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November 26, 2024

Spares: Second Chance Stories of Frozen Embryos (free film)

Issue No. 628 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting spotlights a new and powerful documentary film from Jason Pearson, “Spares: Second Chance Stories of Frozen Embryos.” Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Uncommon Graces: Christlike Responses to a Hostile World. And...Happy Thanksgiving to our U.S. readers!

View the movie trailer for the new documentary, “Spares: Second Chance Stories of Frozen Embryos.”

My Interview With Jason Pearson on His New Documentary Film, “Spares: Second Chance Stories of Frozen Embryos”

Editor’s Note: I’m blessed to recommend a new documentary film in this issue, created and directed by our son, Jason. Here’s a “Son & Pearson” interview about the film. (For more “Son & Pearson” conversations, read the introductions to our two recent books on mistake-making and 100 must-read books.)

JOHN: Happy Thanksgiving, Jason! I’m so thankful for you and Melinda and our five grandchildren. And…WOW! This 20-minute documentary you created, “Spares,” is sobering, stunning, and poignant. I’ve viewed it four times already! It’s personal, isn’t it?

JASON: It is personal. About two percent of U.S. births are now from in vitro fertilization (IVF). That was the path that Melinda and I discerned—and God blessed us with five children. Yet—few people realize that in this age of advancing reproductive technology, thousands of American families face an unexpected moral quandary: what to do with their remaining frozen embryos after completing IVF.

JOHN: I had no idea. Your documentary, which just premiered last week in Washington, D.C., and is also featured on Real Clear Politics, is subtitled, “Second Chance Stories of Frozen Embryos.” Explain.

JASON: “Spares” spotlights four couples and their ethical dilemma of what to do with their frozen embryos. Today, over 1.6 million frozen embryos remain in storage across the United States. And many believe they are human lives.

JOHN: You had told me, a few years back, about this movement—that couples can “adopt” frozen embryos and be blessed when these yet unborn children become part of their families. The four couples you interviewed for your film—oh, my! These are complex issues. How do they navigate this challenging intersection of faith, ethics, and modern medicine?

JASON: Travis and Tara, one of the couples featured in the documentary, faced this decision after successfully having three children through IVF. They found themselves with 11 remaining embryos! They had three options: discard them, donate them to science, or pursue embryo adoption.

JOHN: Oh, my! You mean they could potentially have had 11 more children?

JASON: That’s unlikely, but "Spares" presents a unique solution gaining traction among pro-life families: embryo adoption, also known as "snowflake adoption." While still relatively rare, these adoptions have grown dramatically—by 420% over seven years, with a notable 29% surge in 2023 alone.

JOHN: So this movement is championing the idea of “snowflake adoption.” What a great name for it—the uniqueness of every snowflake and the uniqueness of every child. It reminds me of Psalm 139:

“Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
you formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking!
Body and soul, I am marvelously made!”

JASON: Exactly. When people view the film, they are so taken by these hopeful and loving parents, like Gabbi and her husband, on their decision to pursue embryo adoption. She tells us, "The more I researched it, the more I wanted to be a part of this new frontier of saving these little lives, these lives in these almost frozen orphanages, just waiting for a chance."

JOHN: “Frozen orphanages!” As you know, Jason, when writing my eNews, I’m always looking for a title for each issue. I almost titled this issue, “Frozen Orphanages!”

JASON: Trust me—there are so many poignant comments. The creative process in filmmaking takes many twists and turns—and it pushed me to pray more. Much more. This project was very emotional and very challenging—yet deeply rewarding. I felt like I was a steward of these very personal stories.

JOHN: You’ve worked on over 70 films, right? How did this one affect you?

JASON: Memorable storytelling, obviously, must have great stories. These amazing couples were so willing to share their stories. Here’s what Travis told us about their remaining embryos: "Every embryo mattered to me. I still feel like I'm the father of those embryos. I still feel like I'm responsible for those and make the best decisions I can."

JOHN: Wow. I’m urging people to view the film. But some, perhaps, might push back on the whole concept of IVF, right?

JASON: Many Christians, particularly those in the Southern Baptist and Catholic traditions, believe those 1.6 million frozen embryos are much more than just statistics—they represent human lives at their earliest stage of development.

JOHN: I believe that. But didn’t the Southern Baptist Convention highlight their concerns about IVF and the subsequent potential for embryo destruction—per a “resolution” at their June 2024 convention? (Note: That news report also said the SBC was in favor of “adopting frozen embryos to rescue those who may otherwise be destroyed.”)

JASON: Right. Their position reflects a growing awareness within Christian circles about the moral implications of reproductive technology. For example, the Catholic Church has long maintained that IVF raises serious ethical concerns, particularly regarding the creation and potential destruction of genetically-tested human embryos. In the film, Paige shares this:

"To even have this idea about eradicating a type of person because you don't view them as enough. Yeah. To me, is a form of evil. Or because it's inconvenient—where do you draw the line on that?"

JOHN: That’s a huge issue, right? The “potential destruction of human embryos.” If we believe in the sanctity of human life from conception on—then that consequently requires us to grapple with the complex reality of frozen embryos already in existence.

JASON: Some Catholic bioethicists argue that while the Church opposes IVF, the adoption of existing embryos could be seen as a life-affirming response to an already existing ethical dilemma. This perspective aligns with the Church's emphasis on the dignity of human life while acknowledging the complex realities families face.

JOHN: So…I see this documentary then, perhaps, as a crucial conversation starter for the Christian community. It challenges us to think deeply about how we can uphold the sanctity of human life while compassionately supporting families struggling with infertility. As more couples face decisions about remaining embryos, the need for ethical guidance and practical solutions becomes increasingly urgent.

JASON: Yes, and for anyone considering embryo adoption, the process involves careful screening and matching. Prospective adoptive parents create detailed profiles of their lives and values, similar to traditional adoption processes. The genetic parents then have the opportunity to choose a family whose values align with their own.

JOHN: That's amazing. Where can someone go for more information?

JASON: For more information about embryo adoption and to watch the full documentary (free), visit SparesDocumentary.com.

JOHN: Great website, Jason, as usual. The resources section is amazing, as well as the “10 Things to Know About Embryo Adoption in 2024.” This movement is so hopeful. While viewing “Spares,” I was struck with what Ali said—when someone first told her about embryo adoption. "I think at that moment, it was a new spark of light and a new spark of hope that we could carry a baby and bring a baby into this world."

And LOL. According to a Wall Street Journal article I read this past weekend, parents are not supposed to “humblebrag” about their brilliant offspring! But how could I not help you spread the word about this powerful movement?

JASON: Powerful is right. Thank you. We believe it is close to God’s heart.

Visit SparesDocumentary.com for more information about embryo adoption and to watch the full documentary (20 minutes). It’s free.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Frozen Orphanges! In the “Spares” film, Gabbi notes, "The more I researched it, the more I wanted to be a part of this new frontier of saving these little lives, these lives in these almost frozen orphanages, just waiting for a chance.” Does your organization have a two-word phrase that arrests the attention of customers, donors, and volunteers?

2) What’s your organization’s story? How do you communicate it so it touches hearts? Aristotle said, “The soul never thinks without a picture.” After watching this 20-minute documentary, what did you appreciate about the storytelling approach?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books
Part 18: The Final Four

Book #98 of 100: The Discerning Life

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #98 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

The Discerning Life:
An Invitation to Notice God in Everything
by Stephen Macchia

Books #97 through #100 spotlight “the final four” books in this recommended volume of 100 must-read books. Steve Macchia asks, “But are we aware of his presence? He’s tapping on the shoulder of our hearts all the time: tap, tap, tap . . . tap, tap, tap.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon.
• Listen to The Discerning Leader Podcast.
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

Steve Macchia writes, “Far too often, spiritual discernment has been pigeon-holed into the exclusive realm of decision-making, learning how to make good choices and know God’s will methodically and predictably. We want a simple system to follow: set up the room, put people in place, consider the right options, add a prayer, and then press the button of discernment.”

And this: “Without a prayer closet, we are destined to live an inch deep and a mile wide. For any number of reasons, we are highly allergic to spiritual depth.”

7 Songs to Go!

We hope you’re enjoying this blog series, Johnny Be Good, featuring the 45 songs in the book, Anatomy of a Song, by Marc Myers. Stay tuned for the final seven songs—in the next seven issues. What’s your favorite song, so far, in this series?

ChatGPT and the Future of AI

“Will I lose my job?” That’s just one of dozens of fascinating topics in this new book, ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution, by Terrence J. Sejnowski. It’s humorous and humble. Read my review. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

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Tags: in vitro fertilization, IVF, Jason Pearson, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Spares

November 19, 2024

Uncommon Graces: Christlike Responses to a Hostile World

Issue No. 627 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights seven “uncommon graces” that need front-row seats today. Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders.

John Vawter writes: “When ‘safe sins’ go unchallenged, something of a Christian fantasy religion is allowed to thrive—a religion that condemns alcohol and adultery, yet condones, say, arrogance and abrasiveness. There should be a support group in the church for those addicted to ‘safe sins’—an AA for the arrogant and the abrasive.”

AA for the Arrogant and Abrasive

Yikes! John Vawter writes about one of his best friends who considered “leaving his extremely stressful job. He reached this conclusion one night when he went to tell his daughter goodnight. As he sat beside her, he said, ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you. I’ve had a bad day at work.’ She looked up at him and said, ‘Dad, you have a lot of bad days at work.’”

Vawter adds, “His daughter acted as a circuit breaker. With that one sentence, she gave him the opportunity to set aside his excuses and take an honest look at how the stress of his job was affecting him.” Read more about “circuit breakers” in this powerful book:

Uncommon Graces:
Christlike Responses to a Hostile World
by John Vawter

Written in 1998 by this discerning pastor, former seminary president, golfer, and golf ball hawker (see below!), this NavPress book is as current as today’s headlines—and needed now more than ever. In his chapter, “Establishing Circuit Breakers,” Vawter asks, “Why is it that so many people who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ live lives that are so offensive?”

And before you cheer, “Yes! A book I can give to some of my friends”—I’d encourage you to read Uncommon Graces prayerfully yourself. And keep a big mirror handy.

Vawter says that “Just as circuit breakers in our homes break the flow of electricity when there is a power surge or another electrical problem, personal circuit breakers are those people who God uses to break the flow of destructive behaviors in our lives.” He adds, “Each of us needs circuit breakfast in our lives. And God has called us to be circuit breakers in the lives of others.”

The author lists five reasons we need circuit breakers (I love the metaphor!):
#1. To help us look at ourselves.
#2. To help us see how our weaknesses cause us to behave. (You’ll appreciate his insights on the four social styles. Vawter is a “Driver”—and yes, that gets him in trouble sometimes!) I have no idea why that might be.
#3. To help us take responsibility for ourselves. (Read his wife’s funny poke!)
#4. To show us how we are hurting others. (Yikes! Read what his daughter and son told him.)
#5. To help us grow. (Read why a leader told him, “You honor the leader you have.” See the blurb below for A Tale of Three Kings.)

This chapter is meaty enough for weeks of reflection—and I haven’t even mentioned the author’s list of seven “uncommon graces.” (What seven would you list?) Vawter recommends these “simple courtesies of grace” to our hostile world: Gentleness, Attentiveness, Loyalty, Candor, Mercy, Kindness, and Repentance.

GENTLENESS. Vawter quotes a professional counselor: “Some of the smartest people who come to see me are the best liars. They pay money to sit there for sixty minutes and lie.” And read this:

“When ‘safe sins’ go unchallenged, something of a Christian fantasy religion is allowed to thrive—a religion that condemns alcohol and adultery, yet condones, say, arrogance and abrasiveness. There should be a support group in the church for those addicted to ‘safe sins’—an AA for the arrogant and the abrasive.”

ATTENTIVENESS. Read why a friend declined to speak at a conference—until the conference leaders changed their arrogant theological postures!

LOYALTY. “You’ve all heard about the Norwegian who loved his wife so much that he almost told her.”

CANDOR. “One college board chairman told an administrator, ‘I don’t want you going out and conducting any more conflict-resolution seminars. You haven’t resolved a single conflict in your own institution.’” (See also the HBR article on candor in the boardroom and the Peacemakers website.)

MERCY. “In contrast to the darkness that selfishness and insensitivity bring with them, mercy walks into a room and brightens everything.” (Enjoy this song.)

KINDNESS. The author quotes Charles L. Allen, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

REPENTANCE. What about people who refuse to look in the mirror? Vawter mentions Hale Irwin’s comments on golfing great Jack Nicklaus. (Really interesting!) Then addressing those in the church who are rarely, if ever, repentant, Vawter writes, “But isn’t it true that far too many people who say they are followers of Christ who have to be hit over the head with a nine iron before they will admit the truth?”

And speaking of golf—after you look in the mirror at these uncommon graces—take a swing at another book by John Vawter, Anything for a Golf Ball: The Art of Finding Lost Golf Balls. While learning about “ball hawking” is laugh-out-loud funny, you’ll also find it redemptive. “Billy Graham [was] a ball hawker. He says it is a direct practical carryover from his life's spiritual mission ‘to seek and save that which is lost.’”

Uncommon Graces will preach! Whether you rotate the leadership (one person per week sharing one of the seven uncommon graces at staff meetings), or your church launches a sermon series—you’ll find treasure in every chapter:
• Dozens (maybe hundreds) of practical stories—punctuating the points.
• Memorable anecdotes including Football Coach Frosty Westering’s inspirational goal for an out-of-shape middle-aged man, who started out as “a one-tree man” and placed a tiny tree in his office every time he reached a new “tree” goal. (In six weeks, he became a 43-tree man.) Brilliant!
• In a project for Murdock Trust, the author collaborated on a phone survey to 420 people that asked, “What is the number-one quality you’re looking for in your pastor?” (The #1 response: “compassion.” What would #1 be now in 2024? Must-read chapter, “Building Community.”)
• Learn how “Living the Golden Rule” (Chapter 10), prompted frequent letters from custodians at other universities. See how Coach John Wooden’s UCLA basketball teams practiced the golden rule at their away games! Stunning.

FORE! In 2007, I was the fourth guy in a golf foursome in Palm Desert, Calif. I didn’t know the other golfers, but I mentioned a new Ken Blanchard book I had heard about. Everyone laughed and pointed to Bob Jewell, the marketing brains behind the book that also became a movie. Small world! Jewell gave me a copy of The Mulligan—Everyone Needs a Second Chance in Golf and in Life, by Wally Armstrong and Ken Blanchard. (Read my review. I named it Book #64 of 100 on my must-read list.)

Had The Mulligan been written before 1998, I’m sure John Vawter would have included it in Uncommon Graces. Over the years since Vawter and I were in seminary together, we met only once in 1986 at a Leadership Network retreat with Peter Drucker in Estes Park, Colo. (Read more about Peter Drucker here and click here for the memorable story Drucker shared.)

NO EAGLES! Just this month—38 years since connecting with John Vawter in person—we golfed together and I was able to thank him personally for writing this powerful and convicting book. And no…I’m not revealing my golf score, but I did lose (not find) two new golf balls in the water!

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for Uncommon Graces: Christlike Responses to a Hostile World, by John Vawter.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) John Vawter quotes Harry Evans, former president of Trinity Seminary, who was asked by a denominational executive, “Evans, why does your board hate me?” Harry Evans responded, “I think it’s because they think you’re two-faced.” Yikes! QUESTION: Does being a “circuit breaker” for colleagues sometimes require a proverbial two-by-four—or even more?

2) Vawter writes, “Too often we duck such confrontations. We ‘enable’ our friends in their wrong behavior and attitudes in the name of mercy or tolerance. But mercy, tolerance, and enabling are distinct from each other. POP QUIZ! Define each word (answers: pages 165-166).

BONUS! For more on the power of grace, read my review of Grace Ambassador: Bringing Heaven to Earth, by John Jackson.

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books
Part 18: The Final Four

Book #97 of 100: A Tale of Three Kings

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #97 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

A Tale of Three Kings:
A Study in Brokenness
by Gene Edwards

Books #97 through #100 spotlight “the final four” books in this recommended volume of 100 must-read books. My suggestion: give this book to someone who’s just been fired! (Really.)
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon.
• Listen on Libro (1 hour, 42 minutes)
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

David complained to the Lord that King Saul was hardly God-honoring—so why should he honor and respect this tyrant king? Sound familiar? “Why did I get fired? My boss is the jerk, not me. Lord, this isn’t fair!”

Gene Edwards is a master storyteller and this classic unwraps the relationships between David, Saul and Absalom. His conclusions may astound you. It’s a great book to mention at your weekly staff meeting.

BONUS! Read why Bob Lonac has read this book three times!

Song #38 of 45: "Heart of Glass"

Listen to “Heart of Glass,” by Blondie, Song #38 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. LOL! Our guest blogger, aka “Production Guy,” gets a little carried away on this blog—and seems to favor machinery over music.

Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Corporate Boards vs. Church Boards

“Perhaps the most important difference between corporate governance and church board leadership is the task of discernment.” That’s from Book #3 of 3, in the Transforming Church Boards series, by Dennis Baker, David C. Fisher, and John Vawter (also author of Uncommon Graces above). Read my review. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

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Tags: AA, arrogance, dishonesty cult, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, John Vawter, Uncommon Graces

November 1, 2024

Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders

Issue No. 626 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting spotlights eight major shifts for the “future-ready” church—and eight case studies. Brilliant! Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Next Level Nonprofit.

“Most churches in North America have more in common with 1950 than with 2050.” The authors of Becoming a Future-Ready Church wonder if you’re more like Leave It to Beaver or Modern Family?

• If you're a reader...continue reading!
• If you're a listener...enjoy this AI-generated podcast created by Google's NotebookLM. Listen to AI’s “review” of my review here (12 minutes, 31 seconds). For more AI-generated "reviews" of my reviews, visit here.

Church 1950 or Church 2050?

Brilliant! Eight paradigm-crushing churches are spotlighted in this critical book for church leaders. And just imagine this: What if…your church on U.S. Election Day 2024 followed Mosaic Church’s example from 2020? “While tens of millions watched their broadcast news outlet of choice as the votes in the 2020 presidential election were being cast, Mosaic Church held a daytime Communion service in downtown Dayton, Ohio.”

I urge you and your local church leaders to read the powerful and hopeful message of this new book—and then discern next steps.

Becoming a Future-Ready Church:
8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower
the Next Generation of Leaders
by Daniel Yang, Adelle M. Banks, and Warren Bird
Oct. 22, 2024

The authors of this well-researched (and well fact-checked) book are prayerful, yet appropriately pushy! They write, “Most churches in North America have more in common with 1950 than with 2050.” (Gulp!)

Using a memorable “from this…to that” format, Yang, Banks, and Bird make the case for creating space for the next generation of church leaders—but, gratefully, they don’t pontificate for a one-size-fits-all methodology. But first, they urge you to pray and self-assess your current ministry:
• Are you still in the Leave It to Beaver era (1950s)?
• Or…the Modern Family era (2009-2020)?
• Or…something else?

The authors poke church leaders with eight dramatic “from this to that” shifts. Here are just three of the eight that tweaked my soul:

SHIFT: "From Church Refugees to Church as Refuge. Why True Hospitality Is Essential for Congregations to Thrive.” Each chapter lists a “dated” question (1950s maybe?) and a “better” question—plus the trend. Chapter 5:
• Dated Question: “How can we stay a ‘big happy family’ by reaching more people like us?”
• Better Question: “How can a culture of irresistible hospitality unify our congregation’s increasing diversity?”
• The Trend: “Mitigating division not by avoiding conflict but by creating truly hospitable places that allow people to be seen and heard.”

The authors address church conflicts and warn, “As society becomes more diverse, fracturing and splintering in churches will sadly become more common.” (“Pearson—I thought you said this was a ‘hopeful’ book?” It is. Keep reading. And by the way, you'll love reading Acts 16:15 in The Message.)

They add, “Every week in America, people who researchers call church refugees shuffle in and out of various congregations—sometimes discreetly but at times loudly (usually online by posting or blogging about it)—hoping to find a new spiritual safe house to rest and heal.”

What’s needed? The book highlights churches that seek to address conflict with “a more robust and practical theology of hospitality.” They add, “A culture of hospitality leads the church to be preoccupied with caring for people’s real needs more than curating its public image.” The case study on Mosaic Church in Beavercreek, Ohio, is both inspirational and instructive. (See more on boardroom hospitality here.)

Rosario “Roz” Picaro says his church models the 70/30 philosophy. “Seventy percent of what we say and do, you’re going to love, but you’re going to hate 30 percent. But your 30 percent is someone else’s 70 percent and vice versa.”

You’ll appreciate the graphic on page 104, based on co-author Daniel Yang’s church consulting work. He believes there are “four dynamics that people need to experience within a church.” Four V’s: Visibility, Voice, Value, and Volition. The descriptors for each are memorable and you will borrow them! Yards, Porches, Couches, and Tables. Read how the future-ready church must be competent in these “places and spaces” to effectively prepare for future conflict—because it will come.

SHIFT: “From Nuclear Families to Forged Families. Why Churches Need to Serve a Wider Range of Households.”
• Dated Question: “How can we get more people to volunteer so that we can strengthen ministry to the families in our church?”
• Better Question: “How can our church’s family ministries build health and increased capacity in people so that they can be more available to those who are lonely, struggling, or feeling that they don’t fit in?”

Discussing the “modern American family,” the authors note, “If there’s anything worth learning for churches from sitcoms such as Modern Family, the key takeaway is that they have been too myopic on the nuclear family for their ministry programming.”

Each chapter includes a “One Degree of Change” self-assessment with five to seven questions to prompt leadership conversations on the big shifts, “from this to that.” With five response options (Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree), I immediately pictured church leaders wresting with these questions in a series of robust leadership meetings (with strong coffee, of course).

OOPS! If you’re flying from Seattle to Madrid, and you’re one degree off—you’ll end up in the Sahara Desert!

Why “one degree of change?” Heed the authors’ wake-up call! “When you’re traveling somewhere, if you’re off course by just one degree, after a mile you’ll miss your target by 92.2 feet. On a long journey, that difference will take you to a different city! Suppose you’re flying from Seattle, Washington, to Madrid, Spain. If your flight path is off by just one degree, you’ll end up instead in the middle of Africa’s Sahara Desert!”

Here's the good news: “That one degree of change can also move you in the direction you should have been heading in the first place.” (Pastors: this will preach!)

SHIFT: “From Physical Only to Healthy Hybrid. Why More Church Life Will Happen Virtually.”
• Dated Question: “How do we do in-person church better so that people will want to spend less time online?”
• Better Question: “How can we discern God’s work everywhere people spend time, especially in the growing digital world?”
• The Trend: “Embracing technology not by valuing its convenience but by pioneering spaces for Christ to be worshipped and proclaimed.”

Don’t skip Chapter 8! COVID maximized online church—and some folks are still viewing services in their Sunday morning PJs. Good thing or bad thing? The authors will challenge your preconceived notions (maybe your 1950 notions?) with a deep dive section, “Is Digital Ministry a Theological Advancement?” (When is the last time you thought about technology and the incarnation?)

Here's the first agree/disagree statement in the ”One Degree of Change” section: “Today’s exploding world of digital media is likely to be as world-changing as the impact of the printing press or the shift from agrarian life to urban life.” (If you’ve checked out the AI-generated podcasts I’ve created recently—you’ll have to join me in checking the “Strongly Agree” box.)

The case study is eye-opening! Read about Imagine Church in Gilbert, Ariz., “A Digital Congregation Creates Onscreen Face-to-Face Community.” The co-lead pastors, Janae and Justin Klatt, are leading what one researcher calls “a digital church using a digital-micro strategy as their primary gathering.” Learn why they’ve found that a “Brady Bunch” size (nine boxes/people on the screen) is optimal for a digital “community.”

Oh, my…there is so much more meat in this important book. I’m praying that hundreds and hundreds of astute and discerning “Leaders Are Readers Champions" will generously order this book for their pastors and elders. Imagine this scenario: a pastor prays, “Lord, what’s next for our congregation?” And then Amazon arrives with this powerful book!

When you read this book, be sure to note:
• “Why the future is birthing a new apologetic” in the shift, “From Mind to Soul.” Listen on Libro to the first three minutes of this chapter. (And read my review of Faith for the Curious.)
• The shift “From Attendance to Attachment” (Why church membership is losing its appeal and what’s replacing it.)
• Why “shaming a generation for being less religious is a surefire way to create greater disaffiliation and hostility toward the church.”
• The summary on page 200, “Eight Shifts to Start Becoming a Future-Ready Church,” with eight “dated” questions and eight “better” questions. (And thanks to the publisher, Zondervan, for granting fee-free reprints of this page. Generous!)

AND THIS:
• In the shift “From Racial Tension to Community Blessing,” see the very helpful list (pages 145-146) of 12 “church diversity” terms and their meaning. (Example: the difference between a “Multiracial Church” and a “Multiethnic Church.”)
• Why wise church leaders “will follow the model of those who led God’s people in the past, ‘who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do’ (1 Chron. 12:32).”
• And—so helpful—a “Scripture Index” (2+ pages) with verses referenced in the book from 28 books of the Bible.
• And this “blunt” question: “Will the young people in your church, when given the reins at the proper time, want and be able to lead what you’re passing on to them?”

This book has already made the cut for my Top-10 books of 2024.

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders, by Daniel Yang, Adelle M. Banks, and Warren Bird. Listen on Libro (5 hours, 41 minutes).

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Co-author Warren Bird is also the editor of Wisdom from Lyle E. Schaller: The Elder Statesman of Church Leadership (read my review). Schaller noted that when changes are made when following a long-term leader, “A common result of this changing of the guard is the creating of the AAOEL group. ...The initials of this informal, ad hoc, unrecognized group stand for alienated, angry, older ex-leaders.” Who should read this book?

2) Warren Bird and William Vanderbloemen, co-authors of NEXT: Pastoral Succession That Works, begin their book with this profound alert: “Every pastor is an interim pastor.” Read more on succession in the ECFA Governance Toolbox Series No. 4, “Succession Planning: 11 Principles for Successful Successions.” If our pastor (or CEO) were to be hit by the proverbial bus, what’s our succession plan? (Note: See also my review of Vanderbloemen’s new workbook for Be the Unicorn.)

3) Warren Bird and Elmer Towns will prompt about 21 LOLs if you read their piece, "When the Horse Is Dead, Dismount,” from their book, Into the Future: Turning Today’s Church Trends Into Tomorrow’s Opportunities. Download the one-pager from the Results Bucket. My favorite: “Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.” What’s your favorite response to a dead horse (program)?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books
Part 17: “Nonprofit” Is a Tax Designation, Not a Management Philosophy!

Book #96 of 100: The 80/20 Principle

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #96 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

The 80/20 Principle:
The Secret to Achieving More With Less
by Richard Koch

Books #92 through #96 spotlight five helpful books for nonprofit CEOs, senior staff, and board members. In 2008, Richard Koch wrote a new and updated edition of his 10-year-old business classic. Will you read it—or delegate the reading to a team member?
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon.
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

The 80/20 principle is all around us:
• 20 percent of your donors give 80 percent of the budget
• 80 percent of your sales come from 20 percent of your customers
• One-fifth of your time (equivalent to one day a week) produces 80 percent of your important work
• 80 percent of your people problems come from 20 percent of your staff!
• 20 percent of your volunteers do 80 percent of the work
And how about your wardrobe—you likely wear 20 percent of your clothes about 80 percent of the time, right?

BONUS BOOK!
Just published on Oct. 8, 2024, check out 80/20 Daily: Your Day-by-Day Guide to Happier, Healthier, Wealthier, and More Successful Living Using the 80/20 Principle, by Richard Koch.
• Order from Amazon.
• Listen on Libro (11 hours, 58 minutes)

Song #37 of 45: “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes”

Listen to “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” sung by Elvis Costello, Song #37 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Costello wrote this song in just 10 minutes!

Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

5-Star Workbook on 12 Leadership Habits!

As I paged through this beautifully designed WORKBOOK, a follow-up to the Be the Unicorn book by William Vanderbloemen, I had this overpowering urge to organize a discussion group! You'll love it—including the free assessment on the "12 Data-Driven Habits that Separate the Best Leaders From the Rest." Read my review. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

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Tags: Adelle M. Banks, Daniel Yang, Future-Ready Church, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Warren Bird

October 24, 2024

Next Level Nonprofit: Build A Dream Team + Increase Lasting Impact

Issue No. 625 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting warns you that Next Level Nonprofit might create some angst initially—but it will be well worth the read. Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my short reviews of four leadership books and my favorite niche chapters. BONUS! Read Skye Matlock’s color commentary on “Deacon Blues,” by Steely Dan.

Reading Next Level Nonprofit prompted me to rethink my Top-20 books of all time. This is a MUST-READ. Tell me what you think!

• If you're a reader...continue reading!
• If you're a listener...enjoy this AI-generated podcast created by Google's NotebookLM. Listen to AI’s “review” of my review here (13 minutes, 57 seconds). For more AI-generated "reviews" of my reviews, visit here.

Warning! This 20-Question Assessment Might Be Risky!

When our son, Jason, and I published Mastering 100 Must-Read Books in 2022, today’s book had not yet been written—so now in 2024, we have a problem. Should we edit the title so it reads “Mastering 101 Must-Read Books?” Or…maybe I’ll go out on a limb here and add it to my Top-20 book recommendations (see Resource 5.2). Either way…if you understand the power and the importance of nonprofit organizations, this is a must-read:

Next Level Nonprofit:
Build A Dream Team + Increase Lasting Impact
by Chris Lambert (June 2, 2023)

This book is a complete package—and packed with practical next steps. How practical? The author recommends you ask your “Direct Supports” (his term for “direct reports”) this question from Kim Scott, “What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me.” (Warning! Don’t ask this question at home!)

You’ll find even more gut-checks in this compact book—including a 20-question organizational assessment. (Warning to all inflated egos.) For each question, rank where you are as a team on a scale of 1 to 5:
1 = Yea, we really need help on that.
2 = We’re not good at this one.
3 = It could go either way.
4 = We’re doin’ pretty good on this one.
5 = We are rockin’ this!

Go ahead—rank your organization:
• Q6. “Everyone in our organization knows the most important things we need to accomplish over the next quarter to be on track to achieve our one-year goals.”
• Q7. “Every team member has access to a simplified version of our storytelling strategy, and they understand how we are communicating with our core audience(s).”
• Q9. “We are excellent at attracting and retaining the most talented team members.”

Are you gutsy enough to answer all 20 questions in this organizational assessment? If so, click here—and good luck!

I could have—and would have—used this brilliant book in my nonprofit leadership years and also in my consulting/coaching years—had it been written back then. Now today? My best suggestion: order enough copies for your “direct supports” and your board chair.

The “operating system” is organized into four complementary components:
1. Team Unity
2. Compelling Vision
3. Right Strategy
4. Disciplined Execution

I confess. I read Chapter 10 in the “Disciplined Execution” section first. “The Weekly” aligns beautifully with this eNews and my Meetings Bucket—and Lambert gives away the store revealing how he and his leadership team conduct purposeful weekly meetings. They are evangelists for weekly meetings. (Preach it, friends!)

“The Weekly is the backbone of implementing the Next Level Nonprofit system,” Lambert writes. “We created the term ‘The Weekly’ for this critical, 90-minute meeting with your Executive Leadership Team, because it MUST take place on the same day and time every single week. Every leader must be present, without any distractions (no emailing, texting, or doing other work during The Weekly). Always start on time. Always end on time. As the expression goes, ‘Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable!’”

With a nod to Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting wisdom, the Next Level Nonprofit system details how to conduct weekly, quarterly, and yearly meetings and off-sites, plus info on leveraging “The State of the Organization Gatherings.” (You do all this, right?) Here’s their 10-minute video detailing the agenda for the 90-minute weekly meeting:

View this 10-minute video on “How to Run the Weekly” and learn how key team members describe each segment (and the time allotted): Highs & Lows, Focus Time, Scoreboard Review, The W3s (What, Who, When), Quarterly Priorities, Opportunities/Next Steps, and Wrap-Up.

Lambert suggests you use the final five minutes of your 90-minute weekly meeting to summarize three things:
• Recap the W3s (What, Who, When)
• What info needs to leave the room?
• How did we do as a team today?

That last question reminded me of the short feedback exercise I learned from a client a few years back, “Five-Finger Feedback.” See Tool #4 in ECFA Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance: Time-Saving Solutions for Your Board.

ORGANIZATIONAL OPERATING SYSTEM. When you read Lambert’s story, you’ll discover that—like many inexperienced CEOs—he couldn’t keep up with the needs and the growth of Life Remodeled, the nonprofit he founded in 2010 in Detroit. He intuitively knew he needed an “organizational operating system”—but one designed for nonprofits. Thus—Next Level Nonprofit was born (the book and consulting) with three audiences in mind:
• Nonprofit leaders
• Future nonprofit founders
• Generous givers and raving fans of nonprofits

When other nonprofit leaders asked Lambert about his “secret sauce”—how Life Remodeled had grown from 2010 to overseeing more than $43.5 million invested in Detroit neighborhoods between 2014-2022—he realized there was an opportunity and a responsibility to share the applicable principles of his “operating system.” (View his 2015 TEDx Talk here and a recent interview here.)

This book is so, so encouraging. It will give you hope! With little background for taking on a massive and ongoing project in Detroit, Chris Lambert launched Life Remodeled after serving as a community organizer in Liberia, and pastoring a church in Detroit. He writes, “…at the time, our church had only $8,000 in the bank, fewer than 200 members, and no connections to people of influence.”

Lambert's faith journey is remarkable and he enjoys telling colleagues: “I intentionally founded Life Remodeled as a non-religious organization; however, as a person of deep faith, my first response is usually to give all the credit to God. When this response is met with eye rolls or follow-up questions, I share about our ‘no-so-secret sauce.’” (He then talks about their organizational operating system—specifically designed for a nonprofit.)

I urge you to buy at least five copies of this book—to go deeper on:
• Why Lambert uses a “3 strikes” approach with team members. (And speaking of strikes, Go Dodgers!)
• Why many 360 review attempts fail miserably (Hint: lack of humility at the senior team level).
• The 38 questions on the Annual 360 CEO Review! (Warning! Will your CEO dare share this with your board and staff?)
• “For Coaches and Direct Supports, I stand by the principle of praising publicly and critiquing privately. The only exception to this rule are the CEO and COO.” Read why he urges all team members to give him “constructive criticism on the spot”—even when others are in the room. (I warned you, right?!)
• (Did I mention he gives away the store?) See pages 88-89 for a sample job description for their Chief Development Officer.
• Core Value Trophy. Read how Lambert keeps core values top-of-mind with quarterly awards to team members, nominated by the senior team, demonstrating—with a compelling story—how that team member exhibited the core value.
• Book-of-the-Quarter. Imagine—a team that values reading and listening to that quarter’s assigned book. They do this! (Some awards include $50 Amazon gift cards.)
• Ideal Balance of Affirmation and Challenge. See the 2x2 on page 101: High and Low Affirmation and High and Low Challenge. The “high/high” is labeled, “Thriving Culture.” But maybe…your people are in the “Stressed Culture” quadrant?
• Hoopla! Bucket. I thought I had already included all the good ideas in my Hoopla! Bucket. I was wrong! Lambert lists six fabulous ideas in the section, “Trust-Building Activities.” My new favorite: “The Book About Me.”

“You are supernaturally informed
that you’re going to die in the next 24 hours, and you’re given the opportunity to come up with the title of a book that will be written about your life. What do you want the title of this book to be, and how do you want the Amazon description to read?”

ONE OR TWO PAGES?
• 2-Page Strategy Document. David Schmidt, my consultant friend, mentored me on the power of a one-page strategic plan placement. Chris Lambert prefers two pages and I’ll allow that (as if he needs my ok!). See Chapter 8, for his page one, “Where Are We Going?” and view his strategy document here, including his page two, “How Do We Get There?”

What else do I love about this book? The alignment. Next Level Nonprofit aligns beautifully with the business literature and gurus—but also adapts that wisdom to the in-the-trenches messy world of nonprofits. You’ll appreciate numerous references to Jim Collins, SMART Goals, the priority of execution, Lencioni’s work, organizational charts, Scaling Up, and The Power of Moments.

Listen to the final chapter, “Conclusion” (3 minutes, 44 seconds), on Libro. And remember—I warned you!

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for Next Level Nonprofit: Build A Dream Team + Increase Lasting Impact, by Chris Lambert. Listen on Libro (4 hours, 9 minutes). And thanks to the author for sending me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

One of the 20 questions in the Next Level Nonprofit assessment includes three sub-questions. Rank each on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 is high): “If I asked everyone in our organization these three simple questions, I would receive nearly the same responses from each team member.”
#1. What does our organization do?
#2. Why do we do it?
#3. How do we do it?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books
Part 17: “Nonprofit” Is a Tax Designation, Not a Management Philosophy!

Book #95 of 100: Managing Transitions

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #95 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Managing Transitions:
Making the Most of Change
by William Bridges

Books #92 through #96 spotlight five helpful books for nonprofit CEOs, senior staff, and board members. When this book was first published in 1991, it was recognized as the definitive guide to dealing with change. Now one million books sold later, it still holds that position. If it’s not in your organization’s resource library, it should be.
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon.
• Listen on Libro (6 hours, 15 minutes)
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

William Bridges identifies three critical steps in managing transitions. Step 2: Enter the neutral zone (the no man’s land between the old reality and the new). Some will abort in this zone, not wanting the pain. But it’s also the place where creativity, renewal and development will often occur. “The neutral zone is thus a dangerous and opportune place, and it is the very core of the transition process.”

Song #36 of 45: “Deacon Blues”

Listen to “Deacon Blues,” by Steely Dan, Song #36 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Learn how guest blogger Skye Matlock discovered the song while listening to Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”

Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Really! Pearson Did a Podcast (kinda)!

This is crazy! I fed my review of Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future, into Google’s new “podcaster maker” (my term)—and this 10-minute podcast popped out. Must-listen! (Or must-read!) And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

09:50 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: Chris Lambert, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Life Remodeled, Next Level Nonprofit

October 10, 2024

4 Leadership Books and 48 Niche Chapters

Issue No. 624 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting hopes to inspire you to mentor your team members with niche chapters from four leadership books. Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Restoring Our Sanity Online.

Really! The bylaws of Your Weekly Staff Meeting require us to feature this cartoon at least once a year.

4 Books & 48 Niche Chapters!

NEW PODCAST FEATURE! To listen to an AI-generated podcast summarizing this issue of Your Weekly Staff Meeting enews, click here. This is crazy! I created this 12-minute podcast using the new free tool from Google, NotebookLM. I just cut and pasted the content (below) into NotebookLM and in about five minutes this "chatty" podcast between two people bounced out! Read the blog first and then compare my content to the conversation between the two podcasts hosts. (Note: I intentionally did not include my name or the name of this blog.) For more, read the WSJ article about NotebookLM.

Shocker! You don’t need to read every chapter of every book! Instead, mentor your team members with niche books and leverage their strengths with thoughtfully selected chapters.

The late Zig Ziglar wrote, “People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.” Ditto—leadership books! As Dick Daniels urges, “Recalibrate your calling every day.” Or…as then 99-year-old Charlie Munger (1924-2023) told the WSJ last year, “I don’t know how to get smart without reading a lot.”

Your leadership and management challenges never plateau. The obstacles and thorny issues change and grow constantly. And learning leadership is not a one-and-done seminar. The leadership book you read last year may not address those keep-you-up-all-night issues that crowded your inbox yesterday.

So here you go—4 leadership books with niche chapters for what may be coming around the bend. Delegate your reading to your direct reports. Ask them to report on a “niche chapter” relevant to their biggest challenges this quarter.

#1. The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out, by Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan (Senior Partners at McKinsey & Company, Sept. 10, 2024). Order from Amazon. Listen on Libro (7 hours, 51 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending a review copy.

Best Niche Chapter: “Everyone Keeps Things From the Boss.” Using in-the-trenches examples from McKinsey’s Bower Forum, the authors mention a CEO who “complained that the people in his organization no longer told him what was really going on. Since he became the boss, he no longer had any peers, and those frank conversations he used to have with his colleagues disappeared. He felt lost and worried that some bad news would eventually blindside him.”

To “Encourage Truth Telling,” the authors give very specific and practical suggestions including how to “foster dissent by actively seeking it.” They mention the classic example from 2006 when Alan Mulally became Ford’s new CEO. He introduced a weekly meeting with red/yellow/green scorecards. In the first meeting, 16 execs reported that every project was green! “Incredulous, Mulally challenged the executives, asking how all the projects could be going well if the company was losing money” (more than $17 billion!). What happened? View “Alan Mulally: The Ford Traffic Light” (7 minutes).

The authors pack wisdom and wit into this chapter. “After one executive retired, she said the best thing about retirement was she no longer had to walk down the halls and when someone said good morning have to think about what they really meant.” LOL!

Bonus Niche Chapter: “Practice Making Mistakes.” What team member needs to read Chapter 11 on adopting fearless learning? “Teams that avoid failure miss the point, because people learn as much, if not more, from mistakes as from successes.” (Amen!)

Admiral William H. McRaven (U.S. Navy Retired), author of Make Your Bed, is mentioned in this chapter, as is the “Plan B” culture of Navy Seals. Example: the raid on Osama bin Ladin’s compound—and why you sometimes need to “fall out of love with the primary plan and shift to a backup plan or develop a new one.”

#2. Leading People from the Middle: The Universal Mission of Heart and Mind, by William P. Robinson (Jan. 20, 2010). Order from Amazon. And thanks to Jim Canning for recommending this book.

Best Niche Chapter: “Driven and Rhythmic Leadership.” (Oh, my. This assignment I gave myself is hard work! There are way too many “best niche chapters” in Bill Robinson’s powerful book.) Chapter 7 begins, “Leading is hard work—a lot harder than just being in charge.” I’ve never read such a compelling chapter on the leader’s rhythm.

The author was the president of Whitworth University (1993 to 2010) and concludes his seven-page chapter with this: “I’m not all that sappy, but once in a while the smallest thing will just overwhelm me.” He adds, “Sometimes I wonder if God made me for the singular purpose of hanging around with collegians. I don’t know, but here’s what I do know beyond any doubt: our students have made me a better leader than I was every meant to be.”

Bonus! Honest—the preface and introduction are meaty. Learn why this 2010 update of his 2000 book is both shorter and better. He defines “leading from the middle” and uses a memorable three-point outline: “Can’t, Can, Must.” He writes, “First, you can’t lead the way I lead. You wouldn’t want to and the people you lead wouldn’t want you to either. The best leaders lead from their strengths.”

#3. Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion, by Anne Chow (Sept. 10, 2024). Order from Amazon. Listen on Libro (7 hours, 56 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending a review copy.

Best Niche Chapter: Check out the three “Bigger Conversations."
• Gen. Stanley McChrystal: “If You Want to Win”
• Arianna Huffington: “Taking a Whole-Human Approach to Well-Being”
• Adam Grant: “If You’re Not Inclusive, You’re Not a Leader”

With endorsements from Stephen M. R. Covey and Liz Wiseman, this book has niche chapters on “Beyond the Daily Grind,” “Deliver Results and Impact,” and “Dimensionality: Expand Your Understanding of People.”

In the author’s conversation with Gen. McChrystal, author of Leaders: Myth and Reality and Team of Teams, McChrystal said that, as a major, he had three different U.S. Army bosses in three years. Boss #1: fairly inclusive. Boss #2: more elitist. When the “cool guys” were in the room, McChrystal was not invited. Boss #3: “incredibly inclusive.” McChrystal notes that those three years were a “…whipsaw effect, but it was a great way to remind me how someone in my role feels when it’s good and when it’s not good. That variable changed my outlook on the job completely.”

#4. Attentive Church Leadership: Listening and Leading in a World We've Never Known, by Kevin G. Ford and Jim Singleton (Foreword by Ed Stetzer, April 2, 2024). Order from Amazon. Listen on Libro (10 hours, 6 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending a review copy.

Best Niche Chapter: “How Do We Create Community in a Narcissistic World?” If the co-pastors of our home church asked me to recommend one chapter from this important book—I’d urge them to read the whole book, but affirm that they are doing many things well, especially: 1) creating community, and 2) serving with humility. Yet this reminder:

The authors quote Tom Nelson, author of The Flourishing Pastor. “The crowd need not be big nor the stage prominent for the celebrity pastor to emerge. Celebrity is not necessarily tied to the size of the audience, but rather the size of the ego to be stroked.” Ford and Singleton add, “An inflated ego is not only found in megachurch contexts; it can reside in any human heart.” (See also The Leader’s Palette and Let Us Prey.)

By the way, my “Page 25 Rule-of-Thumb” played out again. Jim Singleton describes on page 25 the insurmountable barrier that faced Whitworth University in 1991-1992. Then he relates how the “identify of Whitworth was revived” when Bill Robinson arrived (see Book #2 above).

4 BOOKS…and 48 niche chapters. Watch for additional reviews of these four books and more of my favorite niche chapters.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) What’s the most helpful leadership or management book you’ve ever read? Why?
2) What are two or three of your “Reading 101 Principles” for getting the most out of a book?
3) Name a “niche chapter” you have recently recommended to someone. Why?

Note: These questions are included in “The Book Bucket” chapter of Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit.

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books
Part 17: “Nonprofit” Is a Tax Designation, Not a Management Philosophy!

Book #94 of 100: Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom (2nd Edition)

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #94 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Mastering the Management Buckets:
20 Critical Competencies
for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
by John Pearson

Books #92 through #96 spotlight five helpful books for nonprofit CEOs, senior staff, and board members. Shocker! You don’t need to read every chapter of every book! Instead, mentor your team members with niche books and leverage their strengths with thoughtfully selected chapters.
• Read reviews from others here and here.
• Order from Amazon.
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

OK, I’ll confess again to hyping one of my books—but please keep reading. How would you coach a team member on the following?
• A rookie manager needs to learn the importance of affirming team members.
• A senior leader has a faulty “sequential” view of priorities (God first, family second, church third, career fourth).
• Due to continued workplace dysfunction, trust has been broken in the finance department.
• A board member has workaholic tendencies and an imbalanced life.
• A department head is a “reader,” but her direct reports are all “listeners.”

Read the core competency in Chapter 5,“The Book Bucket,” and then explore how to mentor team members with niche books and niche chapters. (You do have a massive management library and purposeful book culture, right?)

See also: Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates and Tips from John Pearson, with commentary by Jason Pearson (2nd Edition, 2018) - Order from Amazon.

Song #35 of 45: "Love's in Need of Love Today"

Listen to "Love's in Need of Love Today," by Stevie Wonder, Song #35 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read why Stevie Wonder said, "I think most songwriters are inspired by an inner voice and spirit. God gave me this gift, and this particular song was a message I was supposed to deliver.”

Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

12 Niche Chapters on Influence

Good luck landing on your favorite niche chapter in this book. It's impossible. Bill Butterworth delivers 12 nominees on the theme of "The Secret Sauce for Greater Influential Effectiveness." Perfect topics for your next 12 weekly staff meetings. Read my review. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

Join John Pearson on Oct. 18, 2024
The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board
While space remains, The Barnabas Group/Orange County invites nonprofit CEOs and board members to their board governance seminar, led by John Pearson, Oct. 18, 2024 (Friday 7:30 - 11:30 a.m.) in Irvine, Calif. The complimentary seminar includes a continental breakfast and the 100-page workbook, The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board (3rd Edition): How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance. More info here.

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Tags: church leadership, John Pearson's Buckets Blog, lead bigger, leadership, leading people from the middle, the journey of leadership

October 5, 2024

Restoring Our Sanity Online: A Revolutionary Social Framework

Issue No. 623 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting suggests a funny and scary book—just in time for Halloween. “The Woz” says it’s a must-read. Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Faith for the Curious. BONUS! Read Melinda Schmidt’s color commentary on the song, “Walk This Way,” by Aerosmith.

Commenting on “Big Tech’s Overarching Dark Side,” Mark Weinstein writes in Restoring Our Sanity Online, “…Big Tech has a dark side that would make Darth Vader blush.”

Big Tech’s Dark Side

Leaders and readers who know me will immediately recognize that, by reviewing this book, I’m well beyond my pay grade. Forgive (or skip) my feeble commentary—but please read this book:

Restoring Our Sanity Online:
A Revolutionary Social Framework
by Mark Weinstein (Sept. 24, 2024)

Tech entrepreneur Mark Weinstein makes a fascinating comparison (he calls them “uncanny parallels”) between Big Ag, Big Energy, and Big Tech. We need them—but he warns: “…Big Tech has a dark side that would make Darth Vader blush.”

I always look for the meat and potatoes of a book on page 25—and the author did not disappoint. On page 24, he whacks Meta noting that “The Wall Street Journal revealed an internal Meta report showing that 64% of users who joined an extremist group on Facebook did so because Facebook’s algorithms recommend it to them.” His opinion: “That’s crazy.”

On page 25, the author documents the dark sides of Big Energy, Big Tech, and Big Agriculture. Amidst the doom and gloom, however, Mark Weinstein, will still make you laugh-out-loud. Noting that the Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) were fined $50 million in 2016 “due to allegations it conspired to limit competition and manipulate prices,” the DFA willingly paid the fine because “net sales that year were $13.5 billion.” He chuckles, “…you won’t see DFA members crying over spilled milk.”

Weinstein is fearless in documenting the online insanity today—but he doesn’t stop there. He proposes a new approach—a creative solution—“Restoration Networking” and “Restoration Networks.” And attention all skeptics: “In the wake of Sam Bankman-Fried and his misappropriation of ‘Effective Altruism,’ we are correct to be wary of catchy buzzwords.”

Here's why I kept reading and reflecting on Mark Weinstein’s big idea:

#1. THE WOZ. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, calls this a “must-read.” (I agree.)

#2. SHORT-AND-SWEET. While the book is 256 pages, the short-and-sweet 21 chapters are only 148 pages. (One chapter is just two pages.) That’s doable—and someone on your team could read it this week and report on it next week at your weekly staff meeting. Teasers:
• Chapter 4: “Web3 Is Here: What the Heck Is It?”
• Chapter 6: “Meet Your New Boss, Same as the Old Boss”
• Chapter 12: “User ID Verification: Friend or Foe?”
• Chapter 15: “Is AI the High-Tech Tattletale in Your Social Experience?”
• Chapter 18: “Facts, Opinions, Lies: Who Decides?”
• Chapter 20: “Welcome to Web4: The Restoration of Sanity”

#3. BOTS & TROLLS. There are four robust appendices including “Advice to Legislators” (more on that below) and the author’s “Seven-Point Prescription to Vanquish Bots and Trolls.”

#4. CLIFF NOTES-SAVVY. The writing is non-technical (“Let me give you the quick-and-dirty Cliff Notes”). The warnings are scary-important. Chapter 13 (ironic!), “Saving Our Kids from the Abyss,” is must-must-reading. Weinstein’s “commonsense punch list” features 12 bullet points on “How Parents Can Protect Their Kids Right Now.” Spoiler alert: adults need to “set a good example.”

#5. LOL! The humor and one-liners will keep you laughing as you reflect on the author’s concept for a “revolutionary social framework.” Examples:
• On current policymakers’ approach to privacy and anonymity, he pushes back: “Can you say ‘Adios, encryption, hello, Big Brother’?”
• On Big Ag’s animal abuse in factory farms: “Holy cow!” And on Big Energy hiring the same researchers and consultants that Big Tobacco used to deceive the public on the dangers of smoking: “Holy smokes!”
• The history of what he calls Web1, Web2, and Web3 (Web4 is coming) is fascinating. Weinstein notes an 1890 Harvard Law Review article on the right to privacy and adds: “Just making sure this sinks in: 130+ years ago, photos on the fly and posts (in newspapers) were already giving people the creeps.”

#6. WHO SHOULD READ THIS? Weinstein recommends,“This book is for all of the curious [there’s that word “curious” again] and uninitiated, to casual and heavy users of social media, to parents and teachers, to techies and entrepreneurs, to investors and elected officials.” He adds, “Everyone is affected by Big Tech, and everyone is part of the solution.”

#7. AUTHOR'S STREET CRED. With an avalanche of techie books, podcasts, bots, trolls, social media, and (dare I say) book reviews—why should you read or listen to Restoring Our Sanity Online, and can you trust the author?
• The book is also endorsed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web.
• Mark Weinstein’s informative 2020 TED Talk, “The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism,” has over 200,000 views (just 9 minutes).
• The author is frequently featured in the national media, including this WSJ article announcing he had changed his views on Facebook being a monopoly.
• Learn more at the author’s website.

#8. SECTION 230. Did I mention these tech topics are way above my pay grade? Yet, I’ve noticed an increase in conversations about Section 230 (the U.S. Communications Decency Act, per 1996 legislation). I’m trying to educate myself. Here’s Weinstein in the WSJ in 2021 and one of my favorite columnists, Andy Kessler, in the WSJ on Sept. 22, 2024. What’s your opinion?

#9. KA-POW! While Weinstein’s vision for “Restoration Networks” is lofty—he blends those aspirations with pragmatism. LOL! On protecting kids, “Slapping warning labels on social media platforms without significant protective actions is akin to putting icing on an exploding cake.” (I was tempted to ask AI to create that scene for my graphic!)

So…when trick-or-treaters arrive at your door on Oct. 31 for Halloween, will you give them Snickers bars (my favorite!)—or a copy of George Orwell's 1984 (written in 1949!). Or…will you wear your Darth Vader costume and treat those 13-year-old TikTok influencers to a one-pager with all your personal information? (Or…do those kids already have your private info?)

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for Restoring Our Sanity Online: A Revolutionary Social Framework, by Mark Weinstein. And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) As you’re updating your “Rolling 3-Year Strategic Plan Placemat” (see Tool #14 in ECFA Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance), have any of your assumptions about social media changed? (Read more about assumptions.) Will Facebook, TikTok, and other options remain viable in 2025, 2026, or 2027? Will our customers continue to use social media? Who should read Restoring Our Sanity Online this week?

2) Oh, my! How do we keep up with the changing tech world? Richard Foster said, “If you are too busy to read, you are too busy.” Delegate your reading and check out these recent book reviews:
• Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI (View the Zoom review with Dr. John Reynolds, David Schmidt, and John Pearson)
• Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet (read my review)
• Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future (read my review)
• Church IT: Using Information Technology for the Mission of the Church (3rd Edition) – Order from Amazon. (Read my review of the second edition.)

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books
Part 17: “Nonprofit” Is a Tax Designation, Not a Management Philosophy!
Book #93 of 100: Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom (2nd Edition)

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #93 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom:
40 Insights for Better Board Meetings (2nd Ed.)
by Dan Busby and John Pearson

Books #92 through #96 spotlight five helpful books for nonprofit CEOs, senior staff, and board members. Would you trust a surgeon who stopped learning? An airline pilot who was not a lifelong learner? How about a board member who stopped learning?
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon.*
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

I confess! Recommending a book I co-authored might seem a tad promotional—but only half-promotional, maybe? Dan Busby (1941-2022) wrote 20 of the 40 lessons in this book, so I can guarantee that at least half of the book (Dan’s half) will serve you well.

Example: Lesson 35, “Is Your Board Color-Blind to Hazardous Conditions? What color is your boardroom flag?” was written by Dan, who notes that he lived near Indianapolis for several years. He writes, “I occasionally stopped by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, also known as the Brickyard, to experience the pre-race time trials.”

Dan notes the racetrack flags and adds, “In every board meeting, there are flags that fly—green, yellow, or red—corresponding to the current atmosphere in the boardroom.” He asks, “How would you rate the sensitivity of your board to observing the colors of flags in the boardroom?” (Another keen observation and question from Dan.) Read Lesson 35 on ECFA’s website and for more insights, read the blog by Danny de Armas.

*Note: The Lessons book is currently unavailable from Amazon, so consider reading More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom.

Song #34 of 45: “Walk This Way"

Listen to “Walk This Way,” by Aerosmith, Song #34 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. And LOL! Read what happened (and didn’t happen!) when guest blogger Melinda Schmidt—way back when—met Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.

Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Documentary Movie!
The Stories of Nashville Song Writers

“It All Begins with a Song: The Story of the Nashville Songwriter” is a feel-good documentary with great country music—and the stories behind more than 50 Nashville songwriters. It’s fast-moving, but slows down enough so you’ll enjoy the music. Read my short review. And for more book and movie reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

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Tags: John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Mark Weinstein, Restoring Our Sanity Online, social framework

September 28, 2024

Faith for the Curious

Issue No. 622 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting predicts that the hot-off-the-press book, Faith for the Curious, will be a Very. Important. Book. Curious? Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Dynamic Drive: The Purpose-Fueled Formula for Sustainable Success. BONUS! Read Scott Anderson’s color commentary on the song, “Rock the Boat,” by The Hues Corporation.

Mark Matlock, author of the new book, Faith for the Curious, writes, “The institutional church has needed an update: the pandemic offered an opportunity to have a massive garage sale."

Massive Garage Sale Needed at Your Church?

Mark Matlock doesn’t hold back! Whew! He writes, “COVID-19 gave the church an opportunity that we likely haven’t fully leaned into. I conducted hundreds of hours of webinars during the pandemic, many with concerned church leaders wanting to know when we would get ‘back to normal.’ I implored leaders to take advantage of the moment.”

He adds, “The institutional church has needed an update: the pandemic offered an opportunity to have a massive garage sale. Instead of ‘getting back to normal,’ I argued that this was a chance to create a much-needed new normal—one better equipped to meet the challenges of today.” This is a must-read:

Faith for the Curious:
How an Era of Spiritual Openness Shapes the Way We Live and Help Others Follow Jesus
by Mark Matlock (Sept. 24, 2024)

OLD WINESKINS GAME! Mark Matlock is one creative guy! During the pandemic, he “…facilitated numerous workshops with church and nonprofit leaders, and one of the games we played was ‘keep it, curb it, refresh it.’ Never before has the church had an opportunity to ‘curb’ so many relics we have accumulated over time.”

“Enough with putting new wine into old wineskins. Let’s start thinking about what new things God is interested in doing through us.”

You could just stop reading—right here—and facilitate an entire day with your team using the Mark Matlock exercise on your products, programs, and services:
• KEEP IT!
• CURB IT!
• REFRESH IT!

(Or, if you prefer a few more instructions, try the “Stars, Hearts, Money Tree, and Stop Sign” exercise from the book, Nonprofit Sustainability. See the mini-review below.)

But back to the big idea of Faith for the Curious. Matlock has two aims for his book:
1) “The first is to help us understand who the Spiritually Curious are in a deeper way.” He adds, “These people differ from each other in many ways, but curiosity is always a distinguishing factor that draws them together.”
2) “The second goal is to help us make a shift in the way we are personally and collectively practicing Christianity. We have a lot to gain from becoming more curious ourselves, from realizing there may be something we are missing in our own spiritual life that needs tending to, and from embracing the idea that we can’t take people somewhere we haven’t been.”

He adds, “Spiritual curiosity isn’t a fire to be extinguished; it’s a garden to be cultivated.”

How effective are you at communicating across the wide spectrum of spiritual views? Matlock leverages Barna’s research and identifies important segments that your church and your own observations may be missing. One helpful chart, “Supernaturalism x Curiosity” illustrates the “Curiosity” continuum (Low to High) with the “Supernaturalism” continuum (No Belief to Strong Belief), and features these segments: Naturalists, Curious Skeptics, Spiritually Curious, and Practicing Christians. Examples:

The Spiritually Curious: “These are adults who are not part of the Christian church (meaning, they are non-Christians or Nonpracticing Christians), yet they believe there is a real spiritual dimension and show high levels of curiosity.”

The Curious Skeptics: “These non-Christians and Nonpracticing Christians also show high levels of curiosity. When it comes to spirituality, big questions loom; they are uncertain if there is a spiritual dimension, or they believe there is no way to know for sure.”

While reading Faith for the Curious, I sensed that this is a Very. Important. Book. David Kinnaman, CEO of Barna Group, writes in the foreword, “Get this: approximately three-quarters of adults in America say they believe in a higher power, and a majority say they’re interested in exploring spirituality.”

Describing Matlock’s expertise as a “data storyteller,” Kinnaman notes that “Mark authored this book under the Barna brand, which means he included reliable charts, infographics, and statistics, and he unpacks them for those who share our love of a good data story.” (The charts and stats are both eye-opening and soul-opening.)

Kinnaman assures us, “But this isn’t your typical quantitative Barna research book.” So he urges readers and leaders to “…pause for a moment and ask God to meet you where you are in your own faith life: to humbly ask him to soften your heart so it will be open and receptive to what you’re about to experience in the pages that follow here.” (Who writes a foreword—with humility—and asks you to pray before reading the book? Who does that? Oh, my.)

Kinnaman, by the way, is the coauthor with Matlock, of Faith for Exiles: 5 Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon (read my review). That book provided “hopeful news and handrails to help guide our own kids and other young adults on how to cultivate a resilient faith.” Matlock builds on that research and Faith for the Curious focuses on “this current cultural moment.” Kinnaman writes: “Massive receptivity to the possibility of God exists today.” He adds, “We’re living in a cultural moment full of enormous evangelistic opportunities.”

I can’t possibly showcase the depth, width, and wisdom of Faith for the Curious in one review. I hope you’ll read it—or at least delegate your reading to someone on your team. More teasers:

INSIGHTFUL. Matlock’s commentary on “post-Christian culture” is so, so helpful as he unpacks “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans,” by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). Lewis, author of more than 30 books including The Screwtape Letters, wrote that “there are three kinds of people in the world.” Lewis described them: “(1) Those who are sick and don’t know it (the post-Christians). (2) Those who are sick and know it (Pagans). (3) Those who have found the cure.”

JOY. Matlock: “To journey with a Curious Skeptic is one of the greatest joys we can have as a believer. This unique type of skeptic can often help us deepen our own faith, because we find we have to trust Jesus as we help them do the same.”

LESSONS LEARNED. Matlock is pretty transparent in his final chapter, “Lessons Learned.” Here are two of his six lessons:
• “God is at work in places where I don’t think to look.”
• “There are fewer people hostile to Christianity than I thought.”

Did I mention? This is a Very. Important. Book. Now...do you need a garage sale at your church or organization? Keep it? Curb it? Refresh it?

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for Faith for the Curious: How an Era of Spiritual Openness Shapes the Way We Live and Help Others Follow Jesus, by Mark Matlock. Listen on Libro (5 hours, 22 minutes).

GENEROUS! Wes Taber, Global Ambassador for Life in Messiah, emailed me last week. He had just forwarded Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews to a team member—with a very generous offer. Wes said he would cover the cost of any book recommended in my eNews—if that staff member, or any other “LIFEr,” would commit to two requirements:
1) Read the book.
2) “Report back…with two things they found helpful and one thing they are putting into practice immediately.”
That’s both brilliant and generous! Wes Taber also noted that the book reviews in Your Weekly Staff Meeting “are more than worth the cost of subscribing (it’s free!).” (Thanks, Wes! LOL!)

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Have you reflected deeply on “curiosity” in our culture? Molly Fletcher writes an entire chapter on “curiosity” in her book, Dynamic Drive (read my review). I’m also curious—wondering how much fun it would be to host Mark Matlock and Mark Ellis for dinner at the San Clemente Pier! (I explain my dinner offer in my review of the book by Mark Ellis, The House at Channing and Moonsail. Ellis describes how a friend piqued his curiosity to read a book by Josh McDowell.)

2) In the Customer Bucket, we highlight “The Engel Scale,” named by an appreciative grad student who studied under Prof. Jim Engel. (Read What's Gone Wrong With the Harvest? by James F. Engel and Wilbert Norton.) The scale begins with a -8 (a person with an awareness of a supreme being, but no effective knowledge of the gospel). It moves down to a -1 (repentance and faith in Christ), and then to a +1, +2, +3, +4, +5 and beyond (demonstrating growth in being a Christ-follower). QUESTION: How are we communicating to the spectrum of spiritual views? See Matlock’s chart contrasting “Curiosity” with “Supernaturalism” and these segments: Naturalists, Curious Skeptics, Spiritually Curious, and Practicing Christians.

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books
Part 17: “Nonprofit” Is a Tax Designation, Not a Management Philosophy!
Book #92 of 100: Nonprofit Sustainability

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #92 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Nonprofit Sustainability:
Making Strategic Decisions for Financial Viability
by Jeanne Bell, Jan Masaoka, and Steve Zimmerman

Books #92 through #96 spotlight five helpful books for nonprofit CEOs, senior staff, and board members. Nonprofit Sustainability’s “Dual Bottom Line” matrix map addresses mission impact and financial sustainability—with four easy-to-remember icons.
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Nonprofit Sustainability
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

Use the matrix in the book and plot your products, programs, and services in the appropriate quadrant:
• Stars: High Mission Impact, High Profitability
• Hearts: High Mission Impact, Low Profitability
• Money Tree: Low Mission Impact, High Profitability
• Stop Sign: Low Mission Impact, Low Profitability
Gut check! What are you going to do this month about those programs in the “Stop Sign” category?

For more, read “Focus on Mission Impact and Sustainability. The ‘dual bottom line’ equips boards to address dead horses and sacred cows (or goats).” Lesson 23 is featured in the book, Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom: 40 Insights for Better Board Meetings (2nd Edition), by Dan Busby and John Pearson. Order from Amazon. Read the blog by Steve Moore. Read the lesson on ECFA’s website.

Song #33 of 45: “Rock the Boat”

Listen to "Rock the Boat,” by The Hues Corporation, Song #33 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Learn why the song was so "memorable" to a 16-year-old Scott Anderson, “The Disco Dishwasher!”

Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

“God Was Not on My Radar”

While reading Faith for the Curious, by Mark Matlock (see above), I also read a gutsy and transparent autobiographical look-in-the-mirror, The House at Channing and Moonsail, by Mark Ellis. I’d like to host both Marks for dinner at the San Clemente Pier sometime. The conversation would be fascinating. (Read both books and join us!) And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

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Tags: evangelism, Faith for the Curious, Jesus, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Mark Matlock, spiritual openness, spiritual skeptics

September 20, 2024

Dynamic Drive: The Purpose-Fueled Formula for Sustainable Success

Issue No. 621 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting spotlights seven keys to personal growth: “Mindset, Energy, Discipline, Curiosity, Resilience, Connection, and Confidence.” (What are your keys?) Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of The Culturally Conscious Board. BONUS! Read Gary Rea’s color commentary on "Ramblin' Man."

That’s right: “Wow!” That’s what currently unmotivated team members, colleagues, and family members will tell you after they’ve read Dynamic Drive and applied it to their lives. “Wow!”

Energizers, Drainers, and Neutrals!

When leadership and motivational guru John Maxwell recommends a book—it gets my attention. (Can you imagine the endorsement requests he receives?) And speaking of recommendations, I often mention Maxwell’s book, Leadership Gold, which he postponed writing until he was 60. My favorite chapter: “The Secret to a Good Meeting Is the Meeting Before the Meeting” (just $1.99 on Kindle!).

John Maxwell inspired me to read this new book:

Dynamic Drive:
The Purpose-Fueled Formula for Sustainable Success
by Molly Fletcher (Sept. 3, 2024)

For almost 20 years, the author was a sports agent—representing over 300 of the biggest names in sports. Also known as “the female Jerry McGuire,” Molly Fletcher’s TED Talk has more than a million views. She has a podcast, and this new book is just one of many she’s written. (So is her book a “Ho hum…blah, blah, blah?” Or…is it “Oh, my!”)

Oh, My! and Wow! Molly Fletcher hooked me by page 22 with her “What’s Important?” four-column chart and the story of “Dave, the 6-foot-2-inch guy with biceps the size of my thighs.” Along with 25 other leaders in the room, Dave had just completed the author’s exercise, “The Alignment Audit.”

Dave started to cry and Fletcher “quietly walked over and handed him some Kleenex.” She writes, “This wasn’t uncommon at all. Dave clearly saw the significant misalignment with what he holds most dear in his life and how much time and energy he gives to it.” (My guarantee: read pages 21 to 25 first and you’ll read the whole book.)

Fletcher recommends you “Use Failure as Fuel.” Fast forward to Chapter 13, “The Work Is Never Done” and you’ll appreciate the wisdom—and summary chart—of the author’s seven keys: “Mindset, Energy, Discipline, Curiosity, Resilience, Connection, and Confidence.” (Do I get curiosity points for reading the “curiosity” chapter first?)

The author warns, “Complacency can sneak up on you, so it’s essential to recognize the signs so you can take steps to address it and continue growing. Ask yourself these [seven] questions to assess and adjust, so that when you lose your spark—and you will—you know what to do.” The “curiosity” example:
• IF YOU SAY…“I know what I need to know.”
• Then to be more curious, GO AND… “Cold call people who are where you want to be and ask them questions.”

And oh, my—I’m already trying to avoid the author’s “bad” questions! Example:
• BAD QUESTION: “Who is your ideal client?”
• GOOD QUESTION: “I saw you just started working with Target and CVS—congrats; what is it about those clients that make them ideal for you?”

She urges readers to do their homework—before asking questions. “There are stupid questions,” she reminds us. “You can lose people really fast when you’re lazy and unprepared. Demonstrate a level of knowledge, of preparation, then ask questions.”

Also in the “curiosity” chapter—you’ll learn how Fletcher positioned John Smoltz, the longtime Atlanta Braves pitcher, for a sports broadcasting career. To give him some “reps with a mic,” she lined up video interviews with five rookies—one at a time. Learn why the interviews were conducted as far away from the elevator as possible. (Brilliant!)

STOP FOR A MINUTE! Who in your circle has become complacent? Who is lacking in motivation? Who has stopped growing? A team member? A son or daughter? A grandchild? A board member? A leader at your church or someone in your small group? You? (Better order two copies!)

View this CBS Mornings interview with Molly Fletcher (4.5 minutes).

A leader told me last week he doesn’t read the books I recommend—he just reads my reviews. Trust me—you need the whole book on this one. The meat and potatoes are bountiful. Here’s a taste of “The Seven Keys to Unlock Your Dynamic Drive.”

Key #1: MINDSET. “A mindset is like software: it runs on a script.” Brilliant: How a young Molly Fletcher convinced a pizza joint to give her 15 free pizzas every month!

Key #2: ENERGY. “Choose where your energy goes, before the world chooses for you.” Bonus! Click here to download the 19-page guide (PDF), “Auditing Your Energy.”
• Maximize Your Energizers
• Eliminate or Manage Your Drainers
• Be More Efficient with Your Neutrals
(Note: See also Patrick Lencioni’s book and assessment, The 6 Types of Working Genius.)

Key #3: DISCIPLINE. “Most people overestimate talent and underestimate discipline.” Read what a young Tom Brady wrote on his whiteboard and how a former Navy Seal leverages an “Accountability Mirror.” Plus this: “Discipline eats motivation for breakfast.”

Key #4: CURIOSITY. Molly Fletcher has logged more than 1,000 speaking engagements—and her 30-minute “pre-call” to every keynote organizer is pure genius! She asks questions like:
• “What are the three behavior changes you want to see from the people in the room? In other words, if we connect again in six months, what will people be doing differently?” (Pastors: try this!)
• “What are they worried about? Excited about?”

Key #5: RESILIENCE. “The difference between good and great is the ability to recover from adversity faster.”

Key #6: CONNECTION. Two of five “no” reminders: “Say no to attending a client dinner to say yes to attending your kid’s game that night.” And, “Say no to picking up your phone in a meeting so you can say yes to being fully present.” (See also “10 Best Practices for Having Tough Conversations.”)

Key #7: CONFIDENCE. Where do you spend your time? Comfort Zone? Stretch Zone? Panic or Stress Zone? Where is the ideal place for your growth? Fletcher says that the comfort zone has no surprises. “…there’s very little reflection or learning in the comfort zone, so you remain unchallenged. As a result, you can become unmotivated, complacent, and disengaged. Confidence doesn’t come from your comfort zone.”

Wow! In the chapter, “Deep Purpose,” you will read the story—and the perfect weekly staff meeting question—about the proverbial plank between two New York City high-rise buildings. There’s a 20 percent chance you’d die if you tried to walk the plank. Would you do it for $1 million? $3 million? $5 million? Read what prompts every person to volunteer for the task! (You’ll borrow this story—guaranteed!)

Who, in your circle of influence, needs to read or listen to this book?

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for Dynamic Drive: The Purpose-Fueled Formula for Sustainable Success, by Molly Fletcher. Listen on Libro (9 hours, 5 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

BONUS! Listen to the podcast, “Game Changers with Molly Fletcher,” and her interview with John Maxwell on “The One Question Every Leader Should Ask.” (Don’t skip their conversation about “curiosity.”)

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Molly Fletcher writes, “Dynamic Drive is a practice, a muscle that can be strengthened through regular engagement with the Seven Keys…in this book.” She adds, “It’s not about perfect. Dynamic Drive means you’ve never arrived. You’re constantly seeking to improve.” And this: “It’s not about going from point A to point B. It’s about who you become along the way.” Question: Are you practicing? How are your muscles? Says who?

2) David Novak, author of How Leaders Learn, also recommends you read Dynamic Drive, by Molly Fletcher. (Read my review of Novak’s book to learn how to “master the habits of the world’s most successful people.”) Question: How, when, and where are you investing your time this month—on your lifelong journey of improvement? (Read Fletcher’s chapter, “The Complacency Epidemic”—and why “achievement often leads to complacency.” Yikes!)

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 16: Keys to Memorable Speaking and Writing
Book #91 of 100: Gilead

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #91 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson

Books #87 through #91 spotlight five memorable books to enrich your speaking and writing competencies. Why read Gilead? It’s a masterpiece of writing, words, and ideas. It will inspire your vision for excellence. It’s not a leadership or management book, but it is. This is a five-star recommendation.
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Gilead
• Listen on Libro (8 hours, 53 minutes)
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

Like a Rembrandt or a Gauguin, or an exquisite gourmet dinner, you will savor the writing, the language, the nuances, and the hidden humor in this masterpiece novel, Gilead. Marilynne Robinson’s treasure was highly acclaimed by critics and received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. And…Oprah’s Book Club Pick.

Warning. You’ll also weep as you journey with John Ames, the 76-year-old still-in-the-pulpit Congregational minister in Gilead, Iowa. It’s 1956 and Pastor Ames is journaling a life letter to his seven-year-old son, an extraordinary blessing from his second and younger wife.

Warning #2. It will slow you down. Way down. Gilead will prick your emotions, then trigger snickers that balloon to belly laughs.

Song #32 of 45: “Ramblin’ Man”

Listen to "Ramblin' Man,” by The Allman Brothers, Song #32 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Learn why this song was #1 on guest blogger Gary Rea’s playlist—when this singer/songwriter and worship pastor ran the beach trails overlooking the Pacific Ocean in San Clemente, Calif.

Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Photo: Gaither Vocal Band sings “Little is Much When God is in It” (YouTube screenshot, courtesy of God Reports.)

“I have never experienced anything like that then or since.”

One hundred years ago in 1924, Kittie Suffield, wrote a song, “Little Is Much When God Is in It.” My next-door neighbor, Pastor “Mac” met Kittie in 1957—and recently he told me “the rest of the story.” You’re not gonna believe it! And for more book, song, and movie reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

Join John Pearson on Oct. 18, 2024
The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid with Your Nonprofit Board
While space remains, The Barnabas Group/Orange County invites nonprofit CEOs and board members to their board governance seminar, led by John Pearson, Oct. 18, 2024 (Friday 7:30 - 11:30 a.m.) in Irvine, Calif. The complimentary seminar includes a continental breakfast and the 100-page workbook, The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board (3rd Edition): How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance. More info here.

08:17 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: Dynamic Drive, John Maxwell, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Molly Fletcher, Sustainable Success

September 9, 2024

The Culturally Conscious Board: Setting the Boardroom Table for Impact

Issue No. 620 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a hot-off-the-press book on board governance that CHANGED my thinking. Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Leadership and Self-Deception. BONUS! Read Paul Palmer’s color commentary on the toe-tapping song, “Midnight Train to Georgia.”

I love this book—and it changed my thinking. But, really, the publisher should have sent along yellow highlighters. Or just to save us the time—they could have highlighted every sentence!

“Bylaws, Schmylaws!”

If you thumbed through my well-worn copy of The Culturally Conscious Board, you’d likely comment, “John! You’ve underlined something on almost every page!”

That’s right. The publisher should have packaged a highlighter and a pen with each book. With just 134 pages (no filler!), this book absolutely changed my thinking about board governance. Really. If you serve on a board, or plan to, this is a must-read:

The Culturally Conscious Board:
Setting the Boardroom Table for Impact
by Jennifer M. Jukanovich and Russell W. West

(Sept. 3, 2024)

Leveraging the story of Crystal, a new board member at her first meeting of the fictitious City Farm board, the authors invite us inside this dysfunctional boardroom. (What? There are dysfunctional boards?) Every chapter begins with this continuing story of boardroom confusion, chaos, and a commonplace culture. Along the way, the authors poke, prod, and coach using real-life boardroom conflicts.
• “How dare she? Doesn’t she know you aren’t supposed to speak at your first board meeting?”
• The City Farm board’s cardinal rule was even more rigid: “Thou shalt not speak as a new board member for at least six meetings.”
• “When your table culture can be reduced to the sum of all the minutes, roll calls, old business and seconded motions, then that is the only level of consciousness your board expects of itself.”
• “Routine lulls into inattention. The trivial and critical get equal time.”

At one disastrous board meeting, Phil, the board chair, shockingly orders Crystal: “Calm down!” The authors add, “Phil had picked the wrong night to go parental on her. As he continued to mansplain the merits of the deal and what so-and-so said and to whom, Crystal retreated internally to have a meeting with both her tongue and her temper.”

The storytelling and the writing is superb—exceeded only by the depth of this important topic: the culturally conscious board. Jukanovich and West, both experienced leaders and board coaches, write, “We think of consciousness as a heightened focus provoked by our surroundings and experiences, enabling us to predict and participate with integrity in the world around us.”

This week, I emailed several experienced nonprofit leaders and consultants—and confessed that had I read this book years ago, my standard response on questions about “boardroom diversity” would have been dramatically different. This book changed my thinking. It’s never too late to change, right?

Bruce McNicol recommended I read The Culturally Conscious Board. I trust his judgment, but I wondered if this was just one more book on all things DEI. (Companies are now rethinking diversity, equity, and inclusion.) But then I was reminded about my favorite quote from Charlie Munger (1924-2023), “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.”

The authors—gently and persuasively—enriched my thinking and my worldview on what they call “Conscious Culture,” what’s ON the table (agenda, minutes, budget, and strategy) versus “Unconscious Culture,” what’s OFF the table (dependencies, triangles, groupthink, and gatekeeping).

What’s at stake? “Boards operate at half capacity when only at the transactional level that conscious culture tends to provide…” The authors note, “Boards operate at deep capacity governance, driven by a view of integrity that includes all that is conscious (mentionable) and unconscious (unmentionable).”

Who should read this book? Jukanovich and West describe their audience: “So, whether you:
• are a fumbling, eagle-eyed start-up,
• said yes but are unsure where to start,
• will ever get the chance to attend a board training event,
• are a seasoned board member suddenly in the hot seat,
• wonder if you are doing any good by sitting in late-night meetings, bickering over a dollar,
• are tired of constantly being the guest in a story that doesn’t appreciate yours,
we say, this book is written for you.”

With wisdom and wit, the authors describe the problem of boardroom dysfunction and mediocre outcomes—but they don’t leave us hanging. Crystal’s story leads us into “The Board Placemat”—a very helpful one-pager focused on “Five Essential Conversations” and fleshed out over five meaty chapters on Identity, Intention, Impact, Invitation, and Investment. (Click here to download the placemat.)

Download “The Board Placemat” tool from the authors’ website and discern when and how to use these convicting 25 true-or-false questions at future board meetings and board retreats.

“The Board Placemat” features five true-or-false questions for each of the five must-have conversations at your boardroom table. Each chapter dives deeper. Examples:

IDENTITY:
• “We make time to hear board members’ personal stories.” (True or false?)
• “What are the marks of heroes your organization celebrates?”
• “Who does your board turn to during hard conversations?"

INTENTION
• “We are convinced our theory of change makes a difference." (True or false?)
• “Could you draw your theory of change on a napkin…?”
• “…is everyone clear about what must be measured and why?”

INVITATION
• “We glean stakeholder feedback to lift our cultural blindfolds.” (True or false?)
• “How is the executive session used to ensure everyone has an opportunity to use their voice?”
• “How do you understand ‘diverse’ candidate pools? What voices are missing from the table?”

INVESTMENT
• “We model our missional engagement by participating financially.” (True or false?)
• “A board that has 100% member giving is the gold standard. How does your board encourage this?”

IMPACT
• “We harvest learning after events, milestones, fails and wins.” (True or false?)
• “Notice what your board celebrates and when.”
• “What are the feedback loops in the strategic planning process, as well as in board meetings?”

One of the more engaging conflicts in the book centered on a board assignment. “In this story, there were rumblings from the community about how decisions were really made. The leader forced an uncomfortable conversation on a divided board. He put the matter on the table by requiring all board members to read a book together. All would be invited to respond. This is where things got a bit messy.” (You’ll need to read this yourself, so no spoiler alert.)

Jukanovich and West note, “…it’s not the mentionable that cause the most problems. It’s rather the unmentionable aspects of unconscious culture that strengthen and weaken in their influence as long as they remain unnamed.” They add, “Wouldn’t you want to know where denial or negligence has caused culture to be a liability?”

I’ve always sought to inspire boards to be lifelong learners and to delegate their reading by inviting one board member per meeting to spotlight a board governance book. So…I loved that board chair’s assignment (but not the conflict that ensured!).

Now I have a problem! For ECFA’s governance blog, I wrote short reviews of “18 Best Board Books.” Now, I should probably edit those with two options:
• Option #1: Read 18 “Best Board Books” and add #19, The Culturally Conscious Board.
• Option #2: Skip the first 18 and just read The Culturally Conscious Board.

You’ll find practical alignment between The Culturally Conscious Board and other board books and training experiences. Examples:
• “Humility’s path requires attention and courage. It requires conflict even. Humility anticipates it can be wrong.” (See Book #18).
• On the critical role of the board chair, “These instances can sometimes resemble hostage situations, where the emotional tone of the group is dictated by the angriest or saddest person present. In these moments, true leadership is required." (See Book #12.)
• Note: Bob Andringa endorsed this book and his governance books also align with The Culturally Conscious Board. (See Book #10.)
• And…what a delight, as part of the color commentary on integrating values, to read of the authors’ appreciation for the values in Joy at Work, by Dennis Bakke (Book #21 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books and my 2006 book-of-the-year).

In 134 pages, there’s not much space for theoretical musings. You’ll appreciate that and much more. The authors comment, “We learned of a board chair who remarked, ‘bylaws, schmylaws’ upon being questioned about financial discrepancies in staff reports.” Hence, they recommend helpful tools for what they call the board’s only job: to make decisions.

I know my friend and coauthor, Dan Busby (1941-2022) would have loved The Culturally Conscious Board. Our book, ECFA Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance: Time-Saving Solutions for Your Board, will also be helpful when you’re ready to focus on putting the “unmentionables” on the table. Examples:
• Tool #2: Board Nominee Suggestion Form (Avoid the “Friend of a Friend of Cousin Eddie Syndrome”)
• Tool #5: The Board’s Annual Self-Assessment Survey (Look in the Mirror!)

Did I mention that this book changed my thinking? You won’t forget the metaphors, the helpful charts, and the zingers: mama’s bread, spinach, mirrors, parking lot politicking, revolving-door recruitment stories, tokenized checklists, and this: “As the saying goes, people do not quit jobs; they quit managers. We would add: they quit cultures too.”

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for The Culturally Conscious Board: Setting the Boardroom Table for Impact, by Jennifer M. Jukanovich and Russell W. West. And thanks to the authors for sending me a review copy.

BONUS: Click here to listen to (or read) the “On Board Podcast” interview with Jennifer Jukanovich. And click here for several short videos with co-author Russell West (on LinkedIn).

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) The authors of The Culturally Conscious Board write that “A board that has 100% member giving is the gold standard.” (I agree…but I encourage boards to inspire board members with a platinum standard: “Generous Giving.” Here, a board member affirms he or she has prioritized their giving so the organization is one of the “Top-3” recipients for the board member's annual giving. For more details, download “Tool #21: Board Member Annual Affirmation Statement.” (Note: It's not about wealth. Board members of any income bracket can do this.) What's our board's policy on board member generosity?

2) Here’s a link to short reviews of “18 Best Board Books.” What’s the best book your board has read—together—in the last 12 months? Is lifelong learning a staff and board priority? Here’s an idea: “Invest ‘10 Minutes for Governance’ in Every Board Meeting.” (Read Lesson 39, Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom.”)

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 16: Keys to Memorable Speaking and Writing
Book #90 of 100: Keys to Great Writing

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #90 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Keys to Great Writing:
(Revised and Expanded)
Mastering the Elements of Composition and Revision
by Stephen Wilbers

Books #87 through #91 spotlight five memorable books to enrich your speaking and writing competencies. According to Stephen Wilbers, “Level 4” writing (the best) is “to write with such extraordinary insight and beauty that people will be reading what I have written one hundred years from now.” (How about…a week from now?)
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Keys to Great Writing
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

The author's five keys to great writing will surprise you: Economy, Precision, Action, Music, and Personality. Hum along: “One of the most important things you can do to sharpen your style is to reawaken yourself to the sound of your words, to tune your ears to the rhythm and cadence and flow of your language. It is in this context that you should ask, How can I make this music more pleasing to my readers? What techniques can I learn from accomplished writers? What techniques can I discover on my own?”

Song #31 of 45: “Midnight Train to Georgia"

Listen to "Midnight Train to Georgia," sung by Gladys Knight and the Pips, Song #31 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read Paul Palmer's guest commentary on why the song title was changed! LOL! Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Difficult Board Member: A Problem or a Project?

Have you segmented your board challenges into two groups? Is the difficult person on your church board a "problem or a project?" And this: “Perhaps the most important difference between corporate governance and church board leadership is the task of discernment.” Read my review of Book #3 in this church boardroom series. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

07:34 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: board governance, boardroom, culture, Jennifer Jukanovich, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Russell West

September 3, 2024

Leadership and Self-Deception (4th Ed.): The Secret to Transforming Relationships and Unleashing Results

Issue No. 619 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting spotlights a book that has sold more than three million copies and is still going strong. Must-read! Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of The Power and The Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.

Me! That's right...it's all about ME. (Or maybe...not?) Read on...

Drop Everything...and Read This!

Back in 2018, I read and reviewed the second edition of this profound book. Here’s what I wrote:

“Maybe…this might be my most important book recommendation for you this year. The title…timely. The contents…convicting.” Now in its fourth edition—with over three million copies sold—what am I thinking now, six years later?

Leadership and Self-Deception:
The Secret to Transforming Relationships and Unleashing Results
by The Arbinger Institute (Aug. 27, 2024) - Fourth Edition!

Published last week (with new material), I just read it again—but I can’t improve on my April 18, 2018, review. Enjoy:

Last week, while reflecting on issues of leadership character and humility, I found not one, but two copies on my bookshelf of Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box. I had never read the book (to my chagrin).

So my wife, Joanne, read it first this weekend—and her praise was effusive. Then I read it. (Am I the only leader that missed this gem?) I should have read it years ago (and my family and former staff teams would agree). If you haven’t read the book—or leveraged the insights for your organization or family—drop everything and read Leadership and Self-Deception. Here’s why:

Reason #1: Self-deception is rampant. You don’t need this book to recognize how other leaders are blind to their own self-deception—but it will give you handles (and a practical metaphor) for understanding the blindness.

Reason #2: I am blind to my own blindness. Whew. (Did I mention “convicting” and serious gut-checking?) While trying to figure out the sin and self-deception in other leaders, I wondered, how did the authors insert mirrors on every convicting page?

And as Scott Rodin reminds us in The Steward Leader, “If I could put one Bible verse on the desk of every pastor and every Christian leader in the world, it would be this: ‘If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us’ (1 John 1:8).”

Reason #3: The “box” metaphor. Powerful. Trust me—read and study this book with your team (and family) and you’ll be using the “box” metaphor within an hour. The second edition [ditto the fourth edition] of Leadership and Self-Deception includes a short section on how to maximize the book’s impact. The authors list stunning (stunning!) examples of how the principles have transformed organizations (nonprofit and for-profit) and even police departments. In Japan, a word-of-mouth movement has launched “out-of-the-box” clubs. [Note: The 4th Edition uses different language for "the box," but the story is still very effective and you'll remember it.]

The business novel/fable/story format makes for an easy read (about six hours) with memorable characters, but—warning—it’s not a comfortable read.

Reason #4: Faith-based alignment. While the principles of Leadership and Self-Deception are not faith-based per se—they actually are. For my readers who are Christ-followers, you’ll salivate at the opportunity to integrate Leadership and Self-Deception with biblical wisdom.

Listen to the four-minute preface to the third edition. You’ll appreciate the brief analogy of an infant learning to crawl. (It’s almost biblical!)

And speaking of alignment, you’ll also appreciate how Leadership and Self-Deception enhances the insights, especially, of The Cure, The Advantage, Leaders Eat Last, Broken and Whole, Leading Me, Serve Strong, and What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There (to name just a few).

Reason #5: Refreshing humility—no author names! Really! Published by The Arbinger Institute, these leaders practice what they preach—and share the credit for this book with all of their team members, including non-writers. Hence—author names are not revealed. [And note: the book has now sold over three million copies.]

So, could this book help you and your leadership team? Yes! From the authors: “…the myriad ways in which people have used this book and its ideas fall within five broad areas of application: “1) applicant screening and hiring, 2) leadership and team building, 3) conflict resolution, 4) accountability transformation, and 5) personal growth and development.”

The fourth edition includes this endorsement from Verne Harnish, author of Scaling Up (my 2018 book-of-the-year). "...it's one of those rare books that touches both the personal as well as the professional lives of...leaders."

BONUS! The fourth edition includes a new section, “Research about Self-Deception in Organizations” and the Arbinger Mindset Assessment—available free of charge. The 20-question instrument takes less than five minutes to complete and you’ll receive an automated response. Click here.

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for Leadership and Self-Deception, Fourth Edition: The Secret to Transforming Relationships and Unleashing Results, by The Arbinger Institute. Listen on Libro (6 hours, 1 minute—from the third edition). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy of the fourth edition. (Plus, special thanks to Jim Canning for sending me this book way back when!)

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) The fourth edition of Leadership and Self-Deception includes info on a book club, plus a 10-page group discussion guide. In the second edition, the authors noted that “Many organizations utilize the book in their hiring practices. Prospective employees are required to read the book as part of the application process.” What’s the upside of inspiring applicants to understand and buy into your organization’s culture before they join the team?
2) Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (40 million sold), highly recommends this book. Pop Quiz! Habit 5, from Covey, is: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Now…write down the other six.

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 16: Keys to Memorable Speaking and Writing
Book #89 of 100: You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #89 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard:
The Complete Book of Speaking…in Business and in Life
by Bert Decker

Books #87 through #91 spotlight five memorable books to enrich your speaking and writing competencies. “Communicating is a contact sport,” says Bert Decker. “Your ability to communicate is the single most important skill determining your success in every aspect of your life. You dare not make the mistake of thinking that communication is nothing but dumping information on another person.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

So what is communication? It’s selling. “People buy on emotion and justify with facts,” says Bert Decker. If he’s right—you may need to tune-up your public communication style and skills. An emotional decision isn’t necessarily the wrong decision, says the author, and then he reminds us what counts in public speaking: the 3 V’s. Verbal is seven percent, vocal is 38 percent and visual (what the listener sees) is a whopping 55 percent. Yikes—the sub-conscious impression wins every time. So does likeability.

Song #30 of 45: “The Harder They Come”

Listen to “The Harder They Come," by Jimmy Cliff, Song #30 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Marc Myers notes that "...the springy rhythms of ‘The Harder They Come’ opened the door for a new wave that influenced rock, soul and punk." Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Even Brain Surgeons Aren't Smart Enough!

Mark Matson, author of Experiencing The American Dream: How to Invest Your Time, Energy, and Money to Create an Extraordinary Life, warns,“People can read a few articles, watch some videos, and suddenly think they can engineer a portfolio that will help them consistently beat the market, sadly to find out their genius as a brain surgeon did not translate to investing success.” Read my review. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

09:28 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, leadership, results, self-deception, transformation

August 29, 2024

The Power and The Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry

Issue No. 618 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting introduces a new book I couldn't put down. So...here's my Pop Quiz on the relationships between 27 U.S. presidents and 18 corporate CEOs. Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Behind Closed Doors: In the Room With Reagan & Nixon.

Which U.S. president installed a phone in a CEO’s bedroom—without first getting his permission? Honest! It’s true!

“This was the first presidential meeting I’ve ever had where it was like talking to a peer.”

I confess! When I scanned the fascinating table of contents for The Power and the Money, I immediately read the hilarious eight pages, “CEO Joke File.” (You will too!)
• “My mom used to tell me not to laugh at another’s condition because we may be in their position one day. So I laugh at Bill Gate’s condition every day.”
• “Steve Jobs would’ve been a better president than Trump. But I guess comparing apples to oranges is unfair.”
• “I hope Elon Musk never gets involved in a scandal. Elongate would be really drawn out.”
• “What’s the best thing about an Oprah Winfrey joke? You get the joke! You get the joke. You all get the joke!”

This book entertains with another 50 CEO jokes about 18 “titans of industry”—but I hope you’ll read every engaging page of:

The Power and The Money:
The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief
and Titans of Industry
by Tevi Troy (Aug. 20, 2024)

U.S. presidents “come and go,” writes bestselling historian Tevi Troy, who served in the White House and as Deputy Secretary of Health. “But CEOs—Chief Executive Officers of large corporations—in contrast, can potentially reign for decades.” What’s the best model for protecting your business while maintaining a healthy relationship with every new president’s administration? Many CEOs were clueless on how to relate to U.S. presidents (and vice versa). This book will shock you, but you’ll love it. I couldn't put it down.

Back in 2021, I devoted two reviews to Tevi Troy’s robust book, Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump. My second review was a “POTUS Pop Quiz.” The Power and the Money also deserves two reviews (I’ve made over 100 notes!). So for my first review, I’ll start with the pop quiz.

THE EPIC CLASHES POP QUIZ!
Guess which Commander in Chief and/or Titan of Industry is referenced. (Select from the 27 U.S. Presidents and the 18 CEOs—see below.)

IDENTIFY THE CEO AND/OR THE PRESIDENT:
#1. “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

#2. This president, as senate majority leader, “…would brag about being the first legislator to get a car phone.” Later, this president (who loved phones everywhere, including his bathroom) so valued his connection with this CEO “…that he tried to make [this CEO] as accessible as his own aides.” Without consulting the CEO, this president had someone from the White House Signal Corps install a phone in this CEO’s bedroom! True story!

#3. This CEO “got an early lesson in the potency of cultivating presidential support.” Learning that this president was sympathetic with the car industry, this CEO went over the head of the Transportation Secretary to lobby this president on pending air bag regulations. “The regulation was suspended and air bags would not be mandated on American cars until…model year 1998.”

#4. “…you’re a smart guy, but my pollster tells me I’d commit political suicide if I raised the gas tax,” this president bluntly told this CEO. He explained that “people would blame him every week when they filled up their gas tanks.” He added, “That’s why you’re sitting on that side of the desk, and I’m the President.”

BONUS: Watch the trailer here for the new movie, “Reagan,” starring Dennis Quaid, and opening Friday, Aug. 30, 2024.

#5. As a child, this future CEO “had an active mind and a quick tongue. Once, when his mother asked him what he was doing, he said, ‘I’m thinking.’ When she queried, ‘You’re thinking?’ He responded, ‘Yes, Mom, I’m thinking. Have you ever tried thinking?’ Such snappishness would occasionally get him into trouble in his battles with the government, but it was the active mind, and its early attraction to computers, that set him on his path in life.” (Hint and LOL! No joke. When I was making notes and typing this CEO’s name into my Word document, the auto-correct suggested the name, “Billion Gates!”)

#6. “Today, corporations are subject to a panoply of government impositions in the form of regulations and legislation that shape the way they do business. Everything from taxes to hiring to environmental impact to hours worked is regulated to some degree and plays into business strategies and consideration. This is far different than the situation as it stood in the late nineteenth century, when men like [guess the two names here] built their monopolies with little federal governmental input.”

Note: For more on government overreach, you’ll appreciate the recent talk given by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch at the Richard Nixon Library on his new book, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law (Aug. 6, 2024).

#7. This CEO, who “eschewed interest in a possible cabinet opportunity” did join this president’s Strategic and Policy Council. After one meeting that went very well, this CEO said, “…I’ve been coming down here since 1980, and this was the first presidential meeting I’ve ever had where it was like talking to a peer.” (Hint!)

#8. This CEO said in 2016, “I’ve never called a president in my life. So I don’t initiate ‘em. But…if any president asks me for help in any way, I mean, that’s part of being a citizen.” Stunning! This CEO “had thus far lived under fifteen, or one third, of our nation’s forty-five presidents.”

#9. This president’s “war on Fox News” prompted a strong response from Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, “who maintained a reputation as a non-partisan newsperson during his time at Fox.” Wallace called this president's team “the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

#10. Tevi Troy concludes with five rules of thumb, including this: “When CEOs do fight, they need to be careful. It should not be done lightly, and if done, it must be done with a purpose in mind.” This former attorney general (hint!) wrote in his memoir of being interested in working at GTE because CEO Chuck Lee wanted to push back against the regulatory state.” This attorney general believed some CEOs: “…are afraid the regulators will retaliate. Some act like hostages suffering from Stockholm syndrome.”

#11. BONUS NOTE. Tevi Troy documents Mark Zuckerberg’s flip flops on Facebook privacy issues and government regulations. He also notes that it took many years before Oprah Winfrey would endorse a presidential candidate. How times have changed! Read these news reports on “Zuckerbucks” and Oprah!

MATCH THESE PRESIDENTS AND CEOs WITH THE ABOVE STATEMENTS:
U.S. PRESIDENTS (1869-present):
Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden.

CORPORATE CEOs:
Warren Buffett, Tim Cook, Jamie Dimon, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Katharine Graham, Lee Iacocca, Steve Jobs, Henry Luce, JP Morgan, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, John D. Rockefeller, The Warner Brothers, Oprah Winfrey, Lew Wasserman, Jack Welch, Mark Zuckerberg

POP QUIZ ANSWERS.Visit the Book Bucket webpage and look for the PDF with the answers to "Pop Quiz on The Power and the Money, by Tevi Troy."

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for The Power and The Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry, by Tevi Troy. Listen on Libro (12 hours, 8 minutes).

Learn more about Dr. Tevi Troy's six training modules that can be tailored to your organization’s needs, such as "Building A Cohesive Team & Avoiding Infighting." Visit 1600 Lessons.

One more CEO joke: “A boy walks up to Mark Zuckerberg. The boy says: 'My daddy said you were stealing our information.' Mark Zuckerberg replies, 'He isn't your dad.'"

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

Kathryn Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who was the only Fortune 500 female CEO at the time, “had interacted with nine presidents, and eight of them—all but Nixon—had come to her house for one of her famous get togethers." Tevi Troy notes one dinner guest’s memorable moment:

“In 1988, as the Reagans were preparing to return to California, they had one last dinner at Graham’s house. Someone spilled a drink, and Reagan got down on his hands and knees to clean it up.” The author adds, “Graham never again had as close a relationship with a president or a first couple as she did with the Reagans.”

QUESTIONS: What does servant leadership look like when you’re a Fortune 500 CEO or the U.S. president? What does it look like in your organization?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 16: Keys to Memorable Speaking and Writing
Book #88 of 100: Public Speaking Laws of Success

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #88 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Public Speaking Laws of Success:
For Everyone and Every Occasion
by Richard J. Goossen

Books #87 through #91 spotlight five memorable books to enrich your speaking and writing competencies. Ask a colleague to use the “Public Speaking Laws of Success Scorecard®” to evaluate your next presentation using the rating sheet from this very practical book.
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Public Speaking Laws of Success
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

The author’s 50 short chapters (50 laws of public speaking success) are practical and sometimes painful. (For those of us who speak and lead seminars, his pokes-in-the-ribs are convicting.) Example: Ask a colleague to evaluate your next public speaking gig—including counting the number of “filler” words, such as “uhh,” “uhm,” “like,” and “you know.” LOL! Last week, a faithful eNews reader sent me a very timely email on this topic.

My friend recently heard a youth pastor speak. His Sunday sermon was on the Good Samaritan and it was a challenging sermon. But, the young minister said “like” and “right?” often. So my friend decided to count how many times the youth pastor said “like” in one 10-minute period. “He said the word 29 times…yes 29.” He adds, “So, I decided to count how many times he said ‘right?’ In a 10-minute period. He said ‘right?’ 19 times…yes, 19 times.”

Tevi Troy, the author of The Power and the Money, weighed in recently also on this topic in this WSJ article, “‘Like’ May Attract Like, But It Puts Me Off. When interviewing job applicants, I have a simple test: Can you talk without that verbal crutch?”

Like…you need to read this book. Right?

Song #29 of 45: “Respect Yourself”

Listen to “Respect Yourself," by the Staple Singers, Song #29 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. You’ll love this chapter by Marc Myers. “The lyrics were a sermon of sorts, urging listeners to respect themselves and others.” But…could “church people” ad-lib between verses with “Deep, dee-diddy, dee, dee/deep…” and more? Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

GO. SEE. THIS. MOVIE.

I reviewed the new movie, The Forge, in just four words: Go. See. This. Movie. To read my longer (not too long) review, click here for The Forge Movie. Absolutely powerful. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

09:48 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: CEOs, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, money, power, presidents, Tevi Troy

August 21, 2024

Behind Closed Doors - Part 2

Issue No. 617 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting adds a “Part 2” to last issue’s mention of the memoir by Nixon’s and Reagan’s speech writer, Ken Khachigian. Totally captivating! Enjoy! Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of The 365 Day Leader: Recalibrate Your Calling Every Day, by Dick Daniels.

Really! President Ronald Reagan described his first meeting at the 1981 Ottawa Summit with the Big Seven (aka the “Group of Seven” countries): “…I was the new kid, and no one got around to introducing me, so when it came to me, I just said, ‘My name is Ron.’”(Imagine! The leaders of the UK, France, West Germany, Japan, Italy, and Canada—all in the room, but no one introduced the new president of the US!)

Your First 90 Days? How About Your First 90 Hours?
Behind Closed Doors (Part 2)

Honest! I made 74 notes on the front blank pages of Behind Closed Doors. You’ll love the fascinating details behind every single highlight. (Really.) But here’s my problem: I spotlighted 10 stunning sections that are still competing for my attention-getting big opening.

In my last issue I alerted you to three books and a movie that were in the queue. Here’s the first book:

Behind Closed Doors:
In the Room With Reagan & Nixon
by Ken Khachigian (July 23, 2024).

Ken Khachigian’s hot-off-the-press page-turner reads like today’s headlines. Honest! If you’re watching the breaking news this week from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (or like some of us old timers, comparing it to the 1968 Chicago convention), you’ll love the author’s tutorial in Political Speechwriting 401.

Known as the “Word Donkey” for the speeches he wrote for both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Khachigian’s 496-page memoir includes this entry from October 15, 1980 (Incumbent Jimmy Carter versus Candidate Reagan, former governor of California):

“…Carter seemed to embrace a tax increase when he flubbed by claiming that among the factors causing inflation was ‘the government wasn’t taking in sufficient revenues to meet a greatly expanding budget.’”

On Reagan’s campaign plane from Sioux Falls, S.D., to Lima, Ohio, Khachigian had orders to craft a new speech in response to Carter’s blunder. “Not a little panicked and stressed, I hoped my fingers would find magic words to emerge from the IBM typewriter to exploit Carter’s weird [there’s that word again!] connection of inflation and high taxes.”

“Fortunately, I was able to concoct one of the more inspired punch lines of the campaign. I rushed it to the typists, Shirley Moore and Michele Davis; Shirley put it onto Reagan’s half sheets for speaking, and Michele into press release format after Reagan made his edits. They used Wite-Out to correct typing errors, dried the pages under the plane’s air vents and typed over them.” (Reminder: 1980 campaigns had no email, no iPhones, and no Internet.)

The punch line for Reagan’s speech: “We now know what Mr. Carter plans to do with four more years. Catch your breath, hold on to your hats, and grab your wallets because Jimmy Carter’s analysis of the economy means that his answer is higher taxes.” Khachigian adds, “The ‘catch your breath’ line made all three networks that night, so the last-minute change was successful.”

Now, during this 2024 campaign, you should listen for a replay of Reagan’s words (including these scripted by Khachigian):
• “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
• “Jimmy Carter is fond of quoting presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, but I’ve noticed that there is one Democrat that he doesn’t speak much about, and that is Jimmy Carter.”

You’ll appreciate the down-to-earth simplicity of Reagan’s campaign speeches and his presidential speeches. After Reagan won, Khachigian notes that “As president, he was now empowered to go beyond preaching the gospel and put it into practice.” A few more zingers:
• “There’s no such thing as federal funds. ‘It’s your money.’”
• “Business taxes aren’t paid by business; they’re paid by you.”
• “…there are seven million Americans caught up in the personal indignity and human tragedy of unemployment. If they stood in a line, allowing three feet for each person, the line would reach from the coast of Maine to California.”

Khachigian’s robust memoir gives leaders and readers a front row seat to two U.S. presidents—and a reminder that back then, those speeches were crafted on an IBM Selectric typewriter! For more on Nixon, view Ken Khachigian’s talk and Q&A hosted by the Richard Nixon Foundation on July 23, 2024.

In his recent talk for the Richard Nixon Foundation, author Ken Khachigian describes the hilarious fact-checking for Reagan’s word picture that the national debt was approaching $1 trillion. (Today, it is $35 trillion!) View Khachigian’s talk here.

Reagan’s word picture: “If you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only four inches high, you’d be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills over eighty miles high.” Khachigian was skeptical of the math and asked Reagan:

KK: “…if you’ll excuse the question, Mr. President, where on earth did you come up with the number for the thousand-dollar bills reaching up to the sky?"

RR: “Well, by long division.”

KK adds: “I chuckled quietly while picturing him with a yellow pad dividing mysterious numbers into 1,000,000,000,000.”

So Khachigian asked his staff to fact-check that 80-mile high number, noting in his recent talk that there is no shortage of “nerds” that work in our government agencies. The stats on $1 trillion came back:
• Loosely stacked, the pile of $1,000 bills would be 67 miles high.
• Bound together, the stack would be 63 miles high!

Reagan’s memorable word pictures reminded me of bestselling author Chip Heath and his practical book for leaders, speakers, and writers: Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers.

Reagan’s landslide victory on Nov. 4, 1980, was stunning (489 of 538 electoral votes). And Khachigian was close to the action, including at Reagan’s first cabinet meetings in January 1981. The “Reagan Revolution” agenda? The author quotes David Stockman, “the young OMB director,” who said to the president, “I recommend you do what you pledged in the campaign.” (Really? You can do that?)

According to the author of The First 90 Days (my 2010 book-of-the-year), “The president of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself [or herself?]; you get 90.” Yet Reagan didn’t need 100 days, or even 90. How about 90 hours?

Khachigian writes about Reagan: “His energy and enthusiasm were infectious throughout five cabinet meetings crammed into less than two weeks to cut the budget, reduce taxes, and deregulate government. The weight of his presence was greater and more emphatic than history has given him credit, and seated behind him, I took notes to preserve a record of his historic undertaking.”

Where were you when President Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981? (Joanne and I were in Manila in the Philippines. I remember paperboys in the streets hawking newspapers that featured “second coming” headlines.) Khachigian was asked by Vice President George H.W. Bush’s press aide to help draft a reassuring statement for the nation. (Imagine!)

And how timely: Last week in the WSJ, Peggy Noonan contrasts then Vice President Bush with current Vice President Kamala Harris. Read “The Vice President’s Biggest Speech. In July 1988, George H.W. Bush was famous but unknown—and down in the polls by 17 points.”

You’ll love this front-row seat from a gifted speechwriter’s perspective. Captivating! Here are a few more teasers:
• Press secretary Jim Brady on being selected: “I don’t know which of these is the worst. Number two is getting it; but number one is not getting it.”
• A second-grader’s letter to President Reagan following the assassination attempt: “I hope you get well quick or you might have to make a speech in your pajamas. P.S. If you have to make a speech in your pajamas, I warned you.” (The President used that in his next speech!)
• Having served Nixon, Khachigian became an important go-between for Nixon’s political advice to Reagan. Fascinating! The 75-page appendix includes copies of actual letters and memos from Nixon, then based in San Clemente, Calif., to Reagan and the author.

• Nixon quoted Churchill: “History will treat me well because I intend to write it!” (Khachigian conducted research for Nixon’s memoir, all 1,136 pages.)
• Robert Novak, the legendary syndicated columnist and TV commentator, would often meet with Khachigian when he was in California “over pasta at Orange County’s acclaimed Antonello Ristorante.” (Note: I also read Novak’s memoir, all 662 pages!)
• The best speech of Reagan’s career? “In the decade of our collaborations, the eulogy Reagan delivered on May 5, 1985, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp stands alone as the most significant and consequential.” I was unaware of the pre-speech fallout from this momentous day. Chapter 20, “Crisis at Home,” is a case study in the Crisis Bucket—and it’s my favorite chapter.
• Chapter 18, “Morning Again in America,” is also my favorite chapter! (Yes, you can have two favorites.) Khachigian describes his key role in creating the “Morning Again in America” documentaries for the 1984 re-election campaign and the GOP convention. He notes: “It can be more difficult to write a thirty- or sixty-second commercial than a twenty-five-minute speech. Telling a story in 110 or 115 words is agonizing…”

GOOD NEWS. This is not a puff piece on Nixon and Reagan (or the author). Khachigian has harsh words for many White House senior staffers (“wannabe speechwriters”), and ego-driven officials who “were smitten with the disease of proximity to the Oval Office.” His relationship with Nancy Reagan (“chief of staff”) deserves its own book.

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: IN THE ROOM WITH REAGAN & NIXON, by Ken Khachigian (July 23, 2024). Listen on Libro (16 hours, 37 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

BONUS: Watch the trailer here for the new movie, “Reagan,” starring Dennis Quaid, and opening Aug. 30, 2024.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Leaders and managers can learn much from the best and worst management practices in the White House. Bill Clinton’s chief of staff “carried around a card with the president’s top priorities written on it—and rebelled when Clinton tried to go off script.” Read more in The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency. What are your CEO’s top priorities? Who’s holding your CEO (or pastor) accountable for results?

2) Watch for my next issue with a review of Tevi Troy’s new book, The Power and The Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry (Aug. 20, 2024). Listen on Libro (12 hours, 8 minutes). If you’re a longtime reader, you may recall I allocated two issues of Your Weekly Staff Meeting to review Tevi Troy’s 2021 book, Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump. Click here for my “POTUS Pop Quiz.” QUESTION: What is one best practice (or one worst practice) of a recent White House occupant?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 16: Keys to Memorable Speaking and Writing
Book #87 of 100: 15 Minutes Including Q&A

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #87 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

15 Minutes Including Q&A:
A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations
by Joey Asher

Books #87 through #91 spotlight five memorable books to enrich your speaking and writing competencies. Q&A is “presentation duct tape,” says the author of 15 Minutes Including Q&A. “It fixes everything.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: 15 Minutes Including Q&A
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

When speaking, begin with “the hook.” Asher writes, “Start by putting your finger on the business issue that your audience cares most about. A good way to arrive at your hook is to think, ‘If I were to ask my audience what worried them most about the topic I’m going to talk about, what would they say?’”

“The hook often starts with the following phrase, ‘I understand that you are concerned about…’” Your three points should be like bumper stickers: short and memorable, supported by stories. “Great speakers use lots of stories.”

And thinking about political speeches, I loved this line from then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who asked the press, “Does anyone have any questions for the answers I’ve prepared?”

Song #28 of 45: "Carey"

Listen to “Carey," sung by Joni Mitchell, Song #28 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Inspire Your Team to Find GOLD in Every Book!

I discovered GOLD in the new book, The Ethical Imperative: Leading with Conscience to Shape the Future of Business, by Andrew C. M. Cooper. Consider using this "prospecting" idea to inspire your team to read and report on the latest leadership and business books. Read my review. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

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Tags: Behind Closed Doors, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Ken Khachigian, Nixon, Reagan

August 7, 2024

Behind Closed Doors: In the Room with Reagan & Nixon

Issue No. 616 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting recommends a hot-off-the-press book on Nixon and Reagan—also a movie and two more books. Enjoy! Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of The 365 Day Leader: Recalibrate Your Calling Every Day, by Dick Daniels. Bonus! Read Jim West’s color commentary in this week’s blog, "Maggie May," by Rod Stewart, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Watch for the new movie, “Reagan,” starring Dennis Quaid as President Ronald Reagan, coming Aug. 30, 2024. View the trailer.

Attn: Presidential Candidates!
“Read This Book!”

Hey! It’s August and for my readers in the Northern Hemisphere, you’re wondering what book you should read on vacation this month. Here’s my top pick—plus two more books arriving soon:

#1. BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: IN THE ROOM WITH REAGAN & NIXON, by Ken Khachigian (July 23, 2024). Order from Amazon. Listen on Libro (16 hours, 37 minutes).

This Thursday, August 8, 2024, is the 50th anniversary of the day that U.S. President Richard Nixon announced he would be resigning the presidency the next day. That was 50 years ago—but Ken Khachigian’s hot-off-the-press page-turner reads like today’s headlines.

Has anything really changed in our presidential campaigns? Debates over if and when to debate. “Weird” references. Pollsters and policy wonks. VP picks. Name-calling.

Full Disclosure! I’m just 100 pages into this fascinating book (watch for my full review), but I can confidently recommend it because Joanne and I joined friends for a sneak peek on July 23 when author Ken Khachigian spoke at the Richard Nixon Foundation in Yorba Linda, Calif. View the 56-minute video here:

In a talk on July 23, 2024, author Ken Khachigian revealed “inside info” about the preparation for the Frost/Nixon TV interviews which aired in four segments in 1977. Pictured (l. to r.) researcher Diane Sawyer, former president Richard Nixon, Khachigian (author), and presidential assistant Ray Price. Also shown: the briefing books for the interview. (View Khachigian’s talk here.)

When President Nixon resigned, he found seclusion in San Clemente, Calif.—also our home for the last 30 years. He asked Khachigian, who had served on his White House staff, to join him in San Clemente and help write his memoirs (all 1,136 pages!). But there’s more! Khachigian also served as President Ronald Reagan’s chief speechwriter, “trusted political adviser and favorite scribe.”

While you wait for my review and my notes from Khachigian’s talk, coming yet this month, read Tevi Troy’s review of Behind Closed Doors, featured in the July 26, 2024, Wall Street Journal. And speaking of Tevi Troy…

#2. THE POWER AND THE MONEY: THE EPIC CLASHES BETWEEN COMMANDERS IN CHIEF AND TITANS OF INDUSTRY (coming August 20, 2024), by Tevi Troy. Order from Amazon. Listen on Libro (12 hours, 8 minutes).

The author sent me his manuscript—and his insights are so, so timely! (Watch for my review.) If you’re a longtime reader, you may recall I allocated two issues of Your Weekly Staff Meeting to review Tevi Troy’s 2021 book, Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump. Click here for my “POTUS Pop Quiz.”

#3. FAITH FOR THE CURIOUS: HOW AN ERA OF SPIRITUAL OPENNESS SHAPES THE WAY WE LIVE AND HELP OTHERS FOLLOW JESUS (coming Sept. 24, 2024), by Mark Matlock (foreword by David Kinnaman). Order from Amazon. Listen on Libro (5 hours, 22 minutes).

Mark Matlock now serves as the executive director of the Urbana Student Missions Conference. Read my review of the 2020 book he co-authored with David Kinnaman, Faith for Exiles: 5 Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon. (Watch for my review of Matlock's new book, Faith for the Curious.)

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Ken Khachigian’s color commentary in Behind Closed Doors spotlights memorable moments and one-liners in Reagan’s and Nixon’s presidential campaigns and White House years. (“Are you better off than you were four years ago?” was scripted by Khachigian.) What’s the most memorable presidential speech you’ve heard or read? What’s your favorite line—and why?

2) The authors of The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity note that Eisenhower’s people held rehearsals for Cabinet meetings. Kennedy was restless in long meetings; he hated them. (But after the Bay of Pigs debacle, he called Eisenhower for advice and changed his approach to meetings.) So…when you inherit a new boss (or board chair), how do you get-up-to-speed on your new leader’s style (and idiosyncrasies)?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 15: Feeble Faith and Flabby Worship
Book #86 of 100: Let Us Prey

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #86 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Let Us Prey:
The Plague of Narcissist Pastors
and What We Can Do About It (Revised Edition)
by Darrell Puls

Books #82 through #86 spotlight five soul-strengthening books to connect you with the God of the Universe. Hmmm. Had I read a book on narcissism earlier in my career, could I have avoided some big leadership mistakes relating to Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)?
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Let Us Prey
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

NPD DEFINED. According to the diagnostic criteria of the American Psychological Association, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a “pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following…” Read my review of Let Us Prey. It includes three of the nine eye-popping statements about NPD.

And get this! “…deep inside the true narcissist sees himself as godlike and God as a terrifying rival.”

Song #27 of 45: “Maggie May"

Listen to “Maggie May," by Rod Stewart, Song #27 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read Jim West’s color commentary—and learn what a friend said about Jim’s singing at church! Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Inside Marine One: The World's Most Amazing Helicopter

What's not to like about a 10,000-foot view of four presidents from the cockpit of Marine One, the president's high performance helicopter? Read my review of Inside Marine One: Four U.S. Presidents, One Proud Marine, and the World’s Most Amazing Helicopter—and you'll have dozens of quotable facts for impressing your friends. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

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Tags: Behind Closed Doors, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Ken Khachigian, Nixon, Reagan

July 24, 2024

The 365 Day Leader: Recalibrate Your Calling Every Day

Issue No. 615 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting urges you to read a daily dose of Dick Daniels from his hot-off-the-press book, The 365 Day Leader: Recalibrate Your Calling Every Day. Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future.

Why do we need 365 daily nudges on leadership? The late Zig Ziglar wrote, “People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.” I’m loving my daily dose of Dick Daniels!

Recalibrate Your Calling Every Day

For years, I’ve urged leaders to “get a daily dose of Drucker”—insights every day from Peter Drucker (1909-2005), the father of modern management. (Read my review of The Daily Drucker.) But that was the 20th century, Pearson! What are you recommending for the next generation of leaders and managers? I’m glad you asked!

The 365 Day Leader:
Recalibrate Your Calling Every Day
by Dick Daniels (June 27, 2024)

Dick Daniels has done it again! Two of his earlier books captured my “book-of-the-year” honors. Will The 365 Day Leader get top billing in 2024? (Stay tuned.) In the meantime, you will love this “daily dose of Dr. D.” Every day features a short “snapshot of what exemplary leaders consistently do.” Examples:

• LEADERSHIP DELUSION! “Have You Ever Had a Coach? The leadership delusion is to assume everyone needs a coach except you.” (Day 3)

• MUSEUM TERMINOLOGY. “A ‘Curator’ is defined as the keeper or custodian of a museum or other collections. Leaders are ‘Curators’ of organizational culture which is the collection of the company’s vision, mission, values, and strategy.” (Day 15)

• ETHICS MADE EASY. “Wrong is never right even if everyone does it. Right is never wrong even if no one does it.” (Day 17)

• PRIORITIES. “The capacity of a leader increases when they protect their time and their priorities to address the important more than the urgent.” (Day 23)

• FINAL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS. “The Professional Competence Question: Can they do the job? The Personal Drive Question: Do they want to do the job? The Cultural Fit Question: Will we like them while they do the job?” (Day 30)

• THE TOXIC TEAM MEMBER. “Waiting too long while making well-intended attempts to bring the toxic member up, brings everyone else down.” (Day 36)

• KNOW YOUR TEAM. “If you don’t know the uniqueness of each direct report, then you will never understand how to uniquely develop them either.” (Day 44)

• NO JOKE! “It’s no joke that leaders are human… It’s no joke that leaders make mistakes… It’s no joke that great leaders admit it!” (Day 50)

• LEADERSHIP WORDS MATTER. “Tomorrow, you may not remember what you said today, but some of your words may stick with a team member forever.” (Day 55)

Oh, my. Each day—each short bellringer—is a team engagement conversation waiting to happen. The wisdom oozes off the page. The insights are fresh. The leadership poke-in-the-ribs, well…convicting! More examples:
• Day 60: Three Questions to Ask Before Signing the Offer Letter
• Day 85: The Eisenhower Matrix (the four quadrants: Do, Schedule, Delegate, Delete)
• Day 160: When Plan “A” Doesn’t Work
• Day 161: I’m Leading. What Could Go Wrong?

Did I mention gut-checks and pokes-in-the-ribs? Pick a page—any page—and you’ll be reminded to “recalibrate your calling every day.” (I love that!) But you’ll also be compelled to leverage these lifelong learning principles as you invest in developing your direct reports. (See my Pails in Comparison blog, “Team Retreat Engagement Plan: 4 Books by Dick Daniels.”)

• LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT CONSEQUENCES. “It’s so much better to develop your supervisors, managers, and leaders even if they leave, rather than not develop them and they stay.” (Day 56)

• THE EMOTIONAL QUESTION. “Is this the best time, place, person, and level of intensity to express what I am feeling in this moment?” (Day 199)

• THE DANGER OF THE 15%. “Some leaders are often right. It’s a powerful gift to be a subject matter expert and be right even 85% of the time. The danger is when a leader assumes they are right 100% of the time. It becomes a personal blind spot 15% of the time when they are wrong but think they are right.” (Day 200)

• LOOKING FOR THE SILVER BULLET. “Leaders would love a guaranteed quick solution for difficult problems. There are no quick fixes for complex issues. Start by looking for the root cause. That just might be the silver bullet.” (Day 206)

I’m a big fan of Dick Daniels. Read my reviews of his other three books and you’ll see why this gifted leader and author received a stunning endorsement for The 365 Day Leader from Marshall Goldsmith, the Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach.
[ ] Hardwiring New Leadership Habits: Does Development Develop? by Dick Daniels
[ ] Leadership Core: Character, Competence, Capacity (Leadership Multipliers), by Dick Daniels
[ ] Leadership Briefs: Shaping Organizational Culture to Stretch Leadership Capacity, by Dick Daniels

I had the privilege of writing a one-page preface for The 365 Day Leader. I wrote, “So why do we need 365 daily nudges on leadership? The late Zig Ziglar wrote, ‘People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.’ I’m loving my daily dose of Dick Daniels!”

I mention my preface—reluctantly—because I just posted this gem on my office wall:

TOO ARROGANT OR TOO HUMBLE?
“What is one thing you could do differently
to avoid arrogance and practice genuine humility?”
(Day 362)

Trust me. Leadership is messy, and as Daniels promises, “Every leader will face at least one impossible situation during their leadership tenure.” We need all the help we can get and gratefully—help has arrived! Leverage the introduction in The 365 Day Leader and review the six “How To” steps for your weekly staff meeting—to help your team answer the “So What?” questions of exemplary leadership. Brilliant!

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for The 365 Day Leader: Recalibrate Your Calling Every Day, by Dick Daniels. Note: You may be able to purchase the book at a discounted price at Ingram Spark: hardcover or paperback.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Planning an early fall team or board retreat? Read my blog, “Team Retreat Engagement Plan: 4 Books by Dick Daniels,” for an idea on how to inspire team members to summarize a book chapter in four minutes. (Hint: You’ll need a few Starbucks cards!) What inspires you to read a leadership book? A crisis or an opportunity?

2) In 2015, I cajoled 42 friends and colleagues to be guest bloggers for my Drucker Mondays blog—a 52-week journey through the book, A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, by Joseph A. Maciariello. Each Monday in 2015, we featured a Drucker fan and his or her favorite snippet from the week's topic. What’s your favorite Druckerism?

IDEAS: In “The Drucker Bucket” chapter of Mastering the Management Buckets, I list five ways to engage your team in practicing the art of leadership and management: 1) Stand and read, 2) Boot and read, 3) Email and read, 4) Post and read, and 5) Brown bag and read.

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 15: Feeble Faith and Flabby Worship
Book #85 of 100: The Cure

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #85 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

The Cure:
What If God Isn’t Who You Think He Is
and Neither Are You
by John Lynch, Bruce McNicol and Bill Thrall

Books #82 through #86 spotlight five soul-strengthening books to connect you with the God of the Universe. The Cure gently describes (in story and commentary) two profound fork-in-the-road choices. One fork: a “Pleasing God” sign points me to a giant building labeled “Striving Hard to Be All God Wants Me to Be.” The door has a title, “Self-Effort.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: The Cure
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

The other option: “The Room of Grace!” The authors write, “Grace! That word appears 122 times in the New Testament. The Judaizers in the Apostle Paul’s day hated it. They feared what it would do if it got loose. ‘Paul, you can’t tell them this!’ they said. ‘These people are immature, lazy and have little religious background. They’ll abuse as soon as they can. They’ll live Christianity-lite. These people are weak and want to do whatever they want. And believe me, what they want is not good.’” (Read more in my review.)

Song #26 of 45: “Moonlight Mile"

Listen to "Moonlight Mile," by The Rolling Stones, Song #26 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Team Retreat Engagement Plan: 4 Books by Dick Daniels

In addition to The 365 Day Leader, Dick Daniels has written three other insightful books. Read my blog for a simple, but powerful, way to engage your team in the "How to" and "So what" steps of exemplary leadership. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2024, while space remains, The Barnabas Group/San Diego is hosting John Pearson for his workshop, "The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board: How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance." Location: Encinitas, Calif. Register here. ____________________________________

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Tags: calling, Dick Daniels, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, leadership, The 365 Day Leader

July 13, 2024

Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future

Issue No. 614 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting spotlights a hot-off-the-press book on AI. The author delivers both good news and bad news and says that, yes, we can master AI—“but to do so, we must master ourselves.” Plus, click here to see book recommendations in all 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of The Power of Instinct to learn how to enrich your persuasion competencies.

The author of Mastering AI reports that the chief executive of a new online T-shirt company in Portugal announced that he had named ChatGPT as “the CEO” of his start-up!

ChatGPT: Your New CEO!

Attn: CEOs! Update your resumes! Last year, the chief executive of a new online T-shirt company in Portugal announced that he had named ChatGPT as “the CEO” of his start-up. According to Jeremy Kahn, author of Mastering AI, Joáo Ferráo dos Santos named his new company “AIsthetic Apparel” and said he “would simply execute the tasks ChatGPT recommended.” Discover more AI insights in this fascinating must-read book:

Mastering AI:
A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future
by Jeremy Kahn (July 9, 2024)

I predict you’ll meet dozens of people who will be talking about this book in the months ahead. The project began as a Fortune magazine cover story on OpenAI and the creation of ChatGPT and evolved into this powerhouse overview of artificial intelligence. The author is an award-winning journalist for Fortune and writes their weekly Eye on AI newsletter, plus cochairs Fortune’s Brainstorm AI technology conferences.

Jeremy Kahn is very optimistic about AI, but moderates the good news with ample bad news. Examples:

Chapter 4: Everyone on Autopilot
• Good News. Discussing “the return of the human apprentice,” Kahn lists law firms that are creatively using AI legal software. He quotes Jake Heller, co-founder of Casetext, who says that “AI should make the profession less ‘draining and soul sucking.’” (How would you describe your profession?)
• Bad News. For many gig economy workers (Uber, etc.), they soon discover “that the only way to earn a decent wage is to meet the demanding, sometimes inhumane, expectations of an algorithm.”
• Good News. Walmart uses “My Assistant,” an AI copilot and 50,000 employees have access to this new software aide.

Chapter 12: War at Machine Speed
In August, watch for my review of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Guns of August about World War I. So no surprise, the first chapter I read in Mastering AI was “War at Machine Speed.” Oh, my!
• Bad News. “Deploying autonomous weapons places us on a slippery slope to losing control over warfare. Autonomy inevitably begs more autonomy.” Kahn summarizes the potential results between enemies: “Spy vs. spy becomes AI vs. AI.”
• Bad News. When terrorists and nations have "a new toy for mass murder: artificial intelligence," we will find that AI is an accelerant, not a deterrent, to war—thus “…making conflict more likely and expanding, not limiting, its scope."
• Bad News. Noting the “naked soldier” scenario from Michael Walzer, “a philosopher known for his thinking about the ethics of warfare,” the author believes “the critical issue is that autonomous weapons obliterate the possibility of mercy.” (Must-read!)

Chapter 7: Aristotle in Your Pocket
• Good News. Students cheered the November 2022 release of ChatGPT and labeled it “CheatGPT,” but teachers panicked. Yet Kahn pushes back. “AI will change education. Teachers will need to adopt new methods. But the moral panic and hand-wringing is misplaced.” (He reminds us that CliffsNotes in the 1950s and calculators in the 1970s also created misplaced hysteria.)
• Bad News or Good News? “If the AI revolution helps dethrone the lecture as the primary pedagogical tool in undergraduate education and replaces it with the seminar, that would be no bad thing.” (Attention Church Leaders: Might AI displace the sermon? Is that good or bad?)
• Good News or Bad News? “AI is an existential threat to colleges and universities. But not because of the risk of rampant cheating. No, the real risk to higher education is irrelevancy.”

Good News! View this 7-minute video, "Who Is the Man of the Shroud?" It was created just this week by Jason Pearson using the latest AI tools. View the documentary, The Shroud Face to Face.

Chapter 2: The Voice Inside Your Head
• Bad News. In the section, “The Erasure of Provenance,” Kahn writes, “Memory and its link to learning is just one cognitive ability AI may damage. It could diminish our intellectual powers in other ways, too.” He adds that generative AI, in “providing a confident summarized answer, makes the abandonment of critical thinking all too easy. Anyone who has conversed with ChatGPT or its rivals, Bing, Gemini, and Claude, will know that these chatbots are often wrong, even when they sound right.” He fears “groupthink.”
• Good News/Bad News. The good news is that Kahn’s comprehensive book—efficiently written from a competent reporter’s perspective—sounds the AI alarm and addresses both ethical and moral issues. The bad news: “…our use of AI to write and read for us is just one way this technology could contribute to a risky moral deskilling. More troubling is the delegation of decisions that require moral judgment to AI.”
• Good News. What about AI in the classroom? “Children should also be instructed in ethics. And vitally, they must still learn how to write.” Gratefully, Kahn probes deep on the moral and ethical issues of AI in every chapter. I was reminded of the opportunity for organizations like Gateways to Better Education, and others, that will help educators and parents understand both the pedagogical and the theological issues of AI. (Note: Did you know, for example, that many states address the role of the Bible in state academic standards? Read more here.)

Chapter 5: Pillars of Industry
• Good News. The publishing industry will benefit “…where AI might not just help authors write, but also change the way books are read, changing the industry’s economics.” Example: you will have an “AI reading companion that can answer questions, look up unfamiliar references, or provide literary analysis.” Watch for virtual book clubs also.
• Bad News. The big will get bigger (architectural firms, major movie studios, law firms, etc.), but “midsize businesses will probably fare the worst.” (Read why “the business models of entire fields will be upended.”)
• Good News. This is a wake-up call! AI will enable “personalized product promotion” with more intelligent use of customer data. Example: Domino’s Pizza in Mexico were victims of the old adage that “half of an ad budget is wasted, you just don’t know which half.” Now with AI software, they’ve grouped their customers “into several buckets, and using AI, offered predictions of the best messages, best medium, and best times to reach out to people.” (I love the buckets reference!)
• More Good News. “As a result, Domino’s Mexico saw a 700 percent increase in the return on its Google ad spending and cut customer acquisition costs by 65 percent, while increasing customer retention.” (Wait…what? The author of the book I reviewed last week says it’s not customer differences that matter—it’s “how are our customers alike?”)

THERE’S MORE!
I can’t stop talking about this book—and I thought I was more clued in on AI than many of my colleagues. For six months, I’ve been clipping AI articles and viewing videos from The Wall Street Journal (often 10 or more per week). And yes, “clipping” is accurate. I’m old school with an actual newspaper and scissors. But, I’m astounded at the deep-and-wide content of Mastering AI. The book checks all the boxes and I’ve underlined hundreds of insights, including:
[x] History: ENIAC and the Turing Test (“AI’s Original Sin”)
[x] Authenticity and Trust: ontology and epistemology
[x] Why Microsoft built a data center in Iowa the size of 20 football fields!
[x] Why early innovators hated the term “artificial intelligence” and why “deep learning” was a brilliant term
[x] Why “confabulation,” not “hallucination,” might describe AI’s shortcomings better

Someone on your team needs to read this book. And gift this book to your pastor or priest also! (Note: On the Pails in Comparison Blog, I posted a “compare and contrast” question that I asked ChatGPT and Claude about this book and another book just published.)

TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future, by Jeremy Kahn. Listen on Libro (10 hours, 29 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) At your next weekly staff meeting, ask a team member to present a three-minute summary of a recent book or article on AI. Example: on July 9, 2024, Barna published their recent research, “The Ethics of AI: How Far Is Too Far?” Would your team’s view of AI align with Barna’s findings?

2) I’ve used OpenAI’s ChatGPT dozens of times for fun and research. Recently, I asked this: “Using the four social styles (Analytical, Driving, Amiable, and Expressive), what are the key questions that each style would ask, after hearing a pastor's Sunday morning sermon?” Here’s ChatGPT's response. QUESTION: How have you used AI recently—and were you pleased or disappointed?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 15: Feeble Faith and Flabby Worship
Book #84 of 100: Pursuing God’s Will Together

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #84 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Pursuing God’s Will Together:
A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups
by Ruth Haley Barton

Books #82 through #86 spotlight five soul-strengthening books to connect you with the God of the Universe. Ruth Haley Barton has the audacity to write, “Just because something is strategic does not necessarily mean it is God’s will for us right now.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Pursuing God’s Will Together
• Listen on Libro (6 hours, 59 minutes)
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

Warning! This is a dangerous book! Have you every gathered your team or board for a fork-in-the-road decision and prayed for “holy indifference” (a good thing)? Read my review to learn why the author urges you to pray this prayer.

Song #25 of 45: “Mercedes Benz"

Listen to "Mercedes Benz," sung by Janis Joplin, Song #25 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read why Joplin sang her new song "Acapulco" style! Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

I Asked AI to Compare and Contrast!

One day after these ground-breaking books were published, I asked AI to compare and contrast Pattern Breakers with Mastering AI. Both were published on July 9, 2024. Read the results from two AI sources. For more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

07:56 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: artificial intelligence, Jeremy Kahn, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Mastering AI

July 6, 2024

The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life

Issue No. 613 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a contrarian book on the new rules of persuasion. Take my pop quiz! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of The Power of One. Bonus! Read Ed Barrett’s color commentary in this week’s blog, "Whole Lotta Love," by Led Zeppelin, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good.

Old Spice deodorant and men’s grooming products needed a do-over from their 1970s successful TV commercials. (Think “old!”) Their research revealed “60 percent of body wash was purchased by women, ostensibly for the men in their lives,” writes Leslie Zane, founder of a brand consulting firm rooted in behavioral science. Enter the “Keep, Stop, Add” process—and this 2010 Super Bowl commercial, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” with Isaiah Amir Mustafa, the actor and former American football player. View it here.

Persuasion Pop Quiz!

I’m so sorry. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, your vacation is calling you—and you need a beach read, or maybe a bestseller for your mountain hideaway. But while you’re enjoying R&R, someone on your team must read this book ASAP. The Power of Instinct is a counterintuitive and contrarian deep dive into everything you’ve assumed (wrongly!) about how to sell your products, programs, services, ideas, sermons, causes, and even yourself. Must-read!

The Power of Instinct:
The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life
by Leslie Zane (June 18, 2024)

“This is the playbook for the next generation of marketing,” writes Leslie Zane, the founder of Triggers®, a chief marketing officer (CMO) advisory and first brand consulting firm “rooted in behavioral science.” Can a new book on marketing and persuasion be a page-turner? Yes! Here’s a pop quiz:

TRUE OR FALSE?

#1. TRUE OR FALSE? The first Harry Potter book, before being acquired by Bloomsbury, was rejected by more than 12 publishers. Bloomsbury’s chairman “passed the first chapter of the book on to a trusted beta reader—his eight-year-old daughter, Alice.” The estimated value of the franchise today: $40 billion!

#2. T or F? Why was Harry Potter (and dozens of other contrarian examples in this book) so successful? You must understand the brain: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. The author quotes behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman and others: “…the conscious mind only accounts for roughly 5 percent of our decisions.”

#3. T or F? What do these brands… [Kohl’s, Victoria’s Secret, Sears, Kmart, JCPenney, Toys “R” Us, Circuit City, Lord & Taylor, Borders Books and Music, Kodak, and Blockbuster]… have in common? Answer: “The Core Customer Trap.” The author adds, “Companies that are laser-focused on existing customers lull themselves into believing their brand is fine as is.”

#4. T or F? “Each year, approximately two-thirds of chief marketing officers and marketing leaders report that their focus in the coming year will be on marketing their products and services to existing customers.”

#5. T or F? “If you’re not constantly replenishing your franchise with new generations of customers, your business is going to diminish in size.” And, “If you’re not scaling, you’re dying.”

#6. T or F? “Marketing departments, ad agencies, and a constellation of research and consulting firms have been built to sway audiences using rules developed back in the middle of the twentieth century, before anyone recognized how we actually make decisions.”

#7. T or F? “Brands like Walmart entirely dispel what is known as the ‘brand and product life cycle,’ a classic marketing concept immortalized in 1967 in Marketing Management…and still taught in undergraduate and graduate business programs at top universities and in major corporations.”

#8. T or F? “But like so many theories on which the old rules of marketing were based, it turns out this one is a myth as well. The life cycle concept is not only scientifically inaccurate, it also causes missed opportunities, as so-called mature brands lose out on potential investment and continued growth.”

#9. Guess! Which one of these seven brands has NOT been around for 100 years or longer? Boeing, Crayola, Ford, Kraft Foods, Harley-Davidson, The UPS Store, or Whirlpool?

In the chapter, “The Snow-Capped Mountain Effect," the author describes how Tropicana’s 2008 decision to “freshen up its brand” led to “one of the most famous package design blunders in marketing history.” (See the original classic brand above—a winner.) Another winner: “the marvelously creative ‘Slices’ ad” that Heinz ketchup used to create positive associations. (Note: “positive” and “negative associations” is a critical theme in the book.)

#10. T or F? “If you want to get the green light for a project, you can’t just put together a presentation and rely on your ability to make a rational argument. You need to think like a marketer. And that means appealing to the subconscious of the decision maker.” (True or false? Find the answer in Zane’s HBR article here.)

#11. T or F? “People don’t buy because of need or loyalty; they buy on instinct.”

#12. T or F? The marketing and sales funnel, conceived in 1898, “has been treated like gospel by every marketing, sales, and media department in the business world.” (The five stages: “awareness, interest, desire or consideration, action or conversion, and loyalty or advocacy.”) “In essence, you can skip the funnel. But you’ll never hear anyone in the marketing world admit that out loud.”

#13. T or F? Finding Growth Triggers. “…according to research by 3M, humans process images sixty thousand times faster than text.” (Example: Nike’s “swoosh.”) Leslie Zane preaches: “To find the right Growth Triggers, you want to consider stimuli that affect at least one of the five senses. If the customer can see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it, it can serve as a cognitive shortcut.” Six triggers:
• Image Triggers™
• Verbal Triggers™
• Auditory Triggers™
• Olfactory Triggers™
• Taste Triggers™
• Tactile Triggers

#14. T or F? “Relying on existing customers is a trap. You get more growth out of people who don’t buy your brand.”

#15. T or F? You’re a big fan of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), right? “The concept became widely adopted in Fortune 500 C-suites. There was only one problem—there is sparse evidence that NPS or loyalty are actually correlated to business growth.”

#16. T or F? Yikes! “Assigning different handles to different segments with different characteristics isn’t helpful. Building a bunch of profiles, whether ‘Knitting Nancy’ or ‘Jogging Joe,’ doesn’t provide useful insight when you’re trying to grow your franchise with as large an audience as possible.” Oops? Is Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary still valid?

#17. T or F? “The most salient brands bring similar themes and associations to mind for everyone—new customers and existing ones alike. So the question you need to ask is not ‘How are our customers different?’ but ‘How are our customers alike?’”

#18. T or F? “A single brand message stifles growth; multiple messages fuel it.”

#19. T or F? The 1981 seminal marketing book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Jack Trout and Al Ries, championed “presenting only one potent message about your brand” and “working with what’s in people’s minds already.” Yet Zane pushes back in her chapter, “Why Layering Beats Focusing.” She notes: “There’s only one problem…what consumers say they want and what they ultimately choose bear little relationship to each other, since their behavior is dominated by their unconscious mind.”

#20. T or F? “Marketing conditions aren’t holding your brand back; negative associations are.”

EXTRA CREDIT. What was the familiar jingle in 1984 for Folgers Mountain Grown Coffee and what was the trigger? (Hint.)

POP QUIZ ANSWERS: Email me your 20 best guesses and I'll email you the correct answers next week. Possible prize for best guesser!

To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life, by Leslie Zane. Listen on Libro (8 hours, 47 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Oh, my. When I began reading The Power of Instinct, my first instinct was to call my friend Bob Hisrich. (But sadly, he passed away in 2023.) Bob was a prolific business author and university prof. Back in 1990, I convinced him to coauthor a business story with me to communicate his basic marketing principles. You can find used copies on Amazon for this 116-page quick read, Marketing Your Ministry: Ten Critical Principles. (Note: The 10 principles are summarized in “The Program Bucket” in Mastering the Management Buckets.) I think Bob would have found The Power of Instinct fascinating and might have mentioned Critical Principle #10 from our book: “One clever direct mail piece does not a marketing plan make. People buy a total package.” QUESTION: Do you agree that there are now “new rules” of persuasion?

2) Is “power” the new power word? I’ve reviewed 16 books that include “power” in the title or subtitle. Examples: The Power of Instinct, The Power of One, by Billy Wilson, The Power of Moments, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, and Doesn't Hurt to Ask: Using the Power of Questions to Communicate, Connect, and Persuade, by Trey Gowdy. (The last two books were books-of-the-year.)

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 15: Feeble Faith and Flabby Worship
Book #83 of 100: Soul Keeping

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #83 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Soul Keeping:
Caring for the Most Important Part of You
by John Ortberg

Books #82 through #86 spotlight five soul-strengthening books to connect you with the God of the Universe. In the chapter, “The Soul Needs a Center,” John Ortberg confesses, “If I am always in a hurry to be somewhere else, it’s an indicator that my soul has not yet found its home.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Soul Keeping
• Listen on Libro (6 hours, 8 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

Warning: you can’t speed-read this book! I lingered slowly through this book over 17 weekends…a chapter every Saturday or Sunday morning. Whew. Good stuff. Quotable stuff. PowerPoint-worthy wisdom. And always good for a half-page read to my wife, Joanne, who also appreciates John Ortberg and Dallas Willard. Most weekends, I also read her funny stuff from this one-of-a-kind book.

Song #24 of 45: “Whole Lotta Love"

Listen to “Whole Lotta Love,” by Led Zeppelin, Song #24 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read Ed Barrett’s color commentary—and learn why Led Zeppelin is his all-time favorite band. Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

4th of July
Follow-Up

American readers may want to continue their 4th of July celebration by reading John Grisham’s page turner, The Reckoning: A Novel (2018). It’s the story of a decorated WW2 war hero who survives the Bataan Death March in the Philippines and returns to his Mississippi home and farm, there to commit an egregious crime. His lackluster defense: “I have nothing to say.” Read my review.

For more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

07:01 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: John Pearson's Buckets Blog, Leslie Zane, marketing, new rules, persuasion, triggers

June 26, 2024

The Power of One: Reaching Every Person on Earth

Issue No. 612 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting introduces a must-read book with a BHAG for 2033—and powerful stories about “the power of one.” Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of The Transformational Leader. Bonus! Read Bill Butterworth’s color commentary in this week’s blog, “Suspicious Minds,” by Elvis Presley, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good.

Billy Wilson’s important book, The Power of One, begins with the true story of a World War II conscientious objector who saves soldier’s lives—one at a time. Mel Gibson directed the Oscar-winning movie that tells this young medic’s story. View the trailer for Hacksaw Ridge.

The Power of 1...and 1...and 1...and 1...

You gotta love a book—with a BHAG—that ignites your heart in the very first paragraph of Chapter 1. The author opens with Hacksaw Ridge, the 2016 Oscar-winning movie directed by Mel Gibson that chronicles the true story of a young medic, Desmond Doss (1919-2006), in the World War II Battle of Okinawa. This loyal American solder, although a Seventh-day Adventist conscientious objector, persuaded the U.S. Army to let him serve as a battlefield medic armed with God and guts, but no rifle. (View the movie trailer. The movie is R-rated due to wartime brutality.)

Ignoring the order to fall back on May 5, 1945 (“Full retreat! Get to the cliff!”), Doss viewed the thousands of wounded men on the battlefield and instead of retreating to safety down a 500-foot cliff, he saved a soldier’s life. Then he prayed, “Lord, help me get one more.” So he rescued one more, and then as Billy Wilson writes, he prayed again:
“’Lord, help me get one more.’
And then again.
And again.
And again.
And again….
‘One more. I’ll risk it all for one more. Even if I die, Lord, help me get one more.’”

Whoa! This is a powerful book and the tribute to Desmond Doss (who was awarded the Medal of Honor and other awards) sets the stage for this faith-based call for unity with a mission, written by the president of Oral Roberts University.

The Power of One:
Reaching Every Person on Earth
by Billy Wilson

Note: While Jim Collins popularized the term BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), I prefer the term Big HOLY Audacious Goal. And while Billy Wilson doesn’t use either term in his book—trust me—it’s a BHAG!

The author is part of Empowered21, “a relational network that God birthed in 2010 to help shape the future of the Spirit-empowered movement.” Wilson says that the network met in 2013 and asked a bold question: “What is something we can do that is so big, no single denomination or network of ministries can do it by themselves?” And also this: “What will keep us at the table together for a long time?” The answer:

“That every person on earth
would have an authentic encounter with Jesus Christ
through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit…by Pentecost 2033.”

Yet—get this! A few months after the network had adopted this “big vision,” Billy Wilson attended a Planetshakers Worship Night at a church on the outskirts of Manila in the Philippines. (What a great name for an event! You’d have to go, right?) That evening, he didn’t know a soul at that church where “Filipino teenagers were screaming, yelling, singing, worshiping, and having a blast.” Yet, one of the leaders “took the microphone and stopped the concert” and pointed to Wilson: “Sir, you, there in the red shirt.”

The leader continued, “I’ve never met you. I don’t know who you are or where you are from, but God just told me to speak to you for a minute.” Wilson writes that this leader’s first statement was simply, “God is saying you’re thinking too small.”

Imagine! You’ve just been on holy ground with Christ-followers from around the world—drafting a 2033 vision statement that includes “every person on earth”—and a stranger at a Planetshakers Worship Night in Manila tells you to think bigger! (This reminded me of the classic, Your God Is Too Small: A Guide for Believers and Skeptics Alike, by J.B. Phillips.)

The “everyONE” metaphors in the book are memorable: Hacksaw Ridge, the prodigal son, the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the force and influence of one person.

Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven-Life, writes in the foreword: “Just as Jesus explained that the Good Shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep safe to go after the one sheep that is lost, The Power of One explains why and how each of us can do our part in reaching everyone with the Good News that they matter to God, Christ’s died for them, and that He wants them in His family forever!”

I won’t spoil the journey for you, but this short book is both inspiring and convicting. Examples:
• “The Butterfly Effect” across generations: From D.L. Moody’s Sunday school teacher in 1855, to F.B. Meyer, to Wilbur Chapman, to Billy Sunday, to Mordecai Ham in 1934, to a 16-year-old young man, Billy Graham. (Chapter 3 is must-read! View the video.)
• The power of “supernatural synergy” (Jesus sent disciples out two by two.)
• Steve Moore: “The Great Commission is too big for anyone to accomplish alone and too important not to try to do together.” (See The Top Ten Leadership Conversations in the Bible.)

IMAGINE…if at the conclusion of the Russia/Ukraine war (we pray), we would hear of a story similar to Jacob DeShazer (1912-2008), one of the Doolittle Raiders in WW2 that bombed Nagoya, but was captured. Entering the war as an atheist, DeShazer persuaded a Japanese guard to loan him a Bible. He was converted and returned to Japan in 1948 as a missionary. But there’s more!

Japanese Captain Mitsui Fuchida, “who led the first wave of Japanese bombers in the attack on Pearl Harbor, became a Christian in 1950 after reading I Was a Prisoner of Japan, a tract about Jacob DeShazer. They became friends and "in 1959, DeShazer moved to Nagoya to establish a Christian church in the same city he had bombed in 1942.” Whew!

Note: Read the 1950 book, The Amazing Story of Sergeant Jacob DeShazer, by C. Hoyt Watson. How ironic! Billy Wilson, president of ORU, inspires us with DeShazer’s story. The full book on DeShazer was written by another college president, C. Hoyt Watson (1888-1969), who led Seattle Pacific College (now SPU) from 1926-1959. (DeShazer attended SPC, which is also my alma mater.)

THERE’S MORE: In 1942, Cameron Townsend (1896-1982) founded Wycliffe Bible Translators, “one of the world’s most significant missionary forces.” Read another powerful example of “The Power of One” in Wilson’s book. Townsend served more than 60 years in Latin America!

In 1934, Townsend launched “Camp Wycliffe,” a linguistic training program named after John Wycliffe, the first translator of the entire Bible into English. Billy Wilson writes that he, too, loves the Christian camping movement. Don’t skip his story in Chapter 5 about bringing baseball bats to a camp in India and the staff’s encounter with a seriously-large rat!

USE ME ANYWAY! I was struck with Wilson’s list of Bible characters that God used “despite their weaknesses and struggles.” They echoed Isaiah’s example, “I’ll go. Send me!”—but due to their imperfections, they responded, “Here am I, use me anyway!”
• “Abraham was too old.”
• “Jeremiah was too young.”
• “Elijah was suicidal.”
• “Joseph had been abused.”
• “Job went bankrupt.”
• “Moses stuttered.”
• “Gideon had low self-esteem.”
• “Samson had a problem with women.”
• “Rahab was a prostitute.”
• “Hosea had an immoral wife.”
• “Peter lacked moral courage under pressure.”
• “And Paul persecuted the church and lived with a thorn in the flesh.”

Hmmm. Maybe God can use us—and our imperfections. Don’t skip Chapter 6, “A New Era of Evangelism” and Wilson’s hopeful view. He’s a cheerleader for biblical unity, but notes, “…while unity is relational in scope, it must be missional in intent.” He adds, “After years of experience convening Christian leaders, I have discovered that relational networks deteriorate unless they have a united mission.”

“Without His presence and the work of the Holy Spirit, our attempts at unity are futile and limited to human ingenuity.” I loved this line: “God’s glory is the rest of the story.” Amen.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Power of One: Reaching Every Person on Earth, by Billy Wilson. And thanks to Paul Palmer who asked the author to send me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Thinking of BHAGs (see above), it was a few years back when Evangelical Alliance Ireland posted these memorable statements:
• Vision Statement: “Our vision over the next 25 years for Ireland is that: The Kingdom of God becomes UNAVOIDABLE in every sphere of Irish life.”
• Mission Statement: “The mission is what EAI will seek to do every day to move closer to the vision: To mobilise evangelicals into engagement with society.” What do you appreciate about the vision statement?

2) Calvinists who read The Power of One might initially discount Billy Wilson’s thoughtful critique of the “TULIP” doctrine. “At times,” Wilson writes, “it has dulled the church’s effectiveness.” Before you push back, maybe follow Charlie Munger’s approach: “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.” Can you articulate the five key themes in Calvinism's doctrine of salvation in the Bible (pro and con)?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 15: Feeble Faith and Flabby Worship
Book #82 of 100: Knowing God

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #82 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Knowing God
by J.I. Packer

Books #82 through #86 spotlight five soul-strengthening books to connect you with the God of the Universe. Here’s Packer: “When you start reading Luther, or Edwards, or Whitefield, though your doctrine may be theirs, you soon find yourself wondering whether you have any acquaintance at all with the mighty God whom they knew so intimately.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Knowing God
• Listen on Libro (10 hours).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

Oh, my. Pick any page in this beloved book—and you’ll need to pause and pray. J.I. Packer (1926-2020) writes, “But this is knowledge which Christians today largely lack: and that is one reason why our faith is so feeble and our worship so flabby. We are modern people, and modern people, though they cherish great thoughts of themselves, have as a rule small thoughts of God.”

Bonus! Listen to this three-minute opening of Chapter 2, “The People Who Know Their God.”

Song #23 of 45: “Suspicious Minds”

Listen to “Suspicious Minds,” by Elvis Presley, Song #23 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read Bill Butterworth’s color commentary—and his “almost” moment with the King of Rock and Roll! You’ll love it! Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Remembering Pat Clements

Read my tribute to Pat Clements (1945-2024) and the many ways his faithful leadership (and practical tools) served other leaders in the U.S. and globally (including me). I'm so grateful.

10:53 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: Billy Wilson, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, The Power of One

June 18, 2024

The Transformational Leader: How the World's Best Leaders Build Teams, Inspire Action, and Achieve Lasting Success

Issue No. 611 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features another book from WSJ bestselling author Matt Mayberry and a Leadership Pop Quiz! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World's Most Successful People. Bonus! Read this week’s blog commentary on "Oh Happy Day," by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good.

The stirring pre-game locker room talk by Al Pacino in the movie, Any Given Sunday, is referenced in Matt Mayberry’s new book, The Transformational Leader. View the clip here. (Note: Several “non-church” locker room words!)

“Leadership, as we know it, is extinct.”

POP QUIZ! NO CHEATING!
#1. What are the five pillars of every great leader? (Extra Credit: List at least one specific action step for each pillar in the “Code of Leadership.”)
#2. What are the five imperatives in a leader’s Communication Toolbox? (Hint: “Adapt Your Style” is Imperative 3, but what are the three learning styles that may require you to adapt your own communication style?)
#3. What are the five pillars of emotional intelligence? (Extra Credit: List one action step for each pillar. Hint: Try a team-building exercise with a tent and a blindfold!)
#4. What are the four coaching imperatives? (Extra Credit: List three popular excuses for why many leaders do not invest time in coaching their team members.)
#5. What are the five sacrifices of transformational leadership? (Have you ever thought about this before? See the five warnings for wanna-be leaders!)

ANSWERS? Sorry…you’ll need to read this powerful new book:

The Transformational Leader:
How the World's Best Leaders Build Teams,
Inspire Action, and Achieve Lasting Success
by Matt Mayberry (May 7, 2024)

I’m partial to any author who once played pro football for the Chicago Bears and delivers fresh and practical content in bite-sized portions—perfect for your weekly staff meetings. Matt Mayberry checks all the boxes and his new book is jam-packed with wisdom, encouragement, and frequent pokes-in-the-ribs for every leader.

Much like Marshall Goldsmith’s warning, “What got you here, won’t get you there,” Matt Mayberry is concerned about the leadership crisis today. “Leadership, as we know it, is extinct,” he writes. “Many leaders still use management competencies learned early in their careers despite changing workplace dynamics.”

He adds, “Leadership isn’t just a title; it’s a ripple effect. Great leaders can inspire us, but bad ones, driven by ego, can wreak havoc.”

I took my own medicine and approached each of the 27 short chapters with a “Pop Quiz” exercise. (By the way, “27” may be the new trend. How Leaders Learn also has 27 short chapters.) Example: Mayberry introduces a topic with three, four, or five key pillars or principles—and I’d try to guess what they were. (Apparently, I’m not a good guesser and I still have much to learn.) I came close with one or two ideas—but his full lists are PowerPoint-worthy. And as I mentioned—perfect for your lifelong learning moments in your weekly staff meetings. More examples:

• “The 8 Building Blocks of Inspirational Leadership.” Yikes! I may have overemphasized the Results Buckets, to the neglect of the People Bucket. Mayberry notes a survey of 60,000 workers that gave higher ratings to leaders “who adopted a dual focus on results and people.”
• LOL! Mayberry explains why “Skill” is not listed first on the “6 Components of the Influence Model” (Head, Heart, Skill, Connect, Trust, and Inspire). He writes, “…there’s a good reason it’s not number one, and that reason is the talented jerk we all encounter at some point who produces incredible results but destroys everyone around them.” He quotes Charles Swindoll, “Leadership is influence. To the extent we influence others, we lead them.”
• You’ll appreciate Mayberry’s precise choice of words—explaining why we must address ineffective leadership models (“with all its traditional wisdom”). It requires debunking, dismantling, and abandoning the old leadership lingo—and moving to a gardening and cultivating mindset. (This reminded me of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s metaphor in Team of Teams.)

KEEPERS. The featured quotations are keepers (Churchill, Spurgeon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tom Landry, Indra Nooyi, Warren Buffet, Craig Groeschel, and numerous other leaders). In his chapter on “Authentic Leadership: Leading with Integrity,” Mayberry reminds us, “…we do not define leaders by their rise to prominence, but rather by their ability to resist external pressures at the top, where temptation is the strongest.” (See also The Leader’s Palette, by Ralph E. Enlow, Jr.)

A CONTINUOUS JOURNEY. With insightful color commentary from sports, coaching, and the military, The Transformational Leader will inspire you to elevate your aspirations. “Excellence isn’t a destination but a continuous journey of challenging ourselves to become better that we were yesterday.” Last week, I watched the new documentary film from Amazon Prime, The Blue Angels (2024)—the perfect companion piece to this book. I urge you to view this documentary with your team and host a conversation on excellence, succession, and much more.

View the official trailer for the documentary, The Blue Angels. “When you’re flying 12 inches apart, that can be scary!” Think excellence. Think discipline. Think teamwork. Think succession planning.

THERE’S MORE!
For an August preseason NFL game, prior to the 2023 season, Tennessee Titans Head Coach Mike Vrabel “stunned the football world and left us all in awe. Recognizing the ambition of assistant coach Terrell Williams, Vrabel stepped aside to let him take over the full scope of head coaching operations against the Chicago Bears.” Williams had the “whistle and clipboard” from Thursday afternoon until after the game on Saturday.” (Wow! You don’t see that often—in any organization!)

When KPMG challenged their team members to generate 10,000 stories on this global company’s impact on society—they received 42,000 “We Shape History!” stories! Read more in the Harvard Business Review article, “How an Accounting Firm Convinced Its Employees They Could Change the World.”

Mayberry quotes Tom Peters: “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.” And how’s this for an interview question from another CEO? “Don’t tell me everything you’ve done or accomplished. Give me examples of how you have helped others grow.”

OK…just one more Pop Quiz Question: Name “The 5 Core Tenets of Effective Leadership.” (Here’s a hint from the author: “Let me ask a blunt question: how can someone lead others if they can’t lead themselves?) This reminded me of Steve Brown’s helpful book, Leading Me.

Bottom Line: If you’re planning to showcase your same old/same old leadership to the next wave of coworkers and team members—good luck! I’m urging you to add this important book to your leadership library. (You do have a leadership library, right?)

To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Transformational Leader: How the World's Best Leaders Build Teams, Inspire Action, and Achieve Lasting Success, by Matt Mayberry. And thanks to the author for sending me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) For another taste of Matt Mayberry, read these two Harvard Business Review articles by the author: “How to Lead Your First One-on-One Meeting” (April 17, 2024), and “You Don’t Need to Be ‘the Boss’ to Be a Leader" (Feb. 13, 2023). For more on one-on-one meetings, visit the Meetings Bucket. QUESTION: How would you coach a new manager preparing to lead her first one-on-one meeting?
2) The leadership books from Dick Daniels are also Pop Quiz-worthy. He writes “Communication is the primary competence of a leader.” (I named this book my 2021 book-of-the-year.) And in Hardwiring New Leadership Habits (2023), he coaches, “Among the three levels of a development culture, leading yourself is always harder than leading the team or even leading the organization.” QUESTION: What’s your go-to book for inspiring and coaching young leaders and managers?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 14: Leadership & Management at War
Book #81 of 100: Leaders: Myth and Reality

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #80 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Leaders: Myth and Reality
by General Stanley McChrystal (US Army, Retired),
Jeff Eggers, and Jason Mangone

Books #77 through #81 spotlight five fascinating books with military viewpoints on leadership and management. Book #81 features profiles of 13 leaders (some with warts) and some deep thinking on the myths and realities of true leadership.
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Leaders: Myth and Reality
• Listen on Libro (17 hours, 2 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

The book’s approach is fascinating, disturbing, and thought-provoking. McChrystal’s compare-and-contrast model was Plutarch’s Lives—and, trust me, you’ll need a pen if you’re still reading books the old-fashioned way. Oh…and schedule a long vacation this summer—this gem is over 400 pages, plus notes.

Song #22 of 45: “Oh Happy Day"

Listen to “Oh Happy Day,” by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, Song #22 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read Paul Palmer’s heavily-researched color commentary and learn what Dick Clark said when the Singers appeared on American Bandstand! Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

What to do when the CEO isn't in the room!

Last year, I reviewed another book by Matt Mayberry, Culture Is the Way: How Leaders at Every Level Build an Organization for Speed, Impact, and Excellence. He quotes this gem: “Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn’t in the room, which is of course most of the time.” Read my review. For more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

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Tags: John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Matt Mayberry, The Transformational Leader

June 6, 2024

How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World's Most Successful People

Issue No. 610 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting delivers bite-sized lifelong learning snippets from 105 leaders. The author quotes Peter Drucker, “The most pressing task is teaching people how to learn.” Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do About It. Bonus! Read this week’s blog, “Magic Carpet Ride,” by Steppenwolf, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good.

David Novak, author of How Leaders Learn, says that every time he gives a speech, he asks his wife for a letter grade! (Spoiler alert! She doesn’t always give A’s.)

How 105 Leaders Learn!

So…as is my habit (sometimes annoying, apparently) to share book insights with my wife, Joanne, who patiently listens (sometimes)—this week I read her a brief paragraph from the new Harvard Business Review Press book:

How Leaders Learn:
Master the Habits of the World's Most Successful People
by David Novak with Lari Bishop (June 4, 2024)

The author writes that a colleague (kindly) asked Patrick Lencioni, “Why are you like this?” This coworker noticed that Lencioni “showed up in the morning excited for the day but would suddenly turn into a grump in the middle of a meeting. Then, in the next meeting, he would be upbeat again. He recognized it himself, and it bothered him, but he could never figure out why he was hot and cold.”

Novak leveraged that story—and the Lencioni book that resulted—to discuss what leaders often don’t learn about themselves. Joanne’s response, “Do you think this is common for most leaders—that they have gaps that need to be filled in?”

I couldn’t believe her question! “Are you kidding me?” I asked. “That’s the title of Novak’s third chapter, ‘Fill Your Gaps.’ How did you know that?” (LOL! She may also have mentioned something about my reading fewer books and just learning from her!)

BITE-SIZED LEARNING. There’s no need to read any more of this review—if you’ll just read this book (or schedule a session with my wife). How Leaders Learn is very, very practical. The format is brilliant: 27 short chapters (in bite-sized, 15-minute insights)—with each chapter featuring the learning habits of three to five leaders. You’ll be familiar with many of the 105 people spotlighted:

PATRICK LENCIONI discovered that of his six “working geniuses,” he was strong in just two of them: invention and discernment. (Read more and take the assessment mentioned in his book, The 6 Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team.)

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, former U.S. Secretary of State, tells the author that as a young professor, she received a one-year fellowship to work for the strategic nuclear planning division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I was three things they had never seen. Female, black, and civilian…” And yes, on her first day, they told her, “The rookie makes the coffee.” Read how she responded.

HENRY KISSINGER is quoted in the chapter on what you can learn from a crisis: “There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”

LOL! Novak spotlights five leaders facing crises, including Oscar Munoz, who had to face the media as CEO of United Airlines when a 2017 PR disaster went viral. (Read more in Turnaround Time.) Munoz told Novak, “My barometer is the business schools around the country that initially wrote it as a case of exactly what not to do. Those business cases shifted to become lessons in ‘It’s never too late to do the right thing.’”

MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER is interviewed for the chapter on learning to ask better questions, “What If, How Could, and Why.” I was delighted to see that two books from “MBS” were included: The Advice Trap (my 2020 book-of-the-year) and The Coaching Habit. Novak affirms, “Active learners make the effort to stay curious first and dole out advice second so they don’t fall victim to what Michael calls the ‘Advice Monster,’ which grows from our need to tell it, save it, or control it.”

And…speaking of good questions, several years ago I mentioned to a client that the next time he was in town, he should bring his wife—and I’d treat the four of us to the (now) $7.00 dinner at the San Clemente Pier. I suggested that his wife would appreciate meeting Joanne. “She often asks probing questions,” I added, “and people often respond, ‘I’ve never been asked that question before!’” (Oops! My client told me the next day, “I mentioned that to my wife last night—and she doesn’t want to meet Joanne!”)

GINNI ROMETTY, former CEO of IBM, is interviewed for the chapter, “Ditch the Blinders”—an important wake-up call about how our biases and assumptions ignore reality and cause harm. In her book, Good Power, she describes how she challenged “two faulty assumptions” at IBM: “…people with at least a bachelor’s degree and with experience would be better hires.” Yet Novak writes that we must “learn to make—and check—your own judgments.” So IBM started looking for talent at high schools and community colleges and “…they started testing for the traits that made people successful through transformation: curiosity, grit, and drive.”

DAVID NOVAK actually didn’t need 105 people to learn how to learn (my opinion), because you’ll learn a lot just from his own life lessons. He’s the co-author of the self-coaching book, Take Charge of You, and he’s the cofounder and former Chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands (over 1.5 million team members in 135 countries!). Check out his top-ranked podcast, How Leaders Lead. Here are just three of the dozens of insights from Novak that I underlined in my book:
• “The biggest truth-teller in my life is my wife, Wendy.” Every time he gives a speech, he asks her for a letter grade! You read that right—and she doesn’t give all A’s! When she does give the rare A, “I know without a doubt I’m doing my best work.” (And yes—not thinking clearly, I read that to my wife, Joanne!)
• When leaving Yum! Brands as CEO, he was invited to serve on numerous boards—but he said “yes” to Comcast because “I’d constantly learn about the most current ideas in media and tech.” (Attn: Board Chairs! Are you recruiting new board members by aligning board service with the gaps in their lifelong learning aspirations?)
• In the first chapter, “Trailer Park University,” Novak confesses to accepting a big promotion by moving from Pizza Hut over to PepsiCo—without asking his current boss for counsel. “He had given me the biggest break in my career, and I owed him a lot more sensitivity than I had given him.” (This prompted me to reflect on my own transitions.)

URI LEVINE, founder of Waze and author of Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, is featured in the chapter, “From Pain to Possibility: Learn by tackling problems.” Novak writes, “Most of my career moves reflect a theme: I took jobs with organizations that were experiencing trouble. Those might seem like jobs to avoid, but I have never felt that way.” He adds, “Solving problems and active learning go hand in hand.” He notes that Levine embraces problems because they deliver at least two values. Must-read! When you ask for input, “you kind of sign up for a mission” and Novak adds, “…sometimes, you discover new and bigger problems to tackle next.” (That’s a good thing!)

THERE’S MORE! I’ve barely scratched the surface of the deep learning (practical!) in this treasure chest for lifelong learners. Novak uncovers more “how leaders learn” wisdom from Coach John Wooden, Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Jason Goldsmith, Stephen M.R. Covey (The Speed of Trust), and more than 90 other leaders.

You’ll love this: INDRA NOOYI, former CEO of PepsiCo, told Novak that when she was young, her mother inspired her and her siblings “to be both aspirational and competitive.” For a task at dinner, her mother would ask, “Give me a speech about what you would do if you were the prime minister of the country.” After the speeches, “her mother chose the best speech and handed out the prize—a tiny piece of chocolate.” Her mother didn’t play favorites: the best speech always earned the chocolate. (Another must-read chapter!)

This is a perfect book for your “10 minutes for lifelong learning” segment at your next 27 weekly staff meetings! And by the way, when you’re writing your next book, ask Novak to write your chapter titles. They’re brilliant bumper stickers!

To order from Amazon, click on the title for How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World's Most Successful People, by David Novak with Lari Bishop. (Note: the seven-hour audio book is coming.) And thanks to Harvard Business Review Press for sending me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) In Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom, Dan Busby and I asked, "Would you trust a surgeon who was not a lifelong learner? Would you trust an airline pilot who relied on outdated training?" The first chapter, “Wanted: Lifelong Learners,” ends with a prayer: “Lord, Romans 12:8 says that I am to lead diligently. Give me a heart to be a lifelong learner in my leadership journey. Amen.” Do you know how leaders learn?
2) Abraham Lincoln said, “My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.” What friend needs a book from you this week?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 14: Leadership & Management at War
Book #80 of 100: Make Your Bed

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #80 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Make Your Bed:
Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe the World
by Admiral William H. McRaven (U.S. Navy Retired)

Books #77 through #81 spotlight five fascinating books with military viewpoints on leadership and management. “If you want to change the world…” writes Admiral McRaven, “…start off by making your bed.” The first chapter, from the author’s Navy SEAL training days, is “Start Your Day With a Task Completed.” Sage advice!
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Make Your Bed
• Listen on Libro (1 hours, 53 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

Looking for a graduation gift? This book packs a punch at the fast clip of one big punch every 10 short pages. Adm. McRaven’s 10 principles were delivered first as a university commencement address. His 19-minute speech on May 21, 2014, to the graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin went viral—with over 10 million views! View it here.

Note: Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. As we thank God for the men and women who served and are serving, listen to this poignant song, "Till They Came Home."

Song #20 of 45: “Magic Carpet Ride”

Listen to “Magic Carpet Ride,” by Steppenwolf, Song #20 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read guest blogger Larry Beatty’s color commentary and why he’s the drummer for three groups—even in retirement! Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Ceiling Power!

David Novak (see above) is also the co-author of Take Charge of You: How Self-Coaching Can Transform Your Life and Career. Read my review to learn why Novak filled his office walls (and home office walls) with pictures of people that mattered to him. He ran out of wall space—so more pictures adorn his ceilings! For more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

Do you serve on a regional or national association staff or board? John Pearson was invited by Christian Camping International to discuss “5 Ways to Organize Your CCI Association (1 Size Doesn’t Fit All)” on the “Campfire Conversations” webinar on May 14, 2024. CCI Worldwide inspires 27 associations in 80 countries whose members serve 10 million campers each year! View the webinar on YouTube.

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10:12 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: David Novak, How Leaders Learn, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, lifelong learning

May 24, 2024

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about It

Issue No. 609 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting warns that the new book, May Contain Lies, may also discombobulate your confirmation biases! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance. Bonus! Read this week’s blog, “Stand By Your Man,” sung by Tammy Wynette, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good.

The new book, May Contain Lies, warns that business schools “teach the future captains of industry using stories, not science.” Also: beware those amateur YouTube videos and the “10,000 hours rule!”

May Discombobulate Your Confirmation Bias!

Yikes! Please remind me never to prove my point with research, studies, or statistics. After reading this book—I may need to scrub dozens (hundreds?) of my book reviews, client presentations, and previous conversations with my wife! Someone on your team must read:

May Contain Lies:
How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases
―And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans (May 14, 2024)

GOOD NEWS. Can you trust my review of May Contain Lies (because, unwittingly, it may contain lies and misinformation)? Well, you can read the 10-page appendix, “A Checklist for Smarter Thinking.” The author lists punch-in-the-gut questions to ask before you use Statements, Facts, Data, and Evidence. He begins with this: “Do you want the conclusion to be true?”

BAD NEWS. Wait…what? Does Alex Edmans really throw several bestselling authors under the bus? Can you still trust the premise, the research, and the conclusions of these books and presentations?
• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek, plus his TED talk (60 million views!)
• Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Edmans writes that “these two accounts are completely different from one another. But it’s their similarities that help us understand how two inconsistent explanations become lodged in Apple lore. Both prey on black-and-white thinking.”

GOOD NEWS. This is helpful! The author’s “Ladder of Misinference” features five rungs (top to bottom): Proof, Evidence, Data, Fact, and Statement. The chapters in “Part II, The Problems,” go deep—and you’ll be shocked.
• A Statement is Not Fact
• A Fact is Not Data
• Data is Not Evidence: Data Mining
• Data is Not Evidence: Causation
• When Data is Evidence
• Evidence is Not Proof

BAD NEWS. There’s more. The author pokes other bestsellers. He’s ruthless, perhaps even sacrilegious—attacking St. Malcolm and St. James!
• Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell - Was the “10,000 hours rule” ever really valid?
• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras

Edmans picks his fight with Collins, noting: “Built to Last…identifies nine principles that seemingly lead to enduringly profitable companies. Chapter I ends with over ten pages brow-beating the reader with how much information they gathered, to convince you to put your faith in their principles.”

Oh, my. Edmans is harsh. I won’t rub salt in the wounds of my faithful readers who are Collins zealots, but Edmans quotes a business prof who critiques Built to Last and similar books calling out “the delusion of rigorous research.”

GOOD NEWS. Amazingly, I forced myself to trek deeper into this book—in spite of the author raining on my parade of previously-highly-regarded authors. So why am I recommending this book? I called upon the credo of all lifelong learners—study both sides. This quote from Charlie Munger (1924-2023) in my 2023 book-of-the-year inspires me:

“I never allow myself
to have an opinion on anything unless I know
the other side’s argument better than they do.”

BAD NEWS. Yikes! The author, who is Professor of Finance at London Business School, will mess with your head (but maybe that’s actually good news). His TED talk, “What to Trust in a Post-Truth World,” has almost two million views.

Professor and author Alex Edmans gives an example of confirmation bias in his 17-minute TED Talk about Belle Gibson, an Australian, who deceived people around the world! Who can you trust?

GOOD NEWS. We need prophets and police in our world. Had this book been written 10 or 20 years ago, I’m pretty sure my analysis of client surveys would have been better and more accurate. Now today, May Contain Lies makes me less trusting of stats and studies—but that’s good.

BAD NEWS. Yikes! The book begins: “The sweat was dripping down my face as I awaited my grilling in the UK House of Commons. I’d been summoned to testify in front of the Select Committee on Business. This was a group of MPs who, infuriated by a couple of high-profile scandals, had launched an inquiry into how companies were being run.” What happened next—shocking, even to the author!

It reminded me of the recent Amazon Prime Video series, Mr. Bates vs The Post Office—“The true story of Alan Bates’ 20-year fight against wrongful accusations by the Post Office, exposing one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.”

GOOD NEWS. Prof. Edmans is an equal-opportunity investigator. While calling out U.S. VP candidate Sarah Palin for saying there would be “death panels” under Obamacare (“PolitiFact named death panels the ‘Lie of the Year’ for 2009”), he also calls out U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders for saying, “Wall Street CEOs who helped destroy the economy don’t get police records. They get raises in their salaries.” (Not true for the CEOs of Bear Stearns and Lehman who “each lost nearly $1 billion when their companies went under.”)

Edmans writes, “When statements don’t have sources, the checks we’ve previously mentioned are harder to conduct.” What to do? “We can respond passively by putting much less weight on a claim if no evidence is provided, particularly if the claim is extreme. The statements by Palin and Sanders were conspicuous in the lack of their evidence despite the strength of their assertions.”

BAD NEWS. Really? The author dares to question the efficacy of many of our favorite opinions and axioms:
• “As a driver of company success, culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
• “Our country’s education system is why we’re behind our neighbours.”
Edmans reminds us, “There’s no scientific study that can either prove or disprove these assertions.” He gives three principles for testing the validity of things we can’t certify with certainty.

This reminded me of the helpful book, Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations, by Garson O'Toole. (Read my review and check your confirmation bias with my “True or False” pop quiz!)

BAD NEWS. Now, Edmans is just meddling! He takes business school case studies to task (and he's a business prof!), saying they “take one company that ended up a storming success or a futile failure and reverse-engineer an explanation for its fortunes—without ever testing whether other companies with the same traits had similar outcomes. As a result, we teach the future captains of industry using stories, not science.”

He sticks the knife in with this: “If a book, column or case study by a business guru is based on a story, or even several stories, it’s no more reliable than a YouTube video by an amateur.”

GOOD NEWS. This book will help you spot lies, confirmation bias, and recognize “psychobabble” and more—so will you read it? Each chapter concludes with helpful summary bullet points—and the practical pointers are plentiful. Example: when you read about “Garfunkel and Simon’s greatest hits”—you should be wary. He explains why.

And you’ll appreciate the author’s transparency. “Writing a book on misinformation is dangerous, as you might fall foul of the mistakes that you describe.” (Ditto when writing book reviews!)

To order from Amazon, click on the title for May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do About It, by Alex Edmans. Listen on Libro (8 hours, 33 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) The author of May Contain Lies is not a fan of some case studies or one-sample-only assumptions about business success. While you may find this April 2012 HBR article interesting, Alex Edmans reminds us to distinguish between “stories” and “science.” Example: “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs: Six months after Jobs’s death, the author of his best-selling biography identifies the practices that every CEO can try to emulate,” by Walter Isaacson. (Read the 21-page article at HBR.) QUESTION: Are we guilty of citing sources and studies—because we want them to be true—without verifying their veracity?

2) In his chapter, “A Statement is Not a Fact,” Alex Edmans asks, “Is there anything worse that bad data? There is—having no data at all.” Don’t skip this chapter and this note: “As the Queen of Hearts scoffed in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ‘Sentence first, verdict afterwards.’” QUESTION: Who will read and report on this book at our next weekly staff meeting?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 14: Leadership & Management at War
Book #79 of 100: Team of Teams

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #79 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Team of Teams:
New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
by Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell

Books #77 through #81 spotlight five fascinating books with military viewpoints on leadership and management. Gen. McChrystal’s book is relevant to every leader and manager because we all face what he labels “VUCA.” The acronym stands for: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. (Can you relate?!)
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Team of Teams
• Listen on Libro (12 hours, 5 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

McChrystal says we must reject our love affair with “heroic leaders.” Not easy for a four-star general, who led the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq during the Persian Gulf Wars, and retired in 2010 after serving as commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Confessing to his own struggles, he writes: “Although I recognized its necessity, the mental transition from heroic leader to humble gardener was not a comfortable one.”

In the chapter recap (three succinct bullet points summarize each chapter), he cautions, “The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing.”

Song #19 of 45: “Stand By Your Man”

Listen to “Stand By Your Man,” sung by Tammy Wynette, Song #19 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read guest blogger Patsy Barton’s notes about why Wynette didn’t use her given name, Virginia Pugh! Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Grace and Grit for Sufferers and Sinners!

Terry Powell’s latest book asks, “What Is the Most Important Sermon You Will Ever Hear?” That’s just one of 31 tantalizing and convicting short chapters in his new book, Can You See The Cross From There? Grace and Grit For Sufferers and Sinners. Read my review. For more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

09:43 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: Alex Edmans, confirmation bias, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, May Contain Lies

May 17, 2024

The Problem With Change

Issue No. 608 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting recommends another candidate for book-of-the year that changed my thinking about change! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress.

The author of The Problem With Change lists five major problems in “Blender Land” (our workplaces) when change is unwittingly foisted upon normally-healthy team members. One biggie: “The problem of lack of control.”

I Changed My Thinking About Change!

If there were a Pulitzer Prize or a Booker Prize for “Best Beginning of a Nonfiction Book,” this year’s prize would certainly be awarded to:

The Problem with Change:
And the Essential Nature of Human Performance
by Ashley Goodall (May 7, 2024)

Listen free to the first 5 minutes of the audio book.

The author invites us into a corporate setting (“for the sake of illustration”). It’s Friday and the Wall Street Journal reports “that the company you work for is in advanced discussions of some sort with your largest competitor.”

Then, after 48 hours of “much frantic pinging of your peers and little concrete news, late on Sunday comes the official press release: The two companies are merging. There follows a flurry of announcements from your senior leaders, who are, to a person, both ‘excited’ and ‘thrilled’ by the news—some are even ‘energized.’”

It gets worse (I mean, funnier). A fanfare heralds “the Arrival of the Management Consultants” and finally, “white smoke emerges from the regulatory chimney, and the deal is given the go-ahead.” (For more “white smoke” and change examples, read my review of the humorous movie, We Have a Pope.)

What follows?
• Reorganization!
• Listening Tour!
• Bad Old Names replaced by Obviously Better New Names!
• And worse!

“In all of this, you will marvel that things were quite so broken in the old world…” It gets worse! Musical chairs, one step forward, two steps back—and more “fanfare heralds the Arrival of the Rival Management Consultants”—and, of course, a special PowerPoint template. The new Model emerges and all of this will “help people who were, last week, working happily alongside one another to continue to do so, but with betterness.”

LOL! (There’s more: the new open floor plan, “because collaboration.”) “This is life in the blender,” writes Ashley Goodall, a leadership expert and former Chief Learning Officer for Leadership and Professional Development. (He’s seen it all—and it ain’t pretty.)

And speaking of floor plans, had the publisher asked me, I would have suggested a new subtitle for this Very Important Wake-Up Call:

THE PROBLEM WITH CHANGE:
Before You Play Office-Layout-Musical-Chairs Again, Reorganize Your Organizational Chart, or Rewrite Another Shiny New Mission Statement—Read THIS Book!

Frankly, I fear my feeble review will cause you to delete this and move on—but that would be your biggest mistake this year (honest). I love this book and I couldn’t stop reading excerpts and one-liners to my wife. She loves it! Last week I emailed five colleagues—urging them to listen to the free five-minute audio and then read (or listen to) the entire book.

But here’s my problem. My last review, The Illusion of Innovation, trumpeted the power of disruption. This week’s book, The Problem With Change, takes a contrarian view—and I appreciate both sides of this debate! I hinted that last week’s book might be my 2024 book-of-the-year. Yikes! I may need two books-of-the-year.

Why? Page after page, learning about the unhealthy results of change foisted on previously healthy team members, I was reminded of the many missteps in my leadership years—totally missing the trauma that I unwittingly perpetrated on employees. (So sorry, friends—if we’re still friends.) My entire view of CHANGE has changed.

EXAMPLES:
• “Toxic Positivity.” The dozens of interviews with people enduring workplace changes are stunning, even eye-opening. “Leslie” grew tired of the “toxic positivity” when new leaders would babble “…there always being an upside to change, or a lesson, or that when one door closes, another one opens.”
• In the first chapter, “Life in the Blender,” the new leader arrives and mandates that the microwave in the office be replaced because it was “nonstandard.” When employees exited—unable to deal with all the small and big changes—it became a joke: those employees were “nonstandard.”
• First 90 Days. “Leaders are told to spend their first ninety days in a new role figuring out a plan for change, and then to launch that plan on day ninety-one, needed or not.” (Ouch! See my review.)
• “No one has ever made a name for themselves by saying, ‘Let’s stay as we were and see where it takes us.’”
• And if, while leaders are explaining upcoming changes, “they manage to say the word ‘disrupt’ a lot, they get extra-bonus-biz-dude points. A few years back, it was cool, in certain circles to describe yourself as a Change Agent; now all the change agents are looking sad and slow, and all the cool kids are Disrupters.”

“CHANGE-Y WORDS” AND “MEANING CREEP.” In the chapter, “The Cult of Disruption,” the author doesn’t hold back:

“Before Disruption, the job was to move things up and to the right. After Disruption, the job is just to move things. In this way, the advent of disruption was also the occasion for an insidious bit of meaning creep. Right under our noses, all the change-y words—innovate, disrupt, change, renew, transform, update, reimagine, reinvent, refresh—came to share a single, unquestionable meaning: better!”

Oh, my. Ashley Goodall is a writer’s writer. I’m on my second black felt tip pen—underlining his pokes-in-the-ribs glossary:
• “Financification of business”
• “Tagline-ification” and “big shiny change levers” and “shiny new mission statements”
• “Hubris Syndrome” and the “Altitude Sickness” of higher-than-ye leaders who “wall” themselves off from the changes (“assaults”) they inflict on their people
• Why “foosball and free food” doesn’t cut it anymore

Here are the problems with the changes you’re throwing at your people:
• The problem of uncertainty
• The problem of lack of control
• The problem of unbelonging
• The problem of displacement
• The problem of loss of meaning

Hard-headed (and hard-hearted) leaders will skip this book—thinking there’s no room for the “softer” side of leadership. They will do this at their own peril. Read this book—and it will change your thinking. Warning! Your misguided changes (yes, you!) often produce:
• Dizzy spells and nausea. (Yes, in your people!)
• Nostalgia. (It’s a thing. Documented in the U.S. Civil War to have “caused the illnesses of 5,537 soldiers of the Union army and the deaths of 74 of those.” Oh, my!)
• Loss of meaning. (It’s not the same for each person.) “Meaning isn’t a property of a company, and it isn’t something stapled onto us by someone else. It is a property of a person, and if we are to find it, it must be discovered by each of us for ourselves.”

The simplest next steps in the Internet’s “10 Critical Changes in 10 Weeks” blather will likely backfire and boomerang on you—if you are not a student of how change impacts “the essential nature of human performance.” (Did I mention eye-opening?)

Need to change your tagline or brand promise? “These are attempts to engage in some way with higher human purpose, and yet they are some of the more bland and non-goose-bump-inducing things that companies say.” It’s part of the “seldom-challenged belief that things that can’t be said in one pithy sentence aren’t worth saying at all.” Must-read: the power of story-telling in the section, “The problem of loss of meaning.”

I gotta end this review—but I haven’t yet coaxed you into the deep end of the pool—how to RETHINK change. Goodall includes nine next steps—all beginning with verbs: Make space, Forge undeniable competence, Share secrets, Be predictable, Speak real words, Honor ritual, Focus most on teams, Radicalize HR, and Pave the way.

In the section, “Focus most on teams,” the author notes the “engagement” research of Gallup, Deloitte, and his co-author of an earlier book, Marcus Buckingham. He cites studies on the performance of the “best teams” at Cisco using eight questions in three categories: company experience, individual experience, and team experience. The first two “are shaped by their overall team experience.” The eight questions, alone, are worth the price of the book! You may become a believer: “Focus MOST on teams!”

Read why Goodall is so passionate about healthy teams: “This is nothing short of criminal. Companies are clueless—and incurious—about their single most important organizational unit.” There is so much value in this book, I’m tempted to write a second review, maybe a “Zoom Review” with willing zealots. Any takers? This is already another nominee for my 2024 book-of-the-year.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance, by Ashley Goodall. Listen on Libro (7 hours, 58 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Ashley Goodall quotes management prof Jeffrey Pfeffer that when team members experience a lack of control in the workplace, it “compares unfavorably with exposure to secondhand smoke in terms of physical health, mental health, morbidity, and mortality, and that diminished agency has a greater correlation with heart disease than does smoking.” Yikes! QUESTION: Of the five major problems that change creates in our workplace, is “a lack of control” our most challenging problem?

2) In the book, Belonging Rules, Brad Deutser writes, “Most leaders think about belonging as yet another squishy, amorphous concept more easily relegated to Human Resources than as a function under the vision, direction, and responsibility of the C-suite. Our work and research in this space says emphatically ‘No!’” QUESTION: So who should read this week’s book? Click on the title to order The Problem With Change.

3) Bonus Book! Patrick Lencioni wrote the foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, by William Bridges. I recommend this book often. (Read my review.) In the same review, read the blog I wrote for ECFA, “Beware the Emotional Effects of Transition.”

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 14: Leadership & Management at War
Book #78 of 100: Operation Mincemeat

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #78 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Operation Mincemeat:
How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan
Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
by Ben Macintyre (now a Netflix movie!)

Books#77 through #81 spotlight five fascinating books with military viewpoints on leadership and management. On June 6, 2024, we will commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day in World War II, when the Allies invaded Western Europe in the largest amphibious attack in history. In this page-turning book, the leadership and management issues jump off the pages—including how to recognize the twin sins of “wishfulness” and “yesmanship.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Operation Mincemeat
• Listen on Libro (11 hours, 17 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

In World War II, following the successful North Africa campaign, a tiny team at British Intelligence in London attempt to create the biggest ruse in war history—convincing the Germans that the Allied invasion of Europe would come through Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. The big idea: find a corpse, build an identity, dress and drop it off the coast of Spain by submarine—and deceive the German spies in Spain into believing that the officer’s secret documents contained the invasion plans.

It’s a true thriller—and the details and insights are extraordinary. The small team in London (about 20 men and women and just five typewriters in a stuffy underground office) executed the plan with spy movie genius.

What's Your Favorite Song... So Far?

We're 40% of the way through our blog series, Johnny Be Good (18 songs so far). What's your favorite song in this 45-song toe-tappin' marathon? I appreciate the spin (no pun intended) that our guest bloggers put on these songs and lyrics, especial Paul Palmer's blog, "Please Mr. Postman." (Watch for his well-researched blog on "Oh Happy Day" next month.) Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Remembering Tony

Thirty-five years ago, a dear friend and accountability partner, Tony Danhelka (1945-2024), gave me a “deep-and-wide” devotional book, A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants. Read my review here and my tribute to Tony, who entered Heaven’s gates on April 29. For more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

Learn why The Shroud of Turin is the most studied artifact in history. Does it show proof of the resurrection? From the bloodstain evidence we know the linen burial shroud did cover a man who suffered a brutal crucifixion, but we can also see details that go beyond a typical Roman form of execution to wounds particular to those suffered by only Jesus, as recorded in the gospel stories. From Robert Orlando and Jason Pearson, discover this new documentary now streaming. TheShroudFilm.com

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Tags: Ashley Goodall, Change, Human Performance, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog

May 10, 2024

The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress

Issue No. 607 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting warns—fasten your seatbelts! This new book on innovation is contrarian, very readable, and a bit mind-blowing! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing, by Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor. Bonus! Read this week’s blog, “Street Fighting Man,” by the Rolling Stones, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good.

The new book, The Illusion of Innovation, mentions this one-minute scene from the 2019 film, Ford v Ferrari, contrasting Ford’s engineers with a smaller enterprise, Shelby American. It’s the perfect example of the author’s bias towards experimentation that includes “fast, cheap, and weird!”

Scrappy, Messy, Cheap, and Weird!

SPOILER ALERT! In the short conclusion to his new book, Elliott Parker, a startup expert, describes his consultation with a company in India that was losing $1 million per day! His analysis and presentation to the CEO involved—wait for it—the unique business cards used by the firm’s chief competitor! Must-read chapter: “Conclusion: Change Is Hard, But Not Changing Is Much Harder.” This book will change the way you think and work:

The Illusion of Innovation:
Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress
by Elliott Parker (April 16, 2024)

Elliott Parker has harsh words for most companies, including the dozens of Fortune 500 companies he’s worked with over the last 25 years. “I have concluded that most of the tools large organizations rely on to innovate do not produce the change they seek and need.” He should know. He worked with Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma.

INNOVATION THEATER! The author, founder and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, writes, “Innovation efforts pursued inside corporations too often look like theater—people acting busy doing something so executives can explain to the board and investors that innovation is definitely, without a doubt, a top priority. But when reviewed after the fact, most of the effort produces little impact.”

Parker warns that “…this type of investment in innovation theater is actually value destructive, not neutral in its effect: organizations would be better off doing nothing (or actively accepting and managing their decline) instead of pretending to innovate—instead of engaging in an illusion of innovation.”

Here’s the kicker. The author wants “…our scaled institutions—our businesses, governments, universities, and churches—to be more effective at solving big problems.” His playbook is creative and contrarian:
• “This book explains why innovation naturally emerges from deliberate inefficiency.” (You read that right.)
• It’s now easier for small teams and individuals to “disrupt the status quo.”
• “In actuality, creativity results from collisions, from taking an idea from one context and applying it to another.”

NEW LEXICON. Much like the book, In Search of Excellence, this also introduces a new business lexicon and I’m predicting that The Illusion of Innovation will pick up the slack. Here’s the new lexicon for 2024:
• Scrappy, messier, frequent misses
• “It is that messiness, that purposeful error making, that creates resilience.”
• Corporate hospice workers
• “In people and in companies, growth results from actively seeking surprises, not from predictability!”
• Novelty and serendipity
• Treasure hunters and patient capital
• Weird! (mentioned frequently—and my favorite!)

The takeaway in Chapter 9, “Selecting Shots,” will be challenging for most—but critical: “Run more experiments: fast, cheap, and weird.” (Fascinating: what happened when the NBA adopted the three-point line in the 1978-1979 season—a metaphor for innovation.)

VETOCRACY. The author’s poke-in-the-ribs notes the term, “vetocracy,” coined by a political scientist. It describes “an environment in which many more people are empowered to say no than to say yes.” To combat this tendency for organizations to play it safe and avoid risk, Parker’s how-to book urges companies to embolden individuals (or a small team of “changemakers”) to go off the grid and innovate.

He quotes advertising pioneer David Ogilvy, who once quipped, paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton:

“Committees can criticize, but they cannot create.
‘Search the parks in all your cities,
you’ll find no statutes of committees.’”

TEASERS! Would an outside consultant give your organization high marks for innovation? Are you still funding sacred cows and dead horses? My opinion: this could be the book-of-the-year that your senior team members must read. Some teasers:
• The extraordinary account of the innovator that—amazingly—was given authority to launch the Federal Witness Protection Program.
• “The most dreaded sentence a corporate innovator can hear may be, ‘Show me your revenue and profit projections for next year.’ This is an impossible request of anyone building something new, when there are more assumptions than known facts.”
• Wow! In the chapter, “The Power of Small Teams,” the author notes that Instagram had just 13 employees, servicing as many as 30 million customers, when it was sold to Facebook for $1 billion!
• Parker argues that most corporations are not positioned to create something new within the organization. “A corporation trying to act like a startup is like a high school marching band trying to play improvisational jazz: it may sound like a fun idea, but the result is chaos.”

INNOVATING WITH AI. After reading the author’s musical metaphor (above), I couldn’t resist. My son, Jason (founder of a new startup), introduced me to Udio, the new AI site for generating music. So my prompt was: “a marching band song about inspiring innovation, yet with an improvisational jazz feel.” In about three minutes, Udio produced two half-minute songs:
• Innovator’s March
• Innovation March
Not Grammy-quality yet, but hilariously fun!

TOO MUCH EFFICIENCY! “…too much efficiency inevitably leads to failure in the long run.” Example: It took San Francisco 27 years (1995-2022) to build a two-mile bus lane on Van Ness Avenue at a cost of $300 million or about $110,000 per meter. “In contrast, all 1,700 miles of the Alaska Highway connecting eastern British Columbia to Fairbanks, Alaska, were constructed in 234 days in 1942” at a cost of about $1,000 per meter in 2023 dollars. Yikes! (I’m tempted to write lyrics for a song about this!)

THE WRONG OBJECTIVE! Must-read: the devasting 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., was “the direct result of dramatic institutional effectiveness directed toward what is now, in retrospect, understood to be the wrong objective—fire eradication instead of fire management. We prioritized efficiency and the illusion of near-term safety over long-term resilience, and are now paying the price.”

In California, between 1999 and 2017, land management burned, on average, 13,000 acres per year. Almost meaningless, we now know. As of 2018, experts estimated that the state had accumulated a “fire debt” of about 20 million acres! “…it means an area the size of Maine might need to burn before California can restabilize.”

THERE’S MORE!
• Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix: “Think of the standard model as clear, efficient, sanitary, sterile. Our model is messy, chaotic, and fertile. In the long term, fertile will beat sterile.”
• Even though large corporations invest millions in “innovation,” they have little, if any, results. “The corporation as we once knew it is dying and may already be dead.”
• “Experimentation, when done right, is chaotic, natural, and messy—not hierarchical, planned, or objective driven.” (Yikes! So much for SMART goals!)
• The Innovator’s Dilemma. Should you launch a new venture internally or externally? (See the chart on page 162.)

FORD v FERRARI. View this one-minute scene from the 2019 film, Ford v Ferrari, contrasting Ford’s engineers with a smaller enterprise, Shelby American. The test driver, Ken Miles, “no fan of corporate stodginess,” tosses the engineer-installed computer in the Ford GT40—and replaces it with strips of yarn and masking tape to observe drag on the vehicle at racing speed. (Hmmm. Sounds like “cheap” and “weird!”)

SPOILER ALERT: BUSINESS CARDS! Don’t skip the 2 x 2 on page 232, “Rewards Go to Those Who Are Contrarian and Correct,” in the hopeful chapter, “The Optimists Will Win.” But you must also read the “Conclusion” chapter when Parker is helping a company “stop the bleeding” with a long-term strategy.

In his research in 12 cities in India, he meets “an impressive entrepreneur” who played “an instrumental role in building and running one of the most successful automobile manufacturers in India.” Obsessed with keeping costs low, this entrepreneur handed Parker his business card, “which was clearly made by hand. His secretary created ‘cards’ on a sheet of paper that she printed in the office and cut with scissors. The edges and angles were imperfect, but the message was clear: this is a company that keeps costs low.”

He took the business card with him to his next meeting and said this in his presentation to the CEO and senior team: “Until you’re ready to print and cut your own business cards, you’re going to have trouble competing with this company on cost.” (Read the rest of the story in the conclusion. You won’t believe it!)

That prompted me to ask ChatGPT, “Give me 10 possible titles for my new business card, including humorous titles. I'm now retired, but I was previously a management consultant.” The list included:
• Chief Retirement Officer
• Ex-Management Whisperer
• Retired, Not Expired
• Boardroom to Boredom Expert
• Former Corporate Magician
• Unpaid Golf Intern
Now I just need to find my scissors and I’ll be all set.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress, by Elliott Parker. (And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.)

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Does your team experiment enough? According to Elliott Parker’s book, Pablo Picasso created a minimum of 26,075 pieces of art—which means “Picasso averaged 1 new piece of artwork every day of his life from age 20 until his death at age 91.”
2) In the chapter, “Manufacturing Serendipity,” the author suggests this: “Instead of judging possible experiments for their potential to ‘succeed,’ choose experiments based on their ability to spawn more experiments, enabling you to accumulate more knowledge over time. Novelty and learning compound.” What are we experimenting with this quarter? Is it fast, cheap, and weird?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 14: Leadership & Management at War
Book #77 of 100: It's Your Ship

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #77 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

It's Your Ship:
Management Techniques from
the Best Damn Ship in the Navy
by D. Michael Abrashoff

Books#77 through #81 spotlight five fascinating books with military viewpoints on leadership and management. In this bestseller, Captain Abrashoff’s dominant core value jumps right out: “It’s your ship, take responsibility for it. Don’t ask permission; do it.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: It's Your Ship
• Listen on Libro (6 hours, 24 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

Captain Abrashoff covers almost all of my 20 management buckets: lead by example, listen aggressively, communicate purpose and meaning, create a climate of trust, look for results—not salutes, take calculated risks, go beyond standard procedure and build up your people. And get this! He urges his sailors: “If a rule doesn’t make sense, break it.”

Song #18 of 45:
“Street Fighting Man"

Listen to “Street Fighting Man,” by the Rolling Stones, Song #18 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Learn why Keith Richards said his guitar-playing hands looked like Mike Tyson’s. “They’re pretty beat up.”

Over 3,800 Quotes & Quips!

Just published this week—the latest edition of Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts and Funny Sayings: A Stupendous Collection of Quotes, Quips, Witticisms, Ponderings, and Humorous Comments, by Bob Phillips. Need a quote or quip? You’ll find it among the 3,800 entries, organized A to Z. Read my review with a quote for every management bucket! For more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

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Tags: Elliott Parker, inefficiency, Innovation, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, weird

May 1, 2024

Moo Hoo

Issue No. 606 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting takes a break from leadership and management books and recommends a new children’s book. Moo Hoo is delightful! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews.

Also, read my recent review of Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing, by Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor. Bonus! Read this week’s blog on the song, “Fist City,” sung by Loretta Lynn, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good, spotlighting 45 songs from yesteryear.

You’ll love this new children’s book!

“There’s no crying in…" (Or is there?)

I know. You’re wondering, Pearson! What qualifies you to write a review of a children’s book? Especially one about Milton—“a very sweet bull with very BIG feelings” (aka Moo Hoo)—who cries a lot?

Well…first of all, this book is for reading levels of ages four to eight. So I can relate!

And…second, even though my Myers–Briggs Type Indicator couldn’t detect any feelings (I’m an ENTJ), my close friends might be surprised to learn that I sometimes do show my emotions like Moo Hoo:

“He cried when he was sad.
Obviously.
But he also cried
when he was so happy
he couldn’t help
but weep with joy!”

And…I remember the power of story. Stories that were read to me. Stories I read. Stories I read to our son, Jason. Stories I read to our five grandchildren.

In my three-part book review of My Ideal Bookshelf, I listed 10 books (as of 2013) that were on my “ideal bookshelf.” I included the book, Cathy and Carl Captured, a gift from my third grade Sunday School teacher. I still have and treasure that book. (Several eNews readers also sent their ideal bookcase photos. Click here.)

That 10-book trip down memory lane reminded me about the power of children’s stories. There’s no spoiler alert here for Moo Hoo, because I hope you’ll read the book and enjoy the author’s exquisite wordcrafting and the illustrator’s wonderful wit. Moo Hoo is a joy to read to yourself and to others. (As they say, “You’ll laugh…you’ll cry!")

Moo Hoo is the also the perfect book for your office reception area. (You’re back at your office, right?) But don’t stop at just one book. Toss those outdated magazines and add other children’s books (or are they grown-up books?) to your coffee table:
• The Book of Mistakes, by Corinna Luyken. (Read my review and the feedback from two of our grandkids.)
• Oak Street Treehouse: The Day They Had a Party, by Dick Daniels and illustrated by Mollie Bozarth. (No. 3 in the series: read my review.)
• What Do You Do With an Idea? by Kobi Yamada and illustrated by Mae Besom. (Order from Amazon.)

Order from your favorite bookstore or to order from Amazon, click on the title for: Moo Hoo: Everything Makes Milton Cry! by Audrey Perrott and illustrated by Ross Burach. (And we’re proud to note that this award-winning author is our niece! Visit her website.)

LISTEN TO the interview with Audrey Perrott on the “Kidlit Love Podcast,” including the back story that inspired this book. Learn how the humor just popped out!

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) What’s your most memorable children’s story? Why?
2) Think of the most complex and complicated work challenge you have. Could you summarize it in a children’s book format—minimal words with attention-grabbing graphics, and perhaps humor? (OK—if you insist, use a PowerPoint!) Is this idea worth thinking about? Can you tell your story in five minutes or less?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 13: In Search of Global Perspectives
Book #76 of 100: Churchill

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #76 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Churchill
by Paul Johnson

Books #71 through #76 spotlight six fascinating looks at diverse cultures—in search of global perspectives. In just 166 pages, Paul Johnson (1928-2023) delivers a masterful scan of Churchill’s 90 years (1874 to 1965) and includes insightful detail, laugh-out-loud sidebars, and absolutely relevant commentary on leadership and politics, war, success, and failure (lots of failure).
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Churchill
• Listen on Libro (8 hours, 17 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

Churchill popularized (if not invented) the terms “cold war” and “iron curtain.” Dependent on U.S. help to win World War II, he became a student of FDR and wrote more than 1,000 letters to him. With pen and cigar (up to 12 a day) he was a brute-force writing factory. He documented all verbal orders in writing, and his results-driven memos began with the famous headline, “Action This Day.”

Paul Johnson wrote more than 50 books. I’ve reviewed several, including Jesus: A Biography from a Believer.

Song #17 of 45:
“Fist City"

Listen to “Fist City,” sung by Loretta Lynn, Song #17 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read the “rebuttal” song created in AI for this 17th blog! Fun stuff! Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

Paint the Sistine Chapel!

This is the perfect gift for both kids and adults who enjoy coloring books! Each page includes a Sistine Chapel Ceiling graphic to color—including classics like “The Creation of Adam” and “The Fall of Man and Expulsion from Paradise.” Read my review of Michelangelo's Sacred Art of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling: A Coloring Book Exploration, by Jason Pearson. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

06:55 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: Audrey Perrott, John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, Moo Hoo, Ross Burach

April 24, 2024

Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing

Issue No. 605 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting lists 10 productivity and meeting management insights from the new book, Uptime. Brilliant! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times. Bonus! Read this week’s blog on the song, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” sung by Otis Redding, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good, spotlighting 45 songs from yesteryear.

Best Meeting Ever! Laura Mae Martin, Google’s Productivity Expert, says that at the best meeting she ever attended at Google, “there was an egg timer in the room that went off when presenters had one minute left for their allotted agenda portion.”

“No Agenda? No Meeting!” Says Google’s Productivity Expert

POP QUIZ! At your first coaching session with Laura Mae Martin, who is the Executive Productivity Advisor at Google in the Office of the CEO, she will ask you: “What are your top three priorities right now?”

Next, she’ll review your calendar from the last few weeks and give you a highlighter asking you to "circle every meeting, task, or individual work time that relates to those three priorities.” Ouch! Here’s another must-read for you and the people you’re coaching:

Uptime:
A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing
by Laura Mae Martin (April 2, 2024)

Why read another time management book? I appreciate Richard Kriegbaum’s wisdom: “Leadership is a complex field and no one resource can meet all the needs of every leader in every situation.”

Perhaps, if you’re like me, you’ve also read dozens of books on how to slay the time management dragon. (Okay, I’m an efficiency nerd.) But I’ve always gotten my money’s worth in every book I’ve read about the 80/20 rule, the ONE thing, time-saving hacks, improved systems, “Eat That Frog,” balancing life’s priorities, and clever ways to say “NO!”

Will this book help you at work and at home? Laura Mae Martin writes, “As far as I know, you are only one person, whether you’re at work or you’re at home. There is just one pie of time, and one brain managing it all. Your success and fulfillment will be driven by different personal or work priorities at different times.” (So yes…it’s not just okay—but healthy that perhaps one of your top-three priorities be personal. Refreshing!)

Well organized, the book features “The 5 C’s of Productivity (Life Cycle of a Loop)”—Calm, Create, Capture, Consolidate, and Close. (Calm? “You’ve made time to go on a walk after work with your dog.”) And this:

“We need to think about time more like a bank account. If someone asked for money from your bank account, you wouldn’t say, ‘Sure! Here is my routing and account number—grab however much you’d like!’ So why do we do that with our time?”

Wow. The author packs a ton of practical ideas into this easy-to-read book. Let me tempt you with 10 actionable ideas from her 20 short chapters:

#1. How to Work With Me. A Google exec sets aside an hour each day for urgent matters. It’s the same time every day so his team knows when they can bring those “urgent and important” items to him. “He outlines this in his ‘How to Work with Me’ guide.” (See also Marshall Goldsmith’s “Memo to Staff: How to Handle Me” approach.)

#2. Fix the System! Martin sprinkles quotable quotes throughout the book. This one is golden:

“Urgent once, take care of it.
Urgent seventeen times…
something is wrong with the system.”

#3. Contrarian Calculator! The author’s former manager at Google had a “crystal-clear image of how much his time was worth. When I noticed he was always cutting it close for flights, he said, ‘If you’re not missing five percent of your flights, you’re spending too much of your life in an airport!’” (Must-read section: “How much is my time worth?”)

#4. No-Plans November! Martin attempts to protect her schedule with “an annual No-Plans November: making no plans until the morning of for the whole month to see how my life changes when I do only what I’m in the mood to do that day.” Radical? Yes…and just one of dozens of ideas in the chapter, “How to Say No.” (See also the “No!” book by Doug Fields.)

#5. No Agenda? No Meeting! In her must-read chapter, “The Balance of Boundaries,” Martin writes, “Boundaries are nothing if not advertised widely.” One of her boundaries: “I decline vague calendar invites often with the note that says, ‘I only attend meetings with an agenda

!’ (I usually add the smiley just to reconfirm the friendliness, but that can be a style decision.)”

“I SURVIVED ANOTHER MEETING
THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL!”

In the chapter, “Make Meetings Meaningful,” Laura Mae Martin asks, “Do you need a meeting?” She cautions, “So many meetings could have been emails or chats.” And this: “Saying yes to a meeting is saying no to something else.” (Order the mug or a t-shirt!)

#6. Multi-Tasking in Meetings? “If an individual can attend a meeting and be on their laptop the entire time, they probably didn’t need to be there.” (See the folly about multi-tasking in the chapter, “Break Bread, Not Relationships,” in Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom.)

#7. Best Meeting Ever! Martin lists five elements of the best meeting she ever attended at Google. I love this! “There was an egg timer in the room that went off when presenters had one minute left for their allotted agenda portion.”

Laura Mae Martin discusses hybrid work and says you should “treat work as if it’s your in-laws in your house!” View “Elevate Your Productivity Game with Productivity Expert Laura Mae Martin” in this 17-minute YouTube video.

#8. Book-in-a-Minute Reviews! The chapter, “Location, Location, Location” delivered numerous insights on the hybrid workplace and the preferences of “Marathoners,” “Sprinters,” “Homebasers,” and “Outfielders.” (The chart is brilliant.) Martin suggests five practices for what she calls “seamless collaboration” and she throws in a bonus on making team member social engagement both timely and meaningful. She lists seven activities for a midweek social only standing meeting. “Book in a minute: Summarize your favorite nonfiction book and what it taught you in a minute, round-robin style.”

#9. The Main List. You’ll appreciate Martin’s “List Funnel” concept—and how to organize everything that comes at you. This is pure genius: “Tip: Anytime you do make a physical list, make it a habit to immediately take a picture of it so if you lost the piece of paper, not all is lost!” Visit her website to download templates (printable or digital) for “The Main List,” “The Weekly List,” “The Daily List,” and much more.

#10. Mastering Email! And yes, there’s an entire chapter on “Mastering Email: The Laundry Method.” The author’s hilarious nine bullet points on how NOT to sort your laundry are very, very convicting (but still funny!). The metaphor is brilliant—and you will immediately move towards mastering your email—and not your email mastering you. “The four essential laundry baskets or labels to create are based on the actions that can be taken with an email.”
• Respond
• Read
• Revisit
• Relax!

When’s the last time you’ve read a book on enriching your personal productivity and wellbeing? (Ask your direct reports the same question.) This is the book to read in 2024. (And check out the Google Workspace YouTube channel with hundreds of tips. Where? Just google it!)

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing, by Laura Mae Martin. Listen on Libro (5 hours, 42 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

Note: The Wall Street Journal has featured Uptime twice in recent weeks. Read the book review, “I’ll Get Back to You Later.” Read the excerpt, “Don’t Waste Your ‘Power Hours’ in Meetings.”

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Laura Mae Martin mentions numerous productivity and meetings management resources in her book, Uptime, including Eat That Frog, Getting Things Done, and “Why Your Meetings Stink.” ASSIGNMENT: Give us a one-minute book review of your favorite time management or meetings management book. (Do you lead boring or “WOW!” meetings? Visit the Meetings Bucket for the “WOW Factor Meeting Evaluation” form. See Bucket #20 in Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook.)

2) Oops! Today, April 24, is “Administrative Professionals Day” (a Hallmark holiday!). You remembered right? There’s still time to order Uptime for your admin person. FYI: See my short review from June 4, 2007, for The Organized Executive: A Program for Productivity--New Ways to Manage Time, Paper, People, and the Digital Office, by Stephanie Winston. Although much is outdated, the chapters on working with (and/or sharing) administrative assistants (aka “secretaries”) is excellent. Would a book or audio book be appreciated by your admin person?

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 13: In Search of Global Perspectives
Book #75 of 100: The Great Successor

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #75 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

The Great Successor:
The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un
by Anna Fifield

Books #71 through #76 spotlight six fascinating looks at diverse cultures—in search of global perspectives. In this fascinating book about North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, the author notes that when the “Brilliant Comrade” became leader, high schools added a new curriculum—81 hours of lessons on Kim Jong Un, in addition to the existing courses on his father, grandfather, and grandmother!
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: The Great Successor
• Listen on Libro (11 hours, 37 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

POP QUIZ! Read my review and take the 19-question “True or False” pop quiz. Example:

True or False? DICTATOR-FOR-LIFE. The Kim family’s durability is stunning—compared to other dictatorships. During Kim Il Sung’s reign (1948-1994), the U.S. said hello and goodbye to nine presidents (Truman to Clinton). “Japan cycled through twenty-one prime ministers. Kim Il Sung outlived Mao Zedon by almost two decades and Joseph Stalin by four. North Korea has now existed for longer than the Soviet Union.”

Song #16 of 45:
“(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”

Listen to "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay,” sung by Otis Redding, Song #16 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read why the singer never heard this No. 1 song played on the radio. (Warning: sad story.) Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

“Fix the sink. Don’t mop faster!”

Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work asks if you should hire more people. But wait! You may be drowning in work because your system is broken. “To put it another way: would you rather bring more people into a broken system and fix it later, or fix the system first and bring more people into an efficient system?” The answer is obvious: “Fix the overflowing sink, don’t mop faster!” Read my review. And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.

09:44 AM in Your Weekly Staff Meeting | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: agendas, balance versus busyness, email, Laura Mae Martin, meetings, productivity, Time management, Uptime

April 18, 2024

Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times

Issue No. 604 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting recommends a robust planning process for uncertain times. The author warns, “Stop guessing!” Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for more book reviews. Also, read my recent review of Lost in Transition: Lessons from the Most Disastrous & Successful Ministry Successions. Bonus! Read about the song, “Different Drum," sung by Linda Ronstadt, in our toe-tapping feature, Johnny Be Good, spotlighting 45 songs from yesteryear.

If I were your organization’s coach, I would whip up a quick online survey for your senior team and middle managers—and ask them to discern and assess their susceptibility to the alarming reasons why failure happens.

Stop GUESSING about the future!

YIKES! The author of this issue’s book writes, “Studies consistently show that executives are overconfident in their ability to predict the future—more so than the population as a whole. Often, they do little more than guess, and then feel the need to stick to their decision in order to justify past investments and avoid being wrong. This is reinforced by organizational governance systems that reward sticking to the plan.”

Rebecca Homkes adds, “The only certainty in life and in business is uncertainty.” Here’s help:

Survive, Reset, Thrive:
Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times
by Rebecca Homkes

So…when an important book arrives, which option should you select?

[ ] Option #1: DELETE. But wait! If you delete this review, how will you negotiate your next crisis, the coming disruption, and the relentless changes devastating your organization? Is “delete” a best practice when addressing uncertainty? Will last year’s plan help you leapfrog this year’s challenges?

[ ] Option #2: DELEGATE. Much better! Inspire a team member, or a board member, to read this important book and prepare a summary for your next meeting. Ask your reviewer(s) for insights on how you can play both offense and defense at the same time. Request updates on the new leadership lexicon—the author’s definitions of “swarming,” “kickers,” “killers,” and “game-changer assumptions.” (Pop Quiz: What’s the difference between a “trend,” a “belief” and a “truism?” What's a "MWB?")

Also, ask for details on the “trinity of direction, leadership, and management.” And don’t skip the four quadrants of “The Uncertainty Matrix.” And—the dozens of “never-thought-about-that” charts, such as the four elements of your situation assessment (key trends). My favorite line:

“Putting together a list of trends
does not make you a strategist:
it makes you a journalist.”

[ ] Option #3: DEEP DIVE! Thumbs up! Did you predict the COVID pandemic? Did your rolling three-year strategic plan anticipate wars in Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza, the 4.8 earthquake in New Jersey, the border crisis, quiet quitting, or AI? (Probably not.)

I urge you to pick Option #3 and conduct a deep dive on a very helpful process for “leading a breakthrough growth strategy in volatile times.” Read this book with your senior team—and your coach (you do have a coach, right?).

I won’t spoil the fun for you—but here’s a quick summary of the “Survive Reset Thrive” (SRT) approach. Warning: If you skip the “Reset” phase, you’ll never get to “Thrive.” (Visit the author’s website here.)

Three propositions:
1) “Uncertainty does not always have bad consequences.”
2) “Strategy is an articulation of how your organization creates value.” (See the author's two needles chart, “where the upper needle is customer willingness to pay and the bottom needle is the total cost of delivering that value.”)
3) “No one can predict the future.”

Rebecca Homkes adds, “These three propositions lead to the three important directives for surviving, resetting, and thriving.”
1) “Make good decisions even when we cannot make good predictions.”
2) “Stop planning, start preparing.” (She adds, “Thriving through uncertainty means forgoing the notion that you can just implement a plan, and instead acknowledging you are often in preparation mode for the future.”)
3) “Periods of uncertainty are a great time to grow.” (The author notes that there is “a difference between being bullish and being stupid.”)

The “SRT” approach is comprehensive, but not complex. You’ll appreciate the detail, the examples, the case studies, and the author’s experience. What got my attention? Marshall Goldsmith called Survive, Reset, Thrive: “…a blueprint for flourishing in an era of relentless change.”

But here's what really caught my attention! If you think you know all this stuff (trust me—you don’t), just skip to the three “Leadership Traps (And How to Avoid Them)” in Chapter 11.

The 3 Leadership Traps:
• Trap Set #1: Getting in your own way
• Trap Set #2: Ignoring the leadership trinity
• Trap Set #3: Not optimizing for key executive roles

If I were your organization’s coach, I would whip up a quick online survey for your senior team and middle managers—and ask them to discern and assess their susceptibility to the alarming reasons why failure happens—and why you never reach the “Thrive” phase. Homkes lists commons reasons she sees "leaders getting in their own way, as well as practices to overcome these.” (Good News: each dysfunction includes a “How to Overcome” solution.)

WHY FAILURE HAPPENS:
1) I’ve got this. (Example: “You don’t bother to vet or test your old assumptions—things haven’t changed that much.”)
2) Paralysis by analysis. (How to Overcome: “Build a system to actively test your top beliefs and assumptions, especially your ‘game-changers.’”)
3) They “just don’t get it.” (“You rip up the script and start over, this time on your own.”)
4) Boredom. (“Other new, shiny things” distract the leaders.)
5) False air cover. (Warning: “Do not make assumptions about other people’s bandwidth…”)

6) Your Board becomes your customer. (“More than half of your time—and that of your team—is spent managing your Board, instead of testing and learning from your market.”)
7) Tinkering. (“You are anxious that not enough is being done, and you are afraid to make any big bets. So you tinker. Constantly.”)
8) Overinvolvement. (“You jump in when a team member pauses and enjoy knowing you are the ultimate problem solver.”)
9) Rushing the Reset. (“A Reset sounds great, so you jump in, assuming one three-hour meeting will get the job done!” Plus: “…you are lacking insights on ‘where to play,’ but you move ahead anyway. Note: “A strategy without insights is a prelude to underperformance.”)
10) You want things too simple or too complex. (How to overcome: “...the paradox of a simple strategy is it does not start simple. It is easy to have a simple and stupid strategy.”)

Did I mention charts? The 2x2 matrix, “Simple vs Complex Strategy,” aligns Intelligent and Stupid with Simple and Complex. The bottom right quadrant: Stupid and Complex: “Waste of time.” Bonus: Homkes suggests you write an SRT memo to yourself “on what the organization needs from you in all three modes: Survive, Reset, and Thrive. “Where will your strengths be of most use, and where are your weaknesses a potential trap?”

Whew! Good stuff! Really good stuff. I could go on—but I hope you’ll pick Option #3 and leverage this book for a DEEP DIVE with your board and team.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times, by Rebecca Homkes. And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:

1) Do you have a plan to address the military acronym, “VUCA” (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity)? Read more in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. (View the video lambasting an airline!)

2) Do you know the difference between operational uncertainty and structural uncertainty—and why it matters? In The Attacker’s Advantage: Turning Uncertainty Into Breakthrough Opportunities, Ram Charan writes, “Uncertainty has always been a challenge to business, but never before has it had the intensity and potential to change industries and destroy companies as it does today.” He adds, “The ability to deal with uncertainty is perhaps the paramount skill leaders must have to be successful in this era. Without it they risk becoming personally obsolete and driving their companies off a cliff.”

3) And speaking of future trends (and not guessing), inspire a team member, or a board member, to read and report on Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future. (Hmmm? Can you predict the future?)

Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 13: In Search of Global Perspectives
Book #74 of 100: Money Games

For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #74 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.

Money Games:
The Inside Story of How American Dealmakers
Saved Korea's Most Iconic Bank
by Weijian Shan

Books #71 through #76 spotlight six fascinating looks at diverse cultures—in search of global perspectives. This issue’s book is a page-turner that checks all the management buckets. Honest (honest!)—this is a riveting read! If you’ve ever negotiated anything—or plan to—you and your team members must read this book.
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: Money Games
• Listen on Libro (12 hours, 24 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).

WHAC-A-MOLE! Have you ever been up to your eyeballs in a never-ending negotiation only to groan—as the author did when rushing to close the deal? “Hashing out deal terms with the FSC [the government regulators] was like playing Whac-A-Mole: As soon as we agreed on one issue, another would pop up.” Enriching the book’s novel-like suspense (deal or no deal?) are dozens of negotiating tactics (wrapped in integrity).

SMART Goals. In the chapter, “Change Agent,” read how one bank CEO set an easy-to-remember corporate target and how he would “explain it in meeting after meeting with both executives and employees, for hundreds of hours, until everyone was on board with his objectives.”

Song #15 of 45:
"Different Drum"

Listen to “Different Drum,” sung by Linda Ronstadt of the Stone Poneys, for Song #15 of 45 in our blog series, Johnny Be Good. Read why Ronstadt wasn't happy with the song and why the other band members didn't play on this record! Reminder: Guest bloggers invited! More info here.

3,000 QUOTES!

Need a quote to punctuate your next presentation? Read my short review of Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers. You'll love this “Cyclopaedia of Quotations from the Literature of All Ages—Designed for Use of the Senate, the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Orator.” And for more book reviews, visit the Pails in Comparison Blog.