Teams are about who is in them: The Imaginist

Forrest ChristianOverachievers Leave a Comment

What does a team do? It depends on who is in it.  The Imaginist decision maker sees teams as “teams of persons”. You can’t determine what is should be done until you analyze who is going to do it. Work cannot be separated from who does it because, for the Imaginst, it’s all about the person. Lots of ex-programmers seem …

Manhattan Bridge under construction-1909

Talking about Teaming: The 7 Languages of Action

Forrest ChristianOverachievers Leave a Comment

As I try to get “team” better defined, one of the biggest problems I have — and one shared by Requisite Agility as a whole — is that people use words differently to talk about decisions about action. Teams, as I have started defining them, are all about doing something together, working to a purpose. How we talk about decisions …

Paris: Horsedrawn omnibus on avenue des gobelins.

ANN: Recording new video classes

Forrest ChristianOverachievers Leave a Comment

Tomorrow I am going off to a decent site, with hopefully some better mics than I have, to record a couple of new videos for sale at the store. I will do at least one that is pretty much what I give my coaching clients to start these days. It will be priced low enough to be accessible to everyone …

Belgian royal conservatory's dome, interior with sun. (c) E. Forrest Christian

Does Fluid Intelligence / IQ Matter?

Forrest ChristianOverachievers, Underachievers 6 Comments

(This continues our discussion about intelligence / IQ testing. Read part 1, Intelligence Testing & IQ: What it is, isn’t.) The big issue with intelligence tests is this general mental ability (GMA or g) that they measure. This is mostly “fluid intelligence”. It means how quickly you can solve a unique problem. You would think that it would correlate with …

Is there a Seminary Education Bubble?

Forrest ChristianOverachievers Leave a Comment

Jerry Bowyer has written a very popular pair of blog post at Forbes.com on what he sees as an overlooked piece of the education bubble he has written about for years: the Seminary Bubble (and part 2). It’s interesting here because (1) it’s a bubble that because it has a restricted market illustrates the general problems for MBAs, law degrees, …

Man raising his eyebrow. ? 2008 Lee J Haywood. Via Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

You Change Your Mind – And That’s Not Normal

Forrest ChristianOverachievers, Underachievers 1 Comment

If you’re old enough to bother reading this, you likely can look over your life and see the points at which you have changed your mind. Or finessed one of your pet theories of life. To you this seems like a normal process, one that comes with aging and growing. It’s not. You’re weird. And it makes people see you …

Gov. Martin Henry Glynn with his secretary, Frank Tierney ca. 1913, By Bain News Service via Library of Congress

The Power of Mentoring (And Why You Didn’t Get It)

Forrest ChristianCareers, Change, Motivation, Overachievers, Underachievers 6 Comments

[updated 2013 August 29] Did you ever think that the reason why you didn’t get a mentor was that it was almost impossible to mentor you? A good mentoring relationship requires you to share a growth trajectory in how you handle complexity. Most people’s capacity for handling complex work issues increases over time along predictable paths once in their 20s. …

Church near Junction City, Kansas. ca. 1942. John Vachon, photographer. US Library of Congress collection.

There Is No Single Best Model for Church Organization

Forrest ChristianOverachievers 2 Comments

As I continue my exploration of Christian church organization, specifically focusing on U.S. evangelicals, I need to make something clear from the outset: There is no single, perfect organizational model for all churches. You would think that this is obvious but it’s not. It’s not even obvious in business management. Elliott Jaques’s ideas of Real Boss and work levels is …