Leadership Reflections

Leaders are change agents, and change agents always attract naysayers.  How do you know when to persevere and when to give up?  I have some ideas, but first here’s a little inspirational encouragement.  On July 28th, 1980, Bob Farrow read this poem on CFCA radio and I was so impressed by it I had him send [...]

Does your commitment to strategic planning quench the Holy Spirit?  Should a Christian ministry do strategic planning at all?  A brief study of Paul’s second missionary trip will provide the answer. Paul’s Example Paul’s first missionary trip was very fruitful due to the many churches he planted in Asia.  Good leadership and strategic planning would dictate a [...]

The average Canadian lives to be 80 years old.  Organizations, however, can potentially live forever, but will they?  Just like humans, they have lifecycles that ultimately end in death.  But unlike humans, organizational death can be avoided by jumping on to a new lifecycle.  The time to jump is: before you need to, before you are desperate, while you are still strong, when [...]

I was at a conference in the spring and heard a terrific story that just amazed me and the entire audience.  It was a thrilling example of farsightedness that looked ahead five centuries!  The speaker assured us the story is absolutely true.  It’s about a college at Oxford University: New College, Oxford, is actually very old.  It was [...]

What on earth were the Easter Islanders thinking when they chopped down the very last tree on their island?  How were they going to cook the next day?  What would they use to build their huts?  Their canoes?  How could they have done such a dumb thing!!!  This is a question Jared Diamond asks in [...]