Issue No. 171 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a book on spiritual entrepreneurship by Ted Malloch, one of four presenters at the first ever Entrepreneurial Leadership Summit for Christian leaders in Phoenix, Feb. 21-24. Don Soderquist, former chairman of Wal-Mart, said this about Malloch, “The owl of wisdom takes flight in this book.” And this reminder: check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings, including my Top-10 Books of 2009 and the index to 168 book reviews.
Coming Events With John Pearson:
ECFA Reaching Higher One-Day Workshop, January 21. I’ll be presenting a workshop on “Goal Alignment: The Missing Link in Leadership Effectiveness” at this day for nonprofit executives and board members in Brea, Calif. (Orange County). Visit the website.
Entrepreneurial Leadership Summit: Feb. 21-24. Join us for the first ever Entrepreneurial Leadership Summit for Christians in business, nonprofits and churches, Feb. 21-24, 2010, in Phoenix, in partnership with the Walker Center for Global Entrepreneurship at Thunderbird School of Global Management. Visit the website.
2010 Workshops: Buckets, Boards and Strategic Planning. Check out the dates and locations for our 2010 workshops. Visit the website.
Hard & Soft Virtues
In Know Can Do: Put Your Know-How into Action (see Issue No. 92, June 9, 2008), co-author Ken Blanchard suggests that to leverage the power of repetition, repetition, repetition—you should read a book four times. That leadership counsel would definitely apply to this week’s book. You won’t get the breadth and the depth in one reading.
The recent earthquake in Haiti arrests our senses and prompts us to face many of the big issues of life, death, poverty and sustainability. (Why has Haiti never turned the corner?) With that numbing backdrop, Ted Malloch’s unique treatment of “spiritual enterprise” gave me hope again—yet with heavy-duty substance.
Malloch begins, “For years, I’ve paid close attention to something that fascinates me—the ability of people with religious faith and spiritual commitment to make great successes of their businesses. Success comes to them, I believe, because faith changes business for the better, just as it changes lives. It injects into business something that I call ‘spiritual capital.’ Agnostics and nonbelievers make use of spiritual capital as well, but only people of faith renew it. And by replenishing spiritual capital, they benefit us all.”
If you’re a nonprofit leader or pastor, don’t skip this book. You can mentor your business colleagues (and donors) more deeply by understanding Malloch’s themes of understanding “spiritual capital” and what he calls the hard virtues (leadership, courage, patience, perseverance and discipline) and the soft virtues (justice, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude and humility).
If you’re a business leader, you’ll especially appreciate the author’s “Gallery of Virtuous Companies” including ServiceMaster (faith), PepsiCo (honesty), Chick-fil-A (gratitude), IBM (perseverance), Icon Productions (compassion) and seven more.
Malloch argues that entrepreneurship is a key to all of this. “It is important to emphasize that what is true of the virtuous creation of wealth in developed countries is also true in underdeveloped countries.” He adds, “Development requires economic growth; in turn, growth requires the catalytic drive of the entrepreneur, and entrepreneurship exists only where freedom of action is combined with personal responsibility. In all its myriad forms, accountability is a spiritual asset that is forged by faith that inspires and governs it, and it does not easily come into being in other ways.”
Reminder: you’ll want to read this multiple times. And you may want to weigh your giving to the very long-term Haiti relief effort against a matrix of criteria that includes hard and soft virtues, plus a healthy dose of entrepreneurship.
As Michael Novak, author of Business as a Calling, writes in the foreword, “Businesses similarly are the world’s best hope for democracy. If democracy gave people the opportunity to vote for their leaders regularly but offered them no chance to improve their economic condition, they would find democracy very hard to love. What people rightly love about democracy is the economic opportunity and prosperity it can bring them. It is democratic capitalism, not merely democracy, that they understand to be worthy of their devotion, energy and practice.”
To order this book from Amazon, click on this title: Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtuous Business, by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Malloch says, “Success comes to them, I believe, because faith changes business for the better, just as it changes lives.” Agree or disagree?
2) Let’s talk about the horrific situation in Haiti. If you were facilitating a coalition of Christian relief and development agencies in that country, what would be your Big Holy Audacious Goal (BHAG) for 2015?
7 Stewardship Standards - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas (for Christian nonprofits and churches) in the Budget Bucket, Chapter 15, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to operate with integrity by becoming a member of ECFA (Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability). Many ECFA members are working in Haiti—and ECFA standards enable donors to trust their work.
Click here to check out ECFA’s “Seven Standards of Responsible Stewardship” and the ECFA Best Practices (including best practices customized for churches). You can also view three years of financial data for all ECFA members, including World Vision and other relief agencies.
For more books, insights and resources, visit the Budget Bucket webpage and click on the link to the excellent book from BoardSource, Minding the Money: An Investment Guide for Nonprofit Board Members, by Robert P. Fry, Jr.
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