I have a love/hate relationship with leadership books. Most of them give all sorts of interesting tips and tricks for doing something that you want to do. Most deal with cosmetic issues. What most leadership books don’t do is to evaluate underlying assumptions and issues that cause us to think about why we do what we do.

That’s why I appreciated the honest evaluation of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linksy in their book “Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading.”

One of the central claims that Heifetz and Linsky make is that leadership can be a dangerous undertaking when leaders confuse how they need to react to a set of problems. Leaders, they say, face two main kinds of problems. The first are technical problems. These are issues that can be solved by the leader by applying procedures or tools that are readily available. These are issues such as cutting budgets, streamlining processes, firing people, and the like. The second kind are adaptive challenges.

They say:

“Without learning new ways–changing attitudes, values, and behaviors–people cannot make the adaptive leap necessary to thrive in the new environment. The sustainability of change depends on having the people with the problem internalize the change itself” (p. 13).

In other words, they require people to be able to adapt and make changes in themselves in order to address and meet the need of the issue.

Note the danger when leaders try to apply the wrong solutions, though:

“When people look to authorities for easy answers to adaptive challenges, they end up with disfunction. They expect the person in charge to know what to do, and under the weight of that responsibility, those in authority frequently end up faking it or disappointing people, or they get spit out of the system in the belief that a new “leader” will solve the problem” (p. 14).

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You may know about these already, but just in case I wanted to give them a shout out.

Beginning on 9/09/2010 The NINES conference will be beginning. There will be over 150 speakers that have submitted 9 minute videos in which they teach on leadership. To get more info on the speakers and to register click here.

Also, on September 9-10, there will be a leadership conference webcast for THE FORUM 2010. There will be some big names form the business world presenting as well.

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Here’s a high five for you!

On September 15, 2009, we celebrated the 100th post of Modern Ekklesia here. And almost exactly a year later  we’ve arrived at the 200th post!

Yaaaay! So I guess we’re averaging about 100 posts a year, which is about two per week, which is just right, I think.

So, to celebrate and to say thanks you to YOU, we’ll be having a giveaway!! I love those.

We’re giving away some free “iNotePads.” They’re notepads that look and are the size of an iPhone, and are courtesy of SonicPrint.com. Write your grocery list on there, pretend that it’s a real iPhone and talk into it, or use it as origami paper…the use is up to you

To receive one, just leave any comment here below and I’ll randomly select a few winners. So once again, just wanted to thank you for making this a place of dialogue, encouragement, and learning! Keep it up!

[image by ChernobylBob]

I read this article on Yahoo News about a priest who skateboards to connect with the youth in his area.

He says:

“Many times I have felt that this is the way I can bring many people a bit closer to Jesus.”

So what do you think?

There’s been a lot of discussion these days regarding churches being “missional.” That’s one of those terms that began to appear a few years ago that sounds really good, but that no one seems to understand. It’s similar to the use of “emergent church.” Sounds good, but no one really gets it.

I wanted to submit this post as a primer on the subject. A very basic one.

Before I do, though, I wanted to address something that you may have been wondering about. I’ve been writing a little, and you’ll continue to see a lot more writing concerning topics that deal with missional church. In case you’re wondering why, check out the “about” section of this blog for more info. But in short, it’s because of a program I started a few months back where I’m studying a lot of missional leadership stuff. I just mention that so you know where all this stuff is coming from.  Ok….moving on.

So I was reading an article recently from Alan Roxburgh called “The Missional Church” (you can download it by clicking on the link) in which he seeks to give some basic definitions about what the missional church movement is about. I’ll share just a few of the most basic points.

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It’s a question I’ve been thinking about for the last few months.

At the moment I just have one church. And without any traffic, it takes me a good 40 minutes to get to the church. With any traffic at all, it easily takes me an hour or more. I feel like it’s been severely limiting to my ministry. If someone wants to meet with me, I find myself thinking about what time they want to meet. Is it close to rush hour? Can they meet at a different time to avoid traffic? Of course if there’s an emergency I come no matter the time.

But I can’t lead a small group from my house. It’s too far for people to come.

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If you’re in love with your iPhone or your iPad, or a variety of other Apple products, you can thank Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, Inc.

I read an interesting article from Fast Company magazine recently that highlighted a little more of his leadership style- that of micromanager in chief. Allow me to share the quote and then I’ll share a few thoughts on the other side:

Mike Evangelist (yep, that’s his name) still remembers one of his first meetings with Jobs. It took place in the Apple boardroom in early 2000, just a few months after Apple purchased the American division of Astarte, a German software company where Evangelist was an operations manager. Phil Schiller, Apple’s longtime head of marketing, put Evangelist on a team charged with coming up with ideas for a DVD-burning program that Apple planned to release on high-end Macs — an app that would later become iDVD.

“We had about three weeks to prepare,” Evangelist says. He and another employee went to work creating beautiful mock-ups depicting the perfect interface for the new program. On the appointed day, Evangelist and the rest of the team gathered in the boardroom. They’d brought page after page of prototype screen shots showing the new program’s various windows and menu options, along with paragraphs of documentation describing how the app would work.

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