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Probably one of the most surprising guests at the Leadership Summit was Colin Powell. I was pleasantly surprised at how cool he was.

This session was done via taped interview with Bill Hybels interviewing.

Craig Groeschel, pastor of lifechurch.tv, had some great insights on this session here.

Some of Craig’s statement’s to get us going:

- General Colin Powell is a leadership genius.
- A great leader must simultaneously lead aggressively and humbly.
- On a personal note, I loved hearing the general say that he doesn’t want to be known by the color of his skin, but measured by his performance. When I listened to Bill and General Powell, I didn’t see a white man and a black man. I saw two brilliant leaders.

Here is a summary of the notes I took. Basically Bill and General Powell went through a list of “Powell Principles” – basically things that he adheres to in his role as a leader. They were definitely worth hearing and worth applying in our efforts to be better servant-leaders.

• A good leader promotes a clash of ideas. Take advantage of the team’s expertise and make decisions based on all available information.
• A good leader encourages a noisy system. Let people express ideas, alternatives, and information. Ultimately the leader makes a better decision based on all the information given.
• A good leader recognizes that PEOPLE get things done. Leaders have the responsibility of inspiring people to ACTION to get things done.
• A good leader has an open door policy. People shouldn’t be afraid to “hang out” with and talk about ideas with a leader.
• A good leader probes the organization. From the top to the bottom, leaders should be in touch with what’s going on and who is a part of the organization. (I loved this point because he told a story of how he would always make himself available for lower ranking people under his command to stop and chat with him at a certain point on his daily rounds. He knows the benefit of treating people with dignity and respect and hearing their individual voices.)
• A good leader rewards the best performers. Those who are not good performers are retrained, moved, or let go. Bad performers not checked will damage the morale of good performers.
• A good leader is prepared to make someone “angry.” Leaders have to make the tough choices and/or moves that will sometimes anger and offend followers.
• A good leader has fun along the way. (Another good story: General Powell has a garage behind his house where he can escape the pressures of his job and just zone out with restoring old Volvos.)
• A good leader fits no stereotypes.
• A good leader is a perpetual optimist. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplyer (military speak for anything that increases your force over that of opposing forces).
• A good leader knows that things always look better in the morning. A good leader knows that it’s a new day and things start fresh in the morning. (This was neat to hear from someone who held such a serious and stressful job.)
• A good leaders avoids war if at all possible. (General Powell has been nicknamed the “Reluctant General” because of his commitment to try and find a diplomatic solution FIRST in times of conflict.)
• A good leader trusts his instincts.
• A good leader is prepared to be lonely.

Like I said I really enjoyed this session. In fact, I was indeed so inspired by Powell’s integrity and strong leadership that I would vote for him in a heartbeat. Powell for Prez!!

It was refreshing to hear someone from the administrative side of our government with such a down to earth and simple honesty in leadership. Sure he’s not perfect, but he’s obviously a great leader! So let’s learn from him as much as we can!!

I’m back! Had a rough day yesterday. Won’t go into details, but let’s just say I was out of commission and under the weather, but not really sick. Call me and I’ll tell you about it. Don’t have my number? Sorry….

Anyways, I’m going to continue my debrief of the Leadership Summit materials. It’s been really good typing out summaries and kind of going through them again.

If you’re ever able to go to any kind of conference or event that emphasizes leadership GO FOR IT!!

Session 5 “Strategy & Leadership” – by Michael Porter.

Overview: this was one of the most challenging sessions. Michael really challenged the church from an outsiders viewpoint. I’m not really sure if he is a believer or not, but I really got the feeling that he wasn’t. Either way, he was very impressed with the efforts of the church to “do good” in the community, but at the same time very constructively critical of the results of those efforts.

Dan Kimball, whose writings are often focused on designing worship services that include creative and artistic forms of worship, says this about sitting through this session,

As for Michael, he truthfully shared that his talk would feel like a business classroom lecture. So, I framed listening to him through that grid, as I do when I personally read all types of non-church leadership books. I am screening them through a biblical lens and also screening them by asking the questions of what it means for our church and in that context. But, as a pastor, I love learning from sources of all types where truth can be used to further the mission we are on.

I really wholeheartedly agree with this perspective. It was very obvious that Michael Porter, an academic focused on management and economics, was definitely at home in a “business school” classroom setting. So, trying to be a good learner, I buckled down and went along for the ride.

The 2 questions that really framed the entire session were:

1. How do we do well at “doing good” in our communities?
2. How do we serve our communities well?

Basically, the answer given to these questions were this:

• Shift our mindsets from charity/giving (philanthropy) to delivering a social service (product). Basically, striving to get the most bang for your buck. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that I felt like he was advocating turning giving into a business, but I do sense that his motives were all about making the giving that we do participate in actually produce results.
• Make our “giving” more about the recipients than the people “giving” – A lot of times people within the community of faith give because it makes them feel good and checks off a spiritual requirement from a religious checklist, NOT because it makes the recipient feel good, or changes the recipient’s social situation.
• We must track results. Basically, if we’re doing a bad job of helping the homeless in our area, but someone down the street is doing a great job, we should give them our resources to use to be more efficient. (Although, I didn’t agree with everything Porter said, I do think that being more aware of the results of our efforts is a good thing).
• LESS IS MORE: Sometimes it makes sense to pick one area of social service and do it extremely well, than to spread ourselves thin over several and do each of them in a mediocre or bad way.

Another point that really jumped out at me was this:

One of the pitfalls we can get trapped in is trying to contribute to the thousands of worthy causes that are out there. We should probably just focus on one or two and then be excellent at those.

Strategies:

• Figure out where to serve based on, where you can add the most social value. If it costs $40 a plate to run a soup kitchen (when all is said and done) and the people across the street can do it for $10 a plate, maybe it’s better to give them the resources and reach more people. “Where can we do the most good with the resources we have?”
• What are the most pressing social needs of the congregation? What are the most pressing needs of the community around us? What other organizations already exist that might meet both sets of those need can we support? The answers to these questions will determine HOW we serve our communities.

Lastly, we should do things systematically to create structure to deliver the most value. I know that we should all at the very least be trying to meet the needs of our families and friends and those who are connected to our faith community. But in a city-wide/global sense, we should also be doing what we can with the resources we have to help bring about change in people’s lives as well. How can we connect ourselves to organizations, or how can we create organizations that have inherent structure built in to them that deliver solutions to community problems?

I will say that as a non-academic, but a thinker, I was really challenged by this session. There was a lot of “classroom” information, but when I really sat and thought through a lot of it, it was definitely a challenge to be a better steward of the resources God has given me. Not only individually, but also in our faith family.

I really appreciated Porter’s challenge to the church to continue doing well, but to do it in a more efficient and strategic manner to maximize results.

OK, time to take a break from the conference debrief. I’ve enjoyed processing through these first four sessions, but when it comes to the weekend I do enjoy a bit of free time.

So, with that in mind, I recommend wasting a little time with Line Rider, a little flash game I found a few days over on the Relevant Magazine site. Who finds their news items, anyways, I mean come on!!

Also, I’ll probably spend a few hours on my favorite online video game, City of Heroes, saving Paragon City from an alien invasion, or rescuing kidnapped scientists, or retrieving stolen classified technology…you get the point.

While you’re here, though, check out a few of my friends’ blogs, (bo knows, pointing me in a crooked line)or hop on over to my current events blog where I tackle items from the news and that somehow pertain to my overall health and fitness.

Have a great weekend.

This was one of those sessions that was a combination of stories/teaching, but heavier on the teaching side. In some instances it was hard to follow along because the flow of information was so great, but the thoughts and concepts provided were helpful in my quest to become a better servant leader.

Floyd Flake is a spiritual and political leader in his community (Jamaica, Queens, NYC). What was so inspiring was the commitment he expressed to plug in and stay for the long haul in what God had called him to do. To me, one of the most beautiful expressions of christian leadership is when a person dedicates their lives to the cause God has entrusted them with and spends a lifetime pursuing it and seeing it come to fruition.

Overview: Floyd presented 5 different leadership perspectives that every leader will experience throughout their lifetime. They may happen in different seasons or they might overlap.

1) Transitional leadership: recognizing that you might not be there for all points in the journey. John the Baptizer prepared the way for Jesus’ ministry and then stepped aside.

2) Transactional leadership: getting people to “buy in” to what God is doing. This includes delegating responsibilities, and involving people.

3) Transparency in leadership: I sensed that this was one of the perspectives that should overlap ALL of the others, regardless of what season in life we find ourselves in. Integrity should be the cornerstone of our character. Others should know that our lives are in order (not perfect, but submitted to God). We should choose competent and qualified partners to share the journey with.

4) Transformational leadership: This happens when people are motivated to take the initiative and ask “What can WE do next?” True leaders inspiring others to be leaders and them stepping up.

5) Transcendent leadership: Raising up the next generations, passion the torch. Jesus trained and equipped His disciples to go out and make more disciples. We should always be moving towards a place where we WANT our “next generations” to do greater works than we did.

Overall, this was a tough session to sit through. Not because Floyd was a bad communicator. He is an outstanding orator, and a very passionate one at that. It was just a lot of information in one sitting.

Personally, I would have loved to hear more stories about the community and how God was working in and through Floyd and his partners.

This session was a one-on-one interview with Carly Fiorina with Bill Hybels interviewing. In my opinion it was more of a “story” driven session than an actual teaching session. This by no means lessened the opportunities to learn, though.

Carly has an intriguing story, whether you love her or hate her, she is an engaging personality, and we can all learn from her experiences. Even the fact that she was hired by HP as CEO speaks to the talent and leadership skills she possesses.

In her own words she described the atmosphere at HP as resistant to change. “[HP] had once been radicals and pioneers. Now, I’d seen too many instances where a new idea was quickly dismissed with the comment: ‘We don’t do it that way. It’s not the HP Way.’ The HP Way was being used as a shield against change.”

She felt it her role, as the CEO, to inspire change and innovation in the HP culture. Some loved her, others hated her, many misunderstood her. Regardless, she was the leading force in the HP/Compaq merger in 2001.

Her persistent leadership style and dedication to integrity was definitely observable in the interview. In her words, she was fired from HP and they wanted her to “resign” of her own accord to spin it positively in the media for both HP and herself. She refused to, and the resulting media smear has been tough for her, but she said that she is stronger for it.

One of the big ideas that jumped out at me during her interview was her commitment to crediting almost all of her “wisdom” to her parents. “…The older I get, the more I realize that the most important wisdom I’ve learned in life has come from my mother and my father.” (taken from a commencement address in 2005).

This spoke volumes to me, because I understand exactly where she’s coming from. I’m no CEO or world leader, but I do have a circle of influence and I know how to act properly and have a lot of sense because of the way my parents poured their lives into me as I was growing up. Good leadership skills are developed early in a person’s life. Let us all remember that whether we have kids of our own or whether we are around kids, that we can help shape their lives.

Overall, I was very impressed with Carly’s interview. She appeared to be a very thoughtful, composed, and driven person. But one of the things that impressed me the most was when she talked about what was “next” for her. She conveyed that she wasn’t jumping on the next big thing, or rushing into another CEO job. She is waiting for the next “right” thing. You know, the one thing that pulls at her heart strings. Something she is passionate about. That impressed me.

So, whether you agree with her moves as CEO at HP or not, or if you think she is a brilliant leader or not, or if you’ve never heard of her, just a few moments listening to her talk about life, work, and leadership is enough to inspire you to be a better leader. Good leaders are open minded to learning regardless of the source.

May we all be better leaders by opening our hearts and minds to learn from those who have stories to tell and songs to sing.