I am returning from a defense of a student’s doctoral thesis (congratulations Dr. Jill – you passed!). And while the thesis involved assessment of the church and its effectiveness, it could have quite easily been done to assess any one of a number of businesses or organizations. Jill reminded me that there is a lot more we all could do as leaders if we were serious about determining if what we are doing is helpful or not.
Continue reading "How Do You Measure Success?" »
A few weeks back I ran across an article on the front of the Life section in USAToday. The title of the article was "Losing is in the lesson plan" and it told the story of a group of teachers in Indiana who, collectively, dropped 300 pounds by inspiring one another into eating better & exercising regularly.
Continue reading "Lesson Plan For Change" »
Dave Daubert - Three months ago I had never been to a webinar – since then I have helped lead two and we have one the fourth Tuesday of every month! Three months ago I had never spent a lot of time listening to podcasts – since then I have learned how to make them (including learning how to mix in music, narration, etc!). I have used a web/phone combination for meeting with a church council in Tennessee and conference calling for a meeting of a dozen leaders in a dozen communities along the border of Mexico and New Mexico. And in the last couple of weeks I have seen our functional A.R.E. web site nearly stop functioning due to servers crashing at our hosting company and we have had to scramble to get things back up again (I can take almost NO credit for fixing that – Kelly Fryer performed amazingly well doing things she didn’t know how to do, either!). My point is that if we (or you) are going to function in the new world in which we find ourselves, communicating effectively with a busy, fast paced and diverse world requires that we learn the medium of the day.
Continue reading "ARE you techno-phobic?" »