Radio Free JoJo

Seth Godin is a favorite speaker of mine…this years Summit presentation was one of his best.

Someone here today will change everything.

The notion that we can promote from a position of power…the TV-industrial complex:

Buy TV->Get more distribution->Sell More Products

Ends up with average products for average people – mass is built into our system.

Revolution is occurring destroying the perfect, enabling the impossible. Industrial age is over, replaced by tribes who surround ideas or common bond.

People still want to be in sync, we want to do what “our people” are doing.

Tribes need leaders who will connect, commit, build a culture and be clear about where we’re going.

Is it your opportunity?

What’s changed in the last five years is the laptop…the means of production. Everybody has their hands on the world.

Is this the end of job? The rise of the artist. In the post-industrial age we have the change to do things differently. But there is no map.

Quit bowling…if you’re playing by the rules…don’t expect people are going to talk about you or stop and visit. Pick yourself…if you want to write, write…if you want to sing, sing!

If failure is not an option, then neither is success.

Give gifts not favors. Too many people are holding on to something while it rots.

Go Make something happen. Make art, give gifts, do work that matters, lead.

We need you to lead us.

Global Christian – unprecedented catalytic events are bringing the globe together.

Has the technology and events spurred us to engaging the globe, or do we retreat?

Our mission: we become witnesses of the Gospel and take the Good News across cultural thresholds…be the leaders to break through the “sound barriers”:

1. Jerusalem – comfort zone, speak truth to power and confront those people in our own family. Take on the policies and traditions that are uninclusive.
2. Judea – differences in political parties, denominations, generations
3. Samaria – we avoid like the plague, it takes a spirit-filled leader to go to Samaria…they need to move them beyond their natural affinities

From the beginning the church was intended to be a global movement.

Are you ready to break through your sound barrier?

1. Pray for a divine mandate – what’s breaking your heart, God?
2. Name your catalytic events
3. Mobilize People to Go!

Where is your Samaria…that’s where Jesus is calling us to go!

So far the mayor of Newark, Cory Booker has received the greatest response…amazing speaker.

Lessons I’ve learned from my parents; a story about standing up for something.

You will always face outrageous adversaries; before you can stand tall you must realize that you were born out of radical love and action. A grand conspiracy of love.

What will you do? There are forces that will try to crush you and worse lull and seduce you into mediocrity.

We are the result of people who did not see the world they way others saw it; they had extraordinary vision and the courage of doing something about it. Your attitude about the world speaks to your character.

The world you see outside of you is a reflection inside of you. If you see despair and destruction that’s what’s in your heart and you’ll be worthless, but if you see hope and love then you can do something.

If it is to be…it’s up to me.

Show me first of how you choose to live…about your values, ideals, thought put into action. Infuse truth in that moment.

In every moment you can let life be, or infuse life with truth.

Let us know, stand up. Let us stand and tell our truth.

The basis of business:

1. Find out who your customers are
2. Find out what they want
3. Give it to them

Organizational change: here to there. Be very clear about aspects of “here” that are unacceptable, before you start articulating about “there”.

Entrepreneurship has the power to go a long way for providing for a full life.

When we look at the behavior of successful serial entrepreneurs over time, it turns out that they:

• Have a low appetite for risk
• They spread risk around
• They start out without a big vision
• Distrust projections and studies that forecast the future
• Do create new businesses but not necessary original

Go to war with your business model and reinvent yourself 3 to 5 times in your career

Drucker – Entrepreneurship is a discipline that can be learned

Understand the natural limitations of what we have learned: cost and effect, predictability.

Paralysis – risk-measurable and uncertainty-subjective If you can’t predict the future, create it. Creation-oriented action.

Understand that in the face of unknowability, the only logical thing is to act.

- Take small steps, not big leaps

1. What do you really care about?
2. Pay only what you can afford or want to?
3. Then act…sell or enroll people
4. What keeps people from doing this? Worrying about what you want to do, instead worry about what you want to do next.
5. Fear of failure stops us from acting
   1. failure rate of professional venture capitalist is 60%
   2. If things turn out different, you’ve just learned something that others don’t know

With action trumping everything, you get more times at bat, more chances to win

I am blogging my notes from the Global Leadership Summit of the Willow Creek Association, seen locally in Erie at Grace Church.

Five Critical Questions

1. What’s your challenge level at work?

Dangerously over challenged
Appropriately challenged
Under challenged

Best work…just above appropriately challenged.

If you don’t challenge more – your gifts will atrophy.
If you stay above dangerous – you will break down.
If I live in crazy land I set a bad example

The discipline of replenishment…fill the bucket

Do this test in your departments. Save people who are overchallenged…keep people who are under-challenged.

Your organization can be over-revved or get sleepy. Do the challenge test.

2. What is your plan for dealing with challenging people in organization?

The line exercise: if we lost 50% of our revenue…put people in the order of keeping them or saying goodbye first.

These are not bad people, just people at the end of the line
• Do they carry their weight
• Underperforming
• Off mission
• No longer fit

Key to future is unquestionably tied to the ability to attract and retain fantastic people, and dealing with people at the end of the line

Leading difficult people:
• Fantastic Fred – bad attitude, how much time will you allow Fred to spread his poison (30 days)
• Underperformers – not carrying their weight (3 months) – multiple reasons
• Growth of organization requires someone with greater capacity to perform role – talent elasticity (6-12 months)
If you don’t deal with difficult people, you discourage high performers
Best Christian workplace – build a better culture – engagement survey

3. Are you naming facing and resolving the problems that exist in your organization?

Why can’t we call problems problems? We come from a legacy of leaders who courageously solve problems.

Life cycle diagram – every initative/program has a life cycle:

Accelerating -> Booming -> Decelerating -> Tanking

We are going to address these problems (decelerating) restoration teams with new ideas, fresh thinking

4. When was the last time that you reexamined the core of what your organization is all about?

Are we clear about our core? Churches are in the life-transformation business.
5 words – central message of Christianity
1. Love
2. Evil
3. Rescue
4. Choice
5. Restore

5. Have you had your leadership bell rung recently?

Has anything rocked your leadership world recently? Casting a big vision…fearless and confident…need my boldness back.
Job is to move the organization from here to there…you have to believe that God is willing to help you move. Too much at stake to be defeatist. Why cant your next five years be your best five?

Having been a non-profit CEO for 14 years, I know how important it is to protect your status with the Internal Revenue Service. Recently, there was an IRS filing requirement for non-profits that unfortunately dozens and dozens of Erie area NPO’s missed.

Now, in looking at the list, probably many of these organizations are long-defunct. However there are some surprising names of unions, and community organizations that for now no longer have a deductible status for their donors.

Here’s the list for the 164 and 165 zip codes (all data available at philanthropy.com):

Sounds like tax lawyers may get a bump in business as some of these NPO’s fight to get their status back.

It just occurs to me that if today was April 5, 1911, my boy, Joel Natalie Jr, a son of Silician-American and Irish-American parents, would not be celebrating his birthday getting a good education, making plans, overall enjoying his life and looking toward a bright future.

Today would just be another 10 hour work day in his 6 day work week, pouring molds at a foundry, or working the fields getting them ready for planting. He probably would have been working the past six years, since turning 14. Working conditions were brutal, pay was weak. It’s hard to tell if he would ever have the opportunity to break out of the immigrant social class he might have found himself in; certainly options at the time were few.

His world would be amazingly small. Information would be limited to the daily newspaper, if he was fortunate enough to have gone to grammar school and was literate. It might have been a dream to save up for a Model T, which was released three years earlier. Technology such as commercial radio, TV, and of course the internet were still years or decades away.

I just wanted to take a moment and note what a difference four generations makes! Even with all of the negativity and strife in our day, no one can deny that the best time and best place to live is here and now.

We are blessed to have Joel in our lives these past two decades, and know God continues to unfold His amazing plan for him. We are so thankful to our Heavenly Father for his rich blessings on our family, our community, and our country.