John Pearson's Buckets Blog

Stuff and Soul

Issue No. 428 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting announces a new book out just today—Soul and Stuff by Wes Willmer. Another must-read! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my Top-10 books of 2019 and my Book-of-the-Year pick.



Gut-Check: Soul-Check

I measure books on a sliding scale:
• Level 1: Readable—but not worthy of a review.
• Level 2: Readable/Reviewable—but may not land on my annual Top-10 list.
• Level 3: Must Read/Must Review—with new and arresting insights. (Hmmm. Never thought about that before.)

Here’s a Level 3 book—just released today: Stuff and Soul: Mastering the Critical Connection, by Wesley K. Willmer with Micah Hogan.

The authors don’t beat around the bush. They write, “When Jesus said that our heart is where our treasure is (Matt. 6:21), he showed the vital connection between our stuff and our souls. Where is your heart right now? Ask yourself what and where your treasure is, and you’ll know the answer.”

Even if you’ve read a dozen books on joyful giving, generosity, and stewarding your resources, it’s a prudent discipline to read one more—year after year, after year. Why? My friend Dick Towner often quotes Ben Patterson:

“There is no such thing as being right with God and wrong with your money.”

So…here are four reasons why “Soul and Stuff” (hot-off-the-press) is the book I’m reading—and re-reading—this year.

#1. Mastering the Three T’s. Many of us have heard a zillion sermons on the three T’s, right? Time, Talent, and Treasure. But Willmer and Hogan flip the script on us (a mark of a Level 3 book):
• T1 – Stuff is a TOOL. They quote A.W. Tozer: “Any temporal possession can be turned into everlasting wealth. Whatever is given to Christ is immediately touched with immortality.” (Whew. Think about that!)
• T2 – Stuff comes with a TEST. “…the best thing is that this is an open-book test, and you’re allowed to look at your neighbor’s answers! We should constantly have our Bibles open when making financial decisions and also ask our friends and neighbors who are further along in generosity for help and guidance.”
• T3 – Godly use of stuff is a TRADEMARK. “When God’s children bear their Father’s trademark, their giving becomes a means of others worshipping God.” Our giving and our generosity highlight God’s character. (Think about that!)

#2. Quotable Gut-Checks. Stick-in-the-ribs questions and quotes are peppered throughout each chapter like these:
• “Who sits on the chair of your own soul?”
• “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” (Jim Elliot)
• “The object of life, according to Jesus, is breathtakingly simple: Be rich toward God.” (John Ortberg)
• “In the total expanse of the human life, there is not a single square inch of which Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, ‘That is mine.’” (Abraham Kuyper)
• “Nobody is so poor that he or she has nothing to give, and nobody is so rich that he or she has nothing to receive.” (Pope John Paul II)
• “Being rich toward God is not a formula; it’s a way of life.”
• “The formation of our souls, Ruth Haley Barton says, takes place ‘incrementally over time with others in the context of disciplines and practices that open us to God.’”
• “I am convinced that the great deterrent to giving is this: the illusion that earth is our home…Heaven, not earth, is my home.” (Randy Alcorn)
• “According to a Barna survey across all generations, only one in ten Christians say that serving God with their money is their number one financial goal. One in ten! It is no surprise that the Israelites in the desert made their famous calf out of gold.”
• “Have you noticed that most financial appeals address you as the owner of resources or a donor and not the steward of God’s resources?”
• “For Jesus, generosity is an attitude of the heart long before it is a description of an act.” (R. Scott Rodin)
• “…radically and basically all sin is ingratitude.” (Karl Barth)

#3. Page 36 Gut-Check Chart. Yikes. Normally, as I’ve mentioned in other book reviews, page 25 often delivers the meat and potatoes of a book. But since this is a very short book (thumbs up!) with just 92 pages, plus a study guide and a three-page appendix, the authors gently coax us along before hammering us with the spiritual gut-check chart on page 36. They list six “Stages of Faith and Giving” with a three-column format on “Correlation of Stuff Use and Soul Transformation,” building on a model by James Fowler. I’ll list just three of the six:
• Stage 1: IMITATOR – It’s easy to pinpoint a few friends and colleagues here. “Is able to mimic the examples of others in giving when shown or instructed.”
• Stage 3: CONFORMER – “Gives because it is the thing to do. Likes recognition, tax benefits, and other personal gain from giving.” (Yeah—I know the type!)
• Stage 6: MATURE STEWARD – I think I’ll skip this one—it’s meaty. You’ll have to read the book.

My gut: page 36 is worth the price of the book. I’ve photocopied this page and taped it to my office wall—as a daily reminder about my stuff and my soul. (And LOL—as I was photocopying this page—looking out my office window, I noticed a classic 1950s cherry red Chevy drive by, prompting a subtle covetous leap in my soul.)

#4. Is it well with my soul? Read Chapter 2 on mastering the idea of soul—and you’ll never sing “It Is Well With My Soul” casually or thoughtlessly again. If you don’t know this great hymn’s origin, google the story of Horatio Spafford, who lost four daughters with the sinking of the SS Ville du Havre—yet could pen these profound verses.

There’s so much more—and I urge you to read this thoughtful book with a pen and a prayerful spirit.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Stuff and Soul: Mastering the Critical Connection, by Wesley K. Willmer with Micah Hogan.



Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) The appendix in Stuff and Soul lists 10 “Biblical Principles for Stewardship and Fundraising.” Before you reference pages 113-115, write down three to five principles that you would include on the list.
2) Spoiler Alert! The summary statement reads: “When these principles are implemented, which rely on God changing hearts more than on human [fundraising] methods, the resulting joy-filled generosity of believers will fully fund God’s work here on earth.” Fully fund? Wow! Do you agree? 

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“If I am always in a hurry…”
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

One of the big ideas in the Donor Bucket, Chapter 11, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is this caution to nonprofit and church fundraising teams: “When you spend your days in fundraising, you raise money. But when you invest your life in growing God-honoring stewards, He raises up extravagantly generous givers.”

In alignment with Soul and Stuff is John Ortberg’s book, Soul Keeping: Caring for the Most Important Part of You. In his chapter, “The Soul Needs a Center,” Ortberg reminds us:

“We all commit idolatry every day.
It is the sin of the soul meeting its needs
with anything that distances it from God.”

“If I am always in a hurry to be somewhere else,
it’s an indicator that my soul has not yet found its home.”

Is it well with your soul today? (Click here to read my review of Ortberg’s book.) 

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video), including the new book by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love. (Read John’s review here.)
___________________________________________________________________________________

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

The Amazon Management System

Issue No. 427 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a digital wake-up call in just 138 pages. Learn why frugality is an Amazon core value! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my Top-10 books of 2019 and my Book-of-the-Year pick.



Two-Pizza Team Meetings!

Emergency alert! Bestselling business author Ram Charan says the disrupter is in the building—and its name is Amazon. “Our 21st century prevailing management systems are still largely inherited from the oldest forms of human organization, such as the military and the church,” he writes. Designed for “command and control” in the pre-Internet era, these hierarchical bureaucracies mimicked the only management systems they knew.

Until the digital age and Amazon.

Whew. This tightly written book, The Amazon Management System (just 138 pages plus helpful appendices), is a wake-up call for nonprofits, for-profits, and churches. If you’re wondering…
• …why your credit card bill is populated with Amazon purchases, read this book.
• …how to learn more about Amazon’s focused obsession on the customer, read this book.
• …how Amazon (online in 1995) was worth $1 trillion in 2018 (it goes up and down, of course), read this book.

In addition to the big ideas—and bold management risks—there’s plenty of fun stuff in this quick-reading book, with one-page bullet-point summaries for every chapter. For fun: Why did Jeff Bezos pick “Amazon” for his company name? According to Ram Charan and Julia Yang, Bezos had experimented and then rejected numerous other suggestions like:
• Awake.com
• Browse.com
• Bookmall.com
• Relentless.com
• Makeitso.com
• Cadabra.com

“Still searching, Bezos referred to the dictionary. Luckily the name hunt didn’t last long. Amazon jumped out at him. It was love at first sight. Amazon ‘is not only the largest river in the world. It’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all the other rivers away,’ Bezos said.”

That’s just one interesting sidebar in this serious—but short—analysis of the Amazon management system. It’s a must-read assignment for every senior leader (and perhaps your board members).

The authors aren’t suggesting your organization becomes an Amazon clone—but, instead, “understand how it works and pick the valuable ingredients and inspirations for your own digital way.” And you will think differently about digital immediately. The digital future is scary, but brimming with opportunity. The book highlights six building blocks:
   1. Customer-Obsessed Business Model
   2. Continuous Bar-Raising Talent
   3. AI-Powered Data and Metrics System
   4. Ground-Breaking Invention Machine
   5. High-Velocity and High-Quality Decision-Making
   6. Forever Day-1 Culture

A very helpful one-page checklist of the Amazon Management System is on page 135. One page only! And—throughout this gem—it’s the rare page in my book that isn’t underlined. Examples:

• On Amazon’s relentless drive to invent, “Seek and build big ideas continuously [using a brilliant press release process]…and construct cross-functional full-time and co-located ‘two-pizza’ team with the right project leader.” Why? If two pizzas aren’t enough, the team is too big!
   
• On making high-velocity decisions: a brilliant segmentation and process for decision-making: Type 1 decisions (one-way doors) and Type 2 decisions (two-way doors). “For Type 2 decisions, speed matters. Let the metrics owner make the call. If approval required, one level only.”

• To create a “Forever Day-1 Culture,” Amazon does this: “Operationalize by observable behaviors, create forcing mechanisms, live and breathe them yourself, and invent memorable symbols and rewards. (See page 132 for the “Just Do It Award.” The authors add, “Given his constant reinforcement of frugality, Bezos came up with the totally unorthodox idea of having old sneakers, worn and torn, mounted and bronzed.” (It reminded me of my 2017 book-of-the-year, The Power of Moments.)

• “Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ.” Oh, to have observed an executive meeting when Bezos—skeptical when the head of the Customer Service Department said that customer wait times were “well under one minute” (without “offering any supporting evidence”)—used the meeting room speakerphone and dialed the call center’s 800 number. The wait time: four-and-a-half minutes. Yikes!

If you’re looking for weekly staff meeting topics, consider using the “Amazon 14 Leadership Principles” on pages 141-143. Succinct, with three to four lines of commentary, they include: 1) Customer Obsession (there was an empty seat at early meetings—representing the customer), 2) Ownership (leaders are owners), and 3) Invent and Simplify.

The fourth principle is noteworthy and arresting: 4) Are Right, A Lot. Amazon notes: “Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.”

Others include: 5) Learn and Be Curious, 6) Hire and Develop the Best. “Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion.” 7) Insist on the Highest Standards, 8) Think Big. “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” And 9) Bias for Action.

When hiring, a designated “Bar Raiser,” independent of the team that is hiring, also interviews the applicant. Bar raisers are “meticulously trained to be the stewards of Amazon’s leadership principles.” (Read more here.)

The tenth principle is Frugality. “There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.”

11) Earn Trust, 12) Dive Deep [no task is beneath a leader], 13) Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. “Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.” 14) Deliver Results.

Oh, my—there is SO much I should add to this review, like:
   • Avoiding “the creep onto the treacherous slippery slope called ‘Day 2’”
   • Amazon’s flywheel (per the Jim Collins concept)
   • The amazing impact that Jeff Bezos’ grandfather had on his thinking
   • “Nothing overcomes the wrong person. In the wrong hands, great ideas will not blossom.”
   • “To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.” (See the 18 failed innovations on page 80.)
   • Charlie Ward, the junior software engineer, who proposed the idea for Amazon prime in 2004. As of 2018, Amazon had over 100 million Prime Members!
   • Start with the customer (see what questions to ask on page 86).
   • “Eat your own dog food.”
   • The Jeff Bezos 70-90 Rule (When you have 70% of the info—make the decision. “If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”)
   • Why Bezos resists “the overrated importance of harmony.”
   • July 9, 2004: The day Amazon banned PowerPoint presentations at the core executive team level—and honed the “Six-Page Narratives” (sometimes two pages) approach. (See Bezos’ email on page 108!)

And finally, “A wrong decision may not be career-ending at Amazon, but Bezos will make sure the lesson is well learnt.” (Note: Read this book and it will be career-enhancing. Guaranteed.)

To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Amazon Management System: The Ultimate Digital Business Engine That Creates Extraordinary Value for Both Customers and Shareholders, by Ram Charan and Julia Yang.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) The authors say that Amazon’s emphasis on Forever Day-1 is not rocket science. But organizations must notice the “usual suspects” to Day-2 thinking: “complacency, bureaucracy, and interdependency that blurs the lines of accountability.” What are the “usual suspects” that inhibit results in our organization?
#2. Originally, Amazon had five values, but those morphed into 14 Leadership Principles. Many “experts” would say 14 are too many—and can’t be remembered or lived out. But Amazon has “operationalized” their principles into daily life. Example: read the blog post, “What’s It Like to Interview at Amazon.” Pop Quiz! From memory, recite our core values—and share when you saw one value lived out in the last seven days.

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Ram Charan: Prolific Thinker!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

One of the big ideas in the Drucker Bucket, Chapter 4, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is that you must be “a disciplined lifelong learner in the art of management.”

I’ve appreciated Ram Charan’s consistently helpful books on management, leadership, and board governance. In addition to The Amazon Management System (December 2019), check out my reviews of these Ram Charan books:

• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan (Read my review.)
• Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan (Read my review.)
• Leaders at All Levels: Deepening Your Talent Pool to Solve the Succession Crisis, by Ram Charan (Read my review.)
• Owning Up: The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs to Ask, by Ram Charan (Read my review.)
• The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers, by Bill Conaty and Ram Charan (Read my review.)
• Boards That Lead: When to Take Charge, When to Partner, and When to Stay Out of the Way, by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey and Michael Useem (Read my review.)
• The Attacker’s Advantage: Turning Uncertainty Into Breakthrough Opportunities, by Ram Charan (Read my review.)

REMINDER: TO DOWNLOAD 3 LISTS OF 400+ BOOKS REVIEWED BY JOHN PEARSON, visit The Book Bucket (click here):
• List #1: Books by Management Buckets Categories
• List #2: Chronological List of 425 Issues of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (400+ books)
• List #3: John Pearson's Top-100 Books List (updated every 2 years)

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video), including the new book by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love. (Read John’s review here.)
___________________________________________________________________________________

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

Talking to Strangers

Issue No. 426 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features the latest Wall Street Journal bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell—but be warned. It’s depressing! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my Top-10 books of 2019 and my Book-of-the-Year pick.

Don’t Read This Depressing Review!

If you’re looking for an upbeat you-can-be-anything-you-wanna-be positive-thinking, inspirational page-turner for Year 2020—THEN QUICK!—delete this eNews. This book is depressing.

Malcolm Gladwell’s new bestseller, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know, is mistitled. Had the publisher asked me, I would have suggested these titles:
• We Are Rotten at Spotting Liars and Deceivers!
• The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things and Desperately Wicked!
• Why Neville Chamberlain Should Have Skipped the Meeting With Hitler!
• The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth: LOL!
• Dishonesty and Stupidity Are Everywhere: Don’t Trust Large Organizations or Bernie Madoff!

I could go on. But if you insist on reading my review of Talking to Strangers (and even worse—reading the book), please remember that I warned you.

This will be short—because it’s too depressing to write a long review.

THE BIG IDEA: Really smart people (the CIA, military intelligence, regulators, university officials with Ph.D.’s, the list goes on…) are not that smart when discerning if people we don’t know well are hoodwinking us (think spies, double agents, Ponzi schemers, football coaches, job applicants, the list goes on…). So…what chance is there for the rest of us with average intelligence? Gladwell: not much! The author elaborates on two puzzlers:

PUZZLE #1: “Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?”

PUZZLE #2: “How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?”

EXAMPLE: The brazenness of a female employee of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (a Cuban spy), who won honors from the CIA and then was chosen for a stint in Cuba as a CIA distinguished intelligence analyst. Shocking! (Did I mention “shocking”?)

BEST QUOTE: “The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.”

What’s wrong? We’re rotten at spotting liars. Citing numerous studies, Gladwell notes: “What [the researcher] discovered is what psychologists always find in these cases, which is that most of us aren’t good at lie detection. On average, judges correctly identify liars 54 percent of the time—just slightly better than chance.”

He adds, “This is true no matter who does the judging. Students are terrible. FBI agents are terrible. CIA officers are terrible. Lawyers are terrible.”

In typical Gladwellian fashion (to be clear—I love his books), the author paints page-turning narratives with both familiar and unfamiliar accounts: Chamberlain and Hitler, Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Cox (fascinating), the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State University, and the never-should-have-happened death of Sandra Bland (the result of a routine traffic stop). There’s more (and caution—some of the verbatim courtroom accounts are raw and R-rated).

AHA! MOMENT: There are many, but I was particularly intrigued with Gladwell’s focus on “location” and why local police tend to misunderstand criminal data about location—or just ignore it. I found just a modicum of hope to mitigate the depression:

Discussing the “Law of Crime Concentration,” the author writes, “Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.”

FINAL THOUGHT: The book is depressing, but you should read it—or delegate your reading to someone on your team.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, by Malcolm Gladwell. And special thanks to Dave Barton for recommending this depressing book! To listen to the audio version (8 hours, 42 minutes), visit Libro.fm

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Malcolm Gladwell said the reason we’re so bad at spotting liars is because “we’re truth-biased” and “…we nearly always miss the crucial clues in the moment…” Yikes! So…who would like to read and report on this book BEFORE we interview our next job applicant?
2) In a footnote about training U.S. military personnel who might some day be water boarded and/or tortured (page 244), Gladwell contrasted two schools of thought. "The Navy wanted to show their trainees how bad things could get. The Air Force felt their trainees were better off not knowing that.” How would you approach this subject—wanting the best for the people you’re training?

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Outliers: 1 of My Top-100 Books
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

One of the big ideas in the Book Bucket, Chapter 5, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to create your Top-100 book list. This week, I posted three updated lists on my Book Bucket webpage:

BOOKS REVIEWED BY JOHN PEARSON:
• List #1: Books by Management Buckets Categories
• List #2: Chronological List of 425 Issues of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (400+ books)
• List #3: John Pearson's Top-100 Book List (updated every 2 years)

One of my Top-100 book picks is by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success. (Click here to read my 2008 review.) Here’s a snippet:

You will insist that Gladwell’s conclusions cannot possibly be true. Are they? You’ll sense sadness at how we fail to understand culture—and the incredible harm of wasted years and lives—all preventable, claims the author. He makes a compelling case about luck, timing—and the extraordinary power of the 10,000-hour rule and how it contributed to the success of Bill Gates and the Beatles.

Read Outliers and then host a team discussion on the vast implications for your organization, such as what to consider when recruiting new team members and how professional development programs might need to change based on a person’s ethnicity. For example, Greeks and Guatemalans are in the top five of the “uncertainty avoidance” countries (high reliance on rules), while Swedes and Jamaicans represent the top-five cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity. (Did I mention I’m Swedish?)

P.S. To read my 2013 review of Gladwell’s excellent book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, click here.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video), including the new book by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love. (Read John’s review here.)
___________________________________________________________________________________

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

Top-10 Books of 2019 and Book-of-the-Year

Issue No. 425 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting delivers my Top-10 book picks from 2019 and my Book-of-the-Year. Also, Happy New Year! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my 2018 Top-10 picks from last year.

TOP-10 BOOKS FOR 2019

This issue features books I reviewed in Issues No. 398 to 425. To read other 2019 book reviews from Your Weekly Staffing Meeting, visit the archives at John Pearson’s Buckets Blog on this page.

In 2019, I published 27 issues. (But I thought Your Weekly Staff Meeting was published weekly? Not!) Certainly not all 10 books will have popular appeal—because all of us are at different levels of competency and curiosity across the 20 management buckets. What were your Top-10 books in 2019?

2019 BOOK-OF-THE-YEAR
CALL SIGN CHAOS: LEARNING TO LEAD, by Jim Mattis and Bing West (Order from Amazon) – Read my review. Listen to the audio version (12 hours) at Libro.fm

Best Quote. “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate—you can’t coach and you can’t lead.”

I’d slot Call Sign Chaos in a category of one. Leadership savvy (check!). Loyalty to the Commander in Chief—irrespective of political party (check!). An understandable primer on the history and deep divides in the Middle East (check!). A cogent argument for allies and partnerships (check!). Blunt but courteous approaches to commanding officers (check!). And—surprisingly—the in-the-trenches battle accounts and leadership/strategy assumptions in Iraq and Afghanistan—page-turning (check!). I could go on…

Learning to lead is a lifelong journey—and the author leads the way. Gen. Mattis writes that the Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. With every promotion comes a new reading list. Brilliant.

Mattis served 712 days as the 26th Secretary of Defense. His Dec. 20, 2018 letter of resignation to President Trump is just one of numerous signed letters in the book’s epilogue—and is a short treatise on his core values and leadership savvy.

He also served as a U.S. Marine from 1969 to 2013 and was Commander of the U.S. Central Command from 2010 to 2013 under President Obama. From 2007 to 2009, for NATO, he was Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation. That’s an impressive business card! I urge you to read this book.

2019 TOP-10 BOOK LIST: The Other 9
(With brief excerpts from my reviews, these nine are listed in alphabetical order by author.)

#2. KNIGHT OF THE HOLY GHOST: A SHORT HISTORY OF G. K. CHESTERTON, by Dale Ahlquist (Order from Amazon) - Read my review.



Best Quote. G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) “was once asked what advice he would give to a young journalist. He said he would tell him to write one article for the Sporting Times and one for the Religious Times and then put them in the wrong envelopes.”

Published in 2019, the book is just 170 pages, and I couldn’t stop talking about it all year.

#3. EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE 2.0 (The World’s Most Popular Emotional Intelligence Test), by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves (Order from Amazon) - Read my review.

Best Quote. “CEOs, on average, have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace.” The authors add, “Considering the mountain of literature about EQ, you’d think corporate executives would be pretty smart about it.”

“EQ, on the other hand, is a flexible skill that can be learned. While it is true that some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, a high EQ can be developed even if you aren’t born with it.”

#4. TURNING THE FLYWHEEL: A MONOGRAPH TO ACCOMPANY GOOD TO GREAT (Why Some Companies Build Momentum and Others Don’t), by Jim Collins (Order from Amazon) - Read my review.



Best Quote. “No matter what your walk of life, no matter how big or small your enterprise, no matter whether it’s for-profit or nonprofit, no matter whether you’re CEO or a unit leader, the question stands, How does your flywheel turn?”

Jeff Bezos “…considered Amazon’s application of the flywheel concept ‘the secret sauce.’” But this caution: you need to understand how your organization’s specific flywheel turns—and the sequence of the components. Collins notes seven key steps for capturing your unique flywheel approach—plus this warning: don’t feature more than four to six components.

#5. NO! A GUIDE FOR BUSY PEOPLE: Banish Busyness and Focus on What Matters Most, by Doug Fields (Order from Amazon) - Read my review.



Best Quote. “What I didn’t realize was that every ‘YES’ I was saying turned into an unspoken ‘NO’ as well, often to the people most important to me.”

More than 40 powerful quotations on why you must say NO:
• “When you say yes to others, make sure you are not saying no to yourself.” (Paulo Coelho)
• “Sometimes no is the kindest word.” (Vironika Tugaleva)
• “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.” (Warren Buffet)

#6. STRATEGYMAN VS. THE ANTI-STRATEGY SQUAD: Using Strategic Thinking to Defeat Bad Strategy and Save Your Plan, by Rich Horwath (Order from Amazon) - Read my review.

Best Quote. The author noted the Stanford University study that says you’ll retain six to seven times more information when it’s presented in a story format.

Thus...”Fwumpfh!”…”B-Zapp!”…and “Bwa Ha Ha!” (Yes, I’m quoting directly from this must-must read graphic novel!)
• “A survey of nearly 5,000 senior executives showed that more than 50% didn’t think they had a winning strategy in place.”
• “A recent study of more than 8,000 new, nationally distributed products found that only 40% were still on the market three years later.”

#7. LEADERS: MYTH AND REALITY, by General Stanley McChrystal (US Army, Retired), Jeff Eggers, and Jason Mangone (Order from Amazon) - Read my review.

Best Quote. In the chapter on “The Geniuses,” (Albert Einstein and Leonard Bernstein—two of 13 leaders profiled), the authors quote Bernstein:

“Finally, the great conductor must not only make his orchestra play, he must make them want to play. He must exalt them, lift them, start their adrenalin[e] pouring, either through cajoling or demanding or raging. But however he does it, he must make the orchestra love the music as he loves it. It is not so much imposing his will on them like a dictator; it is more like projecting his feelings around him so that they reach the last man in the second violin section.”

#8. “WHY YOUR MEETINGS STINK—AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT,” by Steven G. Rogelberg, (Harvard Business Review, January-February 2019), visit the HBR website here. (Read online at HBR) - Read my review.

Best Quote. “One study found that despite the prevalence of meetings today, 75% of those surveyed had received no formal training in how to conduct or participate in them.”
• “To prevent groupthink, consider incorporating periods of silence throughout the meeting…”
• Instead of verbal brainstorming, use “brainwriting.” (A must-read paragraph!)

#9. WHERE THE LIGHT DIVIDES, by Fred Smith (Order from Amazon) - Read my review.

Best Quote. “What the people of Israel did with the serpent, we do the same in many ways. We make good things into icons and then into idols.” He adds, “Some have made an idol of the church for their own benefit.”

So…caution all readers! Fred Smith’s 50 short chapters will sneak up on you and—if you have any measure of a spiritual pulse—you’ll get hammered. But it’s a good hammering. He’s provocative, but also patient with us. And just when you turn the page for a new chapter (“Ah! Yes! I know this biblical account…”), Fred will twist your pre-conceived and often ill-conceived understanding—and grab you by the spiritual throat.

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For the “10th book” in my Top-10 list, I’ll apologize in advance—here are three more books, co-authored with ECFA President Dan Busby. We pretty much split the writing in half—so at least half of the content is excellent (Dan’s half!).
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#10A. LESSONS FROM THE CHURCH BOARDROOM: 40 Insights for Exceptional Governance, by Dan Busby and John Pearson (Order from Amazon) – Read my summary.


Best Quote. “Would you trust a surgeon who stopped learning? How about a church board member who stopped learning?” (Click here to read the blog series from 40 guest bloggers.)

#10B. MORE LESSONS FROM THE NONPROFIT BOARDROOM: Effectiveness, Excellence, Elephants! by Dan Busby and John Pearson (Order from Amazon) – Read my summary.



Best Quote. In Lesson 39, we quote Donald Rumsfeld, “Meetings are a good place to discover whether an organization might be suffering from groupthink. If everyone in the room seems convinced of the brilliance of an idea, it may be a sign that the organization would benefit from more dissent and debate.” (Click here to subscribe to the blog series beginning on Jan. 8, 2020.)

#10C. ECFA TOOLS AND TEMPLATES FOR EFFECTIVE BOARD GOVERNANCE: Time-Saving Solutions for Your Board, by Dan Busby and John Pearson (Order from Amazon) – Read my summary.

Best Tool. Tool #11 of 22: Monthly Dashboard Report. A one-page color-coded dashboard report from the CEO to the board can be customized to highlight three to five of your CEO’s Annual S.M.A.R.T. Goals—with this caveat from Peter Drucker, “If you have more than five goals, you have none.” This will revolutionize your CEO’s (or senior pastor’s) priorities—and get everyone on the same page. Pair this with Tool #10—and you’ll eliminate hallway whining! (Read the blog series on all 22 tools. Click here.)

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Your Top-100 Books List
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

One of the big ideas in the Book Bucket, Chapter 5, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to create your Top-100 Books List. I’ve crafted my list using my 20 management buckets (core competencies) categories. Download the template from the Book Bucket and start your list this week!

When my buckets book was published in 2008, I listed one book recommendation per bucket on pages 83-85. In the Delegation Bucket, for example, read The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey, by Ken Blanchard, William Oncken, and Hal Burrows (Order from Amazon) - Read my review.

COMING JAN. 6, 2020: Visit the Book Bucket webpage on Jan. 6 to download three lists of books (updated through 12/31/19) that I’ve reviewed since 2006, including my Top-100 books list.

I'm reviewing some fantastic books in 2020, including this hot-off-the-press winner, The Amazon Management System: The Ultimate Digital Business Engine That Creates Extraordinary Value for Both Customers and Shareholders, by Ram Charan and Julia Yang (Order from Amazon).

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video), including the new book by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love. (Read John’s review here.)
___________________________________________________________________________________

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

2020 Spiritual Growth Books

Issue No. 424 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting asks, “In the next decade, what’s your plan for growing and enriching your walk with God?” Here are some daily, weekly, and monthly spiritual growth resources. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and check out this website for recent book reviews. Plus, coming this week—watch for my 2019 Book-of-the-Year pick.



2020 PERSONAL AND SPIRITUAL GROWTH

In the introduction to The Message: Solo—An Uncommon Devotional, the editors describe the classic devotional method of lectio divina (reading, thinking, praying, and living Scripture) as “more Bible basking than Bible study.”

“But it’s not easy,” they add. “Lectio divina takes practice, and lots of it. You will have to learn to be quiet, to silence the voices of responsibility, self, family, and even religion in order to hear what God has to say to you.” (Yikes! “Responsibility” is one of my top-5 Gallup strengths!)

“Try not to view the elements of lectio divina as steps to be checked off your to-do list,” the editors add. But what if…”…no lightning strikes or brilliant revelations” come? “Sometimes devotion means just sitting in the presence of God.”

In Issue No. 423, I recommended several leadership growth books for 2020. Now in this issue, I’m suggesting some options for personal and spiritual growth books for 2020.

Over the decades, I’ve discovered that one size doesn’t fit all—and one spiritual growth practice doesn’t fit all. About every five years, I move on to another approach—in order to keep my walk with God fresh. Lifelong learning, after all, is about authentic living—not just learning. (See John Ortberg’s thoughts below on this.)

52 WEEKS
Silencio: Reflective Practices for Nurturing Your Soul, Stephen A. Macchia, Editor (Order from Amazon)



• This hot-off-the-press and slow-you-down 52-week resource is from the Leadership Transformations Ministry Team, led by Stephen A. Macchia, who practices what he preaches.
• It follows the lectio divina method (read, think, pray, live) and each week includes commentary, a hymn, reflection questions, and spiritual practices.
• John French, the writer for Chapter 1, tells about a friend: “He had read the Bible all his life; sometimes the text was full of life and challenge. Recently, however, his devotional life was more mechanical, simply going through the motions. Here was a serious Christian going through a dry spell. Deciding to read through the Bible in a year, at breakneck speed, he completed his assignment … but he sensed very little of the voice of God in his life.”
• If the above might be your story, you’ll appreciate Silencio.

365 DAYS
Trust for Today: 365 Days of Encouragement – A Year With the Trueface Team (Order from Amazon)

• You’ll chuckle when you read the short, one-page devotional thought for February 24, “Do angels laugh when we say something funny?” and “In heaven, will we be able to make God laugh?”
• Spoiler Alert! I’d buy the book just for the one-page story (May 29) about Dr. Rosscup’s response to a harried seminarian’s request for a one-day extension on a final paper. (The prof finished the paper for his student! On time!)
• I’ve reviewed numerous books by the Trueface Team (their best: The Cure). Maybe start 2020 by re-reading The Cure.

13 MONTHS OR 13 WEEKS
Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry (Expanded Edition, 2018), by Ruth Haley Barton (Order from Amazon) – Click here for the 10-hour audio version from Libro.fm 

• This expanded edition includes a foreword by Gary Haugen, Founder and CEO of International Justice Mission. He writes:
“…imagine with me for a moment, a staff of high-performing lawyers, criminal investigators, social workers and professionals in Washington, D.C., and offices across the developing world, rushing into the office to begin their day, faced with the task of fighting slavery, human trafficking, police abuse, and other forms of violent oppression. As these staff arrive at their desks, their first order of business is to stop. All phones are off. Laptops closed. No email. No meetings. Just silence. Solitude. Stillness. For thirty minutes.”

• In 2004, Haugen gave every staff member two gifts: a blank leather journal with the words “8:30 Stillness” embossed on the cover and a book by Ruth Haley Barton.

• In the Afterword of the book, Leighton Ford, author and pillar confesses, “I read here things that both sting and sing…”
• I named this my 2009 book-of-the-year and in 2020 I will re-read this convicting travelogue on the life of Moses. I’m taking 13 months for the 13 chapters. The chapters are way too meaty to digest in a week. In 2009, Don Parrott, then president of The Finishers Project, encouraged me to read this book—yet with a warning. “After you read it, you’ll need to get away for some solitude to deal with it.” I agree.
• And I double dare you! Answer the 17 assessment questions for leaders, “How Is It With Your Soul?” on pages 241-244.

30 DAYS OR 30 STAFF MEETINGS
Leadership Prayers, by Richard Kriegbaum (Order from Amazon)



• Richard Kriegbaum served and survived as a university president and thus gives us 30 powerful prayers on leadership (Identity, Values, Action, Delegation, Loss, Weariness, Planning, Courage, Marketing, Failure, Budget, Anger, Board, Intuition and 16 more). In his praying, the “board” prayer follows the “anger” prayer. Hmmm.
• Each prayer is two pages, followed by a one-page “reflection.” When is the last time you talked to your Heavenly Father about the Delegation Bucket? His key insight: “The highest form of delegating is to lay the leadership mantle on key people for particular goals and then follow their lead.”
• When I read it, I asked myself: What are five to 10 leadership topics, issues or concerns that, maybe, I’ve never, ever prayed about? (Read my review.)
• But beware! “By their nature, these prayers live only when they are internalized; they have power only when they are applied to real-life challenges. Skimming over them to get the main ideas will mean little because this is not a nifty new management technique.”

31 MORNINGS & 31 EVENINGS
A Diary of Private Prayer: A Devotional Classic, by John Baillie (Order from Amazon)



• Where do I start? I received this deeply encouraging devotional book in 1988 and rarely missed reading the 31 morning prayers, one per day, for 12 years until it was stolen, along with my laptop. (Maybe the thief is still reading it?)
• On the blank facing page to each prayer, I had recorded my travels by date and location, U.S. and worldwide. Combined with the poignant prayers by this Scottish Presbyterian professor, my road warrior diary was both nostalgic and meaningful.
• I bought my replacement prayer book in 2000—a hardback this time—and used it infrequently for a decade (so it wouldn’t become stale), but now I read it online often (click here for free access).
• I’ve gifted this special book to dozens of appreciative friends—and it’s one of 10 books on my “ideal bookshelf” (click here for my list).

DIG DEEP & GO SLOW: 3 More Resources
#1. Steward Leader Meditations: Fifty Devotions for the Leadership Journey, by R. Scott Rodin (Order from Amazon)
• For your next 50 staff meetings! Read my review.

#2. Knowing God, by J.I. Packer (Order from Amazon) 
• 22 chapters/22 months! Read my review.
• 10-hour audio version (Order from Libro.fm)

#3. THE ONE YEAR BIBLE OPTIONS (15 minutes per day):
• The One Year Bible NLT (Order from Amazon) 
• The Daily Message: Through the Bible in One Year, by Eugene H. Peterson (Order from Amazon) 
• 73-hour audio version of The Holy Bible (HCSB) - (Order from Libro.fm)
• Reminder from Silencio: “Deciding to read through the Bible in a year, at breakneck speed, he completed his assignment … but he sensed very little of the voice of God in his life.”

2020 SELF-GUIDED GROWTH
Amazon Gift Card (Order from Amazon)



• Some team members (or family members) may favor picking their own books—based on their season of life. If so…an Amazon gift card is perfect!

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John Ortberg on Training vs. Trying
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

One of the big ideas in the Systems Bucket, Chapter 18, in Mastering the Management Buckets is “Ready! Fire! Aim! Resist the urge to tinker endlessly to perfect the flawless system. Perfection is not the goal.” This big idea also applies to personal and spiritual development.

In the footsteps of Richard Foster (Celebration of Discipline) and Dallas Willard (The Spirit of the Disciplines), John Ortberg wrote The Life You’ve Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People more than 20 years ago. His humor and his plain-spoken practical theology shine through and it remains one of my favorite books. (He joked about calling the book, “Dallas for Dummies.”)

Read the third chapter for his core message, “There is an immense difference between training to do something and trying to do something.” He adds, “Spiritual transformation is not a matter of trying harder, but of training wisely.” Example: A New Year’s resolution to pray more every day may accomplish little if it doesn’t lead to being a more God-honoring person.

He warns do-gooders that God is not impressed with the activity of training. “Spiritual disciplines are to life what calisthenics are to a game. Once the game starts, basketball players get no bonus points based on how many free throws they shot in practice. The only reason to practice them is to be able to make them in a game.”

As you inspire your team in 2020, focus on results not activity. As you pray and practice spiritual disciplines this year, remember that those activities are not ways to get extra credit from God. If you and I are not becoming more loving and more caring, our “practice time” is worth little.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video), including the new book by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love. (Read John’s review here.)
___________________________________________________________________________________

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

2020 Leadership Growth Books

Issue No. 423 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights leadership growth resource options for your 2020 weekly staff meetings. Remember—delegate your reading! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and check out this website for recent book reviews, including Turning Goals Into Results (Harvard Business Review Classics): The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms, by Jim Collins.



2020 Leadership Growth Books

In the foreword to Scott Rodin’s book, Steward Leader Meditations, Richard Kriegbaum cautions about the challenging reality “that leadership is a complex field and no one resource can meet all the needs of every leader in every situation.”

So as you’re looking ahead to leadership growth opportunities in 2020 (and perhaps still needing an appropriate Christmas gift uniquely selected for a uniquely gifted team member or board member), here are some options.

2020 LEADERSHIP GROWTH

52 WEEKS
A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, by Joseph A. Maciariello (Order from Amazon) – Libro.fm Audiobook (11 hours)

• Coach your team on a 52-week journey through this treasure chest of leadership insights and management savvy.
• Delegate each week’s topic to a team member—and resource them with the color commentaries of 52 guest bloggers that weighed in on the 52 short chapters including: “A Second Chance for Failures,” “Work in an Area of Your Unique Contribution,” and “The Power of Purpose: Rick Warren on Peter Drucker.”

365 DAYS
The Maxwell Daily Reader: 365 Days of Insight to Develop the Leader Within You and Influence Those Around You, by John C. Maxwell (Order from Amazon)



• For 365 days, when your colleagues read a snippet from this one-day-a-page daily reader, they’ll think of you with appreciation!
• See “The 80/20 Principle” from November 2: “Spend 80 percent of your personal development dollars on the top 20 percent.”

366 DAYS
The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done, by Peter F. Drucker with Joseph A. Maciariello (Order from Amazon) 

• Click here to read my review of this classic book found on the desks of thousands of leaders and managers around the world. One page of wisdom per day!
• April 10 is a must-read on “Crisis and Leadership.” Drucker writes, “Fortunately or unfortunately the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That’s when you do depend on the leader.”
• April 11, “The Four Competencies of a Leader,” in just one page, sums up the four skills: “…listening, communicating, reengineering mistakes, and subordinating your ego to the task at hand.”

40 WEEKS OR 40 DAYS
Leadership Briefs: Shaping Organizational Culture to Stretch Leadership Capacity, by Dick Daniels. (Order from Amazon)

• Daniels can pack more into three pages than other authors can pack into 30. Leverage Leadership Briefs with your team for 40 days or 40 weeks.
• I named this my 2015 book-of-the-year (read my review). The 40 pithy topics are categorized into nine sections, including: Culture, Formation, Character, Strategy, Leading, Teams, Followers, Communication, and Etcetera: Behind the Scenes.
• Chapter 30 on delegation: “Leaders have three options: (1) Not delegating, (2) Delegating prematurely, or (3) Delegating developmentally.”
• Bonus: Subscribe here to the author’s Leadership eLetter, The Leadership Brief. This month’s topic: “Five Questions for a New Decade,” includes “The Letting Go Question: What should we stop doing?”

20 WEEKS OR 20 DAYS
Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates and Tips from John Pearson, with commentary by Jason Pearson (Order from Amazon)

• Create a “Management Minute” at your weekly staff meeting and inspire your team to highlight one insight from one bucket each week.
• Use the book or the workbook or both.
• Did you know that Jeff Bezos launches every Amazon meeting with a “silent start?” Read Jason’s color commentary for The Meetings Bucket. He quotes Justin Bariso writing for Inc. magazine:

“In the opening minutes of some meetings, before any discussion begins, Bezos and his team of senior executives read printed memos in total silence. (The memos have been known to reach up to six pages, and the silent start may last as long as 30 minutes.) During this time, moderator and attendees peruse. They scribble notes in the margins. But most important, they think.”

2020 SELF-GUIDED GROWTH
Amazon Gift Card in a Snowflake Tin (Order from Amazon)
• Some team members may favor picking your own book—based on their unique preferences and challenges. If so…an Amazon gift card is perfect!

2020 PERSONAL GROWTH
Silencio: Reflective Practices for Nurturing Your Soul, Stephen A. Macchia, Editor (Order from Amazon)
• Watch for the next issue with personal growth books for 2020, including this hot-off-the-press and slow-you-down 52-week resource from the Leadership Transformations Ministry Team, led by Stephen A. Macchia.

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) In the introduction to his book, Leadership Prayers, Richard Kriegbaum writes, “Do not let the simplicity of these prayers fool you. If leadership were easy, everyone would be a great leader. Great leadership is from the spirit. The life of the spirit may be simple, even obvious, but it is never easy.” Are we leveraging the right resources at the right time to grow leaders in our organization?
2) John Maxwell’s one-page daily insight for May 4 is “Become Comfortable With the Middle.” He writes, “Being in the middle can be a great place—as long as you have bought into the vision and believe in the leader.” Whew! That’s a gut check, right? Here’s an Amazon gift card. Buy Maxwell’s book and share more at our next weekly staff meeting.

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“Thank God It’s Monday!” - 3 Gift Books
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

One of the big ideas in the Hoopla! Bucket, Chapter 10, in Mastering the Management Buckets is this: “We harness the power of hoopla! for celebration, recreation, intentional food and fellowship gatherings, and just plain fun.” So…for some out-of-the-box fun gift ideas for team members or family members, here are three more suggestions:

#1. The Book of Mistakes, by Corinna Luyken (Order from Amazon)



• Click here to read the review from 2018 by my grandkids, Emelia, Zuzu, and Anders (now high school juniors)—and their insights into the efficacy of mistake-making!
• It’s not what you’d expect—it’s better. This gorgeously-illustrated coffee table-perfect children’s book is big on white space, and short on pages (just 56). And this caution—display it on the coffee table in your reception area and someone will “borrow” it within an hour. (Better buy two!)

#2. The 5 Book: Where Will You Be Five Years From Today? by Dan Zadra (Order from Amazon)

• “At age 30, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was living in a 500-square foot apartment. Five years later his net worth was $10 billion.”
• The next five years, says Zadra, will deliver 260 opportunities to say “TGIM: Thank goodness it’s Monday!” As you think about goals, “how could you put every Monday on a pedestal?”
• Read my review (click here) on the power of five-year thinking—and why you do have enough time in your schedule for strategic planning.

#3. Oak Street Treehouse: The Day They Messaged God, by Dick Daniels and illustrated by Mollie Bozarth (Order From Amazon)



• From leadership guru Dick Daniels is a delightful children’s book written for his “six incredible grandchildren.” In their treehouse, six neighborhood friends “take the tablet used for playing games and send a message to God. They want to know who He really is. God replies and sends them on three neighborhood field trips to look at different parts of creation.”
• While it’s a children’s book, leaders will find this storytelling art form of interest—how to communicate complex ideas in simple, yet contemporary (think iPad) ways.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video), including the new book by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love. (Read John’s review here.)
___________________________________________________________________________________

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

THIS. 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love

Issue No. 422B of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a Christmas gift giving must for parents and grandparents with 52 fun and serious fill-in-the-blank topics to pass along to their kids and grandkids. And this reminder: check out this website for recent book reviews.



Christmas Gift Memory-Maker!
THIS. 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love

One of the big ideas in the Team Bucket, Chapter 9, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is that a balanced life honors God, each other, our families and our friends. So here’s a book that delivers 52 ways to begin both serious and LOL life discussions between parents and children.

Our son, Jason Pearson, teamed up with prolific author Doug Fields, to write THIS, as in… “I just want you to know THIS.”

Beautifully designed as a tool (really a treasure) for parents and grandparents to think, write, and then pass along to each child or grandchild—you’ll be prompted to share meaningful messages on 52 topics in this fill-in-the-blanks journal. Examples:

Fun stuff:
• 5 movies that I want you to see sometime
• Favorite phrases my parents used to say
• So far the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me was…
• These are the 3 things that really make me laugh hard
• Some favorite foods I hope you try

Serious stuff:
• Here are two habits I wish I would have developed at a younger age
• 5 heroic things that I love about you
• You don’t need to follow the crowd—here’s why
• Here’s what I know about God
• Sometimes I sing the blues—here are a couple social issues that break my heart
• 5 qualities I hope your future spouse will have

“I learned to write to burn the fuzz off my thinking,” said Fred Smith, Sr. And when you discern, pray, and put your ideas to pen and paper on all 52 topics, you’ll be giving a treasured gift to each child or grandchild. (Recommendation: create one book per child to make this gift personal and meaningful.)

You can pen this memory-maker in one sitting or you can savor and wordsmith your thoughts over weeks, months, and maybe a year. Your kids (or grandkids) will cherish your wisdom and thoughts on: Music, God, Jobs, Relationships, Books, Love, Death, Politics, Sushi, and 43 other important topics. Have fun!

To order the deluxe color edition from Amazon, click on the title for THIS. 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love, by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) If you, as a parent or grandparent, were (sadly) hit by a bus tomorrow—and exited this life prematurely, what words, wisdom, and wit would be remembered and treasured by your children and grandchildren?
2) How many copies of THIS. should you order today?

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video). And order the new book by Doug Fields and Jason Pearson, THIS. 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love.
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Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, frequent flyer miles, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. PRIVACY POLICY: Typepad, Inc. hosts John Pearson's Buckets Blog. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform for Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews. By clicking (above) to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy policy here.

The Right Choice: Choosing a College and Why It Matters

Issue No. 422A of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a book for your Christmas gift giving on choosing a college (And see Issue No. 422B for a second book for parents and grandparents on choosing a life—with 52 fun and serious fill-in-the-blank topics.) And this reminder: check out this website for recent book reviews.



Decision Matrix: Dreams, Desires, Details

According to the “Special Report: Strategies for Your Kids’ Cash,” Barron’s magazine, Dec. 2, 2019, college costs from high to low are:
   • $50,000 per year (the average price for tuition, fees, room and board at a four-year private school; many prestigious schools exceed $70,000 per year)
   • $3,730 per year (the average price for a community college)

One expert noted, “You shouldn’t rule out any school as being too expensive, based on the sticker price.” So what should students, parents, and grandparents do? Start by reading Dr. John Jackson’s highly readable (and short) book, The Right Choice: Choosing a College and Why It Matters.

I had the privilege of endorsing Jackson’s book and here’s what I said: "Honest. Practical. Immediately useful. The Right Choice is my choice for inspiring my college-bound triplet teenage grandchildren to think deeper and wider about their college options. The ‘Decision Matrix’ (Dreams, Desires, Details) is brilliant!”

But don’t take my word for it. I asked my granddaughter, Zuzu, a high school junior. As part of her homeschool coursework, Zuzu has already been taking college courses online and on-campus for two years. She and her siblings, Anders and Emelia (also juniors) just completed Dave Ramsey’s “Foundations in Personal Finance” course—so she was ready for my first question!

GRANDPA JOHN: Zuzu—college could be expensive. Do you have a plan?

ZUZU: No loans. If needed, I’ll take a break to earn more money, but I don’t plan to go into debt.

GRANDPA JOHN: Wow! Impressive. So what did you think of this book, The Right Choice?

ZUZU: I think you should judge a book by its cover—and this cover was perfect. It’s the summary of the book with three basic college options: faith-based, public, and private. I appreciated the double-spaced format—and it was easy and informative reading.

G. JOHN: Did Dr. Jackson’s book help you think through college questions and decisions?

ZUZU: Yes. I’ve thought a lot about college, and using his three filters (Dreams, Desires, and Details)—with a short chapter on each—was very helpful.

G. JOHN: Since you and your siblings just returned from being small group leaders at your church’s youth retreat (90 kids—wow!), I thought Jackson’s three points would make a great youth talk:
   • “Dreams are what stir the heart.” He adds, “When you choose a college, having clarity about your dreams is a key asset…Your dreams and your college’s strengths should line up.”
   • “Desires are what I long for.” I thought this was excellent: “Desires are close enough that you can ‘taste’ them, whereas dreams are typically far enough away so that you can only ‘feel’ them.”
   • “Details matter.” This chapter, in my opinion, was very, very practical and necessary. He apologizes, “These details can seem mind-numbing,” but skillfully connects the dots back to your dreams and desires. He also urges students to not make these important decisions alone, citing Proverbs 15:22, “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.”

ZUZU: Using the “desires” filter, I’m would love to study in Asia or maybe Europe—maybe at a castle in Europe! I can taste that!

G. JOHN: I’m not surprised. You’ve been studying Mandarin since you were seven, so sooner or later—I’m guessing—you’ll be crossing an ocean! Any final thoughts about the book? Anything missing?

ZUZU: I think it would be helpful for high school sophomores to read this ASAP—so they start thinking about college sooner. (And it’s only 83 pages.) And...maybe add a parent’s guide. (Although, as you know, my Mom enjoys doing research. She could write the guide!) I also appreciated Dr. Jackson’s balance—giving credible arguments for why some students should pick a public college, why others should pick a private college, and why others might thrive more at a faith-based college.

G. JOHN: Thanks, Zuzu! And—impressive—you told me this is the 124th book you’ve read this year. Way to go!

ZUZU: Thanks! And, by the way, would you and Grammy Joanne consider a monthly recurring gift to the Zuzu College Fund?

To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Right Choice: Choosing a College and Why It Matters, by John J. Jackson, Ph.D.



Note: To read more 2019 reviews by the Zuzana Pearson and Grandpa John duo, click on the titles for two more Christmas gifts ideas for family, friends, and colleagues:
   • The Four Gifts of the King: A Novel, by R. Scott Rodin
   • StrategyMan vs. the Anti-Strategy Squad: Using Strategic Thinking to Defeat Bad Strategy and Save Your Plan, by Rich Horwath

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Dr. John Jackson’s Venn diagram of Dreams, Desires, and Details works both for making college decisions and also many other important life decisions. Share an example where all three Ds have combined to highlight a sweet spot in your life.
2) Count noses here in our organization. How many high school students are represented by parents, grandparents, and friends in our circle? Could this quick-reading book help us lean in and bless these influencers—as they challenge these students to make God-honoring decisions about college? 

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video). And read John’s review (Issue No. 422B) of the new book by Doug Fields and Jason Pearson, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love.
________________________________________________________________________________________

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

More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom: Effectiveness, Excellence, Elephants!

Issue No. 421 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting suggests a Christmas gift for your board members, CEO, and senior team members—and just in time—since Dan Busby and John Pearson, apparently, can’t stop writing books! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and check out this website for recent book reviews, including Turning Goals Into Results (Harvard Business Review Classics): The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms, by Jim Collins.



Two Things You Should Never Joke About!

Looking for a Christmas gift for your organization’s board members, CEO, or senior team members? We’re a tad biased, but co-author Dan Busby and I recommend our latest book, More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom: Effectiveness, Excellence, Elephants!

More Lessons features 40 short insights for enriching effectiveness and excellence in the boardroom—and practical wisdom for addressing those elephants in the boardroom that no one wants to talk about!

While all 40 lessons, we believe, are worthy of your time and reflection, we do have some favorite chapters. My top-two picks would be the wisdom we passed along from Olan Hendrix:
• Lesson 32: There Are Two Things You Should Never Joke About—#1: Prayer
• Lesson 33: There Are Two Things You Should Never Joke About—#2: Fundraising

On fundraising, Olan Hendrix recounts a time he accompanied a client on a donor call. “This Christian leader had a worthwhile cause and many friends, but wasn’t raising any money. I wanted to find out why.

“After exchanging pleasantries with the donor, he began making jokes about the fact that he was there to ask for money. I had discovered his problem! Perhaps he was covering up his nervousness about asking for money, but flippancy is never a good substitute for sincerity.”

Hendrix, who served as the first president of ECFA, concluded, “I want a part of my legacy to be that I helped God’s servants to see fundraising not as something to joke about or apologize for, but as a noble and vital part of ministry.”

No Joke! You’ve likely been at a meal when someone announces, “the last one with your thumb up says grace.” Hendrix shares another lesson learned when a search committee rejected a candidate who “made light of prayer.” When I first heard Olan share this with a group of young leaders—it immediately changed my thinking and my behavior. Yikes.

You’ll find that More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom will challenge and change board member thinking about dozens of boardroom behaviors and elephants:

• Lesson 1: Two Stories—The Board and the Bachelor Farmer and $1.5 Billion Worth of Burger Blessings
• Lesson 4: Guarding Your CEO’s Soul
• Lesson 5: Dashboards Are Not a Secret Sauce for Sound Governance
• Lesson 8: What If Your CEO Is Hit by a Bus?

You’ll appreciate the short lessons in 10 major categories, including: Nominees for the Board Member Hall of Fame, Boardroom Bloopers, Boardroom Time-Wasters, Trouble-Makers and Truth-Tellers, and Boardroom Worst Practices. Examples:

• Lesson 9: Just Do One Thing a Month
• Lesson 13: Caution! Understand the Governance Pendulum Principle
• Lesson 16: Looking for Consensus But Finding Division
• Lesson 17: Botched Executive Sessions Are Not Pretty
• Lesson 18: Warning! Résumé-Builders Make Lousy Board Members

In our first book in this series, Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom: 40 Insights for Better Board Meetings, we encouraged boards to allocate a “10 Minutes for Governance” slot at every board meeting—to fan the flame of lifelong learning. Many boards are now doing that—and these short lessons are perfect for 10-minute segments (five minutes of content and five minutes of discussion):

• Lesson 24: Should Most Standing Committees Stand Down?
• Lesson 27: Address Absentee Board Member Syndrome
• Lesson 35: Leverage the 80/20 Rule in the Boardroom
• Lesson 39: Identify Your Key Assumptions

In Lesson 39, we quote Donald Rumsfeld, “Meetings are a good place to discover whether an organization might be suffering from groupthink. If everyone in the room seems convinced of the brilliance of an idea, it may be a sign that the organization would benefit from more dissent and debate.”

The Boardroom Lesson: “Identify your key assumptions so your inaccurate premises don’t lead to inaccurate conclusions and colossal flops! Invest time in assessing the validity of your assumptions—and asking for advice and counsel from others. Expect God to lead you to colleagues, acquaintances, and even experts who will give you feedback on your ministry’s important plans and your assumptions about those plans.”

We encourage you to order copies for your board members, CEO, and senior team members and consider how to leverage one lesson at every board meeting and/or 10 or more lessons at your next board retreat.

Watch for the “40 Blogs. 40 Wednesdays.” posts by 40 guest bloggers beginning on January 8, 2020. Visit the “More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom Blog” here to subscribe.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom: Effectiveness, Excellence, Elephants! by Dan Busby and John Pearson. To see bulk pricing options, visit ECFAPress here. To see all 40 lesson titles, see the Table of Contents here.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) “Defending Risks Everywhere Is Not a Strategic Plan,” Lesson 28 in More Lessons, warns that you must discuss the “risk elephant in the boardroom.” How effectively do our board, CEO, and senior team encourage “elephant discussions?” Is dissent and debate a value—or is conformity a boardroom value?
2) Lesson 26 cautions that “Ministry boards have a natural gravitational pull towards issues that should be reserved for the staff.” Does our board understand the “Big Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand” metaphor for keeping discussion at high levels? Should we invest 10 minutes for governance on Lesson 26 at our next board meeting?

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Invest “10 Minutes for Governance” at Every Board Meeting
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

One of the big ideas in the Board Bucket, Chapter 14, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to continue “dating” board members after you’ve recruited them to the board. Inspire board members to be lifelong learners. After all, we do appreciate airline pilots and surgeons who are also lifelong learners!

“Tool #19: Ten Minutes for Governance” in the new resource, ECFA Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance: Time-Saving Solutions for Your Board (also by Busby and Pearson), provides a template and ideas for reminding board members that “good governance does not happen by osmosis. It happens only with intentionality, training, and keeping critical governance topics (like focusing on policy, not operations) on everyone’s radar.”



The book provides access to 22 Word documents you can customize for your board’s unique needs. (Follow the blog on the 22 tools here.) For more resources in the Board Bucket, and links to the four governance books by Dan Busby and John Pearson, click here.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video). And watch for John’s review of the new book by Doug Fields and Jason Pearson, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love.
________________________________________________________________________________________

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

Emotional Intelligence 2.0

Issue No. 420 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a WSJ bestseller that says you can improve your emotional intelligence. Buy the book and take the EQ test! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and check out this website for recent book reviews, including the HBR article, “Why Your Meetings Stink—and What to Do About It.”



You Can Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

Really, Pearson? You celebrated 50 years of marriage in 2019 and—just now—you decide to read Emotional Intelligence 2.0? Really?

OK...I confess. But does it count that the book has been on my “to-read-and-review” shelf since 2012? And I do agree—I should have read the book in 2012, not five months ago. Taking the online emotional intelligence test would also have been a good idea years ago! Why now? It keeps popping up on The Wall Street Journal’s business best-seller list (#7 last Saturday).

This will get your attention: “CEOs, on average, have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace.” Authors Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves add, “Considering the mountain of literature about EQ, you’d think corporate executives would be pretty smart about it.”

By 2009, the authors had already measured EQ in half a million senior executives. Their Harvard Business Review article, “Heartless Bosses,” notes: “For each respondent, we measured self-awareness, social-awareness, self-management, and relationship-management skills to yield a cumulative EQ (or “emotional intelligence quotient”) score on a 100-point scale.”

Their findings: “EQ scores rise as executives climb the ladder, peaking at the manager level, falling off thereafter, and bottoming out, alarmingly, at the CEO level.”

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is a fascinating read—and each book includes (like StrengthsFinder 2.0), a passcode for one person to take the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal® test. (More on my test results below!)

EQ is part of understanding the “whole person,” say the authors. Think a Venn diagram of IQ, EQ, and Personality. “Your IQ…is fixed from birth. You don’t get smarter by learning new facts or information. Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it’s the same at age 15 as it is at age 50.”

“EQ, on the other hand, is a flexible skill that can be learned. While it is true that some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, a high EQ can be developed even if you aren’t born with it.”

The authors define EQ as “your ability to recognize and understand emotions in others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.”

So the bad news: you, your spouse, and team members are pretty much stuck with your current IQ.

The good news: “No matter whether people measure high or low in EQ, they can work to improve it, and those who score low can actually catch up to their coworkers.”

More good news:
• “The link between EQ and earnings is so direct that every point increase in EQ adds $1,300 to an annual salary.”
• “EQ is so critical to success that it accounts for 58 percent of performance in all types of jobs.” (See also Marshall Goldsmith’s wisdom on blind spots and this: “The higher you go [in your career], the more your problems are behavioral.”)
• “Of all the people we’ve studied at work, we have found that 90 percent of high performers are also high in EQ.”

Like any good book, the authors usually get to the meat and potatoes (and a summary chart) by page 25. (See these page 25 phenomena in my reviews of Nonprofit Sustainability and Stewardship as a Lifestyle.) These co-authors are really good—their chart is on page 24!

EQ includes four skills:

PERSONAL COMPETENCE
• Self-Awareness (what I see)
• Self-Management (what I do)
SOCIAL COMPETENCE
• Social Awareness (what I see)
• Relationship Management (what I do)

“People high in self-awareness are remarkably clear in their understanding of what they do well, what motivates and satisfies them, and which people and situations push their buttons.” (Think triggers.)

“Self-management is what happens when you act—or do not act. It is dependent on your self-awareness and is the second major part of personal competence.” (For example, note their feedback for a regional sales director: “Mei has a hard time congratulating staff for their accomplishments, and it comes across as jealousy.”

“Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them.” (Example: “Maya has an uncanny ability to spot and address the elephant in the room.”)

“Relationship management [which taps into the first three EQ skills] is your ability to use your awareness of your own emotions and those of others to manage interactions successfully.” (Example: “He knows when to approach an issue sensitively, and knows when to give praise and encouragement.”)

In the chapter, “Get Mad on Purpose,” the authors quote Aristotle:
“Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, this is not easy.”

Chapter 14, “Make Your Feedback Direct and Constructive,” begins with this memory jogger: “Think about the best feedback you’ve ever received.” That was easy for me. I’d been a CEO for 17 years with minimal, if any feedback. Then a colleague, Don Cousins, gifted me with some honest insights that changed my game. I was grateful. And that gave me courage to give more effective feedback to others.

ONLINE RESULTS. After completing the online test in August, I received access to my results in a 16-page “Emotional Intelligence Appraisal” customized report—the first phase of a free customized learning program based on my EQ scores. The promise: “This program will teach you about emotional intelligence…reveal what your current skill levels are, and tell you what you can do to improve.”

The appraisal delivers a score for each of the four skills (“based on a comparison to the general population”) and an overall EQ score.
• 90-100…………..A strength to capitalize on
• 80-89…………….A strength to build on
• 70-79…………….With a little improvement, this could be a strength
• 60-69…………….Something you should work on
• 59 and Below…..A concern you must address

My scores? Let’s just say there’s room for improvement—and the customized report gave me three specific improvement strategies (referencing specific pages in the book), and where I should start. Brilliant and helpful. (Reminder: “EQ…is a flexible skill that can be learned.”)

You’re encouraged to retest again—after working on the customized lessons—and you can also schedule a retest reminder date. Helpful!

I’ve long been a cheerleader for what I call “The 3 Powerful S’s: Strengths, Social Styles, and Spiritual Gifts.” But today I’m updating my PowerPoints to read: “The 4 Powerful S’s,” with the addition of a fourth S (Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management.). You can teach an old dog new tricks!

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Emotional Intelligence 2.0 (The World’s Most Popular Emotional Intelligence Test), by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves.

To listen to the 4 hour, 17 minute audio version, visit Libro.fm here. NOTE! the audio version does NOT include access to the online assessment.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) According to the EQ gurus, one self-management strategy is to make your goals public. (A university prof “pays his colleagues $100 anytime he misses a deadline on a research article.”) Name a goal you have that needs to go public.
2) How’s this for counter-intuitive? One of the self-awareness strategies (#5) in EQ is “Don’t Take Notes at Meetings.” One reason: the head-in-tablet syndrome diminishes active listening. What’s your learning style? What’s your listening style? 

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Avoid “Management-by-Bestseller Syndrome”
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook

One of the big ideas in the Book Bucket, Chapter 5, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to align your reading—and your team’s reading—with complementary books. Avoid “Management-by-Bestseller Syndrome,” says Scott Vandeventer.

Thus—one of the factors that caught my eye about Emotional Intelligence 2.0 was that I had already reviewed books by six of the endorsers, including Patrick Lencioni who wrote the foreword. (He urges us to read the book twice!) Other endorsers included Stephen R. Covey, Ken Blanchard, Marshall Goldsmith, Captain D. Michael Abrashoff, and Brian Tracy.

Caution: “Management gimmick-of-the-month whiplash can be fatal!” So drink deeply and discerningly from the Book Bucket. Click here.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video). And watch for John’s review of the new book by Doug Fields and Jason Pearson, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love.
________________________________________________________________________________________

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