IT: How Leaders Can Get IT and Keep IT - Craig Groeschel

• He told the story of the starting of his church: Lifechurch.tv started in a two-car garage
• 13 sites across the US, 25,000 people reached every week, one online
• Some churches have IT, some don’t have IT
• God makes IT happen…IT is from him, by him, and for His glory
• It’s rare for one person to bring IT, but it’s common for one person to kill IT
• Wherever you see IT, lives are transformed
• The early church had IT…when people tried to kill IT, IT spread
• Acts 2:42-47
• Four qualities that are most often there when IT is present
• Churches with IT have ministries that have razor-sharp focus. More ministries are not always better. Better ministries are better. What can we be the very best at in our ministries? In order to reach people that no one is reaching, you’ll have to do things that no one is doing. They do weekend worship, small groups, kid’s ministry, student ministry, missions. They don’t do concerts, men’s ministries, women’s ministries, single adult ministries, and many other things. What are you doing that you need to stop doing?
• Churches with IT see opportunities where others seem problems. We have everything we need to do what God wants us to do. What is God trying to show us through our greatest limitation?
• Organizations that have IT are willing to fail. Failure is part of the process in finding God. Peter failed many times at the beginning before he made powerful strides for God. If God is speaking to you, have the courage to get out of the boat (like Peter did). If you fail, shake it off and step up. What has God called us to do what we’re afraid to attempt?
• Organizations that have IT are led by people that have IT. You need to have IT for your ministry to get IT. When you have IT it draws others. It’s easy to get distracted and focus on the results of IT rather than IT itself. He lost IT when he became a full-time pastor and a part-time follower of Christ.
• If you don’t have IT, what are you going to do to get IT?

Defending The Faith - Chuck Colson

• The Great Commission isn’t about making converts, it’s about making disciples
• In the Marines, the lieutenant surveys the field, then serves the troops. They are given the vision. Then they are told “Follow me”
• If you are a leader, your job is not to pander to your people, your job is to lead them to the truth
• In a recent survey, 57% of evangelical Christians said that Christianity is not the only truth faith
• Stop blaming the culture when everything goes wrong
• What is Christianity? A conversation? A religion? A relationship? It’s all of these
• Everything in the world is under the domain of Christ - He’s claimed it all
• What are the basics tenants of faith? God Is. He has spoken. The fall happened - we’re what’s wrong with the world today. Jesus was God incarnate on earth. God is three persons in one. We are called to be holy so that the world will know we follow the one true God.
• Christianity is the only religion that is rationally sustainable
• Tell your people the truth then equip them

Risk Taking, Barrier Breaking, Bold Leadership - Catherine Rohr

• She runs a prison entrepreneurship program (PEP, www.peo.org). She left a $200 K/year job in private equity to launch her prison ministry
• 1 out of 15 people in the US go to prison in their lifetime, over 50% return to prison
• Christians are “grace junkies” but we don’t extend grace to prisoners
• PEP looks for people who are sick of their old criminal lives. They go through a business boot camp, 27 hours a week, and gra
• They’ve achieve a single-digital recidivism rate (return to prison)
• 70% of the donors to PEP are graduates from the program
• Character transformation is a part of the program.
• They have 15 hour truth and confrontation session where they speak truth and love to each other
• When dealing with criticism, don’t let your emotions get in the way. Is it legitimate feedback? If it’s not, set it aside. If it’s legitimate, welcome it and learn from it
• She was asked how she keeps from burning out. She responded that saying that she keeps in good shape - physically, emotionally, and spiritually. She sacrifices privacy to get accountability
• 100% of their budget is donation-based
• In all closing situations, 46% of salespeople never ask for the sale or the money
• In order to be good at what they do, they have to be strategic
• Find the leader, then start the ministry. Don’t start a ministry then look for the leader
• The first employees in PEP were felons - they have 27 staff members and the first nine were felons
• When the felons in PEP are expected to rise to the level of society, they do

An Uncompromising Focus on People - Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy

• Best Buy began in 1965 with one stereo store. The world’s largest consumer electronics retailer, 150,000 employees world-wide, $40 billion in revenue
• His father was a pastor, he went to seminary and dropped out
• He started as a sales clerk, worked there for seven years, didn’t feel any longing for leadership
• The owner of the company came to him, asked him which of his three work-mates he should ask to be the leader of the company, he said “Why not me?” - the job was then split into two and he had the opportunity to be a leader
• Best Buy has a high level of employee engagement - and they measure it twice a year, asking questions about how valued the employee feels

Relentless: A Profile of Mother Theresa - Bill Hybles

• A 4 foot 10 inch, 100 pound Albanian woman made a huge impact on the world
• 2 Chronicles 16:9
• In the 1940’s Mother Theresa made a vow to refuse God nothing. She would throw herself fully at whatever God asked her to do, without delay
• She vowed to be faithful to God in the “little practices”; treating everyone that crossed her path with love, sacrificing (going to the back of the line, always volunteering for clean up)
• She had “carte blanche”-yieldedness (yielding to anything that God asks for)
• Am I the kind of person who’s lighting up God’s radar screen with my level of yielding to him?
• Some people want to lead more and bigger rather than wanting more of God in their lives
• At age 36, in 1946, God gave her the vision to live and work in the slums of Calcutta for the rest of her life. She was elated and ecstatic that God would notice her and ask her to do this task - she called it “inspiration day”
• Don’t ever extinguish something that God is trying to give life to
• After “Inspiration Day”, she went to her boss (a priest) but he tells her to keep at her teaching. She’s determined to change his mind, so she continues to meet with him to try and convince him of God’s vision for her. Some of her fellow nuns start a rumour that the reasons she’s meeting with her boss is that she has romantic feelings for him
• Even with a vision from God, obstacles are often part of the process. Questions are part of the obstacles - is this vision from God? What am I willing to sacrifice to follow God’s will?
• It took Mother Theresa four months of meetings with her boss to convince him to go to the arch-bishop, who had the final say in the starting of new ministries. She met with him, and he said no. She was relentless and embarked on a letter writing campaign to wear the arch-bishop down. She explained that she doesn’t want any resources, money, or administrative support - she only asked that he didn’t stand in the way. He refused for months, until her “Let me go” letter where she makes a final plea for his permission for her to start this new ministry - and he finally relented
• Outlast the opposition to people and things that stand in the way of you pursuing God’s vision for your life
• Callings from God are precious and holy things - sometimes you’ll only get one in your life
• After she received permission to go to Calcutta, she dove into her work - she had to find facilities, raise money, build a staff, address and resolve organizational problems, respond to hostile critics, keep her supervisors informed
• She made herself into a phenomenal leader
• She went through spiritual dry spells - she wanted God to reveal himself more, she wanted to feel God’s companionship, she wanted God’s presence to be more tactile and real. She would sometimes feel despondent about it
• “Even though I don’t feel his presence, I will seek to love Him and He’s never been loved before.” - Mother Theresa
• Hybles talked about periods in his own life where he can’t feel as much of God’s love as much as he wants to
• After winning the Nobel Peace Prize, she consistently fought off the corrosive effects of the media and continued her personal vows and practices

These notes are my take-away from each of the speakers, not necessarily my own thoughts - though I can’t think of anything that I disagreed with.

The High Drama of Decision Making - Bill Hybles

• Leaderships’ highest usage is the furthering of God’s kingdom.
• Leadership is all about making decisions, and some decisions have very high stakes
• Leaders need a decision-making process that they implement whenever it’s time to make a decision
• Christian leaders should look to the bible first and foremost as a guideline for decision making
• What would smart advisors suggest I do? Proverbs 11:14: “In the abundance of counsellors there is much wisdom.” Advice from people will often conflict though - as a leader you must sort through the advice
• P/G/E/ Principle: Pain, Gain, Experience. What kind of pain have your past decisions caused? What sorts of gains have your past decisions resulted in? How has the experience of the results of your decisions impact you?
• Is there a prompting of the Holy Spirit in your decision making process?
• When you’re heading in the right direction, there will be an exhilaration of spirit
• Sometimes Hybles will make a “trial decision” - he tests out how the decision feels
• Leaders have to take responsibility for their decisions. If the decision turns out well, you thank God, your advisors, everyone around you. If the decision turns our poorly, you don’t blame anyone. You bear the consequences, you don’t point fingers, you admit that you got it wrong
• Taking responsibility for our decisions keeps the sharp edge on our learning process as leaders
• Some leader compress the above decision making processes into micro-sized bits of wisdom, a self-created proverb
• Abraham Lincoln: “The best way to destroy my enemy is to turn him into my friend.” The Christian application of this axiom is to build bridges with those who have wronged you
• Bob Galvin, Motorola Corp: “Create motion for motion’s sake”. Action is better than inaction. When people are moving, they often move onto a better place
• Colin Powell and the Powell Principles: “Check your ego at the door.” “Promote a clash of ideas.” “Reward your best performers, get rid of non-performers.”
• As a leader, do I reflect often enough about my own leadership and my leadership problems such that I have my own leadership axioms?
• Bill Hybles: “Vision leads.” “All I have to do is get the right people around the table.” “Facts are your friends.”
• Willow Creek did a survey called REVEAL that allows them to learn facts about their congregation. These facts helped them shape their decision making process
• Being misunderstood is sometimes the price of being a leader
• Bill Hybles Axiom: “When something feels funky, engage.” When a problem in the church is brewing, do not believe the lie that unattended problems go away
• Bill Hybles Axiom: “Leaders call fouls.” When something happens in a meeting you’re leading that crosses the line, the leader has to challenge the inappropriate behaviour. Leaders also have to call fouls on themselves and their own behaviour
• Bill Hybles Axiom: “Take a flyer.” Take a risk. Ask God to rock our world, and He will
• Bill Hybles Axiom: “This is church.” Relating to others, sharing meals together, growing together - this is church. Celebrating together, baptism, helping raise each other’s children - this is church. Comforting those who have lots, dealing with grief - this is church
• You will never know life fully until you are uncompromisingly devoted to Christ

Gary Haugen, Just Courage: Charging The Darkness

• Gary Haugen was a Department of Justice investigator, now he leads International Justice Ministry (IJM)
• All leaders want their leadership to matter
• What is the leadership that matters to God? Leadership that involves priorities that matter to God. Not everything that we’re interested in really matters to God
• What is God truly passionate about? For the world, and for justice
• God’s passion for the world: the incarnation of Jesus was motivated by God’s love for the whole world
• What’s the hardest thing for people to believe about the Christian faith? That God is good
• We’re the plan for showing the world that God loves it. When we show up to provide shelter for someone, they see the body of Christ acting
• Injustice in the bible is a particular type of sin; it’s about the abuse of power. Taking from other things that God intended for them: their life, their dignity, their freedom.
• He told the story of David, a young man who was walking down the street when local police, who were drinking at a bar, stole what little money he had to pay their bill. They let him go and as he was leaving the area they shot him three times. He made it to a hospital, had to have his arm amputated, and when the police heard he was still alive, they came and arrested him, throwing him into jail
• In the developing world, between 60 and 80% of the prisoners have never been charged with a crime
• There are about 27 million people in the world living in slavery, 2 million children are held in forced prostitution
• If you want your leadership to matter, lead in the things that matter to God. If you don’t care about the things that matter to God, it may be that God doesn’t matter to you
• Leading easy, safe things matters less than leading when the task is hard
• How do we lead when the task seems hopeless? Despair comes from when we focus on ourselves. If we re-centre our focus on God, he is the center of hope
• He told the story of the disciples and the feeding of the 5000. Jesus said “Feed the people”. The disciples look at their own resources and said “We can’t”. Jesus said “Show me what you do have”, and Jesus took those resources and worked a miracle
• In the case of David, IJM worked to free David, and the five police officers are in jail. David is now in school taking courses on legal advocacy
• The work and the miracle will always be Gods, we’re only called to give what we have
• How do we lead when the task seems scary? IJM staff members have endured death threats and great violence (kidnapped, mugged, attacked)
• We lead people by reminding everyone that Jesus did not come to make us safe, Jesus came to make us brave
• Don’t go on the trip and miss the adventure
• We need to follow God beyond what we can control, and then we’ll experience God’s power. We need to pursue a calling where we actually need God
• What are the tools of leadership when the calling of God is hard?
  • Choosing not to be safe
  • Choosing to pursue deep spiritual health. Hopeless, scary, hard things requires deeply rooted spiritual health
  • Choosing to pursue excellence when the task is hard. Somehow Christians have a Christian-adjusted scale of mediocrity. We need to re-set the bar for excellence.
  • Choosing to seize the joy when the task is hard. The first thing to disappear when spiritual health flounders is laughter
• Jesus didn’t lack seriousness in his devotion to the kingdom of God, but his presence was described as the pure joy. Jesus was accused of being a drunk and a glutton because he was so joyful
• Work hard, suffer hard, play hard, laugh hard
• We need to get out of our cul-de-sacs of triviality and small fears
• The power of the gospel is going into the darkest parts of our world
• In a world of suffering, why are some of us given so much? He told a story about how as a young man he’d be working out in a gym and he’d look at the body builders, with all their massive strength, and realize that all that power is really only good for posing…or maybe opening a jam jar in the kitchen. As Christians with resources, we shouldn’t be posers - we should do something with what we’ve been given

Bill George, Finding Your True North: The Spirituality of Authentic Leadership

• Former CEO of Medtronic, Professor at Harvard Business School
• Leadership is a gift that needs to be developed
• We were born to make manifest the glory of God - all among us are children of God
• Peter Drucker said “Leadership is not money, fame and power. Leadership is responsibility”
• In the 20^th century, leadership was about command and control: getting people to follow you
• In the 21^st century, leadership is about four words: aligned, empowered, serving, collaboration
• “Follow your compass, not your clock”
• There are six things that leaders must do
  • Understanding the purpose of your leadership
  • Gain self-awareness through feedback from people in your group or organization
  • Have good values
  • Follow your motivating capabilities; lead from your strengths
  • Building a support team around you
  • Lead an integrated life. Be the same person in all environments
• Leadership is not about having power over other people, it’s about empowering people
• When you only have a few hours left in your life, and someone asks you what you did to make the world a better place, what will you tell them?
• When leaders fail it’s often because they fail to lead themselves - they fail to be grounded, they get caught up in the world (money, power, fame)
• Shooting star leaders put everything into their work, but they don’t get involved in the community, they have no family life, etc.

Bill Hybles Interviews Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of Teach For America

• Teach for America gives college graduates the opportunity to give up two years of their lives to teach in low-income schools - sort of like the Peace Corps for a new generation
• Great leaders have something that burns inside them
• Teach for America’s vision is that one day every child in America will have the opportunity for an excellent education
• She didn’t set up to become a leader
• Teach For America has an “insanely” aggressive recruiting policy
• They look for people that have more leadership skills than teaching skills
• In Washington DC, one Teach for America teacher took the students from the 13^th percentile against the national average to the 90^th percentile
• My take-away from this session is that most of what I thought I knew about why students under-perform in school was completely incorrect. I also found myself getting rather weepy-eyed at many parts of the interview - I’ve always known I have a real heart for educating others, but I didn’t realize how impacted I would be by hear about the successes they have in bringing children to a new level of education and understanding

John Burke, Leading in New Cultural Realities [Part 1]

• Gateway church has signs up that says “No perfect people allowed”
• 1^st Corinthians 3:6
• We don’t have the responsibility to cause change in order people, we simply have to water and tend the soil
• Many leaders don’t want to get their hands dirty working with the soil
• Does the soil we’re tending allow for questions and struggles?
• He described several stories about people in complex situations that the typical church would find “messy” (hard to deal with): like a sexually active atheist drunk-driver, three years later this man is a devoted Christ-follower
• “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, it’s the sick.” Jesus came for the messy, broken people who recognize they need God’s help
• If we’re Christian leaders but our hands aren’t dirty with the mess soil of the people we serve?
• Are we leading more like Jesus, or more like the Pharisees?
• We need to cultivate the soil with grace-giving acceptance. Grace is where people grow the best
• The world doesn’t naturally do grace, the world does law
• Grace says come as you are, God will welcome you in. God’s grace heals and restores
• Many people never experience grace from Christians. Are we willing to look at people through the eyes of grace?
• Grace makes beauty out of mess, ugly things…but grace gets leeched out of the soil of this world
• Churches can make it difficult for the emerging culture around us to move toward the church
• The perception that the church hates gay people creates huge barriers to grace - the way the church answers this question either opens the doors or slams them shut to people
• When he was teaching in Kazakhstan he would often be asked what the church thought about Mohamed. In every culture there are barriers to grace
• Leaders must cultivate the soil with authentic, confessing community
• The soil that involves growth involves re-connection with God and with others
• When we model and teach grace, others being to see that and experience that
• Our job isn’t to fix, change or grow people - that’s God’s job
• Apart from God, we can do nothing. If we remain in God we will accomplish many things. Stay connected, “fruit happens”
• Soul Revolution.net has stories from people who participated in an experiment where people would spend 60 days radically focused on communicating with God and staying in Gods will on an hourly basis

Efrem Smith, Leading in New Cultural Realities [Part 2]

• We live in a multi-cultural, multi-ethic, multi-racial, technological world - this is the soil we grow up in
• 1 in 19 children in North America are children of mixed race - there’s a generation that will not live by the rigid race labels of the past
• 1^st John chapter 4
• How do we engage culture for kingdom purposes?
• There can be no beloved community without beloved leaders
• A faith leader must be one that loves and is loved simultaneously
• “When Jesus comes back, that’s ultimate justice, but until then it’s just us.” - Pastor in Colorado
• If you can’t love across race, class, urban, suburban, you can’t be a leader today
• God’s in the business of recruiting under-qualified people
• The church needs to go to the places where churches are; where there are hurting people
• 1^st John 4:14
• We must be confessing leaders - we must admit our mistakes as leaders, taking responsibility
• The church can be one of the places that makes the erroneous argument that people only want to go to church with people of like race, like-minded, and similar life stories
• Churches need to look at what caused racially-divided churches in the first place
• Perfection can come through pruning
• We must take an organic approach - we must create places where people of diverse communities can find reconciliation and common ground
• Sometimes it must be programmatic - they created a hip-hop program to reach a specific group of people

This is one funny online project! There aren’t many things that will make me spend 42 minutes watching my browser (I watched this in several small parts), but this online episodic project from Joss Whedon is hilarious and very entertaining - and I generally loathe musicals. The only thing that kind of sucks about it is that they picked iTunes as their exclusive method of distribution, so it’s either iTunes or watching it in your browser. Bleh. There’s more in the world than iTunes Joss!

I’m generally a big fan of PayPal, but I don’t like being lied to: PayPal advertises that you can pay with a credit card using PayPal. I swear you used to be able to do exactly that, but you can’t any more: you only get the option to pay with a credit card if your PayPal balance is zero dollars. If you get a PayPal invoice from someone for $100, and you have $20 in your PayPal account, you can’t use your credit card to pay the $100…you can only use it to pay $80, and the remaining $20 comes from your PayPal balance. This is doubly irritating when you try to not pay via your PayPal account, and instead just pay with your credit card - if you’re using a credit card that’s attached to your PayPal account, PayPal won’t let you use that card, it forces you to sign into your account and pay it that way. Frustrating!

Don’t ask me where I heard this, but for my entire life I believed that starting a car used up the same amount of fuel as an idling car used in five minutes. So for as long as I’ve been driving (which is inching up on two decades now), I thought the “smart” thing was to leave the car idling for a few minutes rather than turning it off. Turns out I was completely and totally wrong according to this article. Idling for 10 seconds uses the same amount of fuel as starting a car in the first place. Idling a car for 10 minutes can use as much fuel as it takes to travel 5 miles. And even on the coldest days, idling your car for 30 seconds is all you need before driving away - the car will warm up faster on the move rather than idling (though the article says not to accelerate hard or drive at high speeds for the first 3-5 miles…which isn’t exactly practical advice in all situations).

I’m generally one of those types of people that thinks he’s right most of the time, but I try to keep myself open to correction and further learning…and I’ve just been schooled on the issue of idling.

Note to self: double-check spelling of domain names before you register them. Good thing I never tried to use these…

If you were an advertising executive working for Gillette, how would you feel about your product being portrayed in such a low-quality manner? The video was truly atrocious in quality. Perhaps MSN Video has some ridiculous limits on the bit rates of submitted advertising videos, but if I were working for Gillette I’d say “This is the video quality we want, if you want our advertising dollars, you’ll run this.”

That video pretty much speaks for itself - it’s amazing how so many businesses can screw up something so simple. I see it day after day with technology products. I might not like Apple on a dozen different levels, but I respect their singular vision for trying to get things right.