Leadership is Important

Someone mentioned to me today that my blog entries have been awfully lopsided toward leadership recently. There are two reasons for that: (1) I'm taking a huge leadership step in the next several months and leadership is occupying a lot of my thinking. (2) I'm preparing for a class at Dallas Seminary at the end of July and all my required reading is in the area of organizational leadership.

Book reviews and a more balanced blog will return once I start reading other things and get a chance to catch my breath.

Even so, leadership is important. I would even argue that good leadership principles are more important for churches than corporations. John Gardner agrees (though he applies it to all nonprofits). He describes a poorly managed nonprofit organization as a "bad" organization

"[Bad] in the sense of pious continuance of not competent or creative work, which in a way is damaging. Damaging because it uses up well-meaning dollars, because it breeds discouragement in people who just feel 'We're working so hard and we're just not getting anywhere.' And I think there's a fair amount of that in the nonprofit world. And there's something about lofty ideals that are at odds with clean-cut self-evaluation. You know, "How can you criticize us when our ideals are so great?" That's why I like that cartoon of Peanuts on the pitcher's mound saying "How can we lose when we're so sincere?""

If we are ambassadors of Christ (and we are); cities on a hill (and we are); lights reflecting the Light of the world (and we are); shouldn't our organizations be led at an even higher level than organizations with a less lofty goal?

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