Happy 4th!

Celebrating Independence Day watching "1776" and eating this cake Anita baked.
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Little Red Book of Selling

I'm closing this week of looking at "The 100 Best Business Books of All Times" by talking about selling. The specific book in question is Jeffrey Gitomer's "Little Red Book of Selling." Gitomer is a sales consultant, prolific author, and motivator.

If you think a book about sales isn't appropriate about the church leadership world, you would be wrong. This book could also be entitled the Little Red Book of Buying. As Gitomer would say, people don't like to be sold, but they love to buy. The people that churches are reaching, and more importantly want to reach, are the same. If you want to connect with them, you must begin to adopt a philosophy that drives you to a higher, value-driven, helping purpose.

This book offers motivation to get you jump-started on interactions with people. Although it is a collection of many of the great sales teaching philosophies, it can be a great learning tool for leaders whose "product" is relationships with people. The nuggets in this book may be couched in "sales" terms, but make no bones about it: you will learn dozens of effective techniques for interacting with people, and creating networks of relationships that will impact your ministry in powerful ways.

Here's a quote that pretty much sums up why I like Gitomer, and why I think leaders in ChurchWorld should be reading his work:

It's not hard sell, it's heart sell. Good questions get to the heard of the problem/need/situation very quickly - without the buyer feeling like he or she is being pushed.

Substitute the word "buyer" with your choice of words - friend, guest, unbeliever, prospect - and you have a pretty good philosophy of engaging people where they are at, and building a relationship with them.

That's my quick look at "The 100 Best Business Books of All Time." Check it out of your local library, or pick up a copy for your own library. There's a wealth of wisdom inside from the business world that you can make applications in your world today.

Why We Buy

Churches can learn a lot from the retail sector. Churches don't sell a "product", or engage in offering goods and/or services for cash - or do they?

"Why We Buy" by Paco Underhill is a classic that I have posted on before - a series of three applications to ChurchWorld here, here, and here. For details, go back to those prior posts. I'm revisiting it today not only because it is on the Top 100 list, but because of the power of its message:

There is a "science" to shopping, and by understanding that science, you can become more successful at it. The relevance to ChurchWorld is the same. The same three distinct aspects of shopping: design (the space); merchandising (what you put in the space); and operations (whatever employees do) apply to churches too.

Leading Change

Change is a constant reality. Not only that, but the rate of change is increasing exponentially. How do you handle change?

John Kotter has written some great works on change; "Leading Change" is the best of a trilogy of works on change. "Help, My Iceberg is Melting" takes the content of "Leading Change" and puts in a fable about a group of penguins on an iceberg. "A Sense of Urgency" focuses in on the first of his change principles. Here is a summary of Kotter's 8 step process:

SET THE STAGE
1. Create a Sense of Urgency.Help others see the need for change and the importance of acting immediately.
2. Pull Together the Guiding Team. Make sure there is a powerful group guiding the change—one with leadership skills, bias for action, credibility, communications ability, authority, analytical skills.
DECIDE WHAT TO DO
3. Develop the Change Vision and Strategy. Clarify how the future will be different from the past, and how you can make that future a reality.
MAKE IT HAPPEN
4. Communicate for Understanding and Buy-in. Make sure as many others as possible understand and accept the vision and the strategy.
5. Empower Others to Act. Remove as many barriers as possible so that those who want to make the vision a reality can do so.
6. Produce Short-Term Wins. Create some visible, unambiguous successes as soon as possible.
7. Don’t Let Up. Press harder and faster after the first successes. Be relentless with instituting change after change until the vision becomes a reality.
MAKE IT STICK
8. Create a New Culture. Hold on to the new ways of behaving, and make sure they succeed, until they become a part of the very culture of the group.

One of the paradoxes of the church today is that it demands continual innovation yet often resists change. Understanding how to lead through change is a great skill all leaders need to have - especially in ChurchWorld.

How's your Leadership Change Quotient?

Six Thinking Hats

This scenario has been repeated thousands of times, maybe in your organization this week: You are facing a big problem. A decision made months ago has now caused sharply declining results. A big meeting has been called, and all the staff enters the conference room with something different on their mind.

Your R&D department has an armful of charts, research, and data depicting the path of the project. The creative department has sketched up a new campaign that improves the message. The marketing manager is unsure if he will be around after the meeting. And the office manager smugly recalls how she suggested it was a bad idea to begin with.

The meeting quickly turns into a discussion that even more quickly becomes an argument about whose perspective has more merit. Each person’s emotional attachment to their point of view and their verbal commitment to their position makes considering other options difficult. The team leader knows that the way through the impasse is to consider a wide range of options.

To move just such a discussion forward, Edward De Bono, in “Six Thinking Hats,” delineates six clear directions, or hats, that represent a particular line of human thought. To each hat he assigns a color, and just like the hat, one puts on that line of thinking to consider the problem at hand.

• White is neutral and objective – the white hat is concerned with objective facts and figures.


• Red suggests anger, rage, and emotions – the red hat gives the emotional view.


• Black is somber and serious – the black hat is cautious and careful; it points out the weakness in an idea.


• Yellow is sunny and positive – the yellow hat is optimistic and covers hope and positive thinking.


• Green is grass, growing and abundant, fertile growth – the green hat indicates creativity and new ideas.


• Blue is cool, the color of the sky, which is above everything else – the blue hat is concerned with control, the organization of the thinking process, and the use of the other hats.

Six Hats thinking allows participants to focus their energy in a specific direction by getting everyone to “wear” one hat at a time.

DeBono rightly states that “the biggest enemy of thinking is complexity, for that leads to confusion.” His six hat method of discussion allows the exploration of a topic in a natural and objective manner. The conversational method makes the material easier to internalize and apply. It is an effective way to organize your meetings so that they actually initiate progress rather than create more roadblocks.

I’ve been able to use Six Hats thinking to help groups step back from an emotionally-charged issue and approach it from a rational, thinking direction. In every case, the results have been simply amazing. Most people have the capacity to look at a situation in a different perspective. It only takes a leader to help them find the right “hat” to wear in the discussion.

Have you tried being a hat-maker lately?

Purple Cow

Regular readers know that Seth Godin is one of my favorite authors, and that his writing, while not originally intended for a church audience, is always dead-on applicable for church leaders to read, digest, and put into practice.

“Purple Cow” is one such book.

Yes, the title comes from the limerick. It’s all about being remarkable. Not in the sense of “incredible” or “extraordinary”, but as in “worthy of remark.” Godin refers to remarkable when a product or service inspires users to spread the word to someone else.

How many experiences did you have today that you are going to tell your five closest friends about? One? None? Now think about the experiences your “customers” had today. Will they be raving to their friends? If your answer to the question is not a confident “yes,” then it’s time to do something remarkable.

What’s the purple cow in your organization?

What's on your summer reading list?

I've posted before on the high value I place in reading. It's something I learned from my father, and something that my own kids have caught. Regular readers of this blog also know that I am always reading several books a week - books of all types. So when "The 100 Best Business Books of All Time" came out earlier this year, it was only a matter of time till a reserved copy came up at my local library. I've started reading it on my Dallas trip and it is living up to its title.

11,000 - that's the number of business books published in the US in 2007. In more concrete terms, that's a stack of books as tall as a nine-story building, with 880 million words that would take six and a half years to read. "100 Best" authors Jack Covert and Todd Satterson also maintain that locked up somewhere in that tower of paper is the solution to your current business problems.

With their comment in mind, for the next few days, I want to dive into "100 Best" and pull out a few that made the list and have proved their worth to the church leadership audience.

At the top of my list from "100 Books" is Peter Drucker's "The Effective Executive". While I will not attempt the impossible task of trying to capture the genius of Peter Drucker in a few paragraphs, I would instead encourage you to pick up a copy from your library and read it; better yet, just go buy up a paperback reprint.

The word "effective" in the title speaks powerfully to Drucker's wisdom. One quote will suffice:

Effectiveness is, after all, not a "subject", but a self-discipline.

You really can't get much simpler, nor much deeper, than that. Effective church leaders do first things first and they do one thing at a time. Effective church leaders are continually learning - and practicing - these disciplines: Time. Strengths. Contribution. Concentration. Decision-making.

How do you measure your effectiveness?