Kevin Stilley

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Leadership and Management Book Recommendations

Danny Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has recommended the following books on Christian Leadership and Management.  What do you think of his suggestions?  What would you add to his list?

Anthony, Michael J. The Effective Church Board: A Handbook for Mentoring and Training Servant Leaders. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993.

Anderson, Leith. A Church for the 21st Century. Minneapolis: Bethany, 1992.

Barna, George, ed. Leaders On Leadership. The Leading Edge Series. Ventura, CA: Regal, 1997.

Drucker, F. Peter. 1996. The Effective Executive. New York: Harper, 1967.

________. Managing the Non-corporate Organization. New York: Harper, 1990.

________. Managing for the Future: the 1990’s and Beyond. New York: Dutton, 1992.

Finzel, Hans. The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make. Wheaton: Victor, 1994.

Gangel, Kenneth O. Feeding and Leading. Wheaton: Victor, 1989.

________. Team Leadership in Christian Ministry. Chicago: Moody, 1997.

Hersey, Paul, Kenneth H. Blanchard, and Dewey E. Johnson. Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Hesselbein, Frances, Marshall Goldsmith, and Richard Beckhard, ed. The Leader of the Future. Drucker Foundation Future Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

________., ed. The Organization of the Future. Drucker Foundation Future Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.

Hesselbein, Frances, Marshall Goldsmith, Richard Beckhard, and Richard F. Schubert, ed. The Community of the Future. Drucker Foundation Future Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

Maxwell, John C. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998.

Miller, Michael D. Kingdom Leadership: A Call to Christ-Centered Leadership. Nashville: Convention Press, 1996.

Mims, Gene. Kingdom Principles for Church Growth. Nashville: Convention Press, 1994.

Schultz, Glen. Kingdom Education. Nashville: LifeWay, 1998.

Shelley, Marshall, ed. Leading Your Church Through Conflict and Resolution. Library of Leadership Development. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1997.

________., ed. Renewing Your Church Through Vision and Planning. Library of Leadership Development. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1997.

Tidwell, Charles A. The Educational Ministry of a Church: A Comprehensive Model for Students and Ministers. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1996.

Westing, Harold J. Church Staff Handbook: How to Build an Effective Ministry Team. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1997.

Williams, Dennis E., and Kenneth O. Gangel. Volunteers for Today’s Church: How to Recruit and Retain Workers. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993.

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Planning – select quotes

Form your plans with deliberations, but execute them with vigor.
~ Bias of Priene

Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you ready or not, to put this plan into action.
— Napolean Hill

The key is not to prioritize what is on the schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
~ Stephen Covey

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.
~ Napolean Hill

The majority of men meet with failure because (they don’t create) new plans to take the place of those that fail.
~ Napoleon Hill

The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
~ Lee Iacocca

Dig the well before you are thirsty.
~ Chinese Proverb

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RELATED

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John Maxwell – select quotes

A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.

All Leadership is influence.

At any time I am one step from stupid.

Encouragement is the oxygen of the soul.

If a person doesn’t govern his temper, his temper will govern him.

People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.

The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders and continually develops them.

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Bureaucracy – select quotes

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
~ Honore de Balzac

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.
~ Rosa Luxemburg

A teacher’s day is half bureaucracy, half crisis, half monotony and one-eighth epiphany. Never mind the arithmetic.
~ Susan Ohanian

My Lord, If I attempted to answer the mass of futile correspondence that surrounds me, I should be debarred from all serious business of campaigning. I must remind your Lordship—for the last time—that so long a I retain and independent position, I shall see that no officer under my command is debarred, by attending to the futile driveling of mere quill-driving in your Lordship’s office, from attending to his first duty—which is, and always has been, so to train the private men under his command that they may, without question, beat any force opposed to them in the field.
~ Duke of Wellington

The growth and prosperity of evangelical institutions during the 1970s and 1980s have brought with them much bureaucracy, and bureaucracy invariably smothers vision, creativity, and even theology. Leadership is now substantially in the hands of the managers, and as a consequence the evangelical capital is not being renewed
~ David Wells

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Time Management – select quotes

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.
~ Jean de la Bruyere

The three most difficult things are: to keep a secret, to employ time properly, and to bear an injury.
~ Chilon

Dost thou love Life? Then do not squander Time; for that’s the stuff Life is made of.
~ Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanac

Time is more value than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.
~ Jim Rohn

Mis-spending a man’s time is a kind of self-homicide.
~ George Savile

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Developing Common Sense

Can you learn common sense? In The Power Of Simplicity: A Management Guide to Cutting Through the Nonsense and Doing Things Right Jack Trout offers the following four guidelines to facilitate thinking in simple, commonsense terms.

  1. Get your ego out of the situation. Good judgment is based on reality. The more you screen things through your ego, the farther you get from reality.
  2. You’ve got to avoid wishful thinking. We all want things to go a certain way. But how things go are often out of our control. Good common sense tends to be in tune with the way things are going.
  3. You’ve got to be better at listening. Common sense by definition is based on what others think. It’s thinking that is common to many. People who don’t have their ears to the ground lose access to important common sense.
  4. You’ve got to be a little cynical. Things are sometimes the opposite of the way they really are. That’s often the case because someone is pursuing their own agenda. Good common sense is based on the experiences of many, no the wishful thinking of some.

What guidelines would you add to this list?

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Seagull Leadership

I have been listening to a series of leadership CDs published by Willow Creek Resources. One of the CDs from his series, entitled The Leadership Summit on Developing Teams, features Ken Blanchard. His session was on “Developing People: Giving and Receiving Feedback.”

In the course of his presentation he made the following statement:

“The number one leadership style in the world is called seagull management, … most managers aren’t around until something is wrong, and then they fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everybody, and then fly out.”

The audience roared with laughter. I think there were a couple of reason why they, and I, found it to be humorous. (1) It was a great visual. There is no way to NOT see the metaphor. (2) It applies all too often.

To those of you who are manager I would ask the following question; “Have you been practicing seagull leadership?” Would we get the same answer if we asked your direct reports rather than you?

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Grace In The Workplace

I asked Peter Drucker, … “Peter, why are you a Christian?” …He says, “Ken, there’s no better deal.” I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Who else has grace?”

The above was related by business consultant Ken Blanchard. I have been listening to a series of recordings on developing teams and Blanchard was giving a presentation on “Developing People: Giving and Receiving Feedback” when he made the above statement.

I believe that in all my years, which included a lifetime in church, a decade of training managers and a stint teaching business at the college level, that is the very first time I have ever heard anyone speak of “grace” as a leadership model. I am hoping to flesh this out a bit and thought I would throw the door open to you for suggestions. Two questions that I have are (1) what Biblical passages would relate to this premise?, and (2) what would a “grace based leadership model” look like in a secular business?

Anyone care to share your thoughts?

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