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…
By: Kristy Newport on March 1, 2023
Polanyi’s summary In my education, I have not taken a course in economics, so I found Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time to be arduous reading. It wasn’t until the twenty-first chapter on ‘Freedom in a Complex Society,’ Polanyi’s final words in his historical account, when my mind began…
By: Becca Hald on February 28, 2023
I do not often have the best sense of direction. I grew up in a part of Southern California where the North/South bound 101 freeway travels East to West. I went to college in Santa Barbara where the ocean was to the South messed with my sense of direction. I am eternally grateful for Apple…
By: Elmarie Parker on February 28, 2023
Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky are each leadership experts in their own right, each with long pedigrees. But in “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World,”[1] they combine their sixty-plus years of experience and learning to provide a leadership “field book”[2] that offers “…practical steps…
By: Kim Sanford on February 28, 2023
My younger son is freakishly good at making mental connections. Since he was little, he’s been surprising us by blurting out the most random and absolutely on-point knowledge. We used to ask him, “How did you know that, Zachary?” Or “Who told you that?” and he would say in his high-pitched 3-year-old voice, “My BRAIN…
By: Pam Lau on February 28, 2023
In his memoir, A Thousand Days, former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger reproached himself for not objecting during the planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion: “I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one’s impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by…
By: Andy Hale on February 28, 2023
Occasionally, a book hits the zeitgeist at just the right time with the right words. Over the last several years, Tod Bolsinger’s Canoeing the Mountain and Tempered Resilience have been those books for church leaders. But if you talk to Tod, which I have on two occasions for the CBF Conversations Podcast (first interview and second interview), he’d tell you that…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on February 27, 2023
Ronald Heifetz and his co-authors Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky had me at the subtitle of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: “Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.” Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky all lead Cambridge Leadership Associates, a leadership development firm that spans international borders and sectors of industry. Having additional experience…
By: Scott Dickie on February 27, 2023
We might be able to get through life, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (1) but there’s only one way to read Kahneman’s book: slow. I found this book full of interesting facts buried in an over-abundance of words—often descriptions of various research experiments—which made the book difficult to read. Having said that, the overall assertion—that we…
By: John Fehlen on February 27, 2023
Nobel Prize recipient, Daniel Kahneman’s landmark book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” has been in publication since 2011. This groundbreaking work explores the two systems that drive the way we think. Simply put (as if!), System 1 is fast and emotional, while System 2 is slower and more logical (Kahneman, 20). For over 12 years, since…
By: Travis Vaughn on February 27, 2023
If I’m truthful, I think I’d say I really like working alone. Not all the time, of course. But a lot of the time. In fact, I’m pretty happy running a small business as my side hustle, in partnership with my wife, with no other employees. Wait. Pause. That might be my “remembering self,”[1] taking…
By: Jennifer Vernam on February 27, 2023
I was struck by the continuation of a theme from last week’s reading of Edwin Friedman[1] to this week in David Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.[2] I am going to try to show how I wove the concepts of Friedman’s non-anxious leadership and Kahneman’s System 1 and 2 thinking together. Last week, in the online…
By: Laura Fleetwood on February 26, 2023
The place where your feet meet the ground matters. In an age where a large part of our communication and information appears on digital screens from all over the world, it’s easy to forget the importance of the geographical environment in our daily lives. Two books that remind us of the power of place are…
By: Daron George on February 26, 2023
“The Map That Changed the World” is a book written by Simon Winchester and published in 2001. The book tells the story of William Smith, a 19th-century English geologist who created England and Wales’s first geological map, changing how people thought about the Earth’s history. The book describes Smith’s life, his early career as a…
By: Tonette Kellett on February 26, 2023
In The Map that Changed the World we read about an engineer named William Smith that lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s. [1] He built canals and discovered many fossils along the way. In doing so, he found that the layers of rock beneath the surface of the earth rose and fell, and…
By: Audrey Robinson on February 26, 2023
This week’s readings couldn’t be more dissimilar on the surface. The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester and Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall are very different stories. As I pondered to find commonality – I realized it is the difference between them that I found merit and will explore. I will briefly…
By: Jean de Dieu Ndahiriwe on February 25, 2023
In Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall shares several ideas, and as I read the book question remains whether there will ever be peace on this side of heaven. I found this book interesting and will look at a few key ideas. My main takeaway is that, as suggested in his title, we might all be prisoners…
By: Chad McSwain on February 25, 2023
Have you ever considered that maps, or more precisely, the ground beneath you influences how you think? Without a doubt, we take the ground and maps for granted. We live in an age of pocket GPS that guides family road trips and gives accurate milage and minutes to the nearest McDonalds, yet this is a…
