By: gfesadmin on October 25, 2012
In my last post I already mentioned Nitin Nohria’s Handbook of Leadership – Theory and practice and how he structures his book into five main topics and 26 different essays. I tried to give an overview about the meta structure and link it to my ministry experiences. I already mentioned that Nohria collected different research…
By: gfesadmin on October 25, 2012
What is leadership? What does it take to lead? Who is an effective leader? What are the qualities and attributes of a leader? These are all great and pertinent questions? But there are no set answers. These questions are all understood in variety of ways in different contexts. One must not fail to understand that…
By: gfesadmin on October 25, 2012
Is the title a hyperbolic overstatement or a kind asessment. Actually, the church may be absent without leave: AWOL. As I read Nohria’s book and especially the chapter entitled “Pursuing Authentic Leadership Development” I wondered how the church was engaged in leadership development. The author of the chapter, Bruce J. Avolio, wrote that “we are…
By: gfesadmin on October 25, 2012
One ice-cube please The flight attendant had that tired smile on her face – the one that is forced after about eight hours on a packed plane. The Brussels Airliner was almost to Burundi and the last drinks were being served before landing. “I’ll take a Coke, please,” I requested. “Do you want ice?” she…
By: gfesadmin on October 25, 2012
As a young boy growing up in Pennsylvania, life seemed simple. Living not to far from Gettysburg I remember climbing and playing hide and seek with my brother and sister at Devil’s Den, one of the most significant positions held during the battle of Gettysburg in The American Civil War. It all seemed surreal at…
By: gfesadmin on October 25, 2012
During my college years I believed leadership skills were something you were born with. They could be honed and tweaked, but you either had them or you didn’t. During my B.A. and M.Div., I went through several leadership classes and other experiences designed to bring out the leader that was supposedly already inside me. Most…
By: gfesadmin on October 22, 2012
Last week I had my second ordination anniversary. Since two years I am now the ordained senior pastor at St. Nicolai Church in Gifhorn, Germany. A Lutheran congregation with three churches and about 5000 members. (With my co-pastors. ht: waz-online.de) An anniversary is always a time for evaluation and a reflecting look back. Our weekly…
By: gfesadmin on October 20, 2012
“After seeing you in ministry and leadership it seems to me that women leaders are fairly well accepted in India”, remarked a friend of mine here in the U.S. There is some truth to that generalization. Like the West, the India too has dynamic women at the helm of leadership in politics, government, business, and…
By: gfesadmin on October 19, 2012
My all-time favorite question I ask when interviewing leaders for American Baptist Homes of the West is “Tell me about your leadership values and how you have used them to lead others in your past experiences?” I very seldom get a well thought-out response. I am not surprised as I have found few leaders have…
By: gfesadmin on October 19, 2012
Acts chapter one and verse eight reads, “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” The power proclaimed here is an inner transformational type…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
In the Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice under the heading “Leadership as Meaning-Making” we find the following quote: “The preoccupation of classic social theorists with the meaning-making capacity of leaders can be traced to an even more fundamental concern with the uneasy relationship between the capitalist mode of exchange on the one hand, and…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
In their book “Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice,” Mayo and Nohria points out that, “Although we find evidence of a prototype design in leadership research, there is no clearly dominant theoretical perspective on leadership.” While this statement may in fact be true, it hasn’t stopped researchers and people from the general public alike…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
At a local church a priest, a rabbi and a imam (no, this is not a bar joke) all met in a church to talk about interfaith understanding. They had developed a relationship after 9/11 to talk about how faith communities can break down biases and suspicions between them. The interchange was respectful and civil.…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
It is so rare to see a musical band stay together for more than a decade. Sure, there is U2, Aerosmith and a few others, but most break apart. After a period of time, crazy schedules, the pressures of fame, life on the road and often a lack of significant leadership cause bands to simply…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
“Without Integrity Nothing Works”* are powerful words (Erhard, Jensen, Zaffron 2008). Reading those quoted words in the present reading assignment book from Harvard Business School caught my attention. Integrity is a word pregnant with numerous nuances of meaning and many are morally charged. So, I was naturally curious about how the issue of integrity as…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
As the title itself suggests, the book Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice edited by Nohria and Khurana is quite a comprehensive and thorough narrative of various facets of leadership. I decided to delve deeper into Chapter 12 titled ‘power and leadership’ and chapter 13 ‘Leadership and Cultural context’ as they are closer inrelevance to my…
By: gfesadmin on October 17, 2012
KFC, Fanta and the BBC If you travel, you know what I’m talking about! I can be pretty certain that whenever I spend the night in a hotel, anywhere in the world, I know that the one English language station on the television will be the British Broadcasting Company – or BBC. I am able…
By: gfesadmin on October 17, 2012
In honor of today’s post I’ve got a little video that should bring back some memories. Check it out, and then read on! The relationship between power and pastors is often a tenuous one. In Handbook of Leadership and Theory and Practice, Joseph S. Nye writes about the connection of leadership and power. Nye breaks down power into…
By: gfesadmin on October 12, 2012
Irrelevant is a word that has been thrown around a lot to describe church. Some churches have worked hard to be relevant to their culture. It usually means attempting to get people to go to church. But young adults are increasingly choosing not to go to church. Do they feel it is irrelevant to their…
By: gfesadmin on October 12, 2012
The journey to gaining an understanding of reality was a long and arduous one for me. You might say that as I set out on this journey of understanding God and my Christian beliefs, I found all of the pot holes any one could imagine. In fact, these pot holes nearly stopped me on several…
