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, positioned John away from trying to be funny all the time (an annoying habit)—and moved him toward greater effectiveness. John notes “That may have been my most important day during my Willow staff years.”

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
___________________________________________________________

JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Do your less-than-professional PowerPoint decks and homemade videos distract from your public speaking presentations? Need a messaging review and refresh? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
___________________________________________________________________________________

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, nap duration, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. PRIVACY POLICY: Typepad, Inc. hosts John Pearson's Buckets Blog. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform for Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews. By clicking (above) to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy policy here.

Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire

Issue No. 488 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting asks: is Carlos Ghosn, the rockstar CEO who fled Japan, guilty or falsely charged by Nissan? And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book John wrote with his son, Jason, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #13 below.

Former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn escaped from Japan in an equipment storage box, “the kind used to transport clunky but delicate audio equipment.” (Apparently, not every plan requires out-of-the-box thinking.)

Rubber Stamp Boards & Lapdog Auditors

Leaders and readers—where do I start? This page-turning book has it all: international intrigue, cultural and governmental shenanigans, backroom deals and self-dealing, draconian detentions, a Green Beret’s illegal scheme to whisk Japan’s most famous foreigner out of the country, allegations, indictments, hubris, boardroom dysfunction, narcissism, and dozens and dozens of even more juicy, jaw-dropping disclosures.

This is a Top-10 book for 2021 and we’ll be talking about it for years to come! Read or listen to Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire, by Hans Greimel and William Sposato.

You’ll remember the worldwide breaking news on Dec. 30, 2019, when Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan and Renault escaped from Japan—hidden in a large black box! With meticulous Green Beret-experienced planning, this clandestine and illegal operation loaded Ghosn-in-a-box onto a private jet at the smaller, Osaka airport. Seven time zones later, after a stop in Istanbul, Turkey, Ghosn landed in Beirut, Lebanon. (And you guessed it. Lebanon has no extradition treaty with Japan.)

How did Carlos Ghosn escape Japan?

View the 6-minute video, “Carlos Ghosn's Great Escape” (CBS Sunday Morning, Jan. 12, 2020).

Shocking Japan and the world (“Ghosn Shock” in the Japanese media), this high profile auto kingpin was arrested upon arriving in Tokyo on Nov. 19, 2018. Instead of facing trial in Japan for alleged financial misconduct (“Defense attorney Takano estimated the whole affair would drag on for at least five years”—typical of Japan’s reputed “hostage justice” system), today Ghosn is a relatively free man in Beirut, where he is a Lebanese citizen.

The story behind the story is skillfully weaved, colorfully painted, and sliced and diced by two Tokyo-based journalists with stunning street cred and international credentials. Why should business leaders, managers, board members, pastors, and nonprofit CEOs read this book?

9 REASONS YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK:

#1. LEADERSHIP COMPLEXITY. Imagine—you’re the CEO and/or chairman of not one, not two, but three major companies (Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi). Does it really work? Was Ghosn’s rockstar status a one-off risky experiment, or is this the new global leadership trend? Ghosn was “the first person to serve simultaneously as the CEO of two Fortune 500 companies.” (How many organizations, formally or informally, do some megachurch pastors lead? Does it really work? What might go south fast?)

#2. AN INNER CIRCLE OF ENABLERS. In 1999, after Renault (France) gambled $5.4 billion to rescue Nissan (Japan) from bankruptcy and had a 43.4 percent stake in the company, Renault dispatched Carlos Ghosn to Nissan. The turn-around expert became Nissan’s CEO in 2001—and the two companies and two countries lived happily ever after. (Not!) Per the authors, Nissan claimed Ghosn orchestrated “a web of self-dealing, both of the illegal variety and the merely unseemly kind, because he had concentrated so much unchecked power in himself as chairman and CEO and an inner circle of enablers. No one could tell him no.”

#3. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT. Carlos Ghosn (at various press conferences from Lebanon) claims he is not a fugitive of justice, but a “fugitive of injustice.” True or False? Authors Greimel and Sposato quote a former defense lawyer in Chapter 11, “Justice Japan Style,” that “Japanese judges are very overconfident of their ability to find the truth. They are trained not to admit that they have made a mistake, even when there is a miscarriage of justice.” (Perhaps Mastering Mistake Making should be taught in Japanese law schools?) And there's more: “the US concept of client-attorney privilege is largely absent” in Japan.

Ghosn had been confined to jail twice for a total of 130 days (with no calls to family or friends permitted). He was facing up to 15 years in prison. And according to his attorneys, Ghosn “was questioned [without his attorney present] for an average of seven hours daily, including on weekends and holidays. Prosecutors dispute those figures.” Per the authors and other sources, this intense interrogation leads to an extreme rate of “confessions.” About just one percent of cases in Japan end in acquittal—a stat that the Japanese, apparently, are quite proud of. The authors add, “One former prosecutor said that if he were to lose just two cases, his career in the prosecutor’s office would effectively be over.”

View the deep dive video on the rise and fall of Superstar CEO Carlos Ghosn.

View “Carlos Ghosn: The Rise and Fall of a Superstar CEO” from the Financial Times, July 26, 2021 (21 min.).

#4. DICTATOR OR DECISION-MAKER? How does one create—and hold together—a global automotive alliance of three major auto makers—featuring 10 brands now in 2021? Click here for the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi corporate website. With national interests and loyalties impacting every decision, how would you orchestrate the governance of this alliance—termed a “strategic alliance” that in 2017 sold 10.6 million vehicles worldwide, making it the leading light vehicle manufacturing group in the world?

Ghosn’s own words: “Between 1999 and 2018, you never heard about any problems, because, obviously, I was the final decision maker, I installed a spirit of cooperation against the extremes. But we knew that the extremes were always there. They were always going to take advantage of any situation to have their opinion prevailing.” He added, “They accused me of being a dictator, but I was a decision-maker.” Are you working on a strategic alliance? What’s your governance model? What’s your style?

#5. CULTURE CLASHES (AND INSIGHTS). Reason #5 why Collision Course is a must-read: you’ll be reminded again that deeply held values and biases in other cultures loom under the surface to create catastrophic clashes, often fueled by basic mistrust. In Chapter 14, “Foreign Entanglements,” the authors include a laundry list of mergers and investments gone bad (Vodafone took a $8.6 billion loss) often due to “culturally insensitive expat executives who had little knowledge of the market, another classic mistake.”

Hans Greimel and William Sposato humorously note what sometimes happens whenever “foreign bosses and Japanese midlevel staff are brought together, when even routine meetings run into language issues and cultural differences about expectations.” One foreign boss showed up unexpectedly at his office on Saturday “only to see the entire Japan management team holding a meeting.” They were “plotting the venture’s strategy,” they said. Yet the non-Japanese boss reminded them that they had just worked on that earlier in the week. The response: “This is the one that we’ll really be following.” Yikes.

I have been in Japan and France multiple times (for business and pleasure), but Collision Course dramatically upped my cultural savvy in the nuances of competing cultural norms. In later years, I’ve been more intentional in widening my lifelong learning lanes by reading outside my culture (See Mistake #3 and Mistake #11 in Mastering Mistake Making.) Read The Great Successor (North Korea) and Money Games (South Korea). See also Leading Across Cultures.

#6. GOVERNANCE DYSFUNCTION. “Until 2018, when Nissan finally appointed its first independent outside directors, board meetings averaged less than twenty minutes long, it claimed.” In March 2019, “Nissan’s governance task force came back with its report on the Ghosn scandal.” The report “outlined how Ghosn allegedly maneuvered with few checks or balances in a world of rubber-stamp board meetings and lapdog auditors.”

#7. THE VOLVO TRUST FACTOR. One former Nissan exec, who left during the tumult, targeted the trust factor—top to bottom. “If you can’t trust people on corporate governance, how can you trust them to build the car you’re going to put your family in? Do you really want to take a gamble with your family? Or are you just going to be done with it and buy a Volvo?” (Delete “car” and insert your company’s product, program, or service. Do customers and clients trust you? Do they trust your governance?)

#8. FIRED IN 15 MINUTES! In Chapter 16, “Scandalous Affairs,” the authors chronicle the stunning whistle-blower story of Michael Woodford (a Brit), who served just two weeks as the CEO of the Japanese camera company, Olympus Corp. The board fired him after just a 15-minute discussion—when “he started to question hidden losses of $1.6 billion in speculative investments” by the company. The chapter discloses the cultural implications of “the narrow viewpoint of employees who live in the world of their life-time employers.” These issues, certainly, played into Ghosn’s long run as CEO of Nissan. But no spoiler alert here. Read Collision Course to decide for yourself if the charges against Ghosn are legit or not. But more importantly—how effective is your organization’s whistleblower policy and culture?

#9. NYT AND WSJ AGREE! The authors note that “Remarkably, the case and Ghosn’s escape from Japanese justice found the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in unlikely agreement.” The question: “Are foreign executives in Japan safe from capricious prosecution?” In addition to business executives, I would add: international travelers, missionaries, and tourists. As a result of reading Collision Course, I’m now thinking differently about international travel. They quote a long-term foreign exec, “It has clearly put a chill on executives from abroad taking a senior job with a Japanese company. It’s a much riskier proposition than it was a year ago.” Yikes.

Whew! Many commentators suggest Carlos Ghosn’s story will become a Hollywood movie (“based on a true story”). If so, I’ll watch it—but there’s no way it will be as good as the book.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire, by Hans Greimel and William Sposato. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (12 hours, 54 minutes). And thanks to Harvard Business Review Press for providing a review copy.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) From his safe perch in Lebanon, Carlos Ghosn has been interviewed numerous times about his daring escape from Japan. “As the Alliance wobbled without him, Ghosn seemed to relish in sniping at its troubles from the sidelines. He derided the group’s new consensus-based approach as ‘Santa Claus’ management.” How would/should your CEO and/or board spokesperson respond to a former CEO’s sniping?
2) Check out the classic CEO bios of yesteryear like Iacocca (1924-2019), who led both Ford (the Mustang!) and Chrysler (1978-1992). Or read more about the “Peter Drucker of the United Kingdom,” Charles Handy, in my review of Myself and Other More Important Matters. 
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Mistake #13 of 25:
Every Leader Needs a Coach—Except Me!
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson


Peter Drucker’s classic, The Effective Executive, is John’s recommended book for Mistake #13. Have you read Drucker’s wisdom on mistakes and risk-taking?

John confesses, “I squandered way too many years treading water without a coach.” In Mistake #13: “Every Leader Needs a Coach—Except Me!” John notes that while he often coached others and often encouraged others to have a coach, sadly he often neglected his own counsel. He credits $1-a-year CMA (CLA) Senior Adviser George Duff with helping him over many rough patches!

According to Milestone Leadership, “92% of executives who received coaching said they would be willing to be coached again.” (Milestone offers coaching at $750 for a 90-minute session. Whew! The $1-a-year compensation for George Duff was John’s bargain of the century!)

George Duff told John that every year he re-read Peter Drucker’s classic, The Effective Executive (the featured book in Mistake #13). Click here to order the 50th anniversary edition (2017). Click here to read the foreword by Jim Collins, “Ten Lessons I Learned from Peter Drucker.”

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Do your communication strategies need more out-of-the-box thinking or in-the-box thinking? Need fresh messaging? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
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Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, nap duration, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. PRIVACY POLICY: Typepad, Inc. hosts John Pearson's Buckets Blog. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform for Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews. By clicking (above) to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy policy here.

Waiting for the Train: Biblical Food for Growing Before Going

Issue No. 487 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a unique story-telling approach (listen in on 100 coaching conversations!) to enrich your spiritual development. Plus—two memorable YouTube songs! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book John wrote with his son, Jason, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #12 below.

Mind the Gap! That’s the simple wisdom from Day 18 in the unique spiritual coaching book, Waiting for the Train. 

This Train Is Bound for Glory!

Can you judge a book by its cover? Sometimes, perhaps.

Can you judge a book by the endorsements of the author’s friends? Maybe, maybe not.

But…can you judge a book by the foreword? In this case, yes!

Josh McDowell, the evangelical apologist, evangelist, and author of more than 150 books (not a typo!), wrote the foreword to this issue’s featured book, Waiting for the Train: Biblical Food for Growing Before Going. Noting that “Jesus was a great storyteller,” McDowell writes:

“I think there is a place in today’s world for stories that present what Jesus said in a different way, a way that resonates in truth without preaching and without overreaching.”

Who doesn’t love a good story? How about 100 short stories? The author tags himself with the memorable pseudonym, S. Tory Teller (“story teller”—get it?), and you immediately appreciate his focus on the story, not himself. (I do know the author. He’s legit and the real deal. Imagine—plowing through all the work of publishing a book and keeping your name hidden. Whew.)

The big idea: what should you be doing here on earth—while waiting for the train? The story teller is, at first, very confused. He wanted, and received, a free ticket. “I think it’s good for a one-way trip to glory,” he told the train station manager. (After reading that, I couldn’t resist. Click here to listen to Johnny Cash sing This Train Is Bound for Glory.)

Listen to This Train Is Bound for Glory (3 ½ min.).

What follows are short two-page and three-page stories between the ticket holder and Stan—a spiritual coach. Often over breakfast, the conversations take twists and turns down the road to spiritual maturity. I love this book! But…

…YIKES! Just when you think you can teach the course, Waiting for the Train WHACKS your know-it-all arrogance. I can’t stop talking about it. I recently shared a chapter with a very wise friend and he, too, was blessed and appreciative of the insights about our God of Glory.

Many of the chapters sneak up on you. Where is the author going with this rabbit trail? Then…WHAM. Right between the eyes. I love the format and the unique story-telling approach. Not preachy, just really solid content served up in tasty doses. Don’t miss the “robe of righteousness” conversation in Day 41.

I ESPECIALLY APPRECIATED:

• Day 10: The Journal of the Journey. Idea: read John 15 (the Vine and the branches chapter) every day for 30 days.

• Day 13: Why Hurry Through the Bible? The value of slowing down: “…one of the author’s nuggets of wisdom was to stay with a particular Bible verse until I was satisfied I’d claimed all that it had to offer.” Click here to listen to the classic anthem, Slow Down, by Chuck Girard.

Listen to Slow Down by Chuck Girard (4 min.).

• Day 18: Mind the Gap. On a trip to London, Stan bought a “Mind the Gap” sign (the ubiquitous warnings around the underground). It’s now on the wall of his study at home. “It reminds me to look for any ‘gap’ between God’s purposes and what I am doing in my daily life.”

• Day 40: Blessed with the Right Answer. Stan tells S. Tory Teller, “Jesus presented a question that I think is easily the most important question a person can be asked.” The question: “Who do you say that I am?” (For more, view “Jesus Claimed to Be God,” (3-min.) on Josh McDowell’s website.)

• Day 75: Having or Being Breakfast. In just two pages the story teller delivers a wake-up call about Satan as a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8). Stan relates a friend’s comment from an African safari: “Some of the animals were either having breakfast, or they were being breakfast. The stronger adversary prevailed.”

• Day 98: Where’s Your Antioch? Acts 11:26 notes that it was in the city of Antioch when the disciples were first called Christians. So the two discuss the relevance of remembering your conversion details and talking about it. Two thumbs up!

You’ll love this book. Each day concludes with a three-part summary:
• Bible verses to consider
• Prayer
• Think on this

Click here to read the first chapter, “Waiting for the Train: Assurance of Salvation and What it Means for This Life.” Click here for the Waiting for the Train blog, and click here for the Facebook page.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Waiting for the Train: Biblical Food for Growing Before Going, by S. Tory Teller (foreword by Josh McDowell).

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) The book, Illuminate, creatively highlights how to “Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, and Symbols.” How effective is our organization (and each of us individually) in communicating creatively through stories?
2) Waiting for the Train leverages 100 stories to communicate spiritual truths in a creative way—short, mini-conversations. As Jim West noted in his Amazon review, the story approach “feels like a fireside chat with a close personal mentor.” How could our organization be more effective at story telling?
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Mistake #12 of 25:
Talking the Coach Talk, But Not Walking It 
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson


Honest! You can become GREAT at making mistakes! Learn how here.

In Mistake #12, “Talking the Coach Talk, But Not Walking It,” John says he recently learned that he is an Advice Monster! And Gary Collins’ wisdom may also shock you. He says to beware of the coach or counselor who promises you can be anything you want to be! (Not possible.) John recommends two books for Mistake #12: Christian Coaching, by Gary R. Collins, Ph.D., and The Coaching Habit, by Michael Bungay Stanier.

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. There’s nothing more powerful than a well-told story! Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social) to hear three memorable stories of how our clients have crashed through the clutter to communicate their fork-in-the-road causes.
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Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, nap duration, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. PRIVACY POLICY: Typepad, Inc. hosts John Pearson's Buckets Blog. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform for Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews. By clicking (above) to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy policy here.