By: Chad McSwain on March 3, 2023
“All your big givers are going to leave.” That is what an older church member leveraged over the phone one morning – my day off, no less. I had made changes to the music and it was not received well by some. Enter the threat: if you do not change it back then all your…
By: Esther Edwards on March 3, 2023
Have you ever thought about your thoughts? Thoughts can live in the present, then suddenly think of the past, or dream of the future. They can wander to distant lands and then focus and shut out distractions[1] Well, no doubt, noted psychology professor and esteemed scientific thinker, Daniel Kahneman, has thought much about thoughts. Reading…
By: Mary Kamau on March 3, 2023
The pace of changes has increased significantly since the beginning of the 21st Century, and success in organizations is becoming more about adapting to the environment. The challenge of leadership is not just about adapting to the environment but also leading their followers to change and adapt to the environment. People have inertia and resist…
By: Jenny Steinbrenner Hale on March 3, 2023
Says Joseph Stiglitz in the foreword of The Great Transformation, “It is hard and probably wrong, even to attempt to summarize a book of such complexity and subtlety in a few lines.”[1] With that in mind, the following is by no means a summary, but a few themes discovered and a small personal application. Understanding…
By: Shonell Dillon on March 3, 2023
Tempered Resilence: The author is attempts to explain to us how one becomes a leader after being subjected to challenging circumstances. The author uses the analogy of going through the process of blacksmithing. He explains that those that can stand to go through the tempered times are true leaders. He predicts that those that can…
By: Greg McMullen on March 2, 2023
Reading Polanyi, The Great Transformation I was instantly taken back to political science in community college. I felt a passion start to rise up in where I wanted to dive deeper into Polanyi. In my time in Community College, I became passionate with Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto.[1] John Stuart Mill on Liberty.[2] Jean-Jacques Rousseau,…
By: Jonathan Lee on March 2, 2023
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership was written by Ronal Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky. They all bring abundant insights and professional experience from teaching and leading international leadership consulting. This book expands on the theory of adaptive leadership to invite the readers to perspire in “making progress on the most important challenges you face…
By: Russell Chun on March 2, 2023
What follows: Büdös láb or Stinky feet Representativeness[1] Availability[2] Anchoring[3] Looking for Kahneman Nobel Prize – Kahneman’s own words 10 Questions for Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman C. S. Lewis – Dignity of Causality Büdös láb or Stinky feet (in Magyarul or Hungarian) Once upon a time, there was a missionary (me) preparing to wash…
By: Mary Kamau on March 2, 2023
There is no doubt that Christianity has had a tremendous impact on different cultures and is the single most influential religion today. According to the World Data website, there are 2.2 billion Christians worldwide who are distributed between the dominant religious groups of Catholics, the Orthodox, Protestants, the Anglican community, and the Pentecostal movement.[1] Hollard…
By: Troy Rappold on March 2, 2023
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World was written by Ronal Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky in 2009. Published by Harvard Business Press, all three authors have impressive academic pedigrees and work experience. Their book falls into categories of Leadership-Management-Business Analytics. We have read numerous books…
By: Nicole Richardson on March 2, 2023
In 1994 Ronald Heifetz set the leadership field afire with his theory of “Adaptive Leadership” in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers. Since then, adaptive change vs technical change has been the focus of many a leadership conference. Wrapping one’s brain around the applicable differences between adaptive and technical can be an exhausting task. In…
By: David Beavis on March 2, 2023
Five years ago, my wife, Laura, and I moved from Southern California to Oregon. This was a dream come true. For years I had the vision of pastoring in the Pacific Northwest. An opportunity presented itself, we packed, and drove north. Dream come true. It wasn’t long after we arrived that the dream became…
By: Tim Clark on March 2, 2023
Think fast: You’re the pastor. You walk out of a church service and are confronted by a member who is yelling at you and causing a scene. You aren’t sure why, and can’t tell if she’s having a psychotic breakdown, is high on drugs, is demonized, or is just angry. A crowd of congregants has…
By: Jenny Dooley on March 1, 2023
Reading two books back-to-back, one by a family therapist and one by a psychologist has been a surprisingly challenging experience. On the one hand, because I work in the field of counseling the general concepts are not new. On the other hand, what is being discussed feels foreign to me. The confusion is that both…
By: Michael Simmons on March 1, 2023
The paradigm shifting book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, attempts to provide a model that scales leadership across a broad spectrum from family systems to national and international governments. The book addresses the problems associated with organizational change. Though it was written well before the…
By: Cathy Glei on March 1, 2023
Leaders make a lot of decisions. After reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by the economist, psychologist and professor, Dr. David Kahneman, not only are a lot of decisions made on a daily basis but my decision making process involves the interplay of two systems. System one is the automatic system that acts without conscious…
By: Kally Elliott on March 1, 2023
A recent reply sent to a friend via text: “Yes, I did receive your email and I read it while sitting in my car waiting for my son but then he got in the car and asked if I could stop at the grocery store for his favorite meal and then my phone actually rang…
By: Becca Hald on March 1, 2023
My husband majored in Business Economics in college and later went on to earn his Master of Business Administration. He loves learning about the concepts in economics and we have talked about these concepts our entire marriage. I understand some of it, but most of it goes over my head and is not exactly one…
By: Roy Gruber on March 1, 2023
I cannot remember the podcast’s name, but I do remember the statement: “Your church is perfectly designed to achieve its current results.” Ouch. Whoever said that piercing comment to church leaders got that idea from a trio of leadership consultants named Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky. Classified under general management, this leadership…
By: Eric Basye on March 1, 2023
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, written by leadership gurus Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linksy, is an incredibly practical book for those seeking to better understand and apply organizational leadership principles to any context. We first see this practicality in the book’s subtitle, “Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.” This…
