John Pearson's Buckets Blog

Quantum Marketing: Mastering the New Marketing Mindset for Tomorrow's Consumers

Issue No. 470 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting reports that “advertising (as we know it) is dead!” New in February and already a Wall Street Journal bestseller—trust me—Quantum Marketing is a must-read for your marketing team and senior leaders. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my recent review of Fast Times: How Digital Winners Set Direction, Learn, and Adapt and learn why the founder of Spotify says, “We aim to make mistakes faster than anyone else.”

Quantum Marketing predicts 5G in the Fifth Paradigm will be "the difference between a tricycle and a motorcycle!"

Quantum Marketing: AI Writes My eNews!

Mind-Blowing! I can’t stop talking about Quantum Marketing, the new bestseller from the global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Mastercard. Raja Rajamannar warns that “65% of CEOs have some or no confidence in their marketing teams.” But help is here as the author guides us in “Mastering the New Marketing Mindset for Tomorrow's Consumers” (the subtitle).

“The world is changing with such unprecedented speed and disruption that classical marketing theories, strategies, and practices are failing. Quantum Marketing is the new framework for that brave new world of tomorrow. Here, every aspect of classical marketing is challenged and frontline strategies are outlined for marketers to thrive.”

Hype or reality? It’s reality, folks. The author documents three dynamics that have fueled “the crisis of confidence in marketing.”
#1. Huge technology transformation—“tremendous advancement in data analytics, and changes in consumer behavior driven by mobile and social media. Collectively, these have shocked business models and upended traditional strategies.”
#2. Little connection between business outcomes and marketing investments and actions—“their contribution and value became increasingly dubious.”
#3. Marketing execs are stuck in a narrow view of marketing—most are at either ends of a continuum (“obsessed with A-B testing” and those with “no clue about business models, digital technologies, or data analytics”).

While the book is not a puff piece at all for Mastercard, I couldn’t resist doing my own research on how Mastercard’s “quantum” marketing leverages all the senses (see chapter 9). After discussing “How Our Brain Functions” (primal brain and cognitive brain—marketing appeals to just one), the author adds, “Today, marketers need to go way beyond jingles.” He references Mastercard’s case study of its “sonic brand creation.” It will blow your mind! (Must-read: Fast Company’s Feb. 13, 2019 article, “Mastercard Just Launched a Sonic Logo. Here’s What It Sounds Like.” Must-listen: the two-minute “audio press release.”)

For more, check out the short videos on Muse by Clio, “Hear Mastercard's New Brand Melody in Various Apps, Styles and Places.” And did you know that in 2019, Mastercard dropped its name from their logo?

To test the author’s claims, I selected—at random—this 30-second video from Mastercard. Listen for the “sonic logo” and enjoy:


Dance along with this 30-second video, “Tap & Go with Your Mastercard.”

But let me back up now for some context. The author says organizations are unprepared for what’s coming: the Fifth Paradigm. You’ll remember the first four:
• First and Second Paradigms—Product Marketing and Emotional Marketing: print, radio, and TV, commoditization, (and doctors endorsing Lucky Strikes!), attitudinal metrics, celebrity testimonials, etc.
• Third and Fourth Paradigms—Data-Driven Marketing and Digital & Social Marketing: World Wide Web (Aug. 6, 1991), Big Data, mobile, social media, “the segment of one,” Facebook, iPhone (June 29, 2007), “average human attention span is less than eight seconds,” average time on digital devices: six hours/day, “no time for prime time,” and “social media heaven and hell.” And more: the “trust” problem!

What’s coming in the Fifth Paradigm? Fasten your seatbelts! Take my Pop Quiz to see if you’re prepared. Can you define these Fifth Paradigm terms—and does your marketing team understand them?

POP QUIZ! Define the following:
1. The 3 types of AI (Chapter 5—“the ultimate propellant of Quantum Marketing”)
2. Blockchain (Chapter 7: immutable and smart contracts)
3. 5G (“the difference between a tricycle and a motorcycle”)
4. AR and VPS (p. 67)
5. VR trade shows (p. 71)
6. 3-D printing and product prototyping (p. 77)
7. IoT (p. 74)
8. The Hierarchy of Loyalty (see Chapter 10)
9. The 4 Ps
10. The Fourfold Mission of Marketing (p. 27)
11. “Case studies…used in many MBA schools are outdated.” Why? (p. 28)
12. FMCG (p. 30)
13. The 3 buckets of data (p. 35)
14. The Slew of Sensors (p. 37)
15. CCPA (p. 45)
C'mon, man! Do the Pop Quiz. Don't skip it!
16. OTM (non-annoying, p. 57)
17. “In the Fifth Paradigm, digital IDs will be the equivalent of holograms.” (p. 85)
18. BE—“the way individuals process, think, feel, and then decide.” Which works best? Two $100 jackets for $150, or the first jacket for $100 and the second for only $50? (p. 89)
19. Neuroscience: “Ninety percent of decision-making takes place in the subconscious.” (p. 91)
20. Merry Go Round (p. 103)
21. QEM: 8 key points (p. 125-126)
22. Chapter 12: “We Are Not Consumers, We Are People”—BAU, CX, UX, “holistic people research,” kids as “R&D managers of the family”
23. Purpose Washing: 2 reasons to pursue purpose
24. Ethics creep
25. Coronacrisis: The Risk Heat Map Template; use humor cautiously in a crisis: “Humor can be mistaken for mockery or tone deafness.” (Chapter 17 is must-read: “Marketing through Crisis”)

For a gut check, read page 38, “A Day in the Data Life.” Early on, the author raises the ethics flag on consumer privacy and a company’s “quasi-unethical or exploitative tendency” when asking you to accept the “reams of terms and conditions.” And this: “Honestly, who thinks that anyone reads them, other than the lawyers and geeks?”

Why does Marriott use “signature scents?” How high did Nike increase sales when they added scents to their stores? (See page 106.) Chapter 9, “All the Senses,” made me wonder if churches and faith-based organizations are delivering adequate sensory experiences? See Psalms 34:8 (MSG), “Open your mouth and taste, open your eyes and see—how good God is. Blessed are you who run to him.”

By the way, Rajamannar notes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) “is also writing articles in very authentic styles of various journalists and writers. It studies the works of an author, and when given a topic, it researches on the internet for relevant content and writes, in a matter of a few seconds, an article that mostly makes sense, in a style that seems authentic.”

I’ve asked Anders (18), my favorite grandson, to harness AI to write future issues of Your Weekly Staff Meeting. I’m expecting a generous use of “Yikes,” plus “Must-read,” plus “Delegate your reading,”—coupled with frequent car chases from the other John Pearson’s bestseller, James Bond: The Authorised Biography.

You’ll remember, of course, the 4 Ps of marketing (price, place, products, and promotion). The author alerts blue chip companies that they are “fragmenting the 4 Ps…and distributing them across multiple areas outside of marketing.” The result: “Currently, marketing is in a crisis.”

Highly readable (as a good marketing book should be!), the author sold me in the preface. By page 100, I had more than 20 critical notes to include in this review. When the book concluded on page 198, I was fired up—and searching LinkedIn for Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) positions!

THE QUANTUM CMO. The 10 pages in chapter 18 are worth gold. Raja Rajamannar warns again: “Marketing is at a point of inflection, and the opportunity ahead is truly once in a lifetime. If embraced, it can take off from here brilliantly. Or it can totally implode. Here is where the Quantum CMO comes in. And here are what characterize Quantum CMOs…” So the author includes 21 short paragraphs of the ideal CMO (really, a narrative position description).

If I were a CEO again, I would turn those pages into a quarterly checklist—and use it to coach and inspire my CMO. What are we doing well? What are we missing? Examples:
#1. “Quantum CMOs are like Leonardo Da Vinci.” They are “both right brained and left brained, creative and analytical.”
#2. “Quantum CMOs are primarily business leaders who understand business.”
#4. “Quantum CMOs understand the basics of human psychology, sociology, and anthropology. They grasp every one of the 4 Ps of marketing.”
#9. “Quantum CMOs are strong, empathetic leaders, because they are literally driving teams through this transformational phase, which is not easy.”
#10. “Quantum CMOs are evangelists for marketing, particularly if they are in companies that are not marketing driven.” And, “they speak the language of the CEOs and the CFOs…”
#11. “Quantum CMOs have tremendous curiosity and agility. Many of us have gone to management schools, many moons ago. Life has changed a lot since then.”

Read the book to leverage all 21 insights—what the CMO in your organization needs to be and to do in this Fifth Paradigm. Don’t forget that agencies “are not our servants, but our equal partners.” And learn why your Quantum CMO must have a good mix of IQ, EQ, CQ, and DQ. (See page 197.)

There’s so much more, but I gotta navigate a way out of this review! Finally, while I’m not a marketing genius, I’ve considered myself to be above average—fairly savvy in the Customer Bucket. Yikes. I’ve been depending on old school paradigms—helpful, yet way behind the curve. Examples:

I’ve often quoted Ogilvyisms from The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising, such as my favorite: “You can’t save souls in an empty church.” (Read my 2009 review.) But now, after reading Quantum Marketing—it’s time to move on to post-graduate level marketing.

Ditto the book I co-authored 30 years ago (Yikes!) with Bob Hisrich, a true marketing/entrepreneurial genius, Marketing Your Ministry: Ten Critical Principles. While many of these “Hisrichian Principles” are still valid (even if the examples are pre-Internet!), it’s time to go deeper. However, the 10 axioms are still fresh, including:
• “Don’t be the 8th lemonade stand in a row of 9.”
• “If you have $10,000 to spend, invest $5,000 in researching and understanding your market.”

You get the picture (and the sound): Quantum Marketing is a must-read. Who on your team should read this first?

To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Quantum Marketing: Mastering the New Marketing Mindset for Tomorrow's Consumers, by Raja Rajamannar. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (6 hours, 12 minutes). And thanks to Fortier PR for sending a review copy.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS
1) In the “Loyalty Transformed” chapter, Rajamannar writes, “Give me affinity. Give me chemistry. Give me context. Give me relevance. Give me experience.” He says those things can “move a brand in the right direction in the quantum future.” On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 is high), rank those five factors in your organization’s top loyalty program. What needs fixing?
2) Quantum Marketing reports: “Today, it is estimated that the average human’s attention span is slightly less than that of a goldfish, at under eight seconds!” Is your organization’s marketing ready for the Fifth Paradigm—or are you still back in the First Paradigm? How do you cut through the noise and the clutter?
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Year 2040 Pop Quiz!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook


POP QUIZ SPOILER ALERT! Listed above: the 2035 population
projections for the five largest cities in Latin America.

Yikes! Need another mind-blowing resource? Download the FREE report, GLOBAL TRENDS 2040: A More Contested World, a publication of the National Intelligence Council (here in the U.S.). Click here to download the 156-page PDF or click here to visit the online report.

And thanks to trends spotter and consultant David Schmidt at Wise Planning for alerting us to this gem—a full week before it was covered by The Wall Street Journal. Schmidt suggests, “at 156 pages, it’s best to brew a full pot of coffee if you plan to read it cover to cover.” Implications for your organization? Contact David Schmidt via his website.

POP QUIZ! In 2040, according to Global Trends 2040, will the percentage of Christians be UP or DOWN from 2020 in each of these nine regions?
• Latin America and Caribbean
• Europe
• Russia and Eurasia
• Middle East and North Africa
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• South Asia
• Northeast Asia
• Southeast Asia
• Oceania

EXTRA CREDIT: List the five largest cities, by population in 2035, in each region. (Answers: pages 120 to 140)

According to the website, this is the “7th edition of the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends report. Published every four years since 1997, Global Trends assesses the key trends and uncertainties that will shape the strategic environment for the United States during the next two decades.”

For more resources in the Strategy Bucket, click here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Pearpod helped the Roe v. Wade movie team create fundraising opportunities for organizations and churches. If you need creative add-ons to your projects—to build loyalty—check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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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.

L.A. Cop: Peacemaker in Blue

Issue No. 469 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a new book by Bob Vernon, Former L.A.P.D. Assistant Chief of Police. L.A. Cop is a page-turner—with gutsy lessons in every chapter. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my 2019 review of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and learn why “CEOs, on average, have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace.”



“The More You Sweat Here, the Less You’ll Bleed on the Streets”

Dum - - - de - DUM – DUM. Ladies and gentlemen: the book review you are about to read is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

If you remember “Dragnet,” the radio, TV, and motion-picture series featuring the dedicated Los Angeles police detective, Sergeant Joe Friday (played by Jack Webb, 1920-1982), then you’ll definitely appreciate the true stories in L.A. Cop: Peacemaker in Blue, by Bob Vernon.

But first, click here and listen to the “Dragnet” theme (or find your old 78 record):

Listen to the iconic theme music from “Dragnet”
which reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100.

Oh, my. Read Bob Vernon’s first person narrative of being a peacemaker in the streets, alleys, and drug busts of Los Angeles—and you will think differently about law enforcement.

Just published last month, I read several pages of L.A. Cop to my grandchildren (four teenagers and an 11-year-old) at our Easter gathering. Zuzu, the serious reader in our family (she read 175 books in 2020) plans to read L.A. Cop this month.

Why should you read Bob Vernon’s book? The news for peacemakers has not been good lately: riots, the denigration of good cops, the misguided “defund the police” movement, and who knows what will happen…when the verdict is announced in the Derek Chauvin trial regarding George Floyd's death.

Bob Vernon retired in 1992 as L.A.P.D. Assistant Chief of Police, after serving 38 years with the department. His pastor, John MacArthur, notes that Vernon “was really a combination of cop and preacher.” Think it’s easy addressing crime and violence every day—and being a Christ follower? Try combining the rough and tumble Policy Academy training with the regimen Eugene Peterson delineates in his book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society. Peterson describes disciples as “people who spend our lives apprenticed to our master, Jesus Christ.”

Originally, with a passion to be a pilot, and between semesters at Biola, Vernon passed the preliminary cadet screening tests and joined a group of 30 for an intense week of exams. He qualified for the final five, but a young psychiatrist pushed back on Vernon’s convictions. “Do you believe that Jesus was born without an earthly father—all that stuff?” The shrink, after a three-minute conversation, concluded that Vernon’s “hyper-religiousness” would not be a good fit in Korea. Sadly, Vernon was disqualified and his piloting career never took off.

So God redirected his path to the L.A.P.D. and while enduring the battery of tests to become an L.A. cop, Vernon interviewed with another psychiatrist. I’m always looking for the meat of a book by page 25—and I was not disappointed. Vernon shared his angst over his disqualification by the first psychiatrist. So in this interview, “I decided to be totally honest and let the chips fall where they would. I answered the questions openly and fully; I even volunteered that I knew Jesus personally. If this doesn’t do it, nothing will,” Vernon thought!

In response, the L.A.P.D. psychiatrist was elated. “I’m glad to see a young man who knows what he believes in. I was especially impressed when I tried to get you to back down and you wouldn’t.” He said that during the Korean War, the government had learned that those U.S. servicemen in enemy camps who had strong religious faith were faring better. (Read the encouraging insights on page 25.)

I’ve never been a crime writer or beat reporter, so I will not attempt to describe the powerful drama (and surprising humor!) in L.A. Cop. (Once, however, for a sixth grade school assignment, I wrote that I aspired to work for the FBI. I came close when I played an FBI agent—actually just one scene—in the 2008 movie, The Genius Club, starring Stephen Baldwin.) But let me tease you with nine Bob Vernon stories and some insights for your weekly staff meeting:

• What was she wearing? Vernon is the son of a cop and now the grandfather of four cops. His dad prepped him for the interview exam—to be ready for the classic observation question, “Describe the secretary who brought you into the interview room.” Oops! It backfired on Vernon—to much laughter—but he passed. (What’s your best interview question?)

• L.A. Policy Academy. Vernon learned this: “The more you sweat here, the less you’ll bleed on the streets.” (What’s the most memorable saying at your organization—and does it involve blood?)

• Rigorous Training. “Many of us were ‘killed’ by an instructor playing the role of a bandit. The instructor would fire a blank from his gun when we were careless during a vehicle pull-over or body search.” Read more about “pursuit syndrome” and why police behavioral patterns are so critical during those 90-mph car chases through residential areas. (How do you assess and address job-related stress?)

• Sobering. “The ‘Officer Survival’ and ‘When to Shoot’ lectures were among the most sobering experiences.” Vernon adds, “Those sessions shook me.” (Does your new employee orientation touch hearts and guts?)

• Pick One. Vernon learned rapidly from partners and other veterans. When a “belligerent and bull-strong arrestee didn’t want to go,” Vernon noted, “They knew how to choose from psychology, humor, and physical persuasion.” (What’s your go-to competency in your persuasion toolbox?)

• No GPS! Imagine—try doing effective police work without GPS, iPhones, and other modern resources. Vernon consulted his Thomas Street Guide to locate his assigned trouble spots. (Raise your hand if you still have a Thomas Street Guide in your car!)

• Timing Is Everything. “Those days of car patrol taught me the importance of being in the right place at the right time.” On one occasion, before the dispatcher had radioed a robbery alert, Vernon had the suspect in custody! The foot race ended with a serious whack on the suspect’s head—just one of dozens of scary, sometimes hilarious, cop stories. (Share a story when God put you in the right place at the right time.)

• The Incredulous Judge. One of Vernon’s early partners, Nick, “had an uncanny sixth sense.” Nick had even more than that. As the arresting office, Nick asked a judge to give him custody of a young man. “The judge was incredulous.” Caseworkers approved and “York” moved in with Nick and his wife. “York” eventually got a job and married. Redemption! (That’s what Max De Pree called a “tribal story.”)

• Pattern of Prayer. During Vernon’s 45-minute oral exam for deputy chief, he was asked how he had turned around a difficult environment when he was captain in the Venice neighborhood. His answer, “Well, I prayed a lot.” He then explained how his pattern of prayer gave him new insights and ideas for that challenging situation. (Read this book and you’ll pray differently every time you see a law enforcement officer—and perhaps how you approach your current job.)

You’ll be blessed and encouraged when you read L.A. Cop and your street-smart vocabulary will also be enriched: D.B. (dead body), u.o.’s (unusual occurrences), rat’s alarms, and righteous busts. You’ll appreciate even more: law enforcement chaplains, preventive media relationships, and split-second life or death decision-making competencies.

Though retirement would have been well-deserved after 38 years, Bob Vernon’s next assignment from the Lord was to launch Pointman Leadership Institute with a mission “to provide ethics training worldwide in character-based, principled leadership.” To date, more than 70 certified instructors have served more than 100,000 leaders in 75 countries with seminars on the power of character and preventing corruption. 

“This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here.” After you read L.A. Cop, check out the classic “Dragnet” TV dramas posted on YouTube.

To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for L.A. Cop: Peacemaker in Blue, by Bob Vernon, Former L.A.P.D. Assistant Chief of Police. And thanks to Three Sixteen Publishing for sending a review copy.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS
1) When working with the L.A.P.D.’s gang task force, Vernon and the team created a strategy to focus on one gang’s hardcore leadership—about 15 percent of the gang. It was very effective. Does your organization’s strategy include a laser-like focus on key leaders and influencers?
2) Are you prepared for the next crisis? It’s not if, but when. Bob Vernon had been lieutenant in the L.A.P.D. accident division for about two weeks in 1965 when the Watts riots hit the nation’s front pages. (Read his chapter, “Shoot?”) Is it time, again, to update our crisis plans?
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John Grisham meets Tim Keller
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook



Here’s the core competency in the Crisis Bucket: “We are prepared for most crises. We have plans in place and a crisis facilitator trained, and we drill our team members frequently and spontaneously. Yet we trust in God, who is our Protector, Comforter and Sustainer.”

If my review of L.A. Cop has you searching for more books in the crime genre, you would enjoy The Ambition, Lee Strobel’s first novel in 2011. I called it “John Grisham meets Tim Keller.” Set in Chicago (where I survived 21 winters), the novel has it all and doesn’t disappoint. Murder. Mayhem. Megachurch. The mob. And Chicago politics! How I’ve missed Chicago politics! (Read my review of The Ambition.)

What’s the most important competency to bring to a crisis? Many would answer “JUDGMENT.” Read my 2017 mini-review of the book, Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, by Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis.

Judgment, preach the authors, is “the essence of effective leadership.” It involves three domains: people, strategy, and crisis. (Interestingly, those are three of the 20 management buckets: the People Bucket, the Strategy Bucket, and the Crisis Bucket.) They call judgment the proverbial elephant on the table—because it’s rarely addressed.

For more resources in all 20 buckets, click here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Pearpod helped the Roe v. Wade movie team create fundraising opportunities for organizations and churches. If you need creative add-ons to your projects, check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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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.

Roe v. Wade Movie

Issue No. 468 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting recommends a powerful movie that left me speechless—and a very comforting song. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my review of 30 Days Unplugged: How a Catholic Priest Turned Off His iPhone and Took a Call From God.



What Can One Person Do?

Exactly one year ago today, I spotlighted eight “leadership flicks” that you and your work-from-home team members could profitably view. (Click here.) I quoted Cecil B. DeMille: “Give me any two pages of the Bible, and I'll give you a picture.” Aristotle said, “The soul never thinks without a picture.”

I asked, “Why do you think the right film, at the right time, for the right reason—can be so powerful?” Today, April 2, 2021, I’m urging you to view another film—the online premiere of Roe v. Wade. I viewed the final full cut earlier this week and as the credits rolled…I was speechless. Oh, my.

Whether you’re “pro-choice” or “pro-life,” I’m wondering if what you believe could pass a FACT CHECK? The U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade landmark decision made history on Jan. 22, 1973. If you’re a regular reader, you won’t be surprised to know that I’m an advocate for the unborn. I believe the unborn are precious souls—made in the image of God. Please view the movie trailer (two minutes) here:

Click here to view the Roe v. Wade movie trailer (2 minutes).

Nick Loeb, the co-director, recently told The Hollywood Reporter, “What we tried to do is really just lay out the facts of how Roe v. Wade came to be and how it was decided. People can take one view or another. I've had a lot of people who think it's in the middle. We tell it from the pro-choice perspective because the story is told through the eyes of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who was the biggest abortionist of all time. He did more than 70,000 abortions.

“Why some folks may think it's a conservative film or why it aligns with those views is because the protagonist actually converts. He starts off pro-choice and becomes pro-life through his journey. It's a true story.”

POP QUIZ: FACT OR NOT?
Here are just five of the 11 claims noted on the Roe v. Wade website. Fact or not?

[ ] #1. “Supreme Court justices switched their votes in favor of ‘Jane Roe’ by striking down laws that restricted abortion.”

[ ] #2. “At the time the Supreme Court was hearing and deciding on Roe v. Wade, family members of some Supreme Court justices were volunteering for Planned Parenthood, the abortion provider and advocate for full legalization of abortion, or pushing to legalize abortion.”

[ ] #3. “Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, is shown speaking at a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan with a burning cross nearby, and making racist statements.”

[ ] #4. “Dr. Bernard Nathanson and Lawrence Lader, on a trip to the Caribbean island of St. Croix, discussed strategy to target the Catholic Church and use fabricated statistics on abortion.”

[ ] #5. Note: In that decade, some Americans were willing to speak up for the rights of the unborn. Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first African American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, is featured prominently in the film.
Fact or Not? “Dr. Mildred Jefferson mentions that the producers of the TV series, Maude, were paid by activists $10,000 for an episode favorable to abortion.”

POP QUIZ ANSWERS:
Click here to visit “Fact Check” on the Roe v. Wade movie website.

WHAT CAN ONE PERSON DO? After viewing this powerful film, I’d suggest you discuss these questions:
   • What did you learn?
   • You cannot have passion for every cause—for every issue—so how do you discern if/when you should harness your energies and resources on this issue?
   • What is God calling you to do now?
   • What can one person do?

HOST A VIRTUAL MOVIE FUNDRAISING EVENT. The producers of Roe v. Wade have an innovative way for your organization or church to view the movie online—and also inspire viewers to give to your organization. Click here for more information and to learn about the three simple steps. You can schedule your event anytime until April 26, 2021. (Note: If an official representative of your organization would like to view an online screener, before you reserve your online event, click here.)

VIEW ROE V. WADE: DIGITAL AND ON-DEMAND (available now)
(1 hour, 51 minutes, PG-13). “Dr. Bernard Nathanson and Dr. Mildred Jefferson square off in a national battle in this untold conspiracy that led to the most famous and controversial court case in history.” Click here to view online.



VIEW ROE V. WADE: DVD (available May 4, 2021)
1 hour, 51 minutes, PG-13, Jon Voight (Actor), Nick Loeb (Actor). Click here to pre-order the DVD from Amazon.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS
Do you know someone who needs encouragement? Has COVID (and now a very heavy topic like Roe v. Wade) affected a friend or family member deeply? There is hope. Listen to this blessed song by The Issacs, “Does Jesus Care?” They sing, “When the days are weary, the long nights dreary, I know my Savior cares.”

Click here to listen: “Does Jesus Care?”
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What Can One Person Do?
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook



In The 5 Book, Dan Zadra asks a convicting question: “Where will you be five years from now?” (Read my review.) He notes:
   • “In just under five years, Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.”
   • “At age 30, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was living in a 500-square foot apartment. Five years later his net worth was $10 billion.” (Today: $182 billion!)
   • “In 1961, Julia Child graduated from cooking school with a quirky idea for a TV show. Four years later she won an Emmy as America’s favorite TV chef.”

So…what can one person do? Think about a five-year plan. And think about Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood leader. Read her story here.

• Click here to read my review of Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader's Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Line, by Abby Johnson.

• Click here to view Unplanned, the movie, on Amazon Prime.

What can one person do? John Baillie prayed, “What I desire for myself I cannot attain, but what Thou desirest in me Thou canst attain for me.” He also prayed, “I would hold myself in readiness today for Thy least word of command. Give me the spirit, I pray Thee, to keep myself in continual training for the punctual fulfillment of Thy most holy will.”

Click here to order A Diary of Private Prayer from Amazon, featuring Baillie’s 31 morning prayers and 31 evening prayers. For more resources in the Strategy Bucket, click here. And for more on prayer, visit the blog I wrote one year ago for ECFA. Click here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Pearpod helped the Roe v. Wade movie team create fundraising opportunities for organizations and churches. If you need creative add-ons to your projects, check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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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.

The Tragedy of Patton: A Soldier's Date With Destiny

Issue No. 467 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting discusses strategic World War II leadership dilemmas and asks—what would you do in Ike’s shoes? If Patton is your best general, it’s very, very complicated. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my pick for the 2019 book-of-the-year, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, by Gen. Jim Mattis.


“If Everyone Is Thinking Alike, Then Somebody Isn’t Thinking”

Imagine this. You’re Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and your most aggressive get-it-done general goes off the rails frequently. But…he’s your best general and whatever you throw at him, he performs well above anyone’s expectations. And his troops love him.

How do deal with a direct report, somewhat flawed, with significant blind spots? Fire him? Promote her? Talk to him? Pray? Before you do anything, read The Tragedy of Patton: A Soldier's Date With Destiny, by Robert Orlando, director of the award-winning film Silence Patton. You’ll be amazed that the issues then—are still the issues today. As President Harry Truman said, “The only thing new in this world is the history you haven’t read.”

So here in 2021, my challenge is to inspire you to read a book and view a documentary film about a World War II four-star general, George S. Patton. But don’t think “been-there-done-that” because you saw George C. Scott play Patton on the big screen way back in 1970. (Scott won the best actor Oscar for that blockbuster, almost three hours long.)

In this new book, Orlando asks a very disturbing question (his subtitle), “Could World War II's Greatest General Have Stopped the Cold War?” It’s disturbing because—like today—there is huge disagreement on what or who are the free world’s greatest global threats.

Read the book and you may be surprised to learn that Patton was in the minority regarding America’s World War II “ally,” the Soviet Union. He never trusted Josef Stalin. FDR later recognized how Stalin had deceived him. And Winston Churchill? The author writes, “Unlike the president, Churchill held his nose and dealt with Stalin only when necessary and with grave reservation.”

At the Yalta Conference, Feb. 4-11, 1945, Roosevelt (1882-1945), Churchill (1874-1965), and Stalin (1878-1953) negotiated the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe—and those decisions back then continue to have an onerous ripple effect today. (How will your leadership decisions today affect the next generation?) I made notes on 11 big ideas that we should think about today.

#1. THE ANTIHERO. The author frequently quotes Victor Davis Hanson, the very thoughtful military historian and professor. Hanson “identifies Patton as an updated form of the antihero, as seen in modern westerns like Shane or The Wild Bunch.” Patton was also a student of military history, but one problem: “Patton had a trained ancient soul of war but needed to function on a democratic state.” QUESTION: Who’s the antihero today?

#2. GIGANTIC KILLING MACHINE. Orlando quotes Patton biographer Carlo D’Este on the moral dilemma of motivating “…decent young men raised on the precepts of the Bible, the sanctity of human life, and the immorality of killing to become an efficient cog in a gigantic killing machine such as an armored division. While it was enough to make their mothers cringe, the only method where a Patton . . . could succeed on a battlefield was to trespass on the inherent decency of Americans by training and motivating their men to survive by killing others whose task was to kill them. Patton did it as well or better than virtually anyone else.” QUESTION: Do our 18-year-olds understand war like their grandfathers and great grandfathers understood war and evil?

#3. THE PARADOX OF PATTON. In the extremely insight chapter, “The Puppeteers” (the decision-makers above Patton), Orlando writes, “…the very qualities that made Patton a successful battlefield general—unflinching nerve, audacity, and fearless candor—were the same characteristics that made him a nuisance when the fighting was over. This paradox, of course, is the tragic certainty of any antihero.” QUESTION: How do you lead and manage an antihero. Would you keep him or her on the payroll?

#4. JUST A SAX PLAYER? The author quotes numerous historians (fascinating—since they all don’t agree!) including Dennis Showalter who surmised, “Patton was ‘merely a saxophonist’ in the big band that was the Allied command structure. Throughout the war, his sense of destiny would be thwarted and defined by the orchestrations of the decision makers—the puppeteers.” If you were Charlie Parker, perhaps the greatest jazz sax player of all time, you might disagree with “merely.” But if you’re Sesame Street’s Hoots the Owl (see my Book Bucket chapter and click here), you're helping Ernie “put down the duckie if you wanna play the saxophone” (sorry for the mixed metaphor). QUESTION: Are your key people in the right big band chairs with the right instruments—or are they unfocused and/or perpetually scheming to grab the band leader’s baton?

#5. MEDIA MOTIVES. Nothing new here! “It is difficult to say why the media was so merciless with Patton. Perhaps the prospect of peace meant that reporters needed a new villain to sell papers.”

Click here to view the two-minute documentary trailer for Silence Patton,
the award-winning film directed by Robert Orlando.

#6. “IF YOU BREAK IT, YOU OWN IT.” Following Germany’s surrender, Patton became the military’s administrative governor of Bavaria—a desk job! Imagine if this was your assignment in 1945. The majority of the country’s infrastructure was operated by people who were required to join the Nazi party. Do you retain them—or hire non-party members who have no clue about water, sewer, power, or transportation? The author notes Gen. Colin Powell’s memorable observation about the Bath party and the planned “debathification” of the Iraqi military following the Iraq War: “If you break it, you own it.” (Attn: President Biden! Read this book before you invade a nation.) QUESTION: Have your ethics and deep-rooted political beliefs ever been challenged by reality?

#7. ASSIGNMENT MISMATCH. After Patton was fired by Ike (well…relocated), even the New York Times was surprisingly sympathetic: “He was obviously in a post [for] which he was unsuited by temperament, training or experience to fill. It was a mistake to suppose a free-swinging fighter could acquire overnight the capacities of a wise administrator. His removal by General Eisenhower was an acknowledgment of that mistake. . . . For all his showmanship he was a scientific soldier, a through military student. . . . He reaped no laurels from the peace, but those he won in war will remain green for a long time.” (Pop Quiz: Let’s surmise what Patton’s Top-5 strengths might have been on the CliftonStrengths assessment from Gallup. QUESTION: Are you placing key people in key places—based on their strengths?)

#8. TWIN SINS: WISHFULNESS & YESMANSHIP. Orlando’s descriptions of Roosevelt’s “wishful thinking” about Stalin and the Communist threat, (“Roosevelt was of the firm belief that, in time, he could transform the tyrant into a ‘Christian gentleman’”), reminded me about the twin sins of “wishfulness” and “yesmanship” described in the nonfiction thriller, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre. QUESTION: Read my review and then self-assess your organization: what are our twin sins?

#9. PATTON AND PRAYER. Orlando writes that Patton clearly believed in God, but he also believed in reincarnation and often pictured himself as a warrior in earlier battles. I’d pay serious money to discuss Patton in a book club with a pastor or priest, a therapist, two ethicists, a general, and my wife, Joanne. Alan Baker’s book, Foundations of Chaplaincy (read my review) noted this fascinating (fascinating!) online article, "When Patton Enlisted the Entire Third Army to Pray for Fair Weather” (History on the Net, Scott Michael Rank). QUESTION: Do we believe in the power of prayer so much that we’d order a rush job of 250,000 printed prayers?

#10. GAGGING PLOT? Patton died in a German hospital at age 60 on Dec. 21, 1945, just 12 days after a mysterious car accident on the eve of his return to England. The author asks, “Was this a freak accident, or were more sinister forces at play? If so, who would want to kill America’s greatest general? Patton had vowed to ‘take the gag off’ after the war and tell the intimate truth about controversial decisions and questionable politics that had cost the lives of his men.” Ironically, Patton had wanted to be killed by “the last bullet of the last battle of the last war.”

Yet Patton would not want us to mourn. In a Boston speech on June 7, 1945, (one year and one day after D-Day), Patton said, “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” QUESTION: If you could write the script (you can’t—see Ecclesiastes 3), how would you orchestrate your exit?

#11. PLAN B? In a riveting section, “Deals with the Devil,” the author quotes Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who wondered if an alternate strategy would have been feasible for winning the war—without the Red Army taking Berlin (think Cold War, etc.). Kissinger: “The longer the interval, the more difficult it becomes to imagine an alternative outcome or to prove its viability. And history refused to be played back like a movie reel in which new endings are spliced into at will.” QUESTION: What’s the balance between looking back on past mistakes and learning from them—versus moving ahead and not blaming or whining?

MY FAVORITE ONE-LINERS AND MORE INSIGHTS:
• “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”
• “An army is like spaghetti. You can’t push a piece of spaghetti, you’ve got to pull it.”
• “Patton wrote of his conversation with [General] Bradley, ‘It really is a great plan, wholly my own, and I made Bradley think he thought of it.’”
• Victor Davis Hanson on Rudyard Kipling’s “the unforgiving minute,” said that Patton knew that “in war, you get one chance and one chance only, and it’s a split second. Fortune favors the brave, the audacious people.”
• Patton’s Bookshelf (a short list of 24 books that shaped him, including the Bible): “Patton was one of the most well-read military leaders in modern history.”
• Patton’s Speech to the Third Army: delivered without notes to the troops between February and June 5, 1944 (the day before D-Day): a brilliant master class in motivation and persuasion, 75 years before Trey Gowdy’s book on persuasion!

To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Tragedy of Patton: A Soldier's Date With Destiny — Could World War II's Greatest General Have Stopped the Cold War? by Robert Orlando. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (5 hours, 22 minutes). Check out the three-minute audio teaser.

View the award-winning movie, Silence Patton, directed by Robert Orlando, 2018 (1 hour, 25 minutes).

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) I deeply appreciated receiving an autographed review copy of The Tragedy of Patton from Robert Orlando. He wrote this in my copy: "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!" (Audacity, audacity, always audacity!) Patton, says Orlando, “embodied the gospel of Napoleon.” Look at your mission, vision, and BHAG—and then discuss if your audacity quotient is properly positioned or does it border on narcissism?
2) Patton believed that General Omar Bradley’s motto seemed to be “In case of doubt, halt.” On the social styles chart, that’s an Analytical approach: No decision is better than the wrong decision. Patton (likely an Expressive Driver) embraced the view: Any decision is better than no decision. Are we leveraging the God-given social styles of our team members and do we understand the upsides and downsides of the four styles—including your own style? (For more, visit the People Bucket.)
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Drucker: “Too Few Generals Were Killed”
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

If you’re still waiting on your vaccinations and need more reading or viewing suggestions, here you go:

#1. BOOK. Read my review of How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions, by Susan Eisenhower (Ike’s granddaughter).

#2. BOOK. When author William Cohen showed Peter Drucker a proposed list of “Eight Universal Laws of Leadership,” Drucker commented on Cohen’s “Law #8: Get Out in Front” with this: “Very true. As junior leader or CEO, the leader must be where the work is the most challenging. During World War I, the losses among higher ranking officers was rare compared with the losses they caused by their incompetence. Too few generals were killed.” Read A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World’s Greatest Management Teacher, by William A. Cohen.

#3. BOOK. General Patton's Principles for Life and Leadership, by Porter B Williamson, features 44 principles on decision-making, success, command and management, good health, and pride and confidence. Must-read chapter: “No One Is Thinking If Everyone Is Thinking Alike.” (Thanks to Jim Canning for sending me this book!)

#4. MOVIE. The Wiper Times (1 hour, 35 minutes, 2013). “Based on the true story of a satirical newspaper published on the front lines of WWI.”

#5. BOOK/MOVIE. Also by Robert Orlando (and Paul Kengor), read The Divine Plan: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Dramatic End of the Cold War (read my review). Or, view the documentary directed by Robert Orlando, The Divine Plan, 2019 (1 hour, 19 minutes).

IDEA: Read The Tragedy of Patton, or view Silence Patton, and then host a weekly staff meeting discussion on the People Bucket—the four social styles. Visit the webpage.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Do your communication pieces communicate to all four social styles as described in our Buckets Workbook? The four: Info-Sponges, Just-the-Facts, Heartfelts, and Share-Meisters. Check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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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.

Foundations of Chaplaincy: A Practical Guide

Issue No. 466 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a famous “save us from our madness” reminder from a book with dozens of management insights, ministry metaphors, and relevant anecdotes for your next leadership challenge or staff meeting. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my review of Let Your Life Speak, by Parker Palmer.



"My Office Is Size 13"

Imagine this: you’re a prison chaplain and you just met with an older inmate—delivering sad news of a death in his family. As he exits your office, you shake his hand, but halfway out the door, he turns around and smiles, “You know, I’ve been incarcerated for fifteen years, and you are the first staff person to shake my hand.”

Imagine this: you’re the new chaplain on the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman (with a captive congregation of 5,680 shipmates!). Your ship’s battle flag includes the “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” phrase from President Truman’s 1948 campaign. At the welcoming ceremony, you receive your new uniform name tag with that same memorable phrase given to every sailor. Your tag reads: “Give ‘em hell, Chaplain Baker.” Then it dawned on the crew—oops! They reconvened 30 minutes later with a new name tag, “Give ‘em heaven, Chaplain Baker.”

Those two snippets, along with 90 more in-the-trenches short snapshots of chaplain life, are sprinkled across the informative and poignant pages of a fascinating book that—on first glance—you might be tempted to skip. But don’t.

Alan Baker, author of the hot-off-the-press book, Foundations of Chaplaincy: A Practical Guide, wants you to envision chaplaincy as “the most exciting and fastest-growing segment of specialized ministry.” That’s a bold claim. But guess what? He convinced me. I had no idea!

Why invest time in this niche book? I was reminded recently that Steven B. Sample, former president of USC, says that for the contrarian leader, most truly original ideas will often come from outside his or her established field. He writes in The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership that he rarely reads what others are reading. So…I jumped into Foundations of Chaplaincy looking for gold nuggets. (I found dozens.)

I’m guessing that if you pause and think about it, there are numerous people in your circle of family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues who are currently (or soon-to-be) in a place, situation, or crisis where a chaplain’s “ministry of presence” can be a balm and a blessing. And when is the last time you thanked a chaplain or prayed for him or her?

Alan Baker, a deeply experienced chaplain, is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, rose to the rank of rear admiral, and currently teaches at Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, and Wesley Seminaries. When you peruse the pages of his practical guide on chaplaincy—GUARANTEE!—you’ll borrow dozens of leadership insights, ministry metaphors, and relevant anecdotes for your next management challenge, inspirational talk, or staff meeting. Examples:

• Odor of the Sheep. “Pope Francis warned that a priest ‘who doesn’t put his own skin and his own heart on the line’ becomes a manager rather than a mediator.” The pope called out priests who end up sad “in some sense becoming collectors of antiques or novelties, instead of being shepherds living with ‘the odor of the sheep.’” The pope’s challenge: “This I ask you: Be shepherds, with the odor of the sheep.”

• Run or Stick? “Chaplains make their feet stick where others may wish to run,” noted a hospital chaplain.

• Not an Interruption. A college chaplain posted this sign above his desk, “Students are not an interruption of the day; they are the reason for the day.”

“SAVE US FROM THE MADNESS!” Foundations of Chaplaincy is endorsed by Rear Admiral Barry C. Black, the current chaplain of the U.S. Senate, who begins each senate session with a prayer. In highlighting a chaplain’s prophetic voice to the institution, the author reminds us of Chaplain Black’s now famous “save us from the madness” prayer during the 2013 government shutdown. (Saturday Night Live noticed too!) In an interview with ABC News, Black said that because the senators do “overhear” his prayers to Almighty God it is “just one of the fortuitous advantages of what I do!” Click here to watch the ABC four-minute video interview.


Click here to view the 4-minute video from ABC News on U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black's "save us from the madness" prayer.

MORE INSIGHTS:

• Pop Quiz. Baker lists four people in four different and difficult circumstances—and asks, “Find a thread of similarity in the following statements.” I was stumped, but the answer—and the teachable moment—was this: “Not one of these people is connected to a faith community. Yet all of them most likely have access to a chaplain, even if they may not realize it.” (Brilliant positioning.)

• Ministry of Presence. Yikes. A Navy chaplain practiced “loitering with intent” when he joined two sailors in the very front bow of the ship. The two “received a set of binoculars and a rifle. Their orders were to use the binoculars to search for mines and then use the rifle to shoot and explode the mine before it hit the ship.” That’s one gutsy chaplain practicing a common pastoral duty, the “ministry of presence.”

• Jailer or Pastor? A correctional/prison chaplain shares: “I use my faith group’s liturgy for communion and prayers. I often wear a robe in order to cover my radio and prison keys while leading worship. I wore the robe because I wanted prisoners to feel that they were in the house of God and that I was their pastor, not their jailer.”

• MBWA. A newly commissioned chaplain, knowing space was tight aboard his ship of 420 sailors, brought his own small desk and folding chair and set up his chaplain’s office in a mop closet! Yet the seasoned chaplain (remaining onboard for the six-week mentoring plan) had no office. The rookie asked him, “how he could possibly minister without an office?” and got this response. “He shifted his eyebrow, stared at me with incredulity, then pointed his index finger to the raised heel of his shoe, admonishing me, ‘My office is size 13.’” The new chaplain soon learned MBWA: Ministry By Wandering Around.

• “Ooh-rah!” A Marine chaplain sat in on a Roman Catholic worship service to see how the chaplain priest conducted the Mass. “To my surprise, at the end of each liturgical prayer, instead of saying ‘Amen’ the entire congregation of uniformed Marines shouted ‘Ooh-rah!’ At the sound of this Marine Corps battle cry, I nearly fell off my kneeler. The priest loved it. The marines loved it. Yet the priest’s bishop didn’t love it.” (The principle: “A chaplain, no matter what faith, must clearly understand, align, and practice in the manner of their faith group.”)

• Convicting. The author quotes Theologian Helmut Thielicke: “Tell me how much you know of the sufferings of your fellow humans, and I will tell you how much you have loved them.”

• Open Door Policy. A Navy chaplain upon arrival on his ship, affixed a plastic sign to the door of his small bunk and counseling office: “Open 24 Hours.” He was soon overwhelmed—especially with late night knocks of often inebriated sailors returning to the ship. His new sign: “Emergencies anytime. Otherwise open at 8 a.m.”

DID YOU KNOW? If you’re in leadership, you’re pretty savvy already. I thought I was too, yet I was surprised—in every chapter—at my miniscule understanding of a profession that dramatically touches and influences lives on a broad stage. Did you know…

…that there are at least 13 types of institutions that “value chaplaincy as organic to their mission” (see Appendix A)? Chaplains serve in hospitals, hospice, continuing-care retirement communities (CCRC), military (active duty, guard, and reserve), correctional chaplaincies (federal, state, local), workplace/industrial/corporate settings, colleges and universities, residential treatment centers, public safety (law enforcement, firefighting, first responders), sports, and in crisis intervention and disaster relief programs. (Check out Marketplace Chaplains.)

…that in 2019, an Army soldier applied for a beard exception as part of his devotion to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (a faith also known as “Pastafarianism”)? The Army denied his request (!), but you’ll be amazed at the intricacies and challenges of the accommodations that have been granted over the years to accommodate the wide range of faith groups. (Note: in this current environment of deep divisions over almost everything, Baker’s book encouraged me. It appears that chaplains—across all faith groups—are working together for the benefit of the people they serve. Ooh-rah!)

…that there are four tensions that a chaplain faces in seeking to provide balance in serving all, yet not compromising one’s own faith tradition? A helpful chart (I love charts!) on page 98 showcases the tensions between 1) serving God, 2) serving people, 3) serving the institution (the employer), and 4) serving the faith group that endorses the chaplain. Chaplains need the wisdom of Solomon!

…that there are four unifying pillars in chaplaincy work? They “serve as the structural principles for chaplains as they delivery ministry and carry the presence of God to people within their organizations.” They include: Provision, Facilitation, Caring, and Advising—and the author allocates one chapter to each functional capability. (Senior leaders and managers will be inspired at the creative ways that chaplains “advise” commanding officers and corporate CEOs. What a mission field!)

“I FOLLOWED THE ADVICE OF MY CHAPLAIN.” The author notes a 2003 PBS interview with General James Mattis who explained why his Marines had such an “exceptionally good relationship” with the sheiks in the Iraqi province occupied by the Marines. Mattis: “I followed the advice of my chaplain.” (Note: read Call Sign Chaos, by Mattis, my pick for 2019 book-of-the-year.)

In anticipation of tensions escalating into violence outside their base camp, Mattis ordered his commanders to arm the Marines “and circle the exterior of our base camp in full battle gear.” His chaplain suggested a Plan B, which Mattis approved. “On the suggestion of my Catholic chaplain, the Marines would take chilled drinking water in bottles and walk out amongst the protesters and hand it out. It is just hard to throw a rock at somebody who has given you a cold drink of water and it’s 120 degrees outside.”

Oh, my, there’s so much more—you’ll just have to read the book yourself (or delegate your reading to a team member). Don’t miss:
   1) Eight quick counseling questions
   2) Insights on the “Bathsheba Syndrome”—“falling victim to your own success”
   3) The chart on page 148 detailing situations when chaplains could have helped lawyers, engineers, scientists, and doctors make better decisions—but they were not invited to the table
   4) Noting the insights in Being Mortal, read how a hospital chaplain interrupted a doctor’s diagnosis—giving a family member permission to weep.
   5) Appendix B: Scenarios and Case Studies. Example: A student approaches a college chaplain and says, “I’m pregnant, but I’m getting an abortion today. Can you pray with me that God will forgive me?” The author asks, “What do you say?”

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Foundations of Chaplaincy: A Practical Guide, by Alan T. Baker. And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Is there someone in your circle that should consider chaplaincy as a career? Baker quotes Frederick Buechner’s inspiring insight: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
2) Steven B. Sample, author of The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, says that most truly original ideas will often come from outside his or her established field. So…is anyone on our team reading outside of their lanes? Who will read Foundations of Chaplaincy?
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Thank You for Your Service
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

In Foundations of Chaplaincy, Alan Baker highlights this inscription at Washington National Cathedral:

“In thanksgiving to the living God
for all ministers who have borne the hot coal of his Word
upon their lips and in their lives.”

My father-in-law, Gordon H. Anderson (1914-1995), served his country and his Lord as an Army chaplain in World War II. While sharing fox holes with priests and other clergy in New Guinea—almost 9,000 miles from home—his first of five children was born in Cleveland in September 1944. Twenty-five years later in September, he officiated at the wedding ceremony of Joanne Anderson and John Pearson. I’m grateful!

I’m grateful that committed men and women are still hearing God’s call to be chaplains. I’m grateful that “the hot coal of his Word” is upon their lips and in their lives. I’m grateful that our country and so many institutions recognize the ethical and spiritual need to have chaplains and their “ministry of presence” at work today. I’m grateful for Alan Baker’s labor of love—Foundations of Chaplaincy. Imagine—you read a textbook and then reflect, “Wow. This was a deeply-moving spiritual experience for me.” Visit the Book Bucket to discover more gold nuggets outside your routine reading lane.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Do you lead a “niche” organization—that the general public needs to know more about? Ready for some creative communication and positioning approaches? Check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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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.

Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You

Issue No. 465 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting warns that once you start reading Backable, you won’t put it down. Think Shark Tank meets Malcolm Gladwell meets Persuasion best practices. Enjoy! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my review of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries.


LOL! Listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s 1960 “oops” version of “Mack the Knife” in West Berlin. She forgot the lyrics but won a Grammy anyway! (See Step 6 below.)

Before the Pitch, Practice the Rule of 21

It’s only March and I’ve already read another guaranteed Top-10 book for 2021. When it arrived, I read the intro—and then I just couldn’t put it down. (The sizeable stack of other “to-read” books just glared at me!)

Suneel Gupta, the author of Backable, was invited to speak at FailCon—aka the Failure Conference! His track record of big busts was so legendary, he writes, that the New York Times wrote “a full-length story on failure, with my face at the top.”

He adds, “I had spent an entire career trying to craft an image of success. Now I was the poster child for defeat. My inbox was jammed with consolation messages. My parents offered to help pay that month’s rent.”

But there was an upside. “I decided to give this new identity a try. I began emailing highly successful people using the Times article to break the ice. I’d write things like, ‘As you can see from the article below, I don’t know what I’m doing. Would you be willing to grab coffee and give me some advice?’”

What he learned: “People who change the world around them aren’t just brilliant … they’re backable. They have a seemingly mysterious superpower that lies at the intersection of ‘creativity’ and ‘persuasion.’”

This book is a must-read! Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You features seven steps and 26 practical pointers for becoming backable. Gupta wrote it for “…hospitals, companies, charities, and studios. I joined the faculty at Harvard University to teach students how to launch backable careers.” As the co-founder of RISE, it took some convincing that his experience (and a book) could be helpful to others. It is. (A colleague emailed me today that he too couldn’t put the book down!)

Check out these seven steps. I’ve included 15 of the 26 practical pointers and you now have the ingredients for staff presentations at your next seven weekly staff meetings—or up to 26!

STEP 1: CONVINCE YOURSELF FIRST
Peter Chernin, the Oscar-nominated producer (The Greatest Showman and Ford v Ferrari), told the author that “when he’s undecided on whether to back an idea, he’ll sometimes look at the filmmaker or entrepreneur and say, ‘That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.’ Then he’ll wait to see if they back down or show conviction.”

Gupta: “What moves people isn’t charisma, but conviction.” The number one TED Talk of all time? “You might be surprised to see Sir Ken Robinson stand with a slight slouch and a hand in his pocket while he explores whether schools kill creativity.” But study his conviction about creativity.

View “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” by Sir Ken Robinson. This 2006 TED Talk has been viewed almost 70 million times!

Schedule Incubation Time. “I don’t jump to conclusions, I jump to experimentation,” said a marketing exec at LEGO. Gupta explains how a top restaurant in Spain rebuilt its menu after a fire sidelined their restaurant for four months—and why a year later, they voluntarily closed again—for more incubation time. Bill Gates takes “think weeks.” Most new ideas, says the author, “aren’t killed inside conference rooms. They’re killed inside hallways and breakrooms.” Most great ideas need incubation time—before they’re shared with others. (Attn: Colleagues, clients, and friends with “Ideation” as your top strength. Read this book!)

Steer Into Objections. “You have the most attention from investors in the first few minutes,” notes Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. So you must steer directly into the likely objections—from the get-go. You’ll do deeper thinking by dropping the PowerPoint (the what) and creating a narrative (the why) like Jeff Bezos requires at Amazon. (Read my reviews of The Amazon Management System and 15 Minutes Including Q&A.)

STEP 2: CAST A CENTRAL CHARACTER
Here are just two of the three big ideas in Step 2:

Choose One Person. “Great storytellers don’t just focus on a central character, but also a central reader.” The author of The 4-Hour Workweek collected 26 rejection letters from publishers—because his manuscript cast too wide a net. Then he narrowed the book to the interests of just two friends (an entrepreneur and a banker). Wham! New York Times bestseller! When a customer tells you, “Wow! It’s like you created this product, program, or service just for me,” you’ll know you’ve nailed it. (Interestingly, Max De Pree wrote his classic 92-page book for board members, Called to Serve, to just one person: Verley Sangster, the new president of a theological school in Philadelphia.)

Create a Storyboard. This is a really big and brilliant idea—in just six pages. Don’t bore your investors or donors—instead, walk them through a “storyboard” of your actual customer. (Peter Drucker would use the term, your “primary customer.”) Gupta visited Airbnb’s first office and “saw illustrations on the wall that storyboarded every major detail for an Airbnb host.” See also the detailed narrative for a Dollar Shave Club customer that convinced a female investor (“with zero interest”) to back this innovative business in just 10 minutes. The storyboard created an “empathy bridge” between the backer and the shaver! Drucker would be proud!

STEP 3: FIND AN EARNED SECRET
The author began using the term, “earned secret,” after hearing a venture capitalist explain the concept—“learning something that not a lot of other people know.” Gupta once interviewed at a fast-growing tech startup. One problem: everything he had researched before the interview; the CEO already knew. So he went to UserTesting.com and within hours he had videos of three users trying to navigate the tech company’s website (total cost: $50). Halfway through the interview he showed the videos to the surprised CEO who said, “I’ve interviewed hundreds of people—and no one’s ever prepared something like this.”

Go Beyond Google. This is must-read section—and also not a bad poster for your wall!

Intoxicate Them With Effort. When you demonstrate your conviction with personal legwork and effort—you’ll elevate your chances of getting to YES. Gupta writes about an auto exec who was pitching an idea to senior management. On his own time, he collected data on the assembly line (early morning, after work) and over several months knew every line worker by name. One supervisor even invited him to a family birthday party! Gupta coached him to flip his pitch: numbers later, his all-in legwork first. Answer: YES!

STEP 4: MAKE IT FEEL INEVITABLE
Note: See Appendix 1 for handy cheat sheet chapter summaries for your weekly staff meeting presentations.

Be an Armchair Anthropologist. Tina Sharkey asks, “What is the shift in the world that is making your idea matter?” Investors and senior leaders may not understand your idea unless you wear your “cultural anthropologist hat.” Airbnb had to document that “sharing your home with a stranger” was no longer creepy. Reminder: “Record labels had perilously ignored the iPod, and we didn’t want to make the same mistake with the iPhone.” (For more, read my review of Non Obvious Megatrends.)

With or Without Us. For some backers, you can leverage FOMO, the fear of missing out. Gupta reminds us about the Blockbuster exec who “passed on buying Netflix for $50 million.” (By the way, Netflix’s valuation on Feb. 26, 2021, was $238 billion.)

STEP 5: FLIP OUTSIDERS TO INSIDERS
Gupta notes research, dubbed “the IKEA effect,” from Harvard Business School that we place “nearly five times more value in a product we helped build than on a product we simply buy. ‘Time spent touching objects’ leads to ‘feelings of ownership and value.’” Research in the 1940s revealed that consumers felt guilty that “instant cake mixes” were too easy to bake—thus dismal sales. (Read the simple solution in Chapter 5.)

The Story of Us. To flip outsiders to insiders, you need to follow the pattern of great political speeches, writes Gupta: “the story of me,” “the story of you,” and most important, “the story of us”—what happens “when we join forces and work together.” He notes, “I’ve discovered that founders often tell the ‘story of me,’ occasionally tell the ‘story of you,’ and almost never tell the ‘story of us.’”

Make Them the Hero. Brilliant! Read these four pages on why you should always go back to people who say no—noting how you’ve addressed or incorporated the feedback you received.

STEP 6: PLAY EXHIBITION MATCHES
Guarantee! Read the intro to Step 6—and you’ll be hooked on this book and this insight. When Oren Jacob was an intern at Pixar, the company changed direction and “laid off more than half the employees.” Jacob’s dad (three cheers for dads) asked his son, “What would happen if you just went back on Monday as if nothing has changed?” LOL! He showed up, got a few raised eyebrows, and found something to do. It was the beginning of a 20-year stint where he went from “intern to technical director of A Bug’s Life to supervising technical director of Finding Nemo and finally chief technology officer for all of Pixar.”

This is convicting. Oren Jacob asked Suneel Gupta about all the practice exams Gupta took in law school. “So, for a law school exam you would spend hours practicing, but for a meeting that could have changed your career, you didn’t practice at all?”

That “punch to the gut” enabled Gupta to understand Step 6: Play Exhibition Matches. “…backable people tend to practice their pitch extensively before walking into the room.”

This is a powerful chapter—whether you’re seeking an investment, fundraising for a nonprofit, or pitching a new idea to your boss. Don’t skip these sections:

No Venue Is Too Small. Practice anywhere and on anyone! Gupta’s eight-year-old daughter has heard “plenty” of his exhibition matches!

Be Willing to Be Embarrassed. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, realized he needed to become a “student of communication.” (Note: Dick Daniels believes that “Communication is the primary competence of a leader.”)

Don’t Ask, “What Do You Think?” A medical professional “…began to see questions as medical instruments—the wrong instrument led to useless answers.”

Build Your Backable Circle. Gupta looks for the Four Cs in his “backable circle,” including a collaborator, a coach, a cheerleader (like your mom!), and a cheddar (someone “who will deliberately poke holes in your ideas”).

The Rule of 21. Your practice, practice, practice will prepare you to “welcome curveball moments” in your pitches or presentations. We can learn from jazz singers and musicians. One keynote speaker (also a jazz musician) does 21 practice rounds. Why? He knows he will mess up, “but because I’ve practiced so much, I have confidence I can recover. Knowing that makes me feel bulletproof onstage.”

For example, Ella Fitzgerald sang “Mack the Knife” to a West Berlin audience in 1960—but she forgot the lyrics! She kept singing confidently “inventing new lyrics as she went.” The crowd loved it and so did her peers. The recording earned her Best Female Vocal Performance at the Grammys in 1961. Click here to listen to her version!

STEP 7: LET GO OF YOUR EGO
Finally, Gupta introduces us to Dr. George Schaller, who studied mountain gorillas in Central Africa in 1959. He was asked, “How did you get such detailed information?” Schaller responded, “It’s simple. I didn’t carry a gun.” He discerned “you could hide a gun, but you could never hide your attitude when you carried a gun. No smile or gentleness could fully cover your unease, and the gorillas could always pick up on that.”

Suneel Gupta confesses, “After many years of struggling to become backable, I came to realize that the gun inside my backpack was my ego. That my extreme desire to impress people in the room had created distance, not connection. No matter how professional or friendly I acted, people could always tell when I wasn’t at ease.” (Another must-read chapter!)

Genius Hidden in Plain Sight. You may not be seeking investors for a startup, but don’t skip the conclusion (page 130). Gupta challenges CEOs: “…companies spend billions of dollars hiring outside consultants and high-price think tanks to come up with ideas that already exist in the minds of their employees. Their genius remains hidden in plain sight.”

And by the way, seven cheers for Gupta who delivered the meat and potatoes of this book in just 133 pages—then included value-added optional reading in Appendix 1 with helpful chapter summaries. Appendix 2 includes short highlights from interviews with nine experts on how to be backable.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You, by Suneel Gupta with Carlye Adler. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (5 hours 59 minutes).

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) In reflecting on “The Rule of 21,” Suneel Gupta writes that after practicing his pitch 10 times, “I felt something new. I knew the material so well that I no longer needed to focus on it. Instead, I could use that attention span to survey my audience.” Why do you think professional athletes are so diligent in their practice routines?
2) Who will volunteer to give a 10-minute presentation on Step 1 at our next staff meeting? If you beat the 10-minute clock, I’ll have a Starbucks gift card for you!
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Move From Presentation Mode to “Huddle Mode”
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

In his book, Giving & Getting in the Kingdom: A Field Guide, R. Mark Dillon, urges CEOs, pastors, and fundraisers to engage givers at the front end of a project. “Big ideas are mission-centered.” He quotes one gifted giver, “Please don’t come to me with an ‘order list’ already thought out, where my only decision is how much to give!”

“Show, Don’t Tell.” When asking for an investment, Suneel Gupta says you must shift from presentation mode to “huddle mode”—where you and your backer are looking at something together. “Huddle mode tends to put you in a place where you’re more natural, comfortable, and confident.”

For more insights on nonprofit fundraising, check out the resources in the Donor Bucket.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Backable suggests that sometimes your pitch might be more believable if it’s low tech, not high tech. Check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video) and ask him to tell you about his intentional “low tech” boardroom presentation in New York City—featuring colored markers on the white wall of a conference room (not a whiteboard). LOL!
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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.

Succession: Seven Practices to Navigate Mission-Critical Leadership Transitions

Issue No. 464 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting cautions: Don’t fumble your leadership succession baton pass. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my recent review of 30 Days Unplugged: How a Catholic Priest Turned Off His iPhone and Took a Call From God.


Worst baton pass ever? Click here to view the NBC Sports two-minute YouTube video of China's catastrophic 4x100 relay handoff in the 2019 World Athletics Championship.

Worst Baton Pass Ever!

Years ago, over lunch in Dallas with Dan Bolin, we were discussing the possibility of his serving on the board of Christian Management Association (now CLA). We were good friends and I wanted an honest answer from him. If he were on the board and sensed that it was time for me to exit—would he have the guts to…?

Dan interrupted before I finished my question. “You’re asking, John, could I fire you—if needed? No problem!”

We both laughed—and I believed him! Gratefully, I was privileged to serve 11 years (without a pink slip) as the CEO of CMA before moving on to consulting in 2006, but I’ll never forget that succession conversation!

“No matter how hard we try to fight it or forget it, we all have an expiration date in our leadership,” warn the authors of Succession: Seven Practices to Navigate Mission-Critical Leadership Transitions.

If this COVID marathon has prompted you to reflect more frequently about your current position (or your current CEO), authors Peter Greer and Doug Fagerstrom remind us, “If you’re thinking about succession at the moment when you need a successor, you’re too late!” This short, fast-reading book, is another must-read on my list. Here’s why:

1 WORD. After 35 years as pastor at Wooddale Church in the Minneapolis suburbs, Leith Anderson was contemplating his exit. “Shortly after he had developed a succession plan for the board to engage in and follow, he called his mentor, Lyle Schaller, and asked what he should do next. Lyle gave him one word: ‘Leave.’”

2 LETTERS. “This might be slightly macabre,” writes Greer, president and CEO of HOPE International. He keeps two letters in his desk drawer. “My resignation letter reminds me that one day I will leave my role, and my eulogy reminds me to live today in light of what matters most.”

3 BATONS. The authors collected in-the-trenches transition stories (the good, the bad, and the ugly) from ministry and business leaders—and passed them along to us, with the reminder (and the metaphor) that the baton pass between leaders is oh-so-challenging, but possible.

  • The Good Baton Pass. When Chris Crane passed the CEO baton to Tiger Dawson at Edify, the two co-founders used an actual runner’s baton. My suggestion to CEOs: buy the baton now—click here for Amazon—and keep it on your desk to remind yourself that “Every CEO Is an Interim CEO” per ECFA Governance Toolbox Series No. 4: Succession Planning.

  • The Bad Baton Pass. One new CEO asked a former CEO if he wanted the baton passed back to him! When asked why, the new CEO said, “Because you are meddling in the ministry.” Apparently the previous CEO wouldn’t let go of the baton. Yikes.

  • The Ugly Baton Pass. The authors describe what’s been called “The Worst Baton Pass Ever.” It’s painful to watch, but click here to view NBC Sports’ two-minute YouTube video of China's catastrophic 4x100 women’s relay handoff (actually, bungled handoff) in the 2019 World Athletics Championship.

4 PRIORITIES. Transition, timing, building, and communicating. Those are the phases and priorities for the new leader, according to McKinsey and Company. Before you arrive in the transition phase, read the wisdom in The First 90 Days and Managing Transitions.

4 WORDS. The authors ask, “What does it mean to steward a mission [and your succession] well? Russ Crosson says it’s the fundamental punchline and it’s just four words “It’s not about you.”

5 MISTAKES. Don’t make the mistake of skipping Appendix 8 on the five mistakes that boards must avoid. Mistake #2: You should never commit the role, in advance, to an internal person. “The board should not be restricted to a choice of one, as circumstances and board members change.”

6 QUESTIONS. Actually, there are 12 helpful questions to ask yourself: stay or go? My six favorite:
   • 2. Am I more nostalgic about the past or energized by where the organization is going?
   • 3. Am I more focused on my own security and status or the needs of staff and stakeholders?
   • 6. Am I still committed to active learning and excellence? Is the organization?
   • 8. Is the board more committed to me as the leader or to the mission? Is there any significant misalignment with the board?
   • 9. Are there difficult conversations that the board or management are avoiding?
   • 10. Am I asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ or ‘What’s best for the organization?’

7 PRACTICES. The meat of the book builds on seven specific practices in a successful succession—framed from the best practices of successful relay races. Four cheers (with my mask on) for the fourth best practice, “Listen to the coach!” The authors warn, “We ignore the advice of coaches to our own peril.”
• “Coaching isn’t just for athletics; it’s for each of us. In succession planning, why would we skip the coaching and try to figure it all out on our own?”
• “There may be no time that mentorship is more important than in succession planning.”

8 COPIES. Buy at least eight copies for your CEO, senior leaders, and the executive committee of your board.

9 INSIGHTS. Addressing three leadership myths on successions (#1: “I’m indispensable”), the chart on page 55 (I love charts!) lists three key attributes (pride, busyness, and insecurity), three truths (“There are people who will do this job well—and even better”), and three corrective pursuits (“…make it an annual conversation with the board”).

THERE’S MORE! I can’t quote the entire book here, but I’m tempted. The nuances down little side alleys are extraordinary and memorable. You’ll rarely find this practical wisdom (and mini-case studies) in the succession literature. Examples:
   • Humility. The book’s “humility” theme is stunning (emphasized 20 times!)—unlike any succession book I’ve read. That heart of humility, in my calculation, said I could learn from this book.
   • Secret Sauce. This warning for outgoing leaders who naively believe that everything they did is part of the organization’s “secret sauce”—and consequently, from a distance, then resist or bad mouth even minor changes: Don’t!
   • The Power of Symbols. The use of an actual baton to create a moment reminds me of my pick for the 2017 book-of-the-year, The Power of Moments.

ACTION STEPS. Each chapter includes action steps for four segments: Outgoing Leader, Incoming Leader, Board, and Staff. For the outgoing leader: “Annually, give the board the names of five people who could do your job well.” And for the incoming leader, this counsel from Steve Douglass, then president of Cru, to Doug Fagerstrom on how to prepare for his new role as CEO of Marketplace Chaplains. “Just one thing, Doug: Pray like you’ve never prayed before.”
   • Unique Successions. Read the short insights for four unique succession scenarios: founder, family member, successful leader, and unsuccessful leader. “We celebrate success stories, but it may be tough to follow one.”
   • Lose/Lose. The authors quote Mario Zandstra: “If you plan a succession well, you might lose your job early. But if you plan too late, you might lose the organization.”
   • Heart Surgery! “Before beginning the practices of succession planning, we must undergo heart surgery.” Early in his leadership years, Greer, with three kids under age five and huge organizational challenges, confessed that he was “doing an exceptionally poor job keeping my priorities in place. I had been away more than a hundred nights that year.” He explored other positions, but soon realized that the duo sins of pride and fear would undermine a healthy succession. “While a job change wasn’t needed, a heart change certainly was.”

3 MORE QUESTIONS. “Every three years in the executive evaluation, Jack Crowley asks himself and his team to consider the following questions:
   • What kind of organization are we in this season?
   • What type of leader do we need now?
   • Is it still me?”

Finally, this from Fred Smith: “How you leave is what people remember the most—even more than what you did while you were there.”

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Succession: Seven Practices to Navigate Mission-Critical Leadership Transitions, by Peter Greer and Doug Fagerstrom, with Brianna Lapp. Read more from the authors: The Volunteer (Fagerstrom), Mission Drift (Greer), and Rooting for Rivals (Greer).

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) In their book, The Talent Masters, Bill Conaty and Ram Charan write, “Only one competency lasts. It is the ability to create a steady, self-renewing stream of leaders.” (Read my review.) How deep and fresh is our leadership pipeline?
2) Greer and Fagerstrom admonish outgoing CEOs: Clean up the mess before you leave! The authors quote McKinsey and Company: “Departing chief executives can leave their companies in the best possible shape by embracing tough decisions rather than leaving them for the incoming CEO.” No need to wait for the actual succession event—what mess (or messes) should be cleaned up this quarter? 
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“He took his shoes with him!”
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

Speaking of shoes…order your own St. Ignatius of Loyola high tops from the Soulwalk Series, or Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” from the Art Series at Saints and Sneakers, created by Jason Pearson. Click here.

Randy Frazee received the leadership baton from Max Lucado at Oak Hills Church in San Antonio. In their book, Next: Pastoral Succession That Works, William Vanderbloemen and Warren Bird describe Frazee’s “humorous visual picture” one Sunday morning. “Visiting the church shortly before it hired him, Randy publicly addressed what many recognized as the elephant in the room. Six inches shorter than Max Lucado, Randy asked him to come on stage. The two tried on each other’s shoes, to no avail. Point made. A standing ovation ensured.”

Dale Burke followed Chuck Swindoll as pastor of Fullerton Free in Fullerton, Calif. Burke quipped when asked what it was like to fill Swindoll’s shoes: “He is a wise leader, and took his shoes with him.”

The Next authors remind all pastors (and leaders): “Every arriving pastor will one day be a departing pastor. It’s not a question of if, but when.” (Note: Frazee and Burke have both departed those pastorates.) I encourage you to get ready for your next leadership succession (planned or unplanned). 

READ MORE:
• Next: Pastoral Succession That Works (Expanded and Updated, 2020), by William Vanderbloemen and Warren Bird (Order from Amazon)

• ECFA Governance Toolbox Series No. 4 - Succession Planning: Eleven Principles for Successful Successions. Download here. To read my series of 11 blogs on the 11 principles, click here.

• The Hero’s Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire, by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, describes four types of CEO retirement transitions: the monarch, the general, the ambassador, the governor. (Read my review.)

For more insights on succession, and the board's role, check out the resources in the Board Bucket.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Do have some media messes that need to be cleaned up? “We ignore the advice of coaches to our own peril.” Check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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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.

Fight House - POTUS Pop Quiz!

Issue No. 463 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting revisits Fight House, the page-turning book that chronicles rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump. This Part 2 review features a Pop Quiz! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for another double bonus—two 2017 reviews of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.


Author Tevi Troy notes that many White House staffs engaged in “process fouls,” defined as “not going through normal channels, not inviting the right people to meetings, not sticking to your lane, and the like.”

POTUS Pop Quiz! (Part 2 review of Fight House)

Today marks the 22nd day of the Biden/Harris administration. So far, it appears, all of Biden’s White House staff and cabinet members are still at their desks, unlike Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s second White House Director of Communications. He exited after just 11 days in that position!

This is Part 2 of my review of Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump, by Tevi Troy. (Click here to read Part 1.) Staff turnover, leaks, and rivalries—fueled by ego, arrogance, and all sorts of character flaws—are sadly the stuff of every White House. It’s disappointing, but delicious reading.

For example, Obama’s brilliant brand and aspiration, “No Drama Obama,” while sincere and noble according to the author, missed the mark many times. Obama’s first term cycled through three chiefs of staff (Rahm Emanuel, William Daley, and Jacob Lew; and four if you count an interim chief) until finally Denis McDonough survived all four years of Obama’s second term.

In Part 1 we spotlighted snippets on Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. So why should you read Part 2 on Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, and Trump? The author quotes Harry Truman: “The only thing new in this world is the history you haven’t read.”

POP QUIZ! Match these eight presidents to the eight statements below. (There will be prizes for perfect scores.)

1) Gerald Ford (1974-1977)
2) Jimmy Carter (1977-1981)
3) Ronald Reagan (1981-1989)
4) George H.W. Bush (1989-1993)
5) Bill Clinton (1993-2001)
6) George W. Bush (2001-2009)
7) Barack Obama (2009-2017)
8) Donald Trump (2017-2021)

___ A. “Read my lips, no new taxes.”

___ B. “When asked about stories of infighting in the White House, [he] responded that strife did not bother him; he encouraged it. ‘I like conflict,’ he told reporters, elaborating that ‘I like having two people with different points of view. And I certainly have that. And then I make a decision. I like watching it. I like seeing it and I think it is the best way to go.’”

___ C. “[He] was also the first MBA president. As such, he stressed strong management principles and discipline in the running of the White House staff. On the management side, [he] took the theory and practice of management seriously. As [an aide] put it, ‘I have read Peter Drucker, but I’d never seen Drucker until I saw [the president] in action.’ [His] campaign manager…agreed, saying that [he] ‘is the best one-minute manager I’ve ever been associated with.’”

___ D. “As president, though, [his] niceness was part of the problem. Immediately after acknowledging that [he] had the right skills and temperament for his House job, [the author of Organizing the Presidency] also noted that ‘running the White House required a more commanding approach.’”

___ E. A policy adviser “described that initial period as ‘just chaotic. There wasn’t anybody in charge.’ [A media consultant] had a similar view, but also noted [the chief of staff’s] lack of a coherent process. As [he] put it, [the president’s] ‘first White House staff, and the way they constantly went around [the chief of staff]—it was destructive.’ As a result, ‘everybody was freelancing, everybody was promoting themselves, everybody was looking out for themselves.’ [Another person] recalled that things were so bad that ‘There was a piece in I believe the New York Times that basically said this would be a failed presidency. You know, ten days into [the president’s] first term.’”

REMINDER FROM PART 1: In a fascinating three-page appendix, the author includes “The Infighting Scorecard” chart—listing a “trio” of the “three leading causes of staff infighting common to the modern presidency and most organizations,” he says. The chart lists the presidents on the left and these categories across the top:
• Ideological Discord (low to high)
• Process (tight to loose)
• Tolerance for Infighting (low to high)

___F. “On the three-part test of ideology, process, and presidential tolerance, [this president] and his team score poorly. The central battle of the administration, the one between [the secretary of state and the National Security Adviser], took place between two antagonists with well-known ideological disagreements over foreign policy. The process challenge was worsened by the lack of a chief of staff to mediate disputes in the administration’s early days, followed by the appointment of a self-admitted ineffective chief of staff…”

___G. This president’s trusted campaign staffer went to work at the White House—where there was a strong culture of congeniality and no leaking. But “…he was more prone to violate some of the rules [i.e. no leaking] he so carefully adhered to during the campaign. In one telling instance during the transition, [he] was approving press releases and noted the announcement of a new White House communications director, the very job he wanted and expected. He was unhappy both with the decision and the way he found out about it: ‘Not only did I not get it, but this was the professional equivalent of being broken up with via a Post-it note. This was messed up.’”

___ H. The First Lady’s influence in the White House was often profound—especially for this president, who joked at the Gridiron Dinner, “[My wife and my chief of staff] tried to patch things up the other day. They met privately over lunch—just the two of them and their food tasters.”

ANSWERS. Click here for the answers (and the prizes!), posted on my Book Bucket webpage.

I hope these teasers will inspire you to read the book. As I mentioned in my Part 1 review, these mini-case studies in leadership, administration, team-building, and team-denigrating are must-read. Politics aside, CEOs and senior leaders would do well to study the good and the bad—and look in the mirror often.

Why my mirror metaphor? Richard “Dick” Darman, director of the OMB under Bush 41, gets roughed up in this book—and it appears with good reason. “His bragging about how he had forsaken private sector opportunities for public service led one unimpressed participant to joke that he was pulling his ‘St. Dick’ act.” I found that insightful—recalling that dozens of nonprofit CEOs over the years have gone out of their way to remind me that they had successful (i.e. well-paying) careers first in the marketplace.

ONE MORE THING…that I’ve never noticed in writing more than 450 book reviews: Tevi Troy’s word choices are perfect and precise. I always read with pen in hand and so I began circling the rich and memorable vocabulary that punctuates his points. Examples: politesse, priggish, propinquity, sobriquet, sycophancy, and declension. (On declension, “Winston Churchill himself once famously mocked [U.S. Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles: ‘Dull, Duller, Dulles…’”)

While feasting on this book and the descriptive word choices, I had ongoing conversations with my new Echo Show (my favorite Christmas gift). “Alexa! Definition for ‘malleability.’” Her answer: “capable of being shaped, as by hammering or pressing”—the perfect definition for the sharp-elbowed culture of White House relationships! (Read this!)

More gleanings from the author’s government glossary: schadenfreude, symbiosis, interlopers, internecine, obsequiousness, puerile, stratagems, putatively, and spelunking. (LOL! One Ford senior advisor went around the chief of staff directly to the Oval Office for “inbox spelunking!”) And this: leakers would “use an absurdly big word, a word from the hoary depths of the dictionary, like ‘inchoate’…” and thus the leak would be blamed on a staffer who pridefully used such words!

As you watch the Biden/Harris administration in action (and wonder who leaked what), remember this wisdom from Ecclesiastes: “There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing. Does someone call out, ‘Hey, this is new’? Don’t get excited—it’s the same old story.”

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump, by Tevi Troy. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (9 hours).

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Author Tevi Troy noted that many White House staffs engaged in “process fouls,” defined as “not going through normal channels, not inviting the right people to meetings, not sticking to your lane, and the like.” Any process fouls in your organization recently?
2) Fight House notes that “Andy Card used to tell staffers that ‘George W. Bush is the most disciplined person I know.’ This discipline, Card would explain, extended to his exercise, his religious worship, and his management of the White House staff.” Who’s the most disciplined leader you know? Why? 
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George Shultz’s Pop Quiz for Ambassadors!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

Maybe…we should add another name to the core competency of the Drucker Bucket? “We don’t just give lip service to management—we are disciplined students of great leadership and management thinkers like Peter Drucker, Ken Blanchard and others [like George Shultz].”

The U.S. statesman George Shultz died on Feb. 6 at age 100. Media tributes have abounded, rightfully, including a column from Fight House author Tevi Troy who noted that Shultz was “one of only two Americans (along with Elliott Richardson) to hold four cabinet-level positions—serving as Secretary of State, Treasury, and Labor, as well as director of the Office of Management and Budget.”

Troy adds, “By legend, he maintained a one-page resume, leading to the ‘George Shultz Resume Rule,’ which I often share with job-seekers: ‘George Shultz had a one-page resume. If he did it on one page, so can you.’”

His tribute also shared this: “The State Department was also the source of the most legendary George Shultz story. Shultz would call all newly minted advisers up to his office before sending them off on their new postings. He would walk the ambassadors over to the globe he had in his office, and tell them, ‘I'm going to spin the globe and I want you to put your hand on your country.’ After each ambassador earnestly pointed to the country to which he or she was headed, Shultz would correct them, explaining that their country was the United States of America.”
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. If clients and donors think of your branding as “Dull, Duller, or Dullest,” you’re overdue for a refresh. Check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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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.

30 Days Unplugged: How a Catholic Priest Turned Off His iPhone and Took a Call From God

Issue No. 462 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting proposes a radical journey during COVID—30 days off-the-grid with St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. (Or try a one-day silent retreat for starters.) And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my recent review of Leadership Core: Character, Competence, Capacity.


30 Days Unplugged author Father Merlino imagines a podcast with Jesus from Luke 2:41-50. (Art by Mark Dever)

Father Merlino Goes Off-the-Grid With St. Ignatius!

Apparently, when you turn off your iPhone and other distractions—and follow the St. Ignatius spiritual exercises for 30 days (not a typo!)—you’ll discover that Jesus delivers some very, very funny lines!

At least that was the 2018 profound experience of Father Darrin Merlino, a Catholic priest in between assignments. During COVID in 2020, when we were “forced to live like monks” (LOL!), he reflected back on that fork-in-the-road month at a Colorado retreat center. And gratefully for us, he shares his joy-filled journey and journal with us. You must read 30 Days Unplugged: How a Catholic Priest Turned Off His iPhone and Took a Call From God.

But first, let’s back up a minute for context. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) was born in his family’s castle in Spain, sowed his wild oats early, excelled in military skirmishes, but a cannonball almost did him in. While recuperating, he read The Life of Christ and became a Christ-follower. Another early influential book was The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis.

On a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Ignatius’ ship was detained and he spent a serendipitous year growing his faith in the Catalonia region of Spain, begging, working, and reading the stories of St. Francis. Thus began his work on The Spiritual Exercises—instructions on how to take a spiritual retreat.

Hmmm. While this sounds interesting, even beneficial, most of us can’t imagine “30 days unplugged.” Good for a priest or a pastor—certainly. Realistic for the rest of us? Hardly. (But as Lee Corso always warns on ESPN, “Not so fast, my friend!”)

Keep reading, please. Even Father Merlino wondered if his larger-than-life personality, with a super-sized relational side, could cope in a cloistered 30-day Ignatian silent retreat in Sedalia, Colo. Yet he confesses that after serving as a priest for 20 years, “that month was truly life-altering for me.” He adds, “The only reason I was able to hear His voice so clearly was that I had turned off my tech—not an easy task for someone addicted to his phone and laptop…”

My Confession. If you’re like me during this unending lockdown, you can hardly wait to travel again. But Father Merlino has an alternative travel plan for us—follow “St. Ignatius’ map to the journey of a lifetime.”

St. Ignatius (who, by the way, was named the patron saint of spiritual retreats in 1922), structured a four-part rhythm/retreat experience—over four weeks (30 days). As recommended, during his July 1-30, 2018 retreat, Fr. Merlino met each morning with a spiritual director who provided handouts/assignments and encouragement.

The practice of solitude and silence enabled Fr. Merlino to engage in the Meditations (intellect) and the Contemplations (imagination). Using our imagination and creativity, St. Ignatius urges us to picture ourselves in the Gospel stories. Example:

Fr. Merlino pictured himself in Luke 2:41-50 as Matthew Marconi, the interviewer and podcaster, broadcasting a Q&A segment with Jesus on his “Matthew on the Mic Show.” The first caller’s question to Jesus: “Yeah. Uhh, my name is Charlie from Nova Scotia. What did you talk about with the Jewish leaders in the Temple?”

Jesus explains and then adds, “When I was a twelve-year-old boy in the Temple, I got through the explanation of about 200 prophecies when My mom and dad showed up. I was on a roll. I was shocked to see My parents, really. I wasn’t sure why they were there.” (You must read the full narrative for July 16!)

In the exercises, St. Ignatius asks retreatants to leverage their hearts, minds, and senses. You’ll enjoy July 9 (“I really had a lot of fun with these meditations throughout the day”) when Fr. Merlino journals more than 175 things that have touched his senses over the years. Just a few here:
   • Tasted: In-N-Out Burgers, Parma prosciutto, gelato (he’s Italian!)
   • Seen: Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier, Sistine Chapel, Venice
   • Smelled: garlic, coffee, cologne
   • Heard: children laughing, the click of a camera, Gregorian Chant
   • Touched: soft bread, pinching cheeks, Eucharist

What’s on your taste-see-smell-hear-touch list? Amazingly, this unpretentious priest grants us permission to read his journal! His transparency is refreshing.
• Fr. Merlino imagines God at a workbench “creating a computer program, which is me. I see all my gifts and talents, one by one, being added.” He adds, “Unfortunately, I then see Him taking away the ability to be organized. Yes, He does have a sense of humor!”
• “My spiritual director suggests I read Isaiah 43:1-19 at least three times out loud.” Fr. Merlino then imagines a new image in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling: Adam is out. He’s in!

“Pearson—you mentioned there was Jesus humor. Is there more?”
• In Fr. Merlino’s commentary on Luke 2:51-52, he notes, “Breaking from my meditation, what I find fascinating is that none of the boys in Nazareth made the cut to be an Apostle!”
• Imaging himself as a guest on Bill Maher’s TV show: “He is accusing me of being a sinner. I say, ‘Duh, of course I am. The difference between you and me is that I admit that I am a sinner, but you haven’t yet.’”
• Yet, Fr. Merlino’s guardian angel chimes in, “This one is taking forever to perfect.”
• Archbishop Fulton Sheen, speaking to prisoners, “The difference between you and me is that you got caught.” (True story!)

In silence and solitude, Fr. Merlino recalled his calling while reading the meditation on Matthew 4:18-25. At the time, he “had NO desire to be a priest, ever!” Yet he writes that on January 6, 1987, around 10:30 p.m. “my mom blurted out of nowhere, ‘I think the Lord is calling you to be a priest.’” He admits, “All of a sudden, I felt a real strong presence of the Holy Spirit, causing me to lose my breath. It almost literally suffocated me.”

Fortunately, Fr. Merlino survived his calling (!), and over a mile high in Colorado in 2018, he discerned, and the Lord confirmed, his calling to media evangelism as co-founder of Catholic Media Missionaries. (Media? His ordination in 2000 was the first ever in U.S. history to be broadcast live via the internet). Visit his website here to learn more, including how to view CMM’s flagship video conversation series, “Hound of Heaven.” (Note: discernment is a big deal in St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises.)

Did you know—that TV’s “instant replay” is a form of contemplation? 30 Days Unplugged notes, “Contemplation comes easily if we let it. It is simply part of us and of our world. Whenever we recall a keenly embarrassing moment, or a fondly remembered moment in our lives we are contemplating them. We are replaying them, making them a deeper part of our lives.” And this insight about contemplation: “It lets the Church, and us, remember the many things [Jesus] said and did. And, we can hardly be surprised that, where we do not have all the data, we fill in; we make the moment come alive. His story is important, and we want to keep remembering and retelling it.”

And wow, God has gifted Father Merlino with a vivid imagination! He invites us to scamper along his rabbit trails and sidebars, including: George McFly in Back to the Future, the Divine experience of an eight-man rowing crew team (reminded me of The Boys in the Boat), then at Dodger Stadium—he’s blasting home runs during BP. And get this: under Michelangelo’s tutelage, “God chisels me fatter and bald to show me the true image of how he sees me now.”

There’s more: Chesterton Chats, “Freedom” by Aretha Franklin, the Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, God putting the finishing touches on his D.I. “Darrin’s intelligence,” and “Grow the heck up!” Crafting a personal mission statement—then with Holy Spirit nudges, re-writing Version 2.0 around midnight. Brilliant: how Jesus wipes “away sin like a high-powered windshield wiper during a heavy rain.”

In the July 10 meditation on Psalm 34, Fr. Merlino asks, “How can my soul glory in God?” and the answer comes to him through songs and hymns. The line “Taste and see that the Lord is good” is paraphrased in The Message (think the senses) as: “Open your mouth and taste, open your eyes and see—how good God is. Blessed are you who run to him.” So, naturally, this sent me to YouTube where I found The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir’s “taste and see” version with almost 27 million views!

Listen to The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir sing Psalm 34 (8 min.)

BONUS! 30 Days Unplugged features stunning original artwork—more than 60 drawings by 24 artists. Buy two books: one for your coffee table and one to read and reread and reread. Visit the artists here.

Finally, be assured Fr. Merlino knows that most of us will not be able to do the 30-day silence and solitude drill. There is an eight-day option. Even Dr. Scott Hahn, who wrote the foreword, admits he may never do the 30-day plan, but adds, “I have two sons who have done it, and I’ve seen the difference it made in them as they discerned their priestly vocation.”

30 Days Unplugged includes five next steps, suggesting you “use this book for a makeshift home retreat.” Plus, the robust website, Ignatian Spirituality, includes a nine-minute video with a summary of the four phases of The Spiritual Exercises. The video also suggests alternatives to the 30-day experience. Click here. Need a retreat location? Click here and click here.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for 30 Days Unplugged: How a Catholic Priest Turned Off His iPhone and Took a Call From God (Full Color Edition), by Father Darrin Merlino, CMF. Note: To order the specially-priced “Black & White Edition,” click here.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) The prayer for July 9 in 30 Days Unplugged, includes this: “Teach me to listen, Holy Spirit, for Your voice—in busyness and in boredom, in certainty and in doubt, in noise and in silence. Teach me, O God, to listen.” When you’ve experienced boredom during this COVID marathon, how have you addressed it spiritually?
2) Father Merlino invested five hours in the spiritual exercises for July 9. During the fourth prayer period, he focused on: risks I took (“jumping off a bridge about 90 feet above the water”), dangers experienced, influences, Scriptural influences, cherished people, life’s achievements, and unfulfilled desires. What would be the value for you—of pausing and reflecting for an entire day with the Lord? 
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“Our Perennial Knack for Disobedience”
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

Read 30 Days Unplugged and Fr. Merlino’s reminder that Jesus’ forgiveness covers kleptomaniac kids and disorganized adults. Amen!

The core competency in the Book Bucket notes, “We mentor team members with thoughtfully selected titles and chapters to help them…grow in their faith and serve others with passion. We don’t just talk about books—we actually read them!” Here are four resources for exercising your spiritual muscles:

#1. Leadership Transformations. Steve Macchia is president of Leadership Transformations (click here) which has a plethora of resources for spiritual formation, including online soul care events, and a spiritual discernment retreat guide (read my review).

Speaking of prison (see above), in his book Crafting a Rule of Life, Steve Macchia profiles the great hymnwriter Fanny Crosby (8,000 hymns!). She wrote “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” after speaking at a prison prayer service and heard one of the prisoners shout, “Savior, do not pass me by!” I found this soulful version by Lyle Lovett. Click to enjoy.


Listen to Lyle Lovett sing “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” (5-minutes).

#2. Renovaré. Richard Foster, in Devotional Classics, writes about the four-part rhythm of St. Ignatius’ 30-day exercises: “We need a deeper musing upon our perennial knack for disobedience and God’s unbounded habit of mercy. We need a rich contemplation upon that Life that shows us the way so we may follow ‘in his steps.’ We need a fuller meditation upon that Death that sets us free. We need a more profound experience of that Resurrection that empowers us to obey Christ in all things.”

#3. “Slow Down and Wait on God” is Lesson 28 in Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom: 40 Insights for Better Board Meetings (2nd Edition), by Dan Busby and John Pearson (order from Amazon). The lesson includes a summary of Lorne Sanny’s classic, “How to Spend a Day in Prayer.” Click here to read the short chapter online.

#4. Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center offer retreats, books, and the podcast, “Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership.” (Read the review of my pick for 2009 book-of-the-year.) Barton says, “The best thing you bring to leadership is your own transforming self.”
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you writing a book during COVID? Many authors are self-publishing. (Jason collaborated with Fr. Merlino on 30 Days Unplugged.) Need help? Check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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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.

Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump

Issue No. 461 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a page-turning book that Joe Biden should read—chronicling rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my 2020 Book(s)-of-the-Year and Top-10 picks.



“Washington has a ladder that goes up and down, and those you kick beneath you on the ladder might—will—kick back harder when they are on an upper rung.”

The Infighting Scorecard (Part 1)

Let’s hope Joe Biden’s first White House staff meeting this week didn’t replicate the chaos of President Carter’s crew. According to Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump, “On the very first day of the Carter administration, the staff had no idea who should run meetings.”

With no designated chief of staff (per Jimmy Carter’s preference), the power plays were palpable—but no leader emerged. A staffer asked Hamilton Jordan (who ran the Carter campaign), “Should we have a staff meeting every day?” Jordan’s response, “We’ll have a meeting when there’s something to meet about.”

Whoa! Tevi Troy, bestselling author and former White House advisor, wrote this page-turner a year ago—and I couldn’t put it down. But caution: this book’s main characters will disappoint you (red or blue). The author says there is “nothing new under the sun” and “infighting has been constant in every presidential administration since George Washington.” Ditto the Trump White House—nothing new.

Thus “Fight House,” unfortunately for the American people, is more descriptive than “White House.” Think dysfunction, chaos, confusion, and rivalries. It’s sad, really—but very juicy reading!

These mini-case studies in leadership, administration, team-building, and team-denigrating are so insightful, I’m splitting my review into two issues.

PART 1 OF 2: PRESIDENTS TRUMAN TO NIXON

“The president needs help” was the four-word summary from the Committee on Administrative Management, convened by Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945). They suggested that Congress fund six “executive assistant” positions. The criteria: people “possessed of high competence” who had a “passion for anonymity.” No leaking? How’d that work out?

So Congress established the Executive Office of the President in 1939. Shocking, but true—that staff of six has mushroomed to more than 1,600 people today, according to the author. Yikes. Here’s a taste of staff rivalries over the decades:

HARRY TRUMAN (1945-1953). Truman employed a “spokes-on-the-wheel” staff structure (“in which aides reported to a centralized hub in the form of the president himself”—no chief of staff). Truman was a listener more than a reader—he preferred oral briefings, not memos. The rivalries between the cabinet secretaries and the White House staff were just warming up—yet Truman rarely addressed conflict.

News Flash! I’m guessing that more than a few Joe Biden staffers began writing their White House memoirs this week! The memoir wars in Fight House is a repeating theme—and Tevi Troy’s research is vast. The 34 pages of endnotes and book references may bust my book budget.

For example: Clark Clifford, Truman’s special counsel, battled with General George Marshall (Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State). Clifford’s memoir: “Not only did he never speak to me again after that meeting, but, according to his official biographer, he never again mentioned my name.”

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1953-1961). “If Truman liked order, his successor Dwight Eisenhower loved it. The mercurial Truman saw order as professionally necessary. Eisenhower saw it as a way of life.” Ike on Truman: “…he didn’t know any more about government than a dog knows about religion.”

One of the first presidents to have a chief of staff, Ike “also believed in cabinet government and gave his department heads leeway to run things as they saw fit.” Troy notes that by increasing the White House staff from 32 to 50 it exacerbated conflict and rivalries. A larger staff created more temptation “to run the departments from the White House.”

In a fascinating three-page appendix, the author includes “The Infighting Scorecard” chart—listing a “trio” of the “three leading causes of staff infighting common to the modern presidency and most organizations,” he says. (Assignment: create a scorecard for your organization!) The chart lists the presidents on the left and these categories across the top:
   • Ideological Discord (low to high)
   • Process (tight to loose)
   • Tolerance for Infighting (low to high)
   • Result

Ike’s scores? Where Truman preferred a “relatively non-contentious environment,” Eisenhower “preferred not to see conflict, but was willing to set some up to get better results.” (Tune in to my Part 2 issue and you might be surprised how Obama and Trump fared on the scorecard.) For more on Eisenhower, click here to read my November 2020 review of How Ike Led.

JOHN F. KENNEDY (1961-1963). Tevi Troy notes that the “modern celebrity culture began to influence the world of politics” during JFK’s term. The chapter’s LOL subtitle: “Passion for Anonymity on the White House Staff? Not So Much.” He says that the best-known feud was between VP Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General “Bobby” Kennedy (JFK’s brother). The “drama and fury” would “make for an excellent Netflix series,” Troy writes.

Attn: Kamala Harris! The vice president position “to outsiders, is a position of great prestige, but to a power player like Johnson, the former Senate majority leader, it was a comedown.” Johnson was miserable as VP. “I detested every minute of it,” said LBJ who had a phone installed in his office for direct calls from the White House, “but the phone rarely rang.”

The shocking nicknames that the Kennedy team used for LBJ were beyond the pale. The author’s five-page appendix of “White House Nicknames” is eye-opening: “Professor Leaky,” “Director of the Sanitation Department,” “ABC News Commentraitor,” and more.

The LBJ/Bobby Kennedy “dynamic shifted again after Kennedy’s assassination, and Bobby ended up serving unhappily under the thumb of the man he tormented.” The lesson to all future White House staffers: “…tread carefully. Washington has a ladder that goes up and down, and those you kick beneath you on the ladder might—will—kick back harder when they are on an upper rung.”

LYNDON B. JOHNSON (1963-1969). Troy reveals that rivalries in the LBJ era were “president-focused rather than staff-focused. Rivalries were not based on who had access to the president as much as who the president targeted.” Often an active participant in staff conflicts, Johnson’s bullying style exacerbated the drama.

Where Ike and JFK each had two secretaries, Johnson needed five to keep up with his herculean output. He worked two shifts every day (6 a.m. to midnight, with an afternoon nap). LBJ: “An eight-hour man ain’t worth a damn to me.” Press Secretary George Reedy termed the White House “an indoor stadium hosting a perpetual track meet.”

“All of this berating and mood swinging came from Johnson’s own sense of inadequacy.” He hated leaks. (Read my review of Robert Novak’s 662-page memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington.) “Johnson even suggested building a wall between the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building to separate reporters from staff physically.”

What’s your style: reader or listener? LBJ’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara “was famously impatient, eschewing oral briefings.” Why? “Because I can read faster than they can talk.”

The author weaves insightful commentary on leadership styles and a leader’s tolerance for conflicting views—“a recurring problem in White House management.” Without a forum for dissenting views at least three things will happen: leaking, behind-the-back whispering, and “writing unfavorable memoirs.”

And this is tragic. According to sources I researched, one out of every 10 Americans who served in the Vietnam war (1955-1975) was a casualty. A total of 58,148 were killed and 304,000 were wounded out of 2.7 million who served. Could we have lessened the pain? The author’s last page in the LBJ chapter notes the Johnson vs. Kennedy conflicts. He concludes, “In this very real sense, America’s most unpopular war was shaped by one of American politics’ bitterest rivalries.”

RICHARD M. NIXON (1969-1974). Nixon supported a strong cabinet-led government, yet “distrusted the federal bureaucracy and wanted to keep decisions under his and his closest aides’ control. Maybe this is all you need to know: “In the Nixon administration, people ended up in prison.” Yet, “Nixon was also one of the most experienced people ever to become president.” The author labels Nixon the “feud stagemaster.”

When the first Biden senior official exits the job “to spend more time with my family,” remember this: “Al Haig recalled that Kissinger was very tough on his staff—he drove away over a third of them in the administration’s first nine months.”

In numerous White House administrations, including Nixon’s, the grab for power and prestige is often about office space, size, and proximity to the Oval Office. In the Nixon administration, a wall was built in Bryce Harlow’s first floor West Wing office, removing his private bathroom, so Henry Kissinger’s adjoining office would be larger. (Page 72 is a must-read. LOL! Fortunately, the author had a full inventory of **** marks!)

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, had a private bathroom. Carter’s VP, Walter Mondale, wanted a private bathroom but was denied the perk. Staffer (and Carter’s cousin) Hugh Carter unsuccessfully attempted to drop the perk of White House cars transporting senior staffers around the city. Jody Powell nicknamed him “Cousin Cheap.” One think tanker mocked the suggestion: “Do you want them to hitchhike? Catch a bus?”

What—No Memoir? I found one high-integrity person in this Nixon chapter that details the Kissinger-Rogers turf wars. William Rogers, who served as Attorney General under Ike and Secretary of State under Nixon, submitted a resignation letter “free of recrimination or argument.” The author adds, “Rogers continued to maintain his silence long after leaving government, refusing to write a memoir, as, he rightly observed, it is ‘hard to write interestingly without being critical of people.’”

PART 2 OF 2: PRESIDENTS FORD TO TRUMP
Watch for my Part 2 review of this book (President Ford to President Trump) next month, perhaps on President’s Day. Learn why Reagan’s former chief of staff, James Baker, said of then current chief of staff Donald Regan (who hung up on Nancy Reagan), “That’s not just a firing offense. That may be a hanging offense.”

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump, by Tevi Troy. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (9 hours).

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Donald Trump is now a member of a very exclusive fraternity described in the book, The President’s Club (read my review). Former presidents, CEOs, staff, and board members can have positive or negative impact on organizations. Do you have a strategy for keeping your former team members informed and raving fans?
2) Is your staff structure a “spokes-on-the-wheel” approach or do you have a chief of staff? Is it working? Click here to read or view more about The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, by Chris Whipple. Warning! Bill Daley got shingles from stress after serving as Obama’s chief of staff.

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Biden Gets 100 Days, You Get 90!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

New U.S. President Joe Biden, and his staff, should read my pick for 2010 book-of-the-year: The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, by Michael Watkins. (Read my review.)

Watkins writes, “The president of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself; you get 90.” The first chapter plowed new ground with five propositions on transitioning to a new job. “Too often…the new leader behaves more like a virus…”

The author says there are four kinds of organizations (or departments). Which one did you inherit in your last transition? His acronym, “STARS,” describes the four: Start-up, Turn-Around, Realignment, and Sustaining Success. A successful CEO of a Turn-Around may fail at a Realignment. How would you label the U.S. during this presidential transition?

Here’s one more must-read book on passing the baton: Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, by William Bridges. (Read my review.)
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Does your shop have a new leader? Is everyone on the same page—using the same carefully-crafted elevator speech? Need help? Check in with Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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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.