John Pearson's Buckets Blog

Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers

Issue No. 502 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting notes that “our brains process stories better than statistics.” And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for my 2021 Top-10 Books and Book-of-the-Year.



Translate Dry Stats Into Emotional Moments!

Chip Heath, bestselling author, says that “our brains process stories better than statistics.” I was hooked on this brilliant concept in the introduction, but by page 25 (my measure of the “meat and potatoes” of a book), he nailed it—and I’ve already repeated this example to friends and family!

THE STATISTIC: “40% of U.S. adults do not always wash their hands after using the bathroom at home.”

THE STORY: “2 out of every 5 people you shake hands with may not have washed their hands between using the toilet and touching your hands.” (Yikes!)

You MUST read or listen to this book (hot-off-the-press yesterday): Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, by Chip Heath and Karla Starr. I’ve already recommended this book to two CEOs, one national association executive, and a chief development officer. Just look at the tempting section and chapter titles on why you must “translate everything” to up your communication game:
   • “Avoid Numbers: Perfect Translations Don’t Need Numbers”
   • “Convert Abstract Numbers Into Concrete Objects”
   • “Human Scale: Use the Goldilocks Principle to Make Your Numbers Just Right”

On using “emotional numbers—surprising and meaningful—to move people to think and act differently,” check out:
   • How to avoid dry statistics by using transferred emotion (Florence Nightingale did this!)
   • “Bring Your Number into the Room with a Demonstration” (brilliant!)
   • “Selecting Combos That Hit the Right Notes Together”

EXAMPLES (Stats vs. Stories):
What’s the difference between a million and a billion? You could give the dry statistics—but where’s the fun in that? (And who would remember?). So the authors create a story. You enter a lottery to win either $1 million or $1 billion—with a catch. If you win, you must spend $50,000 per day. How long will it last?
   • You win $1 million—and “you go bust after a mere 20 days.”
   •  Your friend wins $1 billion—and it would take her 55 YEARS to squander $50,000/day!

I know. Why read a book about numbers? First—the authors are hilarious! Noting that it would take about two generations to spend $1 billion, they add, “Almost 14 presidential terms” or “one wait to hear your name called at the DMV.” Lol.

The genius of this book (less than 150 fast-reading pages, plus almost 50 pages of fascinating notes) is in the mouth-watering examples of stats versus stories. (Oh, my. I could have used this during my CEO years. Just brilliant.)

STATISTIC (Accidental Deaths): “There are a little more than 50 million people in England, and around 50 deaths each day via accidental causes (slipping in the tub; being swept away in a flooding river; falling from a ladder). The daily risk of dying there in an accident is roughly 1 in a million.”

STORY (Accidental Deaths): “Your risk of dying unexpectedly in England on any given day is the same as your odds of having to guess which date someone is thinking of between 500 BC and August 1, 2200.”

ATTN: CDC AND NEWS ANCHORS! Please, please, please—read Making Numbers Count. Retain Chip Heath as your consultant. Most of your COVID statistics make no sense at all—there’s no context. Dry stats—meaningless. We can’t relate. Chip Heath can help you! Please!

Example: Remember the container ship, Ever Given, that ran aground in a sand storm and blocked the Suez Canal in 2021? Here’s the stat vs. story comparison by two news outlets describing the size:

STAT: “The container ship Ever Given is almost a quarter-mile long.”

STORY: “Imagine the Empire State Building tipped over on its side and blocking the canal. The container ship Ever Given is actually longer than the Empire State Building if you take off the tiny, needle-like antenna at the very top of the building.”

You get the idea: what’s more effective? Dry, mind-numbing stats or “Wow! That’s Amazing!” stories and examples that relate to your own experience?” (I’ve been to the Empire State Building.)

What stats should you turn into stories?
• Homeless meals served
• Enrollment comparisons (students, campers, inmates, church attendance, etc.)
• Year-to-date donor comparisons for the board
• Budget vs. Actual reports
• Inventory excesses?

STAT (true story on inventory procurement): “We’re wasting millions, perhaps 10s of millions on an inefficient procurement system. Here’s a 9-tabbed spreadsheet that summarizes my findings.”

STORY (bringing the demonstration into the room): “Come see my collection of the 424 different gloves that our company is currently ordering. This represents just one minor product that we purchase…”

The demo: Jon Stegner, a business exec, recruited an intern to “track down one of each glove, attached price tags to them, and brought them into a conference room where senior leaders met. Then he poured the gloves out onto the conference room table and invited the leaders, one by one, to come see the ‘Glove Shrine.’” 

The result: “The minute anyone saw the Glove Shrine, they immediately jumped to a question, the very one Stegner had wanted them to ask: ‘If we’re wasting this much money on gloves, what else are we wasting money on?’”

I gotta stop, but I could list the dozens and dozens of the book’s STAT vs. STORY examples for the next 20 issues… Wait! Maybe Chip Heath and Karla Starr would say: “In the time it will take you to listen to this book, you’ll drink just 7 cups of coffee (aka 7 trips to the restroom—and please wash your hands) and you and your team will easily have stumbled upon at least 17 ways to leverage the art and science of communicating numbers. That’s the equivalent of…” (Well…you get it.)

OK…just one more—on how to “Recast Your Number in Different Dimensions: Try Time, Space, Distance, Money, and Pringles.” (Yikes! “In order to burn off the calories in a single Pringle, you’d have to walk 176 yards, or almost 2 football fields.” Uh…I’ll have just one, thank you.)

STAT (NEA budget): “In 2016, the $148 million allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts accounted for .004% of the federal budget expenditures ($3.9 trillion). Suppose we eliminated it in response to criticism?”

STORY (NEA budget): “Trying to balance the budget by eliminating the NEA would be like editing a 90,000-word novel by eliminating 4 words.”

Ready…set…SPRINT! Gather your team together and start reshaping your dry stats into memorable stories! Suggestion: read the demonstration stories about the speed of a baseball pitch. (Strike Three!) Plus, marvel at Usain Bolt’s speed (19+ seconds) in the 200-meter race at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro (and the narrow margins). If you can clap your hands four times in a second, Bolt crosses the finish line on Clap 1…and by Clap 3, the eighth-fastest person in the world crosses the finish line—“hopelessly out of contention—and the race is over.”

Enjoy! To order from Amazon, click on the title for Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, by Chip Heath and Karla Starr. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (4 hours, 35 min.). And thanks to Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, Inc. for sending me a review copy.



Note: Chip Heath is also the co-author, with Dan Heath, of The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact (my 2017 book-of-the-year). Read my review.
 
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) I couldn’t help myself! Reading Making Numbers Count reminded me of an early comparison question—first asked by Steve Allen on the 1953 TV quiz show, What’s My Line? (He asks the question of the last guest: “Is it bigger than a bread box?”) Click here. Florence Nightingale was “ahead of her peers, by more than a century, she started by equating basket size.” So instead of describing cold stats following the Crimean War in the 1850s (“…in its first 7 months, 7,857 troops died out of 13,095”), she “translated” that into this memorable line: “We had 600 deaths per 1,000 troops”—“a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the Great Plague of London.” What stats in our organization need to be basket-sized—and appeal more to the emotions?

2) If you’re a “Six Sigma” zealot, you could say: “Six Sigma is 3.4 defects per million objects.” Or…use a memorable story: “To achieve Six Sigma as a baker, imagine baking a batch of 2 dozen chocolate chip cookies every night. You could do that for 37 years before finding a cookie that is burned, raw, or doesn’t have the perfect number of chips.” OK, team! In groups of two…here’s one of our boring organizational stats. Turn it into a memorable story! (Winning team gets these chocolate chip cookies!) 
 

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Oops! Has attention to detail and clarity been replaced by fuzzy thinking and leaky buckets? Time for a refresh? Visit the 20 buckets webpage here.
 

Buckets Countdown: The Printing Bucket (#19): aka The Communications Bucket - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates and Tips from John Pearson, with commentary by Jason Pearson (2nd Edition, 2018) - Order from Amazon.

The Printing Bucket Core Competency: “We elevate the power of the written and spoken word and leverage our communication tools to create synergy and alignment between our mission, BHAG, strategic plans, and programs. We believe proofreading and style matters!”

FUZZ NOTE! “I learned to write to burn the fuzz off my thinking,” commented Fred Smith in his pithy book, Breakfast With Fred. The big idea in the Printing Bucket: Use print deadlines to burn the fuzz off your organization’s blue sky plans that otherwise would rarely be committed to the printed page (or the website).

The 20 management buckets are perfect content for the lifelong learning segment in your weekly staff meetings (you do have weekly staff meetings, right?). Inspire your team to begin a buckets refresh over 20 days, 20 weeks, 20 months, or (if you’re young enough!), 20 years! Visit the 20 buckets webpage here.

 

JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Need help “translating” your dry and boring organizational stats into memorable stories—ones that your raving fans will repeat frequently to others? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers. 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. As a Libro.fm Affiliate, we earn credits. 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.

Born to Build: How to Build a Thriving Startup, a Winning Team, New Customers and Your Best Life Imaginable

Issue No. 501 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting asks if you are born to build? This first issue of 2022 spotlights a book and an online assessment from Gallup that rank orders 10 entrepreneurial talents. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for my 2021 Top-10 Books and Book-of-the-Year.


“Gallup has found that there are three key players in the development of any organization…” Are you born to build?

You Need All 3: Rainmaker, Conductor, Expert

Jim Clifton, chairman of Gallup, makes this striking point:

“People will ask you throughout your life, ‘Where do you work?’ and ‘What do you do?’ They never ask you, ‘What are you building?’ When conversations change to ‘What are you building?’ the world will change.”

Clifton and co-author Sangeeta Badal, Ph.D. (Principal Scientist for Gallup’s Entrepreneurship and Job Creation initiative) make a compelling case for the importance of identifying the entrepreneurial people on your team, in your family, in your church, and in your community. And, says Gallup, the “born to build” genes are God-given. And by the way, did you know that your children or grandchildren can test pilot their entrepreneurial talents at the annual Lemonade Day in the U.S.?
 

This may be the first book you should read in 2022: 

Born to Build: How to Build a Thriving Startup, a Winning Team, New Customers and Your Best Life Imaginable.

And good news! Similar to Living Your Strengths and StrengthsFinder 2.0: Discover Your Clifton Strengths, this 2018 book from Gallup, Born to Build, includes a unique (one-time use) code so readers and leaders can access the online “Gallup’s Builder Profile 10 (BP10™)” assessment. BP10™ will identify your innate talents and motivations and show you how to make the most of your talents to build something.

And more good news! You can postpone reading the book and go right to the online assessment, but I’m guessing if you read the first seven pages, you’ll be hooked. Just 150 pages (plus a huge appendix) with helpful charts and graphs, you’ll hit paydirt on pages 28-29. (Just three pages past my “page 25” standard of getting to the meat and potatoes, or just the potatoes if you are a vegetarian.) 

The three-column chart on pages 28-29, “Pathways From Personality to Business Success,” lists Gallup’s highly researched findings of the “10 talents that are specifically linked to entrepreneurship.” Once you complete the online assessment, you’ll discover the link between Talent, Behaviors, and Likely Business Outcomes. For example:

One of the 10 talents is DISRUPTER, an entrepreneur who can “think outside the box” and “imagine possible futures.” That will enable your enterprise to move in a new direction with “market disruption.”

The other nine talents: Confidence, Delegator, Determination, Independence, Knowledge (“you constantly search for information that is relevant to growing your business”), Profitability, Relationship, Risk, and Selling. The selling talent includes people who are “ambassadors and evangelists,” who can “persuade others easily,” and “communicate clearly.”

NOTE! According to an email I received from a Gallup team member—in response to my inquiry—Born to Build is the new-and-improved version of their 2014 book and assessment, Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder. Read my 2014 review here—and note the additional nine entrepreneurial books and resources I included in that issue.

ARE YOU A BUILDER? 
Whether you’re called to be an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur (inside your organization), I’d urge you to read Born to Build and take the assessment. Or, if maybe your top talent is Delegator…well then, we already know you’re going to assign the reading and reporting back to someone on your team, right?!

WHAT’S NEW? Are you a builder—and how do you fit in? Three labels (new to me, but very helpful) are introduced, based on research. “Gallup has found that there are three key players in the development of any organization, whether it’s a new enterprise, a new division within a company or a nonprofit.” The authors predict that when the following “three alphas” combination exists in an organization or on a team, “the likelihood of it breaking out and booming grows exponentially.” The three:

• The alpha RAINMAKER. “…has unusual drive and persistence—rare grit. Obstacles and failure actually increase a Rainmaker’s determination. An enterprise virtually never works without this player.”
• The alpha CONDUCTOR. “…has management ability. This is the operations person or manager who knows how to get all players on the team—or in the ‘orchestra’—to work together seamlessly. This person holds the whole organization together.”
• The alpha EXPERT. “…provides differentiating expertise to the core product or service. Whether it is an analytic services startup’s brilliant statistician, a new restaurant’s star chef or a software firm’s best programmer, virtually every successful startup has an alpha expert who highly distinguishes it from the crowd.”

Are you an alpha builder? “The trick is knowing how you fit in. This book will help you determine which alpha role is best for you. It will tell you from which role your God-given strengths will develop most.”

WARNING! Clifton and Badal warn that “building is a high-degree-of-difficulty task, but natural builders want the impossible assignment. They prefer the messiness, the problems, the barriers, the absence of supervision, the improvisation and the rush of a new customer breakthrough.” They add, “Builders are made differently than the rest of us. They are born and put on earth to build.” 

8 TOOLS! Once you complete the online assessment, you’ll have access to eight tools—integral to Gallup’s four keys to building an enterprise (nonprofit or for-profit). Key #1: is “Creating Self-Awareness.” The tools include: an internal map of your personal characteristics, how to build your “personal board of directors,” tips on creating a “purpose journal” and (for the second key) an “opportunity journal.” Plus, four more tools to help you analyze the viability of an idea, how to test hypotheses, mapping team talents, and assessing your wider network.

I’m not an alpha anything, but I leveraged my Delegator talents and inspired my son, Jason, to take the Born to Build assessment for a test drive. His BP10™ results delivered his 10 builder talents in rank order. Gallup recommends that you focus on your top four talents because “they provide the best opportunity for business success.” No surprise, “Disruptor” was in Jason’s top four. (Gallup says that Jason is “brimming with new ideas” and thinks of “novel ways to move things forward.” Bingo! I agree!)
 
Are you a builder? Read the book, take the assessment, and download the helpful tools from Gallup—or delegate this to a builder on your team.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Born to Build: How to Build a Thriving Startup, a Winning Team, New Customers and Your Best Life Imaginable, by Jim Clifton and Sangeeta Badal, Ph.D. And thanks to Gallup Press for sending me a review copy.

 

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Born to Build quotes David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather (and also known as “The Father of Advertising”): “In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.” Who on our team ranks high on the BP10™ in Selling?
2) Do we have all three critical alpha players on our team? Who is our Rainmaker, our Conductor, and our Expert?
3) Do we understand the critical role of the Conductor (the alpha manager)? Let’s delegate this Gallup book and assessment to: _______. Begin by reading this review of It's the Manager: Gallup Finds the Quality of Managers and Team Leaders Is the Single Biggest Factor in Your Organization's Long-Term Success, by Jim Clifton and Jim Harter.
 

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Inspire your team to begin a buckets refresh over 20 days, 20 weeks, 20 months, or (if you’re young enough!), 20 years! Visit the 20 buckets webpage here.

Buckets Countdown:
The Meetings Bucket (#20) Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates and Tips from John Pearson, with commentary by Jason Pearson (2nd Edition, 2018) - Order from Amazon.

The Meetings Bucket Core Competency: “We design meetings like an architect designs buildings. We have high expectations that our purpose-driven meetings will enhance team-building, accountability and our commitment to results. We value Holy Spirit-led meetings. We reject boring meetings.”

In addition to other book recommendations on the Meetings Bucket webpage here, check out Resource #20.4: "My Annual Professional Development Plan" form. Download the one-page PDF and use it as a template when coaching team members to take responsibility for their own professional development. Note the Bronze, Silver and Gold levels and the opportunity to create a perks point system. 
 
The 20 management buckets are perfect content for the lifelong learning segment in your weekly staff meetings (you do have weekly staff meetings, right?). Inspire your team to begin a buckets refresh over 20 days, 20 weeks, 20 months, or (if you’re young enough!), 20 years! Visit the 20 buckets webpage here.

 

JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Start the new year off right with an outside assessment of your strengths and opportunities. Do you have all three key people on your team: Rainmaker, Conductor, and Expert? We can help you identify talent and coach them. Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers. 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. As a Libro.fm Affiliate, we earn credits. 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 FOR 2021

Issue No. 500 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (not a typo—500th issue!) delivers my Top-10 book picks from 2021 and my Book(s)-of-the-Year. Also, Happy New Year! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #25 below.) And if you’re behind on your reading, click here for my top picks from a year ago.


“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.” (Anatole France)

TOP-10 BOOKS FOR 2021
This issue features books (and movies) I reviewed in Issues No. 458 to 499. To read other 2021 book reviews from Your Weekly Staffing Meeting eNews, visit the archives at John Pearson’s Buckets Blog.

In 2021, I published 43 issues. (But I thought Your Weekly Staff Meeting was published weekly? Fake news?) 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. As author Steve Leveen reminds us in The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, “Do not set out to live a well-read life but rather your well-read life. No one can be well-read using someone else’s reading list.” What were your Top-10 books in 2021?

2021 BOOK(S)-OF-THE-YEAR
Yes…because we’ve endured another crazy COVID year…why not? For the second time, I’m naming TWO books as my “Book-of-the-Year.” You have time on your hands—so read two books (or maybe 10!).

#1. LEADERSHIP CORE: CHARACTER, COMPETENCE, CAPACITY (LEADERSHIP MULTIPLIERS), by Dick Daniels. Read my review here. I began my review with this headline: “Dick Daniels Has Been in Your Staff Meetings!” I added, “Dick Daniels has an uncanny understanding of our organizations. How did he listen in on our staff meetings, our one-on-one performance reviews, our job interviews, our office gossip, and our board meetings? Yikes!”


 
Best Quote. “Every leader will face at least one impossible situation during their leadership tenure. That time is described as having your back against the wall, with no way out, completely alone, and the feeling of gloom you have when it seems like the end is near.” (Don’t despair: Dick Daniels has deep insights and wisdom for you.) Note: This is the first time that an author has received TWO book-of-the-year picks. His first must-read: Leadership Briefs, my 2015 book-of-the-year.
 
#1. EXPERIENCING GOD (2021 EDITION): KNOWING AND DOING THE WILL OF GOD, by Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, and Claude King. Read my review or listen to the 2009 edition of the book on Libro.fm (11 hours, 3 minutes). From May to December, I read about one chapter every weekend from Experiencing God (2021 Edition). This powerful/powerful update of the classic book/workbook was published in May 2021 with seven new chapters and dozens of memorable stories that you’ll share with families and friends. (I shared one story around our Thanksgiving table last month.)



Best Quote. “Nowhere in the Bible does God promise to stop us from making mistakes!” He lists four inappropriate ways for discerning God’s voice. (Even well-meaning people make these mistakes! Yikes!) These are serious mistakes—because people are misunderstanding what the Bible teaches. They include: “1) Asking for a miraculous sign, 2) Seeking a method, 3) The ‘name it and claim it’ method, and 4) Open and closed doors.”

2021 TOP-10 BOOK LIST: The Other 9
(With brief excerpts from my reviews, these nine books are listed in alphabetical order by author.)

#2. NEXT JOB, BEST JOB: A HEADHUNTER'S 11 STRATEGIES TO GET HIRED NOW, by Rob Barnett. Read my review. Listen on Libro (8 hours, 5 minutes). If you’re currently in between jobs again (the author’s label: #iBJA), this is a must-read.



Best Chapter. “The Perfect 30-Minute Interview” (Chapter 9) is unlike anything I’ve read on navigating your actual interview. Shocker: “…your number one goal in any first job interview isn’t to get hired.” (The goal: score that second interview.)

#3. BECOMING TRADER JOE: HOW I DID BUSINESS MY WAY AND STILL BEAT THE BIG GUYS, by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri. Read my review. Listen on Libro (7 hours, 32 minutes). Literally, this book checks all 20 management buckets.

 

Best Quote. “…the most important single business decision I ever made was to pay people well.”

#4. THE BOMBER MAFIA: A DREAM, A TEMPTATION, AND THE LONGEST NIGHT OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, by Malcolm Gladwell. Read my review. Listen on Libro (5 hours, 14 minutes). No recommendation needed. If the author is Malcolm Gladwell—‘nuff said!


 
Best Quote. The Bomber Mafia is a story about mistake-making and Carl Norden (the genius), a Dutch engineer, educated in Switzerland, who came to America in 1904. Norden “…was a true believer in blank slate, and this reveals his ego. He said, ‘I don’t want to know the mistakes other people made. I don’t want to know what they did right. I’m going to develop what’s right myself.’”

#5. PUBLIC SPEAKING LAWS OF SUCCESS: FOR EVERYONE AND EVERY OCCASION, by Richard J. Goossen. Read my review. Our five grandkids joined me for a Zoom review of this very, very practical book with 50 insightful laws on public speaking—including funerals, weddings, lectures, sermons, seminars, and keynotes. Brilliant!



Best Quote. “You only learn by doing—not by waiting to be perfect. You can be better than 90% of all public speakers by following and applying the laws of success in this book—guaranteed.”

#6. COLLISION COURSE: CARLOS GHOSN AND THE CULTURE WARS THAT UPENDED AN AUTO EMPIRE, by Hans Greimel and William Sposato. Read my review. Listen on Libro (12 hours, 54 minutes). This page-turner chronicles the daring CEO of Nissan who fled Japan—hidden in a box—on a private plane to Lebanon!



Best Quote. The authors quote a former defense lawyer in Chapter 11, “Justice Japan Style,” that “Japanese judges are very overconfident of their ability to find the truth. They are trained not to admit that they have made a mistake, even when there is a miscarriage of justice.”

#7. THE MOTIVE: WHY SO MANY LEADERS ABDICATE THEIR MOST IMPORTANT RESPONSIBILITIES, by Patrick M. Lencioni. Read my review. Listen on Libro (2 hours, 37 minutes). Get this! “If someone were to dive into a stack of my books for the first time, I’d tell them to start with this one.” (Amazing! His book, The Advantage, was my 2012 book-of-the-year).



Best Quote. Don’t invite Lencioni to your commencement program! When this business guru hears a graduation speaker admonish students to “go out into the world and be a leader,” he says he wants to stand up and shout, “No!!! Please don’t be a leader, unless you’re doing it for the right reason, and you probably aren’t!”

#8. BRAIN RULES FOR WORK: THE SCIENCE OF THINKING SMARTER IN THE OFFICE AND AT HOME, by John Medina. Read my review. Listen on Libro (8 hours, 36 minutes). POST-COVID? Dr. Medina is warning “clients about relying too heavily on people looking at behavioral crystal balls to predict the future of work beyond COVID-19. If past is prologue, most people will get it wrong anyway.”



Best Quote. What’s your leadership style: empathy or toughness? Dr. Medina says the difference between Prestige and Dominance “comes down to leading with forearms versus foreheads.” (I think Medina could do stand-up comedy!)

#9. 30 DAYS UNPLUGGED: HOW A CATHOLIC PRIEST TURNED OFF HIS iPHONE AND TOOK A CALL FROM GOD, by Father Darrin Merlino, CMF. Read my review. Apparently, when you turn off your iPhone and other distractions—and follow the St. Ignatius spiritual exercises for 30 days (not a typo!)—you’ll discover that Jesus delivers some very, very funny lines!



 Best Quotes. Fr. Merlino’s commentary on Luke 2:51-52 notes, “Breaking from my meditation, what I find fascinating is that none of the boys in Nazareth made the cut to be an Apostle!” Then…imagining himself as a guest on Bill Maher’s TV show: “He is accusing me of being a sinner. I say, ‘Duh, of course I am. The difference between you and me is that I admit that I am a sinner, but you haven’t yet.’”

Reminder! The Top-10 books ("the other nine") are listed in alpha order by author's last name!

#10. FIGHT HOUSE: RIVALRIES IN THE WHITE HOUSE FROM TRUMAN TO TRUMP, by Tevi Troy. Read my review (Part 1 of 2 reviews). Listen on Libro (9 hours, 1 minute). These mini-case studies in leadership, administration, team-building, and team-denigrating are so insightful, I wrote a second review, “POTUS Pop Quiz!”


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

Bonus Book!
#10. NO WAY HOME: THE CRISIS OF HOMELESSNESS AND HOW TO FIX IT WITH INTELLIGENCE AND HUMANITY, by Wayne Winegarden, Joseph Tartakovsky, Kerry Jackson, and Christopher F. Rufo. Read my review. My short review includes 10 “True or False” questions on how to fix homelessness.



Best Quote. True or False? “Today, across Los Angeles’s 500 square miles, roughly 10,000 people live in some 5,000 vehicles.”

BOOK BUCKET LISTS! I love lists and the core competency in the Book Bucket, Chapter 5, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to create your own Top-100 Books List. I’ve curated my list using the 20 management buckets categories. Download the template from the Book Bucket and start your list this week!

For more Books-in-the-Bunker ideas, check out these lists:
•  2020 Spiritual Growth Books  – click here
•  2020 Leadership Growth Books – click here
•  Best Board Governance Books – click here
•  30 Books to Delegate During This Crisis...and the Next Crisis (a 12-page PDF with links to 30 book reviews) – click here
•  8 Leadership Flicks – click here

COMING IN 2022. I'm reviewing some fascinating books in 2022, including a must-read gem by Chip Heath and Karla Starr, Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers. Pre-order on Amazon for the Jan. 11, 2022, release or listen on Libro (4 hours, 35 minutes). Making Numbers Count should be required reading/listening for every CEO, CFO, board chair, and marketing team member. (Note: Chip Heath, along with his brother, Dan, wrote the 2017 book-of-the-year, The Power of Moments.)

Visit the Book Bucket webpage to download three lists of books (updated through 12/31/2021) that I’ve reviewed since 2006, including my Top-100 books list.

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David Kinnaman: “We have a surplus of Christian leaders who mistake the size of their platform for the impact they are having for Jesus.” (See Mistake #25 in Mastering Mistake-Making.)

Mistake #25 of 25: Obsessing on My 15 Minutes of Fame 
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #25: “’Grace always bats last,’ says Anne Lamott. I was so hyper-focused on my agenda and my big moment, that I missed the opportunity to bless Joe with his big moment.”

John writes, “That morning, literally in the back seat of our ride to the airport, the Lord gave me an unmistakable wake-up call. ‘John, it’s not about you.’ I can laugh now, but I can still remember the sting of God’s voice. So I’ve learned that I need a steady diet of reading reminders to lessen my need to be noticed. When I’m walking in the Spirit, many times the waters part and I see a path open for being a blessing to others. (Now, the more I read later in life, the more I realize that I’m not alone in my self-absorbed focus. Yikes.) Here are two books that continue to remind me that ‘grace always bats last.’”

For Mistake #25, John recommends two books:
• The Leader's Palette: Seven Primary Colors, by Ralph E. Enlow, Jr. (read the review)
• Servant of All: Reframing Greatness and Leadership through the Teachings of Jesus, by Ralph E. Enlow, Jr. (read the review)

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake-Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
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"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you missed John's half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance," you can now order the 107-page workbook on Amazon. Click here.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Overwhelmed by bulging bookshelves and too-many-experts-telling-you-what-to-do? We can help you achieve a laser-like focus for your communication strategies—with simplicity. Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers. 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. As a Libro.fm Affiliate, we earn credits. 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.

Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers

Issue No. 499 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a new book from Harvard Business Review Press on loving your customers! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #24 below.)


Yikes! I assumed I was “in-the-know” about the Net Promoter system (Promoters, Passives, Detractors)…but I was wrong! Must-read: Winning on Purpose.

“The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Your Customers”—Really?

Oh, my! 

I ASSUMED…that this hot-off-the-press book from Harvard Business Review Press by the creator of the Net Promoter system would fill in the blanks on my favorite customer loyalty question. You’ll recognize this question. For example: “How likely is it that you would recommend Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews to a friend?”


 
And…you’ll recall how the NPS management system works.
• Promoters (smiles) – responses in the 9-10 range
• Passives (meh) – responses in the 7-8 range
• Detractors (frowns) – responses in the 0-6 range

I assumed I’d learn a little more…but not much else.

I WAS WRONG! The 11-page preface (who reads the preface first?) hooked me—and immediately raised my expectations. This isn’t a nuts-and-bolts book, this is a fascinating deep dive into loyalty, love, the Golden Rule, and the new “customer capitalism.” Does a business book really say that Jesus raised the bar on all of this? See Matthew 7:12 and then Matthew 22:30. (Wait…love? Really?)

I ASSUMED…that since I have been recommending the Net Promoter system to clients for many years, I was reasonably in sync with the rationale. I assumed…I understood the core values.

I WAS WRONG! Yikes! By page 8, I was agreeing with Fred Reichheld that “the world is tired of surveys,” yet the NPS (aka “Net Lives Enriched”) continues to add value and spotlight the winners. But…I had no idea why. Now I know! And this caution! “…far too many practitioners are corrupting NPS by making the score a target rather than a measure that inspires learning and growth.”

I ASSUMED…(sorry Mr. Reichheld) that while I’ve always been enamored with the NPS (and intentionally did business with high-scoring companies) that this book would be good for me to read (kinda like taking medicine), but wouldn’t activate my juices. Read. Read. Read. Done.

I WAS WRONG! I can’t stop talking about the page-turning exemplars:
   • Enterprise Rent-A-Car: why they don’t use common industry tricks (nuisance fees). Their CEO’s approach to growing a business profitably: “You make sure your customers are treated so well that they come back for more and bring their friends.”
   • USAA’s CEO on caring for their employees who then will care for their customers: “Great leaders wake up in the morning worrying about that, and they go to bed worrying about it.” (Read why they provide freshly boxed dinners for employees to bring home to their families.)
   • Chick-fil-A: As founder Truett Cathy (1921-2014) drove the author around to visit a few of the foster homes Cathy sponsored, the Chick-fil-A leader mentioned "the Southern Baptist tradition of adopting a passage from the Bible as one’s life verse.” Reichheld commented that Cathy’s life verse, Proverbs 22:1, “…well, that might be the right verse for just about anyone.” Think about this: “A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold (NIV).”

I ASSUMED…this book would clone other business books: deliver the goods in the first 25 pages—and then blah, blah, blah with 175 pages of filler. 

I WAS WRONG! Page 27, “NPS as Moral Compass” grabbed my attention: “The annual Forbes list of billionaires for too long has served as the compendium of our society’s exemplars of great success. But are these wealthy magnates really our most worthy role models? I would say ‘no.’ Financial net worth provides a wholly untrustworthy measure of personal greatness.” Must-read: Reichheld’s short list (as a reminder) of wealthy bullies and cheats. “They are all black-belt masters of value extraction rather than value creation.”

I ASSUMED…that the Net Promoter system was all I needed to know. 

I WAS WRONG! I read this poke-in-ribs: NPS is also defined as “Net Purpose Score.” In the chapter, “Aim for Greatness,” while appreciating Good to Great, by Jim Collins, the author also pushes back: “A company can’t be great without embracing a great purpose.” 

And this: “One important insight that Good to Great overlooked is that Collins’s famous flywheel won’t keep spinning unless it is powered by loyalty economics.”
 
I ASSUMED…I would learn more about building customer loyalties—but not much else.

I WAS WRONG! (again)! This book is a treasure trove of leadership and organizational insights. Examples:
   • The Credo of F.R.E.D. (Foster Recommendation, Eliminate Detraction)—which created his investment strategy, “F.R.E.D. Stock Index.”
   • Why he added Texas Roadhouse to his index in 2010. (Fascinating—since I recently reviewed the founder’s book, Made From Scratch.)
   • Why Apple stores founder Ron Johnson was “inspired by Jesus’s advice to ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ which Johnson considers to be the essential message of the Bible.”
   • Why Marriott International “uses the Golden Rule in the design of its training program.”

THERE’S MORE! 
In the section, “Love, Costco Style,” co-founder Jim Sinegal explained to an MIT class why Costco was not tempted to increase the markup on a bargain purchase of one million Calvin Klein jeans. “Our members trust us to pass along every saving to the customer. Any exception to this—well, it would be like taking heroin. Once you start it, you can’t stop doing it. And it would change the whole nature of the company.”

That reminded me of Harvard prof Clayton Christensen’s wisdom in How Will You Measure Your Life? He writes that sticking with your values “100 percent of the time is easier than 98 percent of the time.”

AND MORE:
   • Fred Reichheld’s insightful definition of “good profits” vs. “bad profits” and how his former bank (note: “former” bank) became addicted to bad profits.
   • The “Inspire Your Teams” chapter features a brief history of Bain & Company (where the author has worked since 1977) and why after some missteps (“departing employees were treated as losers or even traitors”), they learned that “truly great leaders are committed to helping employees lead great lives.” 
   • And, of course, since I’m a big fan of weekly staff meetings, another must-read section: “The Power of Doing Huddles Right.” (He calls them “agile scrums.”)

FAILURE TO BE HUMBLE:
   • Don’t Skip: “Honor the Golden Rule: But First, Understand It.” (And why you’ll prefer to fly Qantas—and why Chick-fil-A team members respond with, “My pleasure.”)
   • And why NPS “kicks it up a notch”—even beyond Peter Drucker’s customer axioms.
    • Favorite Chapter: “Be Humble.” He writes that the four deadly sins of greed, arrogance, complacency, and entitlement, “represent different facets of the same transgression: failure to be humble.” This reminded me of Andrew Murray's observation: “Humility is the only soil in which the graces root; the lack of humility is the sufficient explanation of every defect and failure.”
   • Worth gold: “Appendix A: Net Promoter 3.0 Checklist.”

HUMAN AND HUMOROUS:
I assumed this book would be helpful, but not deeply human or humorous. Wrong again! You’ll love the section in “Be Remarkable” when the creator of NPS is tutored by his daughter’s addition of another customer loyalty question! And learn why the author is a big fan of the timeless guide to good writing, The Elements of Style.

MY NPS RATING. So…how would I rate this book on the scale of 0 to 10? It’s a 10. To validate my enthusiasm, I not only recommended it to a friend, I ordered the book for him. Amazon, of course, delivered it in just one day!

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers, by Fred Reichheld with Darci Darnell and Maureen Burns. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm. And thanks to Harvard Business Review Press and Fortier PR for sending me a review copy.



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) What does love look like at Discover Financial Services? “Discover does not sell bad debt to collection agencies, even after they become total charge-offs. As their CEO asked rhetorically, “You wouldn’t do that to a family member, right?” So…are we loving our customers—or do our organization’s policies, practices, and rules inhibit receiving 9s and 10s on the NPS question? 
2) If you have a “life verse,” please share it with our team—and why and when it became meaningful to you. (If you don’t have a life verse, feel free to borrow Proverbs 22:1 until you do!)
3) At your next staff meeting, ask: “Who is our resident Net Promoter system expert on our team? If no one—who would enjoy a generous Chick-fil-A gift card and a commitment to read this book and be our NPS champion?” 

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Warren Buffet: “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say NO to almost everything.” (See Mistake #24 in Mastering Mistake-Making.)

Mistake #24 of 25: Saying “Yes” Too Often
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #24: “Sometimes…ego and over-confidence in my abilities coaxed me into saying ‘yes’ to opportunities and client projects—when I should have said ‘no.’”

Example: John agreed to be the guest host of a Chicago talk radio show in 1993. But…he endured 30 minutes of dead air time—no one called into the show! No one!!! (Not even John’s wife!) He later learned this wisdom from Warren Buffet: “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say NO to almost everything.”  

For Mistake #24, John recommends two books:
• Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets: 5 Questions to Help You Determine Your Next Move, by Andy Stanley (read John’s review)
• No! A Guide for Busy People: Banish Busyness and Focus on What Matters Most, by Doug Fields (read John’s review)

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake-Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
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"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you missed John's half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance," you can now order the 107-page workbook on Amazon. Click here.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Need help creating customer surveys that get quick and informative responses? Need help with customer or donor loyalty? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers. 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. As a Libro.fm Affiliate, we earn credits. 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.

Brain Rules for Work: The Science of Thinking Smarter in the Office and at Home

Issue No. 498 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a new book with 10 “brain rules,” including this one: “Power is like fire. It can cook your food or burn your house down.” And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #23 below.)

The author of Brain Rules cannonballs into the leadership pool—and his one-two punch is noteworthy. 

What’s Your Leadership Style: Empathy or Toughness?

What’s not to love about a developmental molecular biologist—a brain guy—who is gutsy enough to write a chapter on leadership!

Dr. John Medina, an affiliate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, has authored numerous “Brain Rules” books (read my 2008 review)—and this new one may be his best yet (just released on Nov. 23): Brain Rules for Work: The Science of Thinking Smarter in the Office and at Home. He writes:
 
“I admit I’m hesitant to write about leadership. And the biggest reason is that I’m a chicken. It takes chutzpah to address a subject with so many uncontrolled variables. I’m not sure that I or my chosen field of study are up to the task. Noted business guru Peter Drucker seems ready to wave a white flag too. Says he: “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.”

While Medina appreciates Drucker’s “simplicity but not his explanatory power,” the author cannonballs into the leadership pool—and his one-two punch is noteworthy. His leadership Brain Rule: “Leaders need a whole lot of empathy and a little willingness to be tough.”

And get this! To explain his leadership thesis, he cites a study, “A Dual Model of Leadership and Hierarchy: Evolutionary Synthesis”—about the continuum between the Dominance style of leadership and the Prestige style of leadership. To illustrate, he includes scenes from the lovable holiday movie, A Christmas Story. (How’s that for perfect timing this week!) Watch this scene from the movie:

 
View the epic battle: Ralphie vs. Skut Farkus in A Christmas Story (3 min.).

What’s your leadership style: empathy or toughness? Dr. Medina says the difference between Prestige and Dominance “comes down to leading with forearms versus foreheads.” (I think Medina could do stand-up comedy!)

DOMINANCE STYLE. “People on this side of the pool obviously derive their power from an asymmetrical distribution of strengths. The strength can be physical—like Farkus’s ability to overpower weaker boys. The asymmetry can be coalitional too, the ability to compel toadies to do the bidding of the leader. This style is mostly leadership by coercion, exploiting combustible mixtures of anger, fear, and distress to maintain control.”

Medina cautions that “Joseph Stalin was a leader whose use of dominating tactics showed the extreme side of this leadership style.” Dominance leaders frequently offer loyalty programs with rewards, but they’re “not good at sustaining long-term productivity.” They “can make life miserable for subordinates…and often do.”

PRESTIGE STYLE. “To understand what alternatives exist, we have to swim over to the other side of the Dual Model pool, under the sign marked ‘prestige.’” To illustrate this style, Medina turns to the mother’s style in A Christmas Story.

In the hilarious scene when Ralphie’s younger brother, Randy, won’t eat his meat loaf and mashed potatoes for his father (“I’ll get that kid to eat. Where’s my screwdriver and plumber’s helper? I’ll open up his mouth and shove it in.”), Mom comes to the rescue with her “Prestige” leadership style. (View the 2-minute clip here.)

“Mom had knowledge about what it would take to get her little boy to eat his food, which she implemented—and it didn’t involve a screwdriver. Some would call this wisdom.”

Dr. Medina explains, “Prestige leaders posses the skills and knowledge necessary to understand the relational ecologies of the people they lead. To motivate their followers, prestige leaders identify what makes them tick, then use this insight to accomplish their goals.” He adds, “Dominance leaders tend to command; prestige leaders prefer to influence.” (Hmmm. To find out what makes your team members tick, maybe a refresher on the “3 Powerful S’s: Strengths, Social Styles, and Spiritual Gifts” might be helpful? See Mistakes #16, #17, and #18 in Mastering Mistake-Making.)

Short pause for a rabbit hole! I’m a reader, not a listener, so this may shock my regular eNews readers. For this book, I double-dipped and LISTENED to the audio book narrated by Dr. Medina (often witty) and then, later, underlined memorable one-liners and sections in my hardback book. This may be a new lifelong learning methodology for me. Apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks!

Honest. I didn’t plan to focus on the leadership brain rule when I read/listened to this book—because there is so, so much more on “the science of thinking smarter at the office and at home.” Nine more rules and dozens of insights, including: 

1) MEDINA GRUMP FACTOR. Read why one of Medina’s business clients labeled the author’s skepticism about “what research says (and doesn’t say) about the complexities of human conduct” as the “Medina Grump Factor.” His response: “There’s a lot of high-fructose nonsense out there, especially in the realm of self-help advice.”

2) POST-COVID? Dr. Medina is warning “clients about relying too heavily on people looking at behavioral crystal balls to predict the future of work beyond COVID-19. If past is prologue, most people will get it wrong anyway.”

3) TEAMS BRAIN RULE. “Teams are more productive, but only if you have the right people.” He begins this chapter with the boss in the Dilbert cartoon “announcing the team’s less-than-stellar performance.” Dilbert’s boss: “I only brought one teamwork award mug, so you’ll have to take turns drinking from it.” (Or…you could buy a Demotivators® poster from Despair, Inc. that reads: “TEAMS: Together we can do the work of one.”) 


Order this hilarious poster from Despair, Inc. 

4) HOME OFFICE. Medina offers very practical ideas (based on brain research) on how to be productive in your home office, including: Zoom “staring matches,” procrastination, and how to create a showrunner’s agenda to improve online meetings. His chapter summaries include memorable bullet points and the specific brain rule for each, plus “What to do next Monday” insights. 

5) THE BUSINESS OFFICE BRAIN RULE. “The brain developed in the great outdoors. The organ still thinks it lives there.” Wow. This chapter changed my thinking—and should be a must-read for everyone, especially my friends and colleagues serving in Christian camps and outdoor ministries.

6) CREATIVITY BRAIN RULE. “Failure should be an option—as long as you learn from it.” Three cheers for mistake-making and this: “I’m going to begin this chapter by asking you to think of as many new uses as you can for a brick.” Brilliant! And this from tech columnist Michael S. Malone: “Outsiders think of Silicon Valley as a success, but it is, in truth, a graveyard. Failure is Silicon Valley’s greatest strength.”

Don’t skip any chapters, especially the Brain Rule on Presentations. “Capture your audience’s emotion, and you will have their attention (at least for ten minutes).” I read and listened to this chapter twice—before facilitating a half-day training session last month. Yikes! To remind you how emotions trigger your brain, Medina begins with “one of the most iconic advertisements of all time.” View Mean Joe Green’s Coke commercial. It won most ad awards in 1979 including the Clio.

By the way, Medina also wrote Brain Rules for Aging Well. I do plan to read and review (and listen to) that book down the road—once I’m old enough!

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Brain Rules for Work: The Science of Thinking Smarter in the Office and at Home, by John Medina. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (8 hours, 36 minutes). And thanks to Pear Press for a review copy and Libro.fm for the audio version.

  
          BOOK                                AUDIO        

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) In Dr. Medina’s chapter on conflict bias, he highlights the compelling presentation made by Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood) at a senate hearing on PBS funding in 1969. The $20 million subsidy was facing the axe. (View the 7-minute video here.) “The magic in the room became palpable. His gentle kindness and emotional steadiness spread across the assembly as if Rogers were their pastor, and the Senate chambers his church.” Suggestion: watch this at your next staff meeting and facilitate a conversation on what happened in that hearing—and why.
2) The Conflict/Bias Brain Rule reads: “Conflicts can be resolved by changing your thought life. It helps to have a pencil.” Fascinating! Dr. Medina also cautions, “Be wary of any HR training programs that claim to eliminate bias.” OK…team. Who will read and report on this chapter next week? 

 

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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.” (See Mistake #23 in Mastering Mistake-Making.)

Mistake #23 of 25: Being Overconfident in My Bag of Tricks
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #23: “I was sailing along in my leadership career, overly confident that my ‘bag of tricks’ would serve me in every leadership situation. I had a lot to learn.”

John writes, “Without outside help and coaching, I would have continued my dysfunctional ways—to the detriment of my working relationships. Leading in a vacuum, without honest feedback, was a big mistake. What I learned at the Center for Creative Leadership [which included assessments from John’s direct reports and board chair]—was certainly one of the top 10 experiences in my life.”

For Mistake #23, John recommends this book and assessment:
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 (The World’s Most Popular Emotional Intelligence Test), by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves (read John's review)

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake-Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
______________________________________________________________________________________

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you missed John's half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance," you can now order the 107-page workbook on Amazon. Click here.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Need help with Brain Rule #6 on Presentations? “Capture your audience’s emotion, and you will have their attention (for at least ten minutes)." Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers. 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. As a Libro.fm Affiliate, we earn credits. 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.

Jump: Dare to Do What Scares You in Business and Life

Issue No. 497 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting spotlights a new book that double-dares you to face your fears—and JUMP! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #22 below.)


Jump author Kim Perell says you can inoculate yourself against rejection—and learn to do what scares you!

Inoculate Yourself Against Rejection!

Quick! Cancel your next meeting and invest 15 minutes in viewing this hilarious TedTalk, “What I Learned from 100 Days of Rejection.” Jia Jiang grew up with a traumatic fear of rejection. “Rejection was my curse,” he confesses. It “was my boogeyman.” But…rather than fleeing rejection, he embraced it! 

Jiang embarked on a creative 100-day journey of rejection—and you’ll laugh your way through his TedTalk and share it with colleagues. According to Kim Perell’s new Wall Street Journal bestseller, Jump: Dare to Do What Scares You in Business and Life—this young wanna-be entrepreneur figured out how to inoculate himself against rejection! Click here for his TedTalk.


View this hilarious and insightful TedTalk, “What I Learned from 100 Days of Rejection” (15 min.).

Kim Perell (her own bio includes rejection, but also big wins) has an uncanny understanding of our fears and our excuses, listing dozens of reasons why we fail to take the leap into the next big thing. 

Jump is the perfect encouragement gift (Christmas, birthday, any reason) for your colleagues, friends, and family members. In just nine short chapters, Perell’s big ideas are irresistible reading—and her book complements and enriches the wisdom of many other authors.

Chapter 1: TAKE THE LEAP. What kind of jumper are you? Your colleagues? 1) Survival Jumper? 2) Opportunity Jumper? Or 3) Stagnant Jumper? (#3: “You’re considering a change because you’ve stagnated, are bored, or feel unfulfilled.”) 

This reminded me of Hans Finzel’s poignant confession, “My heart had left the building,” in his book, The Power of Passion in Leadership.

With five gut-check questions, Perell counsels, “look before you leap,” and asks, “Can I see my first three steps onto this path?” Or maybe just one, per Henry Blackaby’s insight: “When Jesus invited Peter to get out of the boat to walk on the water, He did not assure Peter he would stay afloat! The Lord simply said, ‘Come!’ (Matt. 14:28).”

Chapter 2: MASTER YOUR MINDSET. “Delete your excuses,” preaches Perell. Her family “would celebrate who had the worst failure. We normalized failure and developed a tolerance for it because that took away its power and mystery.” Don’t have enough time, money, or experience? Just excuses!

Oh, my! Jump was released on Nov. 16, 2021—but I could have used it earlier this fall. My granddaughter, Annika (14), is in the South County Community Handbell Choir (adult choir) and I was her Uber Grandpa transportation to rehearsals. Had I read Jump earlier, I would not have wasted my litany of excuses when Annika and the director asked me to join the handbell choir! (Excuse #1: “But…my most recent serious musical endeavor was in 1968 as a church choir director!”)

Well…I did JUMP in. It’s the hardest thing I’ve tackled in 10 years—but I’m blessed to be ringing with Annika. Our third of three Christmas gigs is Dec. 12. Y’all come!


Granddaughter Annika (14) invited me to JUMP into the South County Community Handbell Choir. (Please hum along: “Jingle bells, jingle bells…”)

The author inspired me! “As a rule of thumb, if something scares me or I hesitate because I haven’t done something before…I make myself do it!”

Chapter 3: TURN YOUR FEARS INTO FUEL. “Failing doesn’t make you a failure. Giving up does.” Kim Perell uses a four-step F.E.A.R. process: 1) Feel, 2) Embrace, 3) Act, 4) Repeat.

My favorite morning meditation from John Baillie (see Mistake #22 below), included this prayer on Day 29, “God, so many people who came before me have trusted You and weren't disappointed, so remove now all my useless anxieties and paralyzing fears."

Chapter 4: THE POWER OF DECISION-MAKING. Perell notes that Colin Powell (1937-2021) was “a big fan of the 40-70 rule which says that you need no less than 40 percent and no more than 70 percent of the available information to make a good choice.” She also urges jumpers to trust their gut more. 

I’m reminded that the intuitive approach is especially challenging for two of the four social styles. Read more on social styles here.
   • Analyticals: avoids risks, based on facts.
   • Drivers: takes risks, based on intuition.
   • Amiables: avoids risks, based on opinion.
   • Expressives: takes risks, based on hunches.

By the way, the two-page chapter summaries are split into two groupings: Jump Prep and Jump Hacks. Here’s a hack: “Another way to force yourself to trust your instincts on a smaller scale is to count to ten, then make a decision.” Or…try my suggestion in the Hoopla! Bucket: “Take a team walk and don’t turn back until you’ve made the big decision!”

Chapter 5: DEFINE SUCCESS ON YOUR OWN TERMS. My opinion: there is inadequate wisdom available on “jumping away from a situation” and how to “make peace with the past.” Gratefully, the author blends her counsel on goal-setting along with how to take stock of lessons learned in your present situation—before you jump.

This reminded me of Michael Hyatt’s book, Your Best Year Ever, and his wife’s wisdom, “People lose their way when they lose their why.”
 
Chapter 6: CREATE YOUR ONE-YEAR SUCCESS PLAN. Practical, gritty, and workable. “Do the hardest thing first” reminded me of Brian Tracy’s book, Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. He quotes Mark Twain’s wit and wisdom, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Click here for my review and Tracy’s two funny frog rules!

Click here to download Kim Perell’s 37-page template for a one-year success plan.

Noting that your one-year success plan should be “aspirational (yet attainable),” the author highlights the innovative fitness program, “Couch to 5K”—one of the world’s most popular exercise programs, according to the BBC. By creating a weekly regimen of small wins, even a couch potato can run five kilometers in just nine weeks. Click here for the 2018 BBC video, “Anybody Can Run: The Story of Couch to 5K” (4-min.), click here for a 2021 update, and google your favorite app store for the "Couch to 5K" app.

Chapter 7: THE ART OF RELATIONSHIP BUILDING. Perell urges jumpers to “build bridges, don’t burn them.” And then this alert: “I promise that scorching the earth when you leave is one of the least pragmatic and intelligent things you can do for your career and reputation.” For more on this no-no, read the wisdom in Rob Barnett’s recent book, Next Job, Best Job.

Chapter 8: TAP INTO YOUR INNER STRENGTH. When is the last time you’ve exercised your emotional courage muscle? (“…it gets stronger the more you exercise it.”) Perell adds, “Emotional courage is a common trait among many of the most successful people I’ve worked with. They’ve trained themselves to be able to feel uncomfortable feelings and have hard conversations, because successful people know that not addressing the hard thing head-on will hurt more in the long run.”

The author confesses she struggles with emotional courage. Ditto. I appreciate Max Lucado’s wisdom in his book, Fearless. “Don’t waste an hour wondering what your boss thinks; ask her.” 

Chapter 9: STOP CARING WHAT OTHERS THINK. It was tough to pick my favorite chapter, but this one has three memorable take-aways:
   • “People-pleasing is a losing battle.”
   • “Cut out the critics.” (Read the five powerful questions for your own life audit.)
   • “It’s never too late to jump.” 

Perell spotlights Colonel Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He jumped at age 62 and in 12 years, KFC had more than 600 franchises! That brought me back to a favorite book, 5: Where Will You Be Five Years from Today? by Dan Zadra.

I hope you’ll jump into this book. Two options:
• Option 1: Delegate your reading for all the books I’ve mentioned here.
• Option 2: Just read Jump—a sweeping approach to doing what scares you!

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Jump: Dare to Do What Scares You in Business and Life, by Kim Perell. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (4 hours, 19 minutes). And thanks to HarperCollins Leadership for sending a review copy.

 

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Kim Perell is goal-oriented. She uses the “Rockefeller Habits” approach recommended by Verne Harnish in Scaling Up (my 2018 book-of-the-year). “I asked every team member to pick three goals or milestones for each month and to monitor their progress toward those goals.” Pop Quiz! What are your three goals for this month?
2) OK, since you asked—here’s one more book recommendation! Seth Godin asks, “What is the desperate need in organizations today? We need a VP of Starting. We need armies of gutsy people who don’t wait around asking for permission to launch.” Urge your staff to also read Poke the Box: When Was the Last Time You Did Something for the First Time? by Seth Godin (just 84 practical pages).
 

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Breaking News! You don’t earn heavenly brownie points for practicing spiritual disciplines! John Ortberg writes, “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.” (See Mistake #22 in Mastering Mistake-Making.)

Mistake #22 of 25: Checking the Box, But Missing the Message 
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #22: “Looking back over the years of my morning meditations, I realize now that I often found comfort in the methodology—not the Message.”

In this chapter, Pearson recommends John Ortberg’s book, The Life You’ve Always Wanted. Ortberg writes, “Spiritual transformation is not a matter of trying harder, but of training wisely.”  He warns do-gooders (and check-the-box devotees) that God is not impressed with the activity of training.

Ortberg: “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.” 

For Mistake #22, John recommends two books:
• A Diary of Private Prayer: A Devotional Classic, by John Baillie (2014 edition with introduction by Susanna Wright)
• The Life You’ve Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People, by John Ortberg

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake-Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you missed John's half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance," you can now order the 107-page workbook on Amazon. Click here.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Is your organization facing a bold opportunity—but timidity is holding you back? We can help you JUMP strategically, thoughtfully, and prayerfully. We’ll help you face your fears! Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers. 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. As a Libro.fm Affiliate, we earn credits. 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.

Experiencing God (2021 Edition): Knowing and Doing the Will of God

2021 Book-of-the-Year!
See Issue 500 for the Top-10 Books of 2021.

Issue No. 496 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights an expanded 2021 edition of Henry Blackaby’s classic, Experiencing God. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #21 below.)


Henry Blackaby: “If Balaam lived in our formula-driven day, perhaps he would have written a book, Donkeys for Dummies…”

Donkeys for Dummies!

I predicted in January 2021, “I’m out on a limb here, but not really. Leadership Core: Character, Competence, Capacity will likely be my 2021 book-of-the-year. It will take a phenomenal book to jostle this pick off its perch.”

Did I speak too soon? Yikes! From May to December, I’ve read about one chapter every weekend from Experiencing God (2021 Edition): Knowing and Doing the Will of God, by Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, and Claude King. This powerful/powerful update of the classic book/workbook was published in May 2021 with seven new chapters and dozens of memorable stories that you’ll share with families and friends. (I shared one story around our Thanksgiving table last week.)

It's likely you spent time in the Experiencing God workbook years ago. Ditto. But…wow. This new edition (now with Henry Blackaby’s son, Richard, as the third co-author) is fresh, convicting, and so, so insightful. (How did I miss these truths on my first read-through?)

In more than 500 book reviews, I’ve featured only a handful of books that required two reviews. This book also requires two reviews, maybe three. Here’s Part 1 of 2:

FOUR MEMORABLE INSIGHTS (Part 1 of 2)

INSIGHT #1: The Two-Word Answer! Henry Blackaby shares the story of a couple who heard God direct them to take early retirement and serve overseas. Instead, they delayed until all their ducks were in a row and their dream home was built. But then… “a violent tornado swept right over their house, tearing it to splinters and leaving only rubble.” They asked Blackaby, “What do you think we should do?”

Blackaby’s two-word response: “OBEY IMMEDIATELY!”

INSIGHT #2: Mistakes! Blackaby writes, “Nowhere in the Bible does God promise to stop us from making mistakes!” He lists four inappropriate ways for discerning God’s voice. (Even well-meaning people make these mistakes! Yikes!) These are serious mistakes—because people are misunderstanding what the Bible teaches. They include:
1) Asking for a miraculous sign
2) Seeking a method
3) The “name it and claim it” method
4) Open and closed doors

On seeking a method, Blackaby comments, “Balaam heard God speak through a donkey even though he had never heard God talk through a donkey before. If Balaam lived in our formula-driven day, perhaps he would have written a book, Donkeys for Dummies, so people could discern when God was speaking to them through a donkey, too!”

INSIGHT #3: “See Where God Is Working!” When Henry Blackaby was a pastor, the church was located near a college campus. “One Sunday, I pulled our students together and said, ‘This week I want you to go to the campus and watch to see where God is working. If God shows you where He is working, immediately join Him!” (He explained that the Bible teaches that “people don’t ask questions about spiritual matters unless God is at work in their lives.”)

He writes, “That Sunday, I told the students, ‘If during the course of your day attending class, someone starts asking you spiritual questions, what else you may have planned, don’t do it. Cancel what you had planned and spend time with that individual to discover what God is doing.’ That week our students went onto the campus, watching to see where God was at work so they could join Him.”

What happened? “On Wednesday, one of our female students excitedly reported, ‘Pastor, a girl who had been in classes with me for two years approached me after class today. She said, ‘I think you might be a Christian. I need to talk to you.’ I remembered what you said. I had a class in a few minutes, but I skipped it. We went to the cafeteria to talk. She said, ‘Eleven of us girls in the dorm have been studying the Bible, and none of us are Christians. Do you know someone who can lead us in a Bible study?’”

Blackaby notes, “As a result of that contact, we started three Bible study groups in the women’s dorms and two in the men’s. For almost two years we had tried to do something for God and failed. Then for three days we looked to see where God was working, and what a difference that made!”

The authors remind readers not to look for a formula to experience God. Instead, they articulate seven key principles (realities) across the 26 short chapters—with dozens of memorable stories. The seven realities:

• Reality 1: "God is always at work around you.
• Reality 2: God pursues a continuing love relationship with you that is real and personal.
• Reality 3: God invites you to become involved with Him in His work.
• Reality 4: God speaks by the Holy Spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes, and His ways.
• Reality 5: God’s invitation for you to work with Him always leads you to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action.
• Reality 6: You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what He is doing.
• Reality 7: You come to know God by experience as you obey Him and He accomplishes His work through you.”

INSIGHT #4: “Please Cancel My Request!” In Mark 2, when the four entrepreneurial friends of the paraplegic man brought their friend to Jesus for healing, Jesus—instead—forgave the man’s sins. Meditating on that passage prompted Blackaby to weep and pray, “O God, if I ever give You a request and You have more to give me than I am asking, please cancel my request!”

Read this gem—slowly—and the truths will seriously whack you. Example: “Focusing on identifying [spiritual] gifts instead of determining what God’s assignment is can also be severely limiting for believers who base their future usefulness for God only on their past effectiveness.” Blackaby adds, “The common approach to spiritual gifts can easily become self-centered rather than God-centered.” Stay tuned for more whacks (Part 2 of 2) in a future issue.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Experiencing God (2021 Edition): Knowing and Doing the Will of God, by Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, and Claude King. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (11 hours, 3 minutes). (Note: The audio version is from the 2009 book revision.)



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) “When God speaks, it is important to write it down,” says Henry Blackaby. That’s from my short 2008 review of Experiencing God (click here). Why might you find value in reading an updated and expanded version of a book you’ve already read—and this time, making notes as you read (when God speaks).
 2) Glub. Glub. Glub? Henry Blackaby writes, “The affirmation comes after the obedience.” He notes: “When Jesus invited Peter to get out of the boat to walk on the water, He did not assure Peter he would stay afloat! The Lord simply said, ‘Come!’ (Matt. 14:28). Peter wouldn’t know he could walk on the water until he took his first step.” This past year or two, what have you learned about taking the first step?
 

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John’s “I’m trying” efforts were fruitless. “In trying to honor God as a college student, I wanted the fruits of the spirit to be evident in my life. But I focused on the fruits—instead of the spirit.” (See Mistake #21 in Mastering Mistake-Making.)

Mistake #21 of 25: Striving Really Hard to Walk With God
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #21: “’I can do this by trying harder’ was my failed strategy. ‘Just be more disciplined.’ I missed the simplicity of John 15—being connected to the Vine.”

Read this chapter to discover what John learned during his college days about the difference between human striving versus simply enjoying a relationship with the God of the Universe! And…learn what happened when he violated that semester’s evangelism training mandate, “Never say ‘TURN OR BURN!’”

For Mistake #21, John recommends two resources from Cru:
• Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?*
• Have You Made the Wonderful Discovery of the Spirit-Filled Life?*  
*See bulk pricing from Cru Press.

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake-Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

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"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you missed John's half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance," you can now order the 107-page workbook on Amazon. Click here.

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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Henry Blackaby suggests you conduct a personal inventory and ask, “’What am I presently doing that can only be explained by God’s activity in my life?’ If you cannot think of anything, spend time with the Lord and ask Him why.” Need help conducting both personal and organizational inventories? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers. 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. As a Libro.fm Affiliate, we earn credits. 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.

From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers...into Lifelong Fans

Issue No. 495 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting includes a confession! John thought he could quickly sail through a new customer experience book. Not! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #20 below.)


Oh, my! Every chapter (honest!) packs a punch in this hot-off-the-press customer experience toolkit, From Impressed to Obsessed.

I Must Confess!

Yikes! I got carried away in the previous issue with my long (but fascinating!) review of Becoming Trader Joe. My penance: today’s short review!

I MUST CONFESS. While the title intrigued me, From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans…really, would there be any new or fresh thinking in yet one more book on the customer experience?

However…an endorsement from Horst Schulze of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company is high praise. (Ditto endorsements from Seth Godin, Marshall Goldsmith, and Chester Elton.) And the wheelchair story from the hotel’s Dubai property is a stunner! Their mantra “radar on and antenna up” will be your next weekly staff meeting sermon!

I MUST CONFESS. I’m fairly well read. I know about Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, and Hyundai…so really, I thought, I can speed-read through this book.

However…I’ve never linked those customer stories to actual principles. The author, Jon Picoult, just gifted me with a new mental filing system—12 slots for his 12 memorable principles. I switched from speed-reading to speed-learning.

I MUST CONFESS. I skipped the intro, looked for the most interesting chapter title—and thought I could judge the book by that chapter. One and done, I thought.

However…Chapter 17, “Deliver Pleasant Surprises,” hooked me in the first line! (No spoiler alert, but after you read it—you’ll share this “hook” and the principle with your colleagues dozens of times!) Pastor Picoult practices what he preaches!

I MUST CONFESS. Okay, I thought, I’ll read just one more chapter. No author on the planet can deliver 18 must-read chapters.

However…I was wrong again. Every chapter packs a punch:
• Chapter 9: the Expedia story in “Make It Effortless.” (“Answer questions before they’re asked.”) Plus, my favorite line: 

“Please waste my time,”
said no one, ever.

 

• Chapter 14: “Creative Relevance” and the question beneath the question, “What time is the three o’clock parade?”
• Chapter 18: the “Maggots on a Plane” incident in “Recover with Style.”

I MUST CONFESS. Honest. I tried to skip a few chapters. No crime in that, right?

However…the “Putting the Principles Into Practice” bullet points at the end of each chapter were just too much. I had to read the full chapter! Add in the “Key Takeways” (more bullet points!)—and Picoult ensured his book would be read. I mean, devoured. So don’t skip any chapter—especially Chapter 7—“Create Peaks and Avoid Valleys.”

I MUST CONFESS. I went back and did a proper read—even starting in the intro.

However…I should have read page one first (what a concept!). The first sentence of this powerful book is convicting: “If you’re aspiring to satisfy your customers, then you are aspiring to mediocrity.” Yikes!

I MUST CONFESS. After a very unsatisfying customer experience earlier this month, my wife and I labeled the 90-minute torture session, “From Impressed to Distressed.” I sent Jon Picoult’s book to the company’s CEO! (Maybe you should order two copies: one for you, and one ready to send to the Chief Offender of your next disappointing customer experience!)

To order from Amazon, click on the title for From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans, by Jon Picoult. Are you a listener? Listen to the audio book on Libro.fm (pre-order for January delivery).



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Pop Quiz! Write down 12 principles for converting our customers and employees into lifelong fans. You have 12 minutes. Go!
2) In the chapter, “Keep It Simple,” the author notes that Trader Joe’s made a conscious decision to limit the number of products it carries. Compare 4,000 SKUs (stock-keeping units) vs. the average grocery store count of 50,000 SKUs. Why might less products, programs, and services help create raving fans—versus adding more, more, and more? Read my review of Becoming Trader Joe.
3) Bonus Idea for Your Team. Offer a Chick-Fil-A gift card (free lunch!) to the team member who will read and report on the customer service stories in Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, by Dan Heath. (Read my review.)

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Ruth Haley Barton: “Like so many of us as leaders, Moses’ natural gifting was at the mercy of his unresolved past and the unexamined emotional patterns that drove him.” (See Mistake #20 in Mastering Mistake Making.)

Mistake #20 of 25: Trying to Fix Workaholism on My Own
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #20: “I did not understand—nor address—my workaholism and the harm it inflicted on my family and coworkers. I should have asked a counselor for help much, much sooner.”

Read this chapter to discover what John learned and how and when he got help. A gifted therapist was instrumental in walking John through what drove his workaholism, often called “the addiction that America applauds.” 

For Mistake #20, John recommends this book:
• Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry, by Ruth Haley Barton (Read John’s review of his 2009 book-of-the-year.)
• Order the 10th anniversary expanded edition of Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership. 

Ruth Haley Barton writes, “Like so many of us as leaders, Moses’ natural gifting was at the mercy of his unresolved past and the unexamined emotional patterns that drove him.”

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you missed John's half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance," you can now order the 107-page workbook on Amazon. Click here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Beware the “Lampshade Effect,” warns Jon Picoult in From Impressed to Obsessed. This is “the tendency for people to take a small error or oversight in the customer experience and infer from it that something bigger may be amiss.” (See also Ball #5 in “The Printing Bucket” chapter of Mastering the Management Buckets—a dozen typos in the airline emergency row’s safety chart! Yikes!) Are you overlooking your “small errors?” How would you know? Is it time for an objective assessment of your small and big errors? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

Becoming Trader Joe

Issue No. 494 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting is just an appetizer to inspire you to partake of the full meal: Becoming Trader Joe. It’s a leadership and management feast! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for almost 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #19 below.)


Trader Joe’s founder, Joe Coulombe, organized the central management’s operation around the “skunkworks” concept popularized by Tom Peters. Coulombe’s title: “Chief Skunk.” See the Operations Bucket. (Photo credit: Becoming Trader Joe.)

Chief Skunk!

I’ve rarely met a Trader Joe’s customer who is not a Trader Joe’s raving fan. How about you?

This past June, HarperCollins Leadership published a fascinating read by the founder of Trader Joe’s. And yes—it’s a leadership book, but you’ll also be fascinated by the delightful discoveries down every aisle of this memorable treat, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys, by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri.

Joe Coulombe (he died at age 89 in February 2020) gifted us with MBA-level thinking in leadership, management, retailing, economics, history, and humor—all in 288 fast-reading pages. Imagine Renaissance Man meets Peter Drucker meets The Galloping Gourmet. (And thanks to my long-suffering wife, Joanne, I taste-tested snippets from the book with her in recent evenings—and she agrees: this is a stunningly delicious read.)

Becoming Trader Joe checks the box in all 20 management buckets (core competencies) and the three arenas of Cause, Community, and Corporation:

THE CAUSE

#1. The Results Bucket. Trader Joe’s financial growth and results were stunning—but, as you’ll read, it was not about the money. When asked a product pricing question—“What percentage margin did you aim for?”—this inquiry launched Joe Coulombe into his “tirade about how you pay your bills with dollars, not percents.”

#2. The Customer Bucket. Trader Joe’s niche customer: the overeducated, underpaid, and well-traveled person. Not “the masses who willingly consumed Folger’s coffee, Best Foods Mayonnaise, Wonder Bread, Coca-Cola, etc.” Joe Coulombe adds, “…I saw an opportunity to differentiate ourselves radically from mainstream retailing to mainstream people.” He notes, “I believe in the wisdom that you gain customers one by one, but you lose them in droves.”

#3. The Strategy Bucket. Coulombe creatively names the three versions of Trader Joe’s: Good Time Charley (1967-1970), Whole Earth Harry (1971-1976), and the final version—Mac the Knife (1977 and beyond). Note: Joe Coulombe and Russia gave up Five Year Plans in the same year, 1988!

#4. The Drucker Bucket. Greatly influenced by Peter Drucker, Coulombe notes Drucker’s “seminal piece in the July 25, 1989, Wall Street Journal called ‘Sell the Mail Room.’” This was six months after Coulombe left Trader Joe’s—but he reminisces about his good and bad outsourcing decisions. (“We never took mainframe computing inhouse…” Another rule: “Never buy a computer you can’t lift.”
        
#5. The Book Bucket. Ironically, Joe Coulombe names the “best” book on management—but he actually lists three of them! (Even better!)
   • The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I, by Barbara Tuchman – “It’s the best book on management—and, especially, mismanagement—I’ve ever read.” (p. 14)
   • The Winning Performance: How America's High-Growth Midsize Companies Succeed, by Clifford and Cavanaugh – He notes his favorite quote “from my favorite book on management.” (p. xiv)
   • The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. – “…one of my favorite books on management.” (p. 204)
   • And one more: Coulombe said “the best economics book I ever read” was Seven Kinds of Inflation, by Richard Dana Skinner (1937).

#6. The Program Bucket. Coulombe was thinking supply chain and logistics well before our current crisis! Chapter 13, “Virtual Distribution,” includes two lists of products carried in 1976 versus 1988—and the percentage of sales for each product. The 1976 list included 19 categories. The top-four sellers: dry groceries, milk and ice cream, and cigarettes at 10% each. Wine was fourth at 8%. The 1988 list: wine (22%), dry groceries (12%), nuts and dried fruit (12%), and frozen foods (11%). The 1988 list was pared down to 14 categories. Read the fascinating rationales for every yes/no buying decision. This chapter reminded me of the book, Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decisions for Financial Viability.

 

THE COMMUNITY

 #7. The People Bucket. “…the most important single business decision I ever made was to pay people well.” Coulombe adds, “At a time when the minimum wage was $4.35, we often paid $13.00 per hour because these people were worth it. A distinction between full-time and part-time is a false dichotomy when it comes to productivity.” Plus, to enrich product knowledge of Captains (aka the top manager in each store), Trader Joe’s sent every Captain and spouse to Europe “to make a three-week grand tour of the wine and cheese regions in Germany, Switzerland, and France.”

 #8. The Culture Bucket. “…as Trader Joe’s became famous, the employees began earning something else: prestige. To be part of Trader Joe’s brought them instant recognition from their friends and families.” 

 
John’s granddaughter, Emelia Pearson (18), discerned that the Trader Joe’s crew member “uniform,” was such a unique and prestigious outfit—that she wore it for Halloween this year! (Note: she is not a crew member.) All Trader Joe’s employees continue to wear Hawaiian shirts, provided by the store (different shades to match the seasons, per Coulombe).

#9. The Team Bucket. Coulombe was not a silo thinker. Chapter 18, “Double Entry Retailing” is a crash course for every manager on what matters and the interrelationships of key areas. Team members influence and impact a whole system—with five variables on the “Demand Side” and 10 variables on the “Supply Side.”
   • Demand Side: assortment of merchandise, pricing, convenience, credit, and showmanship.
   • Supply Side: merchandise vendors, employees, “habits” and “culture,” systems, non-merchandise vendors, landlords, governments, bankers and investment bankers, stockholders, and crime.

Coulombe’s vision of teamwork found inspiration from Pierre Monteux, the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony (during Coulombe’s years at Stanford University). Much later, he read this in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner: “Monteux never tried to get a performance out of an orchestra. He was always giving one with them.”

#10. The Hoopla! Bucket. No surprise—it was a hoot (and still is) to work at Trader Joe’s. He writes, “There was a particular angle to the naming of our products. I wanted to create a silent conspiracy among the overeducated, underpaid people in town, so that as they moved down the aisles they would read secret messages on the products.” Examples: Brandenburg Brownies, Sir Isaac Newtons, The Bagel Spinoza, The Peanut Pascal. “My favorite of all the private labels was Heisenberg’s Uncertain Blend of coffee beans.” (I had to google it. See the “uncertainty principle.”)

Another Hoopla! seasoning: “Showmanship” is defined as “the sum total of all efforts to make contact with the customer. It’s the most ephemeral, the most difficult, and the most important of the Demand Side activities.”

#11. The Donor Bucket. As of 1988, Trader Joe’s was receiving 300 donation requests per year from nonprofit organizations. Coulombe had five policies that guided their giving, including: “1) Never give cash to anyone. 2) Never buy space in a program. That is money thrown away. 3) Give freely, give generously, but only to nonprofits that are focused on the overeducated and underpaid.” 

In 2020, Trader Joe’s also donated nearly $345 million dollars of food and beverages, which equates to approximately 69 million meals, through their Neighborhood Shares program. Every nonprofit fundraiser should read “Promoting through Nonprofits” in Chapter 9.

#12. The Volunteer Bucket. This is stunning! Joe Coulombe—personally—volunteered his time to write and record a one-minute broadcast for a Los Angeles classical music radio station. The opening line, “This is Joe Coulombe of Trader Joe’s with a word on food and wine.” He writes, “We needed the publicity in those days, and KFAC was right on our target of overeducated and unpaid people.” He recorded 3,300 unique scripts (as in…no repeats!) for “Words on Food and Wine” and he would record 50 or 60 broadcasts in a session that left him “pretty well burned out.” Oh, my. This discipline “forced me to study the field of food and wine.”

#13. The Crisis Bucket. “Hairballs” is the title of Chapter 10—and the first line cautions, “All businesses have problems.” Coulombe’s favorite management quote is from Tex Thornton of Litton Industries: “If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions.” The author writes, “Early in my career I learned there are two kinds of decisions: the ones that are easily reversible and the ones that aren’t.”

This must-read chapter includes the section, “The Worst Hairball of My Career: The United Farm Workers’ Secondary Boycott.” Whew! The boycott of Trader Joe’s—just before Thanksgiving in 1971—was actually organized by young seminarians from Union Theological Seminary in New York.

THE CORPORATION

#14. The Board Bucket. When he retired from Trader Joe’s, Coulombe served on the board of directors of several companies. He also consulted with companies, but didn’t have the highest view of consultants! He found board work and the writing of this book, “satisfying, challenging, and appropriate to my age.” His succession plan (selling the company, continuing to lead it for a few years, and then exiting at age 58) is instructive for board members and CEOs.

#15. The Budget Bucket. Did you know that Trader Joe’s is the largest retailer of maple syrup in the United States? Ditto wild rice. That—and more—is from the introductory chapter, “A Trader Joe’s Sampler.” While financial steps (and missteps) are discussed throughout the book, budget-minded leaders will find the list of “Some of the Best Deals We Ever Made” absolutely fascinating. That topic was asked and addressed during a lecture he gave in 1998 for the Culinary Historians Society—“a lecture that led to this book.” (You’ll also appreciate the author’s pre-modern references to adding machines and slide rules!)

#16. The Delegation Bucket. You don’t grow from one store in Pasadena, Calif., to 530 stores nationwide by being inept at delegation. I could write an entire review—just on Trader Joe’s delegation competencies, but I’ll spare you. Just this: “We fundamentally changed the point of view of the business from customer-oriented to buyer-oriented. I put our buyers in charge of the company.” See more in Chapter 11, “Mac the Knife,” and how reducing the number of products—and requiring every product to pay its own way—put the authority and the responsibility on the buyers. Fascinating.

#17. The Operations Bucket. Taking a cue from the skunkworks concept by Tom Peters (see In Search of Excellence), Joe Coulombe created three major skunkworks projects in his central management: Skunkworks I: Buying, Skunkworks II: Sales, and Skunkworks III: Accounting. “I had signs made with these titles to be hung in each department." Over his door was this sign:

CHIEF SKUNK!

By the way, the Trader Joe’s approach to operations (especially the art and science of selecting store locations) should be required reading in seminaries for Church Planting 101. (Hint: Trader Joe’s locations are situated closest to their niche customers: the overeducated and underpaid.)

#18. The Systems Bucket. Fascinating! (Have I used that word yet?) “Every full-timer was supposed to be able to perform every job in the store, including checking, balancing the books, ordering each department, stocking, opening, closing, going to the bank, etc. Everybody worked the check stands in the course of a day, including the Captain.” Note: When I met Jason Addy this week (a 21-year employee, and the new Captain at the San Clemente, Calif., store), he was working the check stands! The Trader Joe’s “system” builds upon “the medieval French verb, retailer, which means to ‘cut into pieces.’”

#19. The Printing Bucket (aka the Communication Bucket). Trader Joe’s launched the Fearless Flyer newsletter in 1970 (now also online here). They synchronized promotion with purchasing—similar to one of my Printing Bucket axioms to “use publication deadlines to fine tune organizational decision-making.” Coulombe writes that “the Fearless Flyer was an educational medium and hundreds of customers kept three-ring notebook collections of the issues so they could refer back to the articles. For years, we printed three rings on the cover.” Three cheers for three-ring binders! (See my Operations Bucket and read, “Bless Bob With a Binder: A three-ring binder will usher in world peace. Almost.”)
 
#20. The Meetings Bucket. Your approach to meetings (with staff, board, vendors, and others) spotlights your organizational culture—but retailing is unique. When to meet? Coulombe hosted two employee parties every year (summer and Christmas), but planned two nights for each—to accommodate those who worked nights. Perhaps the focus on buyers is best illustrated with this: “Whenever a vendor claimed to be truly desperate, we offered to meet him 6:00 p.m. on Friday night. That separates the wheat from the chaff!” (For more on the culture of meetings, read Made From Scratch, written by the founder of Texas Roadhouse restaurants.)

Sorry. I got carried away—this book is so good, but my review is way too long. Sorry, again! Suggestion: after you read Becoming Trader Joe, read the new book on creating superb customer experiences. Watch for my review of From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans, by Jon Picoult.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys, by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (7 hours, 32 minutes).



YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) Trader Joe’s founder, Joe Coulombe, was the classic Renaissance Man. His book oozes with insights and quotations from Scientific American, Smithsonian, Albert Camus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, and others. What do you read—or who do you listen to—to inform your leadership and management decisions?
2) When John Pearson reads a killer quotation or a memorable chapter, he mentally files it under one of his 20 management buckets/core competencies from Mastering the Management Buckets. What’s your mental filing system for all things leadership and management?

A Trader Joe’s Afterword: “King of Cardboard and Spoils”

On Feb. 4, 2008, Dieter Zander, a pastor and friend, suffered a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of his brain. No longer able to pastor, his new vocation was “King of Cardboard and Spoils” at Trader Joe’s (really!). Read my 2013 review of the 32-page book (photos and commentary), A Stroke of Grace, by Dieter Zander and LaDonna Witmer. And another must-read, Bill Gaultiere’s blog, “A Kingdom of Cardboard and Spoils (Dieter Zander’s Story).”

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Chuck Girard wrote the worship song, “Slow Down,” and notes: “Even today, this song receives more mail and comment than any other song I have ever written.” Read more. (See Mistake #19 in Mastering Mistake Making.)

Mistake #19 of 25: Experiencing Infrequent God Moments
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned

John’s Mistake #19: “I believe Almighty God wants us to experience more frequent God moments, but I often moved way-too-fast on my own—and didn’t slow down for God to intervene.”

When John and Joanne celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2019, they began with a family breakfast at Dana Point Harbor. But halfway through the celebration, they were unprepared for a stunning “God moment” when their son, Jason, revealed what the Lord had orchestrated that morning—seemingly coincidental, but not really! 

For Mistake #19, John recommends two resources:
• Option #1: The One Year Bible (the entire Bible arranged in 365 daily readings – New Living Translation, by Tyndale) – Note: this edition was just published Oct. 19, 2021, by Tyndale. (Order from Amazon)
• Option #2: “Slow Down” (listen to this worship song written and sung by Chuck Girard) – Listen on YouTube
 
Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you live in Southern California, join John for the half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance.” Details here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Does your organization need a deep dive into your customer niche again—or a 2021 version of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).

2 Books: Harsh Grief Gentle Hope & Oasis Bible Study

Issue No. 493 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features two books and two women who courageously address deep issues with the good news of HOPE. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for almost 500 book reviews, and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #18 in the eNews link below.)


“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Frederick Buechner) 

2 Women. 2 Books. 1 Hope!

Our world faces deep and destructive problems. Sadness soars. What can one person do? I urge you to read about two women authors in this issue, Mary White and Diane Schnickels. They both tackle tough challenges—and balance truth-telling with hope. Stunning!

[ ] BOOK #1: Harsh Grief Gentle Hope: From the Agony of a Mother’s Greatest Loss on Earth, Comes the Divine Comfort and Hope From Heaven, by Mary White. (Order from Amazon.)



I read the first edition of this poignant true story on an airplane in 1995. I sobbed uncontrollably—alarming my seatmates. “On a dark spring night, Jerry and Mary White’s only son became the victim of a brutal homicide.”

Gratefully, Mary White released a new edition of her book just 12 months ago. I urge you to read it. The White family’s story is still tragic. Still unfathomable. And now in 2021, many others (perhaps you) are experiencing devastating loss exacerbated even more by Covid-19. Words fail us. Deep questions perplex us. This book helps. We need the deep faith and example of the Mary’s and Jerry’s to point us to Heaven’s comfort and hope.

So today, 25 years after first reading Harsh Grief, Gentle Hope—I thought I could sail through this new edition, write this review, and move on. Check. Check. Check.

Oh, my. Mary White’s poignant, soulful narrative of the loss of their son (Steve was 30 when his life was taken) touched me deeply even more in my rereading of this sad, but hopeful account. She writes:

“As this book goes into republishing, many things have changed in Jerry’s and my lives. The piercing, relentless grief of the early years has changed to frequent, comforting memories of Steve. Sorrow and tears still hit us as unexpected moments when something reminds us of Steve and our grievous loss. Tender music brings tears.”

She adds, “Steve’s last gift to me was a bouquet of tulips, and seeing them brings tears along with precious memories. I don’t think one day has passed since Steve’s death when I haven’t thought of him. Sometimes only briefly, but he is always close to my mind and heart. No parent can forget their child whether alive or dead.”

Mary’s husband, Jerry White, adds an “Afterword” to this comforting book and quotes Proverbs 14:13, “Even in laughter the heart may ache, and rejoicing may end in grief.”

The appendix reminds us, “We can’t practice for grief; we can’t take lessons to prepare for it. Loss comes, and we’re suddenly, unwillingly, underway in a sorrowful pilgrimage. All of our life experiences, and our relationship with the loved one, will determine how we grieve.”

They share 10 short “suggestions” (recognizing that “there is no right or wrong way to grieve”) that may help readers on the grief journey, including “Look Beyond People’s Words. Be willing to tolerate people who are less than helpful.” The wisdom is practical and deep.

The power of friendship oozes across the pages. Amazing friends. (Am I that kind of friend?) This book reminded me of another gem that Mary and Jerry White wrote in 2014, To Be a Friend: Building Deep and Lasting Relationships (read my review). They quote Walter Winchell’s poignant line, “A friend is one who walks in when others walk out.”

I’ve prayed for 10 months—to discern the right time to share this review with you. I pray you won’t need this wisdom now, but maybe a friend, colleague, or co-worker needs it now. Likely, we’ll all need it during our earthly journey.

If you, or a friend, or a family member needs encouragement today, listen to the soothing lyrics of "Come Ye Disconsolate," sung by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. Click here.

Meditate on the soulful lyrics to "Come Yet Disconsolate." My favorite line: “Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.” Click here.

[ ] BOOK #2: A Woman's Journey: Healing from Domestic Abuse (Oasis Bible Study Book One: Restoring Hope and Dignity), by Diane Schnickels (Order from Amazon.)



Over the years, I’ve been so privileged to consult with leaders and board members of nonprofit organizations and churches. I’ve met women and men who care very deeply about niche problems. Many problems and injustices are so horrific that most people just walk by. Yet these leaders—called by God—stand in the gap. Their courage, their creativity, and their endurance is simply stunning—and I thank God for them.

Diane Schnickels, the founder of Living Waters of Hope, courageously said “yes” to addressing the “dark world of domestic abuse.” She was shocked to discover that “one in four women of faith are being negatively affected by this silent and destructive dynamic at some point in their life in America.” One in four!

And, sadly, she also discovered that “many churches are ill-equipped to guide these victims in a healthy way,” and “these women are being further harmed by churches.” She writes that “advice like ‘stay, pray, and submit’ to the husbands who are harmful cause these women to feel unheard, alone, and to fall deeper into despair.”

One result of her concern is this important Bible study/workbook.

How do you help someone suffering domestic abuse? Start by reviewing the resources in Diane Schnickels’ Oasis Bible Study. The “Power and Control Wheel” on page 29 (from the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project) is heartbreaking, but so, so helpful. The 20 bullet points, “Symptoms of a Narcissistic Personality,” are revealing. Ditto the best and clearest definition of “gaslighting” I’ve ever read (page 33).

In addition to this 212-page workbook, the Living Waters of Hope website offers an abundance of resources for both individuals and churches. And good news! A second Oasis Bible Study is now available. Click on the title to order the second book in the series, Finding Truth and Strength.

SAFE AND CONFIDENTIAL. Living Waters of Hope provides safe and confidential online Oasis Bible Study classes for women who want to go through the book with other women, especially sisters in the Lord. "We have three classes to choose from and women can join at any time, space permitting. There is a modest fee and scholarships are available to anyone in need." For more information and registration, click here.  

If your church has inadequate resources for vulnerable women trapped in cycles of abuse (and perhaps a blind eye to the horrific problem), I urge you to provide this resource for the pastoral care team. Help women find hope:

Lamentations 3:21-24 (The Living Bible): “Yet there is one ray of hope: his compassion never ends. It is only the Lord’s mercies that have kept us from complete destruction. Great is his faithfulness; his loving-kindness begins afresh each day. My soul claims the Lord as my inheritance; therefore I will hope in him.”

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) What niche or deep problem, or societal condition, has God called you to address?
2) What spiritual gifts have you been given to competently accomplish God’s plan? Do you feel guilty that you don’t care enough about everything—or are you faithful in doing your part of God’s work?
3) Do you agree with Frederick Buechner’s statement? “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Read more.)
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Mistake #18 of 25:
Not Understanding My Spiritual Gift Mix
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson

Bruce Bugbee quotes a colleague: “Why are you doing what others can do—and leaving undone what only you can do?” (See Mistake #18 in Mastering Mistake Making.)

John’s Mistake #18: “While I was confident in my faith and my calling, in my early years I did not understand or appropriate the unique spiritual gifts given to us by the Holy Spirit to competently accomplish God’s plan. But…once I connected the theology with spiritual gifts-in-action, I got it!”

As John learned to leverage “The 3 Powerful S’s” to understand others and himself (Social Styles, Strengths, and Spiritual Gifts), he read several books, attended training sessions, completed a spiritual gifts assessment, and met with a coach. (Click here for a free self-guided spiritual gifts survey.)

When you and others experience tragedy, crisis, and grief, stop and look for people with God-given spiritual gifts—especially Helps, Hospitality, Mercy, and Discernment. They are equipped to minister to you and others competently and thoughtfully.

For Mistake #18, John recommends two books:
• Option #1: What You Do Best in the Body of Christ: Discover Your Spiritual Gifts, Personal Style and God-Given Passion (revised and expanded—with assessment tools and discussion questions), by Bruce Bugbee (Read the review.)
• Option #2: Discover Your Spiritual Gifts: The Easy-to-Use Guide That Helps You Identify and Understand Your Unique God-Given Spiritual Gifts (includes the bestselling spiritual gifts inventory), by C. Peter Wagner (Read the review.)

Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.

"MISTAKES ARE LIKE TUITION." Read the blog by Dr. Richard (Rick) Goossen, Chairman of The Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization (The ELO Network), "Have You Mastered the Craft of Making Mistakes?" And listen to George P. Wood's interview with John Pearson, "“How to Make Mistakes Well” on the Influence Podcast. And, if you live in Southern California, join John for the half-day board seminar on Nov. 18, 2021, hosted by The Barnabas Group/Orange County, “The 4 Big Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board – How Leaders Enrich Their Ministry Results Through God-Honoring Governance.” Details here.
___________________________________________________________

JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Your team has identified a need. You have the passion. You’ve been called by God to address that need. But…how will you thoughtfully craft your mission and message? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
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