Books @ Leadership Network

Sometimes Contrarian Leadership

When I heard a strong endorsement for Steven B. Sample’s The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, I added it to my “need to read” stack. In places, I found helpful nuggets from Sample’s musings, which are drawn largely from his years as president of University of Southern California and SUNY-Buffalo before that. I liked his concept of “open communication with structured decision making.” This means that the president (or senior pastor) should find ways to talk to people throughout the organization but should not subvert the established processes for making decisions. I also liked his quote that “one of the silliest things a leader can do is to first rigidly define the responsibilities of a position, and then try to find a human being to match this preconceived job description.”

This highlights the positives and shortcomings of the book. I thought Sample offered a variety of good leadership ideas, and I suspect that each leader would grab onto different ones as a main take-away. But in the end, I didn’t find his advice to be notably contrarian nor did I find it to be a book that I’d enthusiastically recommend to others. In his chapter, “You Are What You Read,” Sample quotes Thoreau’s advice to “read only the best books first, lest there not be time enough to read them all.” For me, Contrarian’s Guide was not one of the “best books.”

Mike Bonem

http://www.SecondChairLeaders.com

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Servolution

By Dino Rizzo

Over the past couple of decades a major shift has taken place that has gone unnoticed by many established congregations. I’ve never had a good word for this shift until today when I read Servolution by Dino Rizzo, pastor of The Healing Place. More and more church leaders are doing what Dino is doing -shifting their focus from building their church to serving their surrounding community and world in the name of Jesus. And guess what? When you focus on the lost, the least, the hurting, God will fill up your church, a lesson Dino shares in his book.  It was before us all the time ‘whenever you do it to the least of these, you have done it to me.”

Whereas mainline churches have been talking about doing social justice for a long time and avoiding evangelism, these new church leaders are learning how to merge the two.  And along with this shift the mantle of social justice has been passed from mainline to the emerging group of missional, kingdom minded churches.

Dino Rizzo has a lot in common with Steve Sojgren and Mathew Barnett, pastor of the Dream Center in Los Angeles, and now Rick Warren pastor of Saddleback. Steve was one of the first pastors to build a mega congregation around random acts of kindness which he called Servant Evangelism. The Dream Center sends out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of food and medical supplies each month to the people of Los Angeles. Now Rick Warren has turned his attention to the AIDS epidemic.

But I want to say a good word for the book Servolution.  Just like Steve’s website, this book is chock full of helpful pointers on how to join the Servolution as well as dozens of examples of how to get started being a serving congregation.  Get the book. And if you can read it without a tear in your eye and joy in your heart something’s wrong. It’s that good.

 

The War of Art

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield rocks you from the get go.  While you may not agree completely with his views on God or ultimate reality, he gets to the core of what stops creatives from creating. 

Whether you're creating a work of art, starting a new venture, planting a church, or instilling a new habit, he wages war on every excuse you can think of that he personifies as "The Resistance", innate to all human beings. 

One of my favorite sections on the challenge of creativity:

"You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas."

He doesn't provide much in the way of how-to's, or scientific research, simply his own personal insights and experiences from a lifetime of failures and rejections.  Anyone who's dared to do anything beyond the status quo will connect with Pressfield's message.

Lon Wong / http://solarcrash.com / http://twitter.com/lon

Outliers: Blog #2- The Matthew Effect

Malcolm Gladwell begins chapter one of Outliers with a quote from Matthew 25:29- "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.  But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath."  Gladwell studies success in the youth hockey programs of Canada which feed many stars into the college and professional hockey teams all over the world.  He also looks at what produces the great soccer stars in the Czechoslovakian junior programs.  What he learns can be applied to many of the sports programs that exist in the United States and produce stars in football, basketball, and other sports. 

What Gladwell finds is that talent, passion, and hard work are important, but they are not the whole story.  Too often, the mystique of the rugged individual who is a self-made millionaire, super star athlete, or successful in some other area of life is not fully justified.  When we get caught up in the idea that successful people must have earned their special place, we miss some of the important elements that lead to success. 

In the case of many sports programs, the intangible that gets missed is very simple, a person’s birthday.  If a boy in Canada wants to be a superstar some day, there is a much better chance this will happen if he was born in the first three months of the year.  The absolute best day is January 1.  It all has to do with ages for leagues, body size, and being picked for better teams with stronger programs.  If you are a Canadian boy and were born in November or December, you are much less likely to become a star.  It is just a matter of timing, sheer body volume…you were born in the wrong month.  In effect, if one Canadian boy is born on January 1 and another on December 30, the first boy has a much greater chance of becoming a hockey star.  Why, because he is about a year older that the boy born in December but they are in the same league.  Who will excel?  Who will be bigger?  Who will the coach notice?  Who will get more playing time and become better?  All of this is due to the date of birth, not skill or hard work. 

This chapter uncovers the need for humility for those who succeed.  Yes, part of what got them onto the all star team was hard work and ability, but another big part of the equation was something they had no control over…the day they were born.  For all those who find themselves in a place of relative success, a healthy dose of humility ought to accompany an honest awareness that part of what got them where they are is timing…being in the right place at the right time.  This becomes even clearer as Gladwell looks at the role of timing in the success of people like Bill Gates, Bill Joy, the Beatles, and John D. Rockefeller.  Check it out…this chapter is fascinating!

Kevin G. Harney

The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse

I decided that for this post I was going to take a little trip from the usual lineup of ministry, theology and leadership books that so permeate my reading and writing.  And I want to talk about a topic, and recommend a book that I think is important for all of us to consider.

As leaders in a variety of professions it is more than likely that you will come across the topic of sexual abuse.  It may be an issue that you are dealing with personally, or it may be one of your employees or volunteers.  The person I am talking about may be the person sitting in the front row of your congregation every morning listening to you preach.  Or it might be that youth who is a leader on Wednesday nights.  It could be the deacon or elder who serves the church faithfully, or it might be that singer in the worship band up front on Sunday morning.  No matter who the person is, more than likely it's an issue that is more pervasive than we would like to admit...and more than likely you know someone suffering from such abuse.

There are lots of good books on the topic of sexual abuse, but I just recently finished Dan Allender's book, The Wounded Heart:  Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse.  It is a great book.

Besides the belief that I think all types of leaders need to read such a book, especially those in ministry and the healing professions...there are a couple of reasons why I think it's innovative.

1. Allender has great wisdom and insight on the issue of sexual abuse.
2. Allender does a great job looking at the role of God in the healing process.
3. Allender takes the topic very seriously, handling a very difficult subject with grace, and he does not do the disservice of throwing cliche Christian answers at it.

Allender says this at the beginning:

At times, I wonder if every person in the world, male and female, young and old, has been sexually abused.  No doubt the nature of my work biases me perspective, perhaps severely.  As a psychologist and a counselor trainer, I'm invited to enter into the lives of countless individuals: people who are your next-door neighbor, your kid's Sunday school teacher, your pastor, your physician and--this one will hurt--your wife or husband.  For so many of them, a history of sexual abuse lingers like a chronic toothache, so familiar that it is no longer recognized, dulling the senses but not interfering with the capacity to perform the routine tasks of life.  In most cases, you would never suspect who has been abused.  If asked directly, many would not recall past abuse; others would lie to avoid the shame of admitting that they were victims of one of the few crimes where the victim feels more shunned and rejected than the criminal (pp. 25).

This is not a new book, but it's an important book.  And as leaders, especially ones who work so close with many people...many of those hurting, I think it's important to have some knowledge and wisdom on the topic.  And hopefully with some insight, you will have the clarity to help that person you know or come across who has been sexually abused.  Whether you will be the one helping up close in the process of that person's struggle and healing, hopefully you will at least have gleaned some tools from this book to assist the person in finding the right help.

I wish I would have read this book earlier in my ministry.  I know now that I wouldn't have missed so many of the signs of sexual abuse that others were consciously or unconsciously trying to communicate.

Rhett Smith
Marriage and Family Therapist Associate in Private Practice, rhettsmith.com/therapy
Former College Pastor and Current Pastoral Care to Youth at HPPC, rhettsmith.com

Outliers: Blog #1- The Roseto Mystery

Outliers is subtitled, “The Story of Success.”  As always, Malcolm Gladwell looks at life and brings fresh and surprising insights.  As much as I loved Tipping Point, I think Outliers is Malcolm’s best book to date. His writing style is growing sharper and each chapter brought new and intriguing insights about what really leads to success. With every new facet of the book, I found myself gaining great insight to sources of success that I had never really thought about.

In the section, The Roseto Mystery, Gladwell investigates a town of Immigrants who left Roseto Italy in the 1880s and 1890s to come to America. Most of these people settled in one area of Pennsylvania which they eventually named after the town they come from in the old world. The new Roseto looked very much like their old town, everyone in it spoke Italian, and in the early 1900s it was a little island (like any other small immigrant towns around that part of America) unto itself.

Where the story gets interesting is in the 1950s. A doctor in the region of Roseto commented to a researcher that he rarely found anyone from that area who dealt with heart disease.  At that time there were many people researching heart disease so this presented a mystery worth investigating.  Also, at that time, before cholesterol lowering drugs, many men died young because of heart disease.  As the research was done, sure enough, this little community had staggeringly healthy hearts.  The heart disease in men was shockingly low compared to the surrounding area and national averages.  The team researched the diet of these people, their exercise patterns, and all the usual suspects when it comes to heart disease.  To their surprise, there were no dietary behavior or normal health pattern that surfaced to indicate why these people were so healthy.  They finally concluded it was not a physical dynamic.

I’ll let you read the whole story in the book, but here was the conclusion.  Their health was positively impacted because of their commitment to community.  They shared meals together, sat on porches in the evenings, talked and laughed.  They greeted each other warmly as they met in the streets.  The people in the town of Roseto seemed to really love each other, care for each other, and function as a big family.

What a message for our day and age.  Medicine seems to be the answer for everything.  The mystery of Roseto reinforces a simple truth God has been trying to get us to see from the beginning of time.  We were made for community.  Grasping this truth just might add years to our lives.

Kevin G. Harney