Good to Great

I finished reading Jim Collins' Good to Great a couple of weeks ago and am just getting around to writing about it.

This is a fantastic book and I think it is one secular book that should be required reading for all who consider themselves leaders in the church. Over and over we get people telling the church to acts more like a business in one way or another and most of those models fail. The church is not a business. However, this book does not lay out another "fad" for building a better business, it simply looks at what makes great companies great. The book is the product of a fairly insane amount of research into companies who made a transition from poor or mediocre performance to a place where they consistently outperformed other companies in the same sector with similar situations. The author and his team looked for things that these companies, from a wide variety of different industries and service sectors, had in common. The results were remarkable clear.

The consistently great companies held in common:

• a higher level of management
• focused on building a great team before choosing a new direction
• were willing to confront the brutal facts of their current situation
• were able to determine what they were passionate about, able to do better than anyone else and actually profit at
• were disciplined
• used technology to accelerate performance, not jumping on technology bandwagons but carefully selecting only new technology that helped them with their core competency
• understood the flywheel concept (sometimes success doesn't come over night, but building momentum is the key.

I have oversimplified this all a bit just to give you a little taste. What I love about this book in terms of thinking about the church (and I am talking about churches in general) is that, as I have said before, I think that churches don't think much about being great. I think that is unfortunate. I know some people don't like my way of thinking and believe that it is inappropriate to think of church in these terms. However, I think that the institutional aspect of the church should be the BEST institution. We should do a better job than any other type of organization in sharing our message because our message is vitally important.

I apologize in advance for this comparison if it offends you. Gillette from 1980-1995 outperformed the general market by over 7 times. The study showed this was due to all the characteristics I listed above. They were selling razors. Nice, sharp razors with multiple blades are really nice, but they haven't really changed the world. The mainline church in America, which can share a message of grace and salvation that can change the world is on the decline.

If the church really wanted to reach as many people with the message of grace and salvation as possible, it wouldn't need to follow a business model, but it would need to decide it wanted to be great and think about getting the best people on the team (clergy and lay people) think about facing the brutal facts, consider what aspect of sharing the gospel or building the kingdom each individual church was best at and had a passion for and do that, be disciplined and use technology to accelerate a clear mission.

If you are still interested, read the book. I would love to hear your thoughts.

peace,

will