Andy Stanley on Leadership

Andy launched Catalyst 2008 with a great talk on leadership. Quotable…

• We want our leaders to have consistency between what they say and what they do.
• At the end of the day, everyone is a volunteer. They can quit at any time.
• Authenticity is a powerful leadership dynamic.
• Nehemiah got mad and asked the leaders to stop over-charging the people. They immediately complied. Why? Because for 12 years, Nehemiah had been living an authentic life in front of them. He had moral authority.
• As leaders, we must be the men and women who never carry into the future the hurt of the past.
• Perhaps the boldest leadership move you could make is to get on your knees and let go of your hurts.
• Men: If your wife feels like your church is your mistress, you are part of the problem you are trying to solve.
• If your kids feel neglected because of your time at the church, you are part of the problem you are trying to solve.

[from LeadingSmart by Tim Stevens]

Gold Nuggets From Catalyst

Building A Great Church

Jim Collins is the author of Good to Great and Built to Last, and spoke to the Catalyst crowd of 12,400 leaders on Thursday morning. Here are a few golden nuggets:

· Not all time in life is equal.
· Good is the enemy of great.
· Greatness is not a function of your circumstances; or good luck; it is a function of a choice.
· Within every organization or company that is great…you will find a culture of discipline.
· Most overnight successes are really about twenty years in the making.
· It took 7 years for Sam Walton to open his 2nd store. It took Starbucks 13 years before they had 5 stores.
· How do the great typically fall? It’s not through complacency. It is typically over-reaching that derails great organizations. Going too far, too fast.
· A great organization is more likely to die of indigestion of too many opportunities rather than starvation of not enough opportunities.
· #1 sign of over-reaching and the start of decline: When you grow beyond your ability to have the right people in the right seats on the bus.
· It is the undisciplined pursuit of more that will kill an organization.
· We need to spend more time on who and less on what. If you have the right who, they will figure out the right what.
· The people who do well in difficult, unpredictable situations are never any better at predicting the future than anyone else.
· We are in turbulent times. The years 1945-2000 were an anomaly. The convergence of stability and prosperity. It is unlikely we’ll see this again in our lifetimes.
· The greatest CEO’s from the greatest companies in history had one distinctive characteristic that separate them from other leaders. The trait is humility.

[from LeadingSmart by Tim Stevens]