Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Leadership and Ecological Metaphors





I grew up duck hunting with my father on the "Mississippi Flyway" shown to the right --a major migratory path for waterfowl, particularly ducks and geese. We did not know then that our "swamp" was really a wetland, or that there was a biological connection between climate and wetlands and waterfowl. Late in his life, my Dad learned some of those connections and found himself, much to my amusement, an arch-conservative, making common cause with liberal "green" organizations in the name of wildlife conservation.

A story in today's New York Times appears (see link above) about how climate change is impacting duck hunting in Missouri, and how hunters are beginning to see the light about climate change reminded me of that common cause and got me thinking about ecology and leadership.

Today I'm thinking again about how important it is for leaders in any field, but definitely in the church, to see the bigger picture of the ecologies--environmental, social, emotional and spiritual -- and to think like environmentalists about the future. In the article, a member of the UN Panel that shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore is quoted with the idea that we can no longer effectively lead if we only have data from the past.

Often churches are stuck with information and traditions from the past with no sense of where they should go in the future. I believe we can only lead effectively if we can weave together what we know from the past and in the present with a faithfully imagined "trajectory" (to use Gordon Kaufman's term) for the future.

Or to continue the metaphor, in order to have our ducks properly aligned, we have to reformulate our approaches based on what's about to happen, not just what used to happen.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Organizations with Heart

The title of the book, Profit for Life: How Capitalism Excels (Society for Organizational Learning, 2006) by Joseph Bragdon, is misleading--the subtitle gets me quicker: "Living Asset Stewardship." It's about focusing organizational leadership on the living assets--the organization's people and the environment--and allowing the "non-living assets"--the financial ones--serve the living ones.

Today's post is an excerpt from the book on "How to Recognize a Company with Heart."


  • an authentic mission, vision, and values that arose spontaneously from within the firm and that strongly appeal to the heart;
  • a decentralized, networked organization, based on the principle of subsidiarity, in which employees are trusted to self-organize in their areas of competence and are held accountable;
  • a culture of servant leadership, wherein the role of leaders is to serve the professional growth of employees, and employees are treated as precious assets rather than potential costs and liabilities;
  • a commitment to continual learning that gives employees permission to experiment and fail in their quest for innovation; and
  • a history of prudent fiscal management that reflects an intention to serve humanity in sustainable ways for generations to come.

I'll hold that as a manifesto for church leadership as well. Imagine that coming from the Harvard Business School!