Issue No. 61 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a perfect Christmas gift book. “Avoid the authors who are meringue chefs,” urged this week’s author. Trust me, this book is a gourmet smorgasbord. And check out the archives here to read the mini-reviews of the last 60 books.
Breakfast With Fred: Management Morsels
Scan the 52 chapter titles and the bios of the 52 contributors—and you’re hooked. The management morsels are inspired. The leadership lessons are fresh and the spiritual insights are deep. This book is a keeper and would be a treasured Christmas gift for family, friends and donors.
Business leader Fred Smith Sr. used his mentoring gift and God-honoring wisdom to motivate and inspire some of the world’s most influential people, often over breakfast. Each chapter in this brilliant little book delivers two pages of Smith savvy with a response by the likes of John Maxwell, Ken Blanchard, Philip Yancey, Zig Ziglar, Ruth Stafford Peale, Jill Briscoe, Jay Kesler and family members like Smith’s son, Fred, president of The Gathering.
“Flying With the Eagles” (chapter 38), with a response from Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, includes this nugget from Smith. “So early in my business career, I chose six qualities that I wanted to build into my life and I asked individuals who personified each to give me an autographed picture. I framed these pictures, along with Hoffman’s Head of Christ at 33 and a mirror. I hung them on the wall in a circle, with the head of Christ on the top, the mirror on the bottom and the others around. I could look at the pictures and at my reflection and determine whether I was growing in these qualities.”
Fred Smith Sr. was welcomed into heaven on August 17, 2007. His wisdom remains. Order the book from Amazon by clicking on this title: Breakfast With Fred. For his pithy one-liners, visit the Breakfast With Fred website.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
#1. What qualities are you intentionally building into your life?
#2. After our staff meeting today, go to Google images and download the photo of one of your heroes. Then post that photo on our “Wall of Qualities”—and add a note about the life quality that this person embodies. (We’ll put Jesus up there first, so please select another person.)
The Printing Bucket: Burn the Fuzz Off Your Thinking - Insights from the Management Buckets Workshop Experience
Little happens in organizations until the print manager or the webmaster begin bribing the procrastinators. Blue sky BHAGs and visionary futurists have their place—but the brochure needs copy and the print deadline is real. Brochure copy cannot be written in a vacuum—it assumes budget meetings, core values, pricing, customer surveys and agreed upon results. Someone has to write this stuff down and get it okayed.
In Breakfast With Fred, Smith shares this management insight: “I was a totally verbal person. Once I was telling him [my boss] about a situation in the plant and he said, ‘Write it.’ When I told him I couldn’t write it, he said, ‘The reason you can’t write it is that you don’t know it. Anything you know you can write.’ I later came across the quote from Sir Francis Bacon, ‘Writing makes an exact man.’ I learned to write to burn the fuzz off my thinking.”
If you tend to operate on the verbal side, you must be more intentional about leveraging The Printing Bucket to move your agendas, projects and events along on a timely basis.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
#1. Visit The High Calling of Our Daily Work website to read their interview with Fred Smith Sr., two weeks before his homegoing at age 95, “Five Leadership Tips Informed by a Life of Learning.”
#2. What tip grabs you—and why?
NEXT STEPS: I can help you integrate leadership and management tips and best practices into your unique setting and help you assess your competencies in the 20 management buckets. Email me at [email protected].
To bring a one-day or two-day Management Buckets Workshop Experience to your organization or city, call our office at 949/500-0334. Ditto for the six-hour Nonprofit Board Governance Workshop for board members and senior leaders.
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