- Intro: was sick, couldn’t work, so prayed for all the sites
- Product life cycle: starts off slowly climbs quickly, crests, and then falls because of the introduction of new technology. (e.g. people thought CDs would keep growing forever, but then the iPod came out)
- Edsel: product curve was a low and quick curve. Pet rocks had a meteoric rise and an extremely quick fall.
- Does the cycle of a leadership curve need to look like that?
- Bill Gates was very effective at Microosoft, and you might expect that his resigning from Microsoft would cause his influence to wane, but Warren Buffet gave $37 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation; Warren Buffet picks winnners.
- Jimmy Carters’ influence waned during his presidency, but has only continued to increase afterwards
- King Solomon’s heart became drawn to the gods of his wives and his leadership became substantially less effective.
- There are a lot of Christian leaders whose heart is drawn away from God at the peak of their ministry
- If we do leadership right, is it theoretically possible that you will be able to have a steadily increasing effectiveness curve?
- They say that starting early makes you more effective later on
- What do people in their 20s have to offer? Passion for God
- Passion is very important; David’s passion for God was a large part of the motivation of his men.
- When God gives people in their 20s dissatisfaction with just making widgets, listen to that; it is God’s passion stirring in you
- Passion alone is not quite enough forever
- Followers of young leaders ask (to themselves), am I a part of your machinery, or are you going to be a brother.
- Need to add skill to passion
- Adding skill is a concious decision; you have to be able to pay the price to develop yourself.
- Need to be able to cast vision, identify and enforce values, develop a plan, etc.
- If you have the gift of leadership, you are mandated to develop yourself and make sure your chart keeps going up.
- How do you develop leadership skills?
- Read everything you can find (not just Christian leaders)
- Go where leadership is taught.
- Get around leaders better than you and ask great questions
- Keep leading something (90% of what you learn comes from leading)
- The next phase is leadership develoment of other leaders
- Only leaders can develop leaders
- Make investments in people
- Look for character, competence, and with whom you have chemistry
- Give them real responsibility
- This is hard to move past because it is comfortable
- If you stay at this level, you will become the growth-restraining obstacle
- If you are not willing to share power, emerging leaders will leave
- Leaders are not power-hungry, they are impact-hungry
- You can be even more effective when you raise up a consetellation of colleagues
- Raise leaders up to share power with you develop people who are better than you in major ministry areas)
- Who?
- Intelligence
- Energetic people enough to energize others
- Relational IQ
- Some people will get stuff done and hurt people doing it. The supreme value in the kingdom is Love, not efficiency
- Win or die spirit: people who feel the call of God on their life and will die or be ruined in order to accomplish it.
- Leading high-level people is different than leading people who are less of a leader than you
- There is a higher level, but it is something only God can do
- God annoints someone to have influence much larger than their own ministry
- Billy Graham is asked about world affairs; his influence is much larger than his own evangelistic ministry, and it is not something that he had aspired for it
- Some pastors aren’t the leader of a denomination, but have influence over the entire denomination. Some pastors are the de facto leader of a city (like when a police officer is killed or something that the community needs to rally around)
- The stakes of leadership are life or death. If we lead well, people live. If we lead poorly, people die. Sometimes physically (e.g. African orphans), sometimes spiritually.