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 …
Talking about Teaming: The 7 Languages of Action
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 …
ANN: Recording new video classes
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 …
Does Fluid Intelligence / IQ Matter?
(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 …
Finding Average Pastor Salary Harder Than You’d Think
“Could you believe the gall of that guy?” We were coming out of a rather dreadful sermon on giving in our small, startup church. We were a congregation of mostly low earners — even me at the time — and money was going to be tight, even if everyone did their Biblical 10% (even pre-tax). The pastor decided it was …
Is there a Seminary Education Bubble?
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, …
You Change Your Mind – And That’s Not Normal
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 …
The Power of Mentoring (And Why You Didn’t Get It)
[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. …
Hidden High Potentials are “Unemployable” But He Wants Them
I’m off in the Northwest this week, working with a startup I’m helping out in Vancouver. I took the flight to Seattle and rented a car, deciding that in the end it was still a sight cheaper and I’d be able to hit both cities in one trip. We’ve decided to relocate the businesses out to this region, so I’m …
There Is No Single Best Model for Church Organization
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 …