{"id":12618,"date":"2017-03-23T23:18:20","date_gmt":"2017-03-24T06:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=12618"},"modified":"2017-03-23T23:18:20","modified_gmt":"2017-03-24T06:18:20","slug":"creativity-vs-corporate-raider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/creativity-vs-corporate-raider\/","title":{"rendered":"Creativity vs. Corporate Raider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everything in Max De Pree\u2019s <em>Leadership is an Art<\/em>, should be common sense. Placing people over structures, reveling in creativity, allowing experts to take the lead, and discovering that challenges are really opportunities are all things that are seemingly \u201cDuh\u201d statements when it comes to leadership. De Pree captures these ideals in a winsomely simple book. His presentation makes it feel like these ideals should be a given for leaders. His success as CEO for Herman Miller, Inc. puts power behind his assertions. He presents leadership as an art that is refined with practice, poetic in its simplicity, and powerful in its inclusivity.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, on my bookshelf at home I have at least a half-dozen books that assert leadership as a science rather than the art proposed by De Pree. While many of them incorporate some of the same ideas as De Pree, they do so as part of a formula for success within systems where people are incidental to structures (although they would never say it exactly that way.) I \u201cgrew up\u201d in that world \u2013 the world where the bottom line is ultimately more important than people, and process\/structure reigns supreme. Of course we were taught to take care of our people, encourage their creativity, and delegate to them when possible, but that was always within the framework allowed by process and structure. (I once received a \u201cnegative\u201d comment on an evaluation for being too concerned with the well-being of one of my staff people.) The term \u201cservant leader\u201d was bandied about, but we all knew we were there to serve the system, not other people.<\/p>\n<p>Reading De Pree\u2019s words after spending time in Israel with Arab Christian church leaders caused me to look at the art of leadership in a different way. For almost a week I heard stories from leaders who struggle to lead with creativity and flexibility but feel the burden of leadership in a way that feels like life and death. It is their everyday reality to see challenges as opportunities but they have difficulty letting go in order to find or mentor experts to whom they feel they can trust the mission. These couples are wearing themselves out as servant leaders because they can\u2019t (or won\u2019t) develop the balance required of artists of leadership.<\/p>\n<p>The more I reflected on this, the more frustrating I found the current leadership culture in much of the American church. We hear much about how hard it is to be a Christian in America (we have no clue what hard is), while sitting in leadership conferences that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, rubbing elbows with well-known Christian leaders and innovators. Much of our time is spent complaining about how hard it is to get volunteers to work in our nurseries or youth ministries, or how giving is down. I don\u2019t know how many break-out sessions I have attended on motivating people to give or to volunteer. We write vision and mission statements (which are good things) but have never really learned how to empower people to be both creators and implementers (as De Pree discusses on page 33). Instead, we are vision casters, creators, and implementers who view people as co-implementers at best. Maybe I am being hyperbolic out of my frustration, but I know too many pastors who never take a Sabbath yet choose to stay way too involved in every aspect of every process in the church. There is no artistry, only science and industry. How is it that a company that produces furniture managed to live into the artistry while we in the church often remain focused on the bottom line?<\/p>\n<p>Maybe it\u2019s the jet-lag talking, but it seems to me that the church remains part of the industrial revolution, reveling in the hierarchy born of modernism, while businesses and organizations lean in to artistry, creativity, and partnership. Of course not all churches are like this, but I easily tallied ten \u201cstuck\u201d churches for every one church that lives into De Pree\u2019s principles. De Pree challenges me to step away from the corporate mentality and allow creativity and imagination to take me places I have been afraid to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everything in Max De Pree\u2019s Leadership is an Art, should be common sense. Placing people over structures, reveling in creativity, allowing experts to take the lead, and discovering that challenges are really opportunities are all things that are seemingly \u201cDuh\u201d statements when it comes to leadership. De Pree captures these ideals in a winsomely simple [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[626,35],"class_list":["post-12618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-de-pree","tag-leadership","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}