Paul Benger

7 Ways To Think Bigger As A Church

March 22, 2016

Churches can experience significant growth but still think like small churches think. Here are 7 ways to stop that and think like a church larger than your current size.

1) Not every individual should speak into every decision.

When you are small it’s not an issue to get everyone in the same room. As you grow that’s not possible. Place those with the right gifts over each ministry area. Trust them to get the input they need to make good decisions.

2) Not every decision must flow from or through the senior pastor.

This worked fine when decisions were less frequent. Now, every decision must still fit the vision set by the senior pastor. But that vision should be clear enough that team members can easily recognize what does and does not fit..

3) The best solutions don’t always come from bigger churches.

It’s great to learn from bigger churches. But copying practices without fully understanding them can do more harm than good. Filter outside ideas through your strategy and don’t be afraid to innovate on your own.

4) Not all of our ministries should receive equal promotion.

Determine the few best next steps for your weekend attendees and promote them heavily.

5) Not every purchase requires prior approval.

With a smaller budget, you probably needed to approve every purchase to protect limited funds. Today, your financial systems may be slowing down progress. Set a maximum amount each department can spend without prior approval.

6) Excellence is not too expensive.

Excellence is doing the best you can with what you have. You have been trusted with your resources, now more is required of you. Strive for excellence, stretch yourself, go for one step further than you were planning to go.

7) “All hands on deck” is not how things get done.

When you were smaller, every major project required everyone’s involvement. Today, you have dedicated leaders to maximize each area of ministry. Give them the freedom to stay focused on the priorities you have set for their areas.
We don’t like Change – Even When It’s Good For Us

March 18, 2016

I really Enjoyed this article about change on the London Underground.

On 4 December last year, the London Underground ingested 4,821,000 passengers and spat them out at their destinations, and in doing so set a new record for a single day. If you paused to contemplate this for a moment, you might think of all those Oyster cards tapping, all those doors sliding, all those people moving, consider whatever mad visionary first thought of demolishing houses to dig holes in the ground to put trains in, and conclude that a subterranean public transport network is a small miracle. Most of the time, though, commuters don’t pause, and don’t conclude anything of the sort. They have other things on their mind. To many of them, “a small miracle” might seem more like a description of their journey to work than of the system that facilitates it.

In the execution of their own daily miracles, London’s commuters have learned to withstand vast and unpredictable challenges: track closures; signal failures; engineering works. And they have developed a thick skin.

But on that particular Friday, the 11,000 of them who got off at Holborn station between 8.30 and 9.30am faced an unusually severe provocation. As they turned into the concourse at the bottom of the station’s main route out and looked up, they saw something frankly outrageous: on the escalators just ahead of them, dozens of people were standing on the left.

Looming London transport crisis ‘risks sparking riots’, says TfL chief
We might be bad at dancing and expressing our feelings, but say this for the British: when we settle on a convention of public order, we bloody well stick to it. We wait in line. We leave the last biscuit. And when we take the escalator, we stand on the right. The left is reserved for people in a hurry. In Washington DC, those who block the way are known as “escalumps”; here, they can expect the public humiliation of a tutting sound just over their shoulder. “Passengers just don’t like having these things changed,” says Celia Harrison, a Transportfor London (TfL) customer strategy analyst, and one of the key people responsible for this heretical deviation from the norm.

“I’ve worked on stations for many years. So I was aware that whatever we did people weren’t going to be comfortable about having their routine disturbed.”

The idea had come about after Len Lau, Vauxhall area manager, had gone to Hong Kong on holiday. Lau noticed that passengers on that city’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) were standing calmly on both sides of the escalator and, it seemed, travelling more efficiently and safely as a result. His report prompted Harrison and her colleagues to wonder whether the same effect would apply at a station such as Holborn, and so they set about arranging a three-week trial.
The theory, if counterintuitive, is also pretty compelling. Think about it. It’s all very well keeping one side of the escalator clear for people in a rush, but in stations with long, steep walkways, only a small proportion are likely to be willing to climb. In lots of places, with short escalators or minimal congestion, this doesn’t much matter. But a 2002 study of escalator capacity on the Underground found that on machines such as those at Holborn, with a vertical height of 24 metres, only 40% would even contemplate it. By encouraging their preference, TfL effectively halves the capacity of the escalator in question, and creates significantly more crowding below, slowing everyone down. When you allow for the typical demands for a halo of personal space that persist in even the most disinhibited of commuters – a phenomenon described by crowd control guru Dr John J Fruin as “the human ellipse”, which means that they are largely unwilling to stand with someone directly adjacent to them or on the first step in front or behind – the theoretical capacity of the escalator halves again. Surely it was worth trying to haul back a bit of that wasted space.

Paul Stoneman, one of Harrison’s colleagues, did some preliminary calculations. In theory, he found, getting people to stand on both sides would mean that 31 more passengers would get on to the escalator each minute – an increase of 28%. Holborn seemed like the perfect test case, not only for the rake of its escalators, but also for its rush-hour stampede: “When you come round the corner and see this throng,” says Stoneman, “you just go, blinking flip, I don’t want to use this station, it’s a nightmare. It’s like Bank.” But success was by no means a given: as Lau also noted, commuters in Hong Kong are vastly different to British ones. In a wash-up meeting to analyse the results of the trial a few weeks after it was completed, Stoneman asked the dozen people in the room: “How many years have we been saying, ‘stand on the right’? It’s quite a significant behaviour to change.”

Hard though it might be, changing how commuters behave is an ever more important part of a barrage of efforts to increase the capacity of the Tube, efforts that draw in equal parts on social psychology and fluid dynamics: the best model for the movement of a crowd through a warren of tunnels is the movement of a torrent of water through pipes. London is growing faster than any other European city; its population of 8.6 million is expected to hit 10 million by 2030. The London Infrastructure Plan 2050 predicts demand on the system to rise by 60%. And so TfL has to extract every last ounce of capacity from its underground network, the oldest in the world. A 1928 poster on display at the London Transport Museum and TfL headquarters charts the flux in passengers through the day – “The Workers”, “The Businessman”, “The Shoppers and Pleasure-Seekers” – and adds them up to a hefty 1.1 million, a total so large that the copywriter boasts: “WALK IN AND SEE THE SHOW/ NEVER A DULL MOMENT IF YOU TRAVEL UNDERGROUND.” That mass of people was still less than a quarter the size of last year’s average load.
To keep up with that growth, huge investment is needed, and major works are nearly always being carried out: as the Holborn trial went on, the £500m upgrade of Tottenham Court Road was being completed one stop away. In a system operating so close to capacity, the obedience of its users is also vital.

“If everybody wasn’t so compliant in their journey,” says Stoneman, “it would be a fistfight down there.” And so, with so much at stake, decisions to wind up commuters are not taken lightly: there is serious analysis behind them.

The stand-on-the-left controversy is no exception. Harrison, Stoneman and their colleagues believe it could make a noticeable impact on congestion at some of London’s busiest stations, congestion that will only get worse as train design, frequency and reliability improve, as the trains get faster and the doors get bigger, and ever more passengers are dumped on the platform at a time. “From my point of view,” says TfL’s head of transport planning Geoff Hobbs, “the ideal train would look like a bread bin”.

In order to make their plan work, they had to be ingenious – and persuasive. “Originally, we thought enforcement might be a good idea,” Harrison told colleagues at the wash-up, “as in people standing on the left in uniform, so that people couldn’t walk past them. But after concerns about possible assaults were raised, we decided it wasn’t that good of an idea. So we went for encouragement.” That meant teams of staff standing at the bottom of the escalators with loudhailers, asking commuters, as cheerfully as possible, if they would mind standing on both sides. It mean plain-clothes “plants” – “great, big lift engineers,” according to Stoneman – being sent up the escalators to block the way for others and create a new sort of social pressure. It even meant asking amenable couples to hold hands across the escalator, the better to thwart those who wished to slalom through the line.

Harrison is a 16-year veteran of the Underground, and even if she mostly cycles herself, she loves it, above all for the people. For the best part of two decades, she has absorbed everything a global city can throw at her – from the mundane intensity of rush hour to the seismic shock of the 7/7 attacks, when, as station supervisor at Aldgate, it fell to her to call for ambulances after the bomb went off. Through it all, she says, she has remained an optimist, and perhaps she has a better sense of perspective than most. Last month, as she stood on the concourse with all those good ideas up her sleeve and watched the trial unfold, she was a little unprepared for the intensity of the reaction, let alone for the interest of newspapers such as Denmark’s Politiken or the Washington Post. During the three weeks of the Holborn project, those who disapproved of the idea voiced their opinions with alacrity, as a preliminary internal report diligently records. There were plenty who didn’t seem to hate it, too – but they were rather quieter.
‘It’s quite a significant behaviour to change’ … says Paul Stoneman.
“This is a charter for the lame and lazy!” said one. “I know how to use a bloody escalator!” said another. The pilot was “terrible”, “loopy,” “crap”, “ridiculous”, and a “very bad idea”; in a one-hour session, 18 people called it “stupid”. A customer who was asked to stand still replied by giving the member of staff in question the finger. One man, determined to stride to the top come what may, pushed a child to one side. “Can’t you let us walk if we want to?” asked another. “This isn’t Russia!”

It is not yet clear whether a Putinesque future awaits us. If the stand-on-the-left experiment is to be adopted permanently at Holborn, and potentially be extended to other comparable stations, it will have to get through more testing and analysis. What could politely be termed “customer feedback” has already led the team to conclude that it would be wise to keep at least one escalator running conventionally. But the preliminary evidence is clear: however much some people were annoyed, Lau’s hunch was right. It worked. Through their own observations and the data they gathered, Harrison and her team found strong evidence to back their case. An escalator that carried 12,745 customers between 8.30 and 9.30am in a normal week, for example, carried 16,220 when it was designated standing only. That didn’t match Stoneman’s theoretical numbers: it exceeded them.

Overcrowded and getting busier: why new train lines can’t come fast enough for London
These results, you might imagine, would be enough to see the model introduced instantly at any station where the escalator was sufficiently steep to discourage people from walking up. But there’s a problem: those damn commuters. With the constant (and unsustainable) attention of staff, and three weeks of practice, they eventually became a little more docile, and followed the new regime, satisfying themselves, as the report puts it, with a “great deal of non-verbal communication in the form of head-shaking”. The following week, they immediately went back to normal. And so another trial is under discussion. “It’s like child psychology,” says Stoneman, a father. “It takes four days to get your kid to go to bed and do what it’s supposed to do, and it takes one day for them to stay up, and you’re sitting there banging your head against the wall again.” So if you can’t tell them what to do every two minutes, how on earth do you get them to comply?

At the wash-up meeting in the faded grandeur of TfL’s office at St James’ Park station, this question was the subject of careful scrutiny. The next trial, if it happens, will focus on one escalator alone; it will investigate whether customers can be persuaded to stand without loudhailer-brandishing staff to monitor them. The handrail and tread of the escalator will be a different colour, and firmly planted pairs of feet will decorate the left of the steps. In lieu of actual people, a hologram customer service operative will remind people to stand on both sides.

Then there’s the question of exactly what the hologram should say. Some argued for an appeal to altruism. Said Stoneman: “If the understanding is, we’re doing this for the greater good, people will comply.” Then it was pointed out that in the run-up to the Olympics, when everyone was panicking that the Tube would be hopelessly oversubscribed, the team tasked with encouraging people to take alternate routes had hit on the opposite insight: “It wasn’t about saying you’re taking one for team London,” said communications manager James Grant. “It was about saying, you’re benefiting from the journey yourself.” So what’s the slogan? Stoneman cast around for a moment. “It’s a perception of being held back, but you’re not really,” he said. “So … this is benefiting you, your individual time is reduced, but you are relinquishing the right, if you wish to, of walking on this escalator.” There was a pause. “Right,” said Grant Dyer, another of the report’s co-authors. “We’ll try to make that snappier.”
Perhaps it’s a shame that the appeal to altruism tends to prove less effective, but Harrison doesn’t find it terribly surprising. “People would be shocked if they knew how complicated the whole system is,” she says, a week or so after the meeting. “How difficult it is to run a service every two minutes, and control crowding, and work around equipment failures.” Since she started on the tube herself, she has amended one important bit of her commuting etiquette: she doesn’t run for trains as the doors close any more. “On the Jubilee line, if they have to reopen the door because you’re caught, that’s a 30-second delay. And then you have a gap in front, and a knock-on effect, and it gets bigger and bigger, and before you know it, there’s a five-minute delay going through central London. But I was in the habit, and it took me a good month or so to stop myself doing it. How are you going to stop the customers who don’t even understand?”

And yet, recalcitrant though commuters can be, Harrison retains a faith in their reason when it really counts. She remembers how they left the station after the bomb went off at Aldgate: “It was one of the most striking aspects of the day. People doing exactly what we asked them to do, which was leave – really calmly, completely unselfishly, helping each other. And this quality of silence.”

On any given morning at Holborn, the atmosphere is, happily, almost the exact opposite. And perhaps that tumult is the price and the pleasure of living in a great city. Do Londoners have it in their nature to stand on the left? It’s too early to say. Change is hard. Still, as I arrived on a Victoria line platform shortly after speaking with Harrison, and I heard the tell-tale beep of a train getting ready to depart, I surprised myself. I didn’t try to squeeze aboard. Another one, after all, will be along in a minute.
The standing to the right rule, first promoted in Britain, is not mirrored all over the world: Shanghai residents take a strictly optional approach; Australia is a notable rogue, preferring escalator users to stand to the left; and the rules are different in different Japanese cities (left in Tokyo; right in Osaka).

Escalator users in Hong Kong and Japan have seen campaigns encouraging them to stand on both sides of the escalator: “Let’s All Grab a Handrail,” and “Don’t walk. Stand where you like.” But results have been mixed – We don’t like Change…
The Commoditisation of Relationships

March 15, 2016

A few years ago I went to visit a young church leader whose church and ministry was expanding really rapidly. I was excited about our conversation and thrilled to hear of another church in the UK doing great things and reaching hundreds of people.

However, as we began to talk about relationships my alarm bells began to ring. I wasn’t the only person in the car that day, I had another young leader with me and the first alarm bell that began to ring was the tendency for someone’s meteoric rise or success to make them an authority on every subject they speak about. This, of course, is nothing new and not confined to the Church world. That day the subject was relationships, a leaders key relationships in particular and the second young leader was buying everything that was being sold although, in my opinion, the goods were defective.

The second alarm bell and the one that I am addressing here is what I have called the commoditisation of relationships.

Treat a human being as an end and not a means, a subject and not an object, nor a commodity of trade – Pope John Paul II

Using relationships as commodities, a means to get what we want. Just what we want will not lead to the good life, the abundant life that has been promised

I think that relationships are more than commodities, they form our safe zone, our accountability zone, our place of counsel, our place of support, they help us to shape who we are and help us discover the place that we will occupy in this world.

Our throwaway culture isn’t just making us callous about tossing away that old iPhone the second a new one comes out, even though the old iPhone was working just fine. It’s also making us indifferent to friendships.

“It might be fine to have disposable nappies but it isn’t fine to have disposable friendships.”

During the conversation that day, I asked who this leader related to. I was interested who he saw as mentors, who he viewed as leading him, who could speak into his life and who could speak into his operations. The answer was, “No one, I don’t need anyone. That relational thinking is outdated, outmoded.” That response really challenged me. firstly because it’s not how I think and I certainly didn’t want my own thinking to be outdated or outmoded. Secondly, because it felt dangerous, extremely dangerous and without going into detail, so it proved.

In Church thinking, independence and non-accountability is a killer, it always has been and it always will be. Actually, recent studies from the University of Kansas show that this commoditisation approach to relationships is a killer too.

A recent article about these studies said,

This trivial destruction of relationships is more worrying when you consider other research that shows our real-life social networks are as important to our health as diet and exercise.

This need for relationships is as relevant today as ever. It is relevant for leaders and it is necessary for their churches. Treating relationships as commodities that we can accept and discard at will is certain to prove detrimental in our future. Here’s a few thoughts on the back end of this that I hope will be instructive and helpful.

FIND YOUR TRIBE

As human beings we live life alone too much, we travel through life alone. It’s not what we were made for. We were made to travel together in tribe it is the way that God has wired you, to travel together in tribe, to be a part of a people.

1 Peter 2:10

Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

So here’s what God wants for us, he wants us to move from person to people. In short he wants us to find our tribe. He wants this for individuals but also for Churches.

What would it mean for me to open my life to God, to be a person of faith, to move from person to people, from individual to tribe. It means no matter what corner of the world you find yourself in, you are a part of God’s holy people, Gods Tribe… This is who you are!

YOU CARRY THE DNA OF YOUR TRIBE AND YOU HAVE BEEN CONNECTED

Notice I didn’t say that your tribe carries your DNA. It doesn’t work that way, you come from somewhere. Somewhere has shaped you, somewhere has influenced you. At a basic cellular level you have been designed by and for your tribe.

Why is this interesting? Well, because as individual as you feel, as powerful as you feel, as libertarian as you feel at a cellular level you are part of a tribe. You are connected, you have descendants, you have people who came before you.

On a psychological level you have a need, it’s the need to belong and it’s huge. Ignore this need and it will hurt you because, as I said earlier you are not meant to travel alone…

Our need to belong is more than a need for companionship. It is in our belonging that we truly discover Purpose: Destiny: Identity:

We make a grave mistake when, either as an individual or as a group we elevate ideas of independence.

WITHOUT A TRIBE WE LOSE A SENSE OF MEANING

When we are alone it’s hard to make sense of life, how will we answer the question why am I here? Have you heard people say, “Family is everything?” They are right, that’s why we like to say Church is family, it’s in being a people, a tribe that we discover meaning.

TRIBELESS IS HARMFUL

From Adam in the garden of Eden to free radical cells in our bodies disconnection isn’t good. Free radical sounds so cool doesn’t it? But when it’s a cell in your body or a disconnected spirit it is the most harmful thing known to man.

TRIBELESS IS POWERLESS

A lone wolf, like free radical sounds so cool. So cool I fact that Chuck Norris named a Cigar brand lone wolf. Wolves, however, are only powerful in a pack. Remove a wolf from it’s tribe, it’s pack and it becomes a scavenger, it feeds off others rather than contributing.

The scriptures teach us that we were made for community, we were made for a tribe and within our tribe we discover identity, purpose, destiny.

Relationships are more than commodities: FIND YOUR TRIBE
Working With Volunteers – Observe the John Cusack Rule

March 11, 2016

Observe the John Cusack rule.

When Inside the Actor’s Studio interviewed actor John Cusack about his work as a producer, he said that he felt his primary job was to

“keep the set free of fear.”

It’s a powerful philosophy for any group, and it’s critical in long term operations. People experience enough fear and criticism in their everyday lives; the serving/volunteering has to be the place where they come for fun, joy, and affirmation. Violating that rule can undermine the group’s energy and badly limit creativity.

A common misstep in this respect is what we call data malpractice: using data to inspect or embarrass volunteers (e.g., publicly ranking their individual performance) instead of using it to create a culture of learning. Effective volunteer teams and organisations do use data — to highlight what works, ask constructive questions about what didn’t work, and then move on.

Keeping the environment fear-free on purpose can create a high-functioning volunteer group that finds meaning, has a good time, and accomplishes big things. When that happens, the group can form a durable identity that will persist for months and years to come. And that’s how large-scale change really begins to happen.
A Front Row Culture and Why it Matters

March 8, 2016

The front row culture – from Seth Godin

The group files into the theater, buzzing. People hustle to get to the front row, sitting side by side, no empty seats. The event starts on time, the excitement is palpable.

The other group wanders in. The front row is empty and stays that way. There are two or even three empty seats between each individual. The room is sort of dead.

In both cases, the CEO or the guest speaker is going to address the group for an hour. But the two groups couldn’t be more different.

The first organization sees possibility, the second sees risk and threat. The first group is eager to explore a new future, the second group misses the distant past.

The truth is this: it’s possible to hire for, train for and lead a front-row organization. And if you merely let entropy take over, you’re going to end up with the second, lesser, failing organization instead.

Worth saying this as clearly as possible: The culture, the choice of front row or back row, is a choice. It’s the result of investment and effort.

Where would you rather work?

Where would you rather Lead?

Where would you rather Worship?
4 Ways To Be A Better Learner

March 4, 2016

“I’m in my early 50s, and I’m afraid that the next time I want to change jobs, people will see me as irrelevant. I’ve seen it happen to plenty of others. How do I stay fresh and convince people that I still have a lot to contribute.”

This is a quote from a CEO of a major telecommunications firm. It’s not a quote from me.

The CEO is right. Research shows that leaders who think and act from the same assumptions and behaviors that they’ve used for years are prone to stagnate, underperform, or derail. As David Peterson, director of executive coaching and leadership at Google puts it, “Staying within your comfort zone is a good way to prepare for today, but it’s a terrible way to prepare for tomorrow.” To sustain relevance, you must develop learning agility.

What is Learning Agility?

Learning agility is the capacity for rapid, continuous learning from experience. Agile learners are good at making connections across experiences, and they’re able to let go of perspectives or approaches that are no longer useful — in other words, they can unlearn things when novel solutions are required. People with this mindset tend to be oriented toward learning goals and open to new experiences. They experiment, seek feedback, and reflect systematically.

A desire to develop by acquiring new skills and mastering new situations is a fundamental element of learning agility. Agile learners value and derive satisfaction from the process of learning itself, which boosts their motivation as well as their capacity to learn from challenging developmental experiences.

As a result, they don’t get defensive and they’re willing to take risks, such as making a mistake or appearing non-expert in public. The CEO in the opening paragraph epitomizes non-defensiveness. Unfortunately, many leaders miss out on key learning opportunities because they avoid questioning themselves or intentionally moving outside of their comfort zone.

Learning agility also involves being open to new experiences, people, and information.

How Do You Develop Learning Agility?

1. ASK FOR FEEDBACK

Think of one or more people who interacted with you or observed your performance on a given task. Tell them you’d value their perspective on how you did, and ask what you could do differently the next time. To maximize learning from their feedback — and this is vital — restrain any urge to defend yourself. Thank them for their input, and then ask yourself what you can learn.

To reduce your defensiveness and develop a learning mindset, consider adopting a motto like Peterson’s:

“There has to be a better way, and I don’t know it yet.”

The power of the motto lies in the word “yet.” As research on growth mindset by psychologist Carol Dweck has found, if you hold the view that there is always more to learn and embrace the process of wading into unfamiliar waters, you can free your thinking, dissolve your fear of failure, and power your success.

2. EXPERIMENT WITH NEW BEHAVIOURS

To identify new behaviors for testing, Peterson recommends reflecting on a challenge you’re facing and asking yourself questions such as “What’s one thing I could do to change the outcome of the situation?” and “What will I do differently in the future?” Don’t just listen to what people do differently in respect of their leadership or read about recommendations for how to do something, experiment. Find an environment that is safe and experiment.

3. LOOK FOR CONNECTIONS THAT MAY NOT CURRENTLY EXIST

Growth almost always comes through the connectivity we have with people. Someone has done what you need to do, connect. Someone is one step ahead and you need the one-step knowledge, connect. I have found that leaders are more than willing to help other leaders, people are more than willing to help.

4. MAKE TIME FOR REFLECTION

A growing body of research shows that systematically reflecting on work experiences boosts learning significantly. To ensure continuous progress, get into the habit of asking yourself questions like “What have I learned from this experience?” and “What turned out differently than I expected?” Leaders who demonstrate and encourage reflection not only learn more themselves, they also spur increased contextual awareness and reflective practice in others, thereby laying a foundation for higher levels of learning agility in their teams and organizations.

Practicing these strategies will help you extract the maximum learning from experience.

Adapted from an article in Harvard Business Review written by Monique Valcour
Saving Starbucks

March 2, 2016
Here’s a link to the 2007 leaked email. The commoditisation of Starbucks.

The woman in the grey sweatshirt stood up in front of roughly 100 others at Borders Books’ Chicago State St. location and tearfully told Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, that she’d closed her store and driven all night from her store in Ohio to see him speak in person. “It’s an honor and a privilege to be in front of you today,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion.

She, like many others, were at Borders to see a Q&A discussion between Schultz and CBS2’s Bill Kurtis on Schultz’s new leadership memoir, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul (and perhaps get a book signed or a photo taken with the man who has changed the way many people think about coffee). After the woman thanked Schultz for all that he’d done for her and her employees, Kurtis asked her why it was that she drove so far to see him – why Schultz? “He’s an inspiration, and he’s honest,” she replied, as if it was the most obvious answer in the world.

It’s hard to argue with the fact that Schultz and the Starbucks brand have a die-hard following – think of this woman who traveled all night from the state of Ohio to see Schultz and express her gratitude and devotion to Schultz and Starbucks in such a personal way, Here was the power of the Starbucks brand in action. Here was a company that, more than most any others, had built up nearly impenetrable company and employment brands, gained a legion of loyal fans, customers and employees, and grown to a massive 16,000-store, “there’s a Starbucks on nearly every corner” giant. But, as Schultz would point out, things weren’t so rosy just a few years earlier.

FLASHBACK TO 2007

“I could sense, or small, that something wasn’t quite right,” Schultz said as he addressed the overflowing crowd of fans and curious onlookers before him. He was referring to February 2007, a time when, he said, he became concerned about what was happening at Starbucks – or rather, what wasn’t happening. Little by little, Starbucks had been losing some of the signature traits it had been founded on.

In 2000, Schultz had stepped down as CEO (or, as a Starbucks employee would write it, “ceo”– they have used lowercase job titles since their early days) and became chairman, moving away from day-to-day operations to focus on global strategy and expansion. In the years that followed, store growth accelerated and stock prices soared as sales and profits increased every single quarter – until they suddenly didn’t. By 2007, things were taking a turn for the worse. “Starbucks had begun to fail itself,” Schultz said.

BITTER TIMES

Over time, the company had been expanding the brand beyond its core into various media like music, books, and film. In addition, every quarter, there was more intense pressure to maintain annual revenue and profit increases of at least 20 percent – an ambitious goal that Schultz admits he was complicit in promoting. Amidst battle cries of “More growth!” the team had lost sight of what the Starbucks experience was really all about. Starbucks, he pointed out in his book, has always been about so much more than coffee. “But without great coffee,” he wrote, “we have no reason to exist.”

So, on Valentine’s Day 2007, Schultz sent an email to Jim Donald, the CEO of Starbucks at that time, warning of the commoditisation of Starbucks, hoping to unleash an honest conversation that would prompt everyone to reexamine the path they were traveling. He stressed a need to get back to Starbucks’ core and make the changes necessary to evoke “ the tradition, heritage and passion they all had for the true Starbucks experience.” Unfortunately, he said, the email leaked, and the next thing he knew it was all over the Internet – and the public was in a furor. Starbucks – and Schultz himself — received a lot of criticism for his opinions, even from Starbucks’ own employees, and as he says, it undermined what he was trying to accomplish.

Online conversations took on a life of their own, and while the company was struggling to figure out how to create balance between growth and a need to preserve what the company was really about, Schultz realised that they could no longer use their stores and website to communicate and control the conversations – the public was really in control of what was being said. Coincidentally, soon before Schultz’s email went out, three big communication changes had occurred: a week earlier, Apple had introduced the iPhone; four months earlier, Google had bought YouTube; and five months earlier, Facebook had opened up to the public.

Times were changing, and Starbucks was forced to either change with them or get left behind.

BACK TO THE GRIND(S)?

Toward the end of 2007, as the situation reached a breaking point, the board decided Schultz needed to return as CEO. So, in January 2008, he did. It wasn’t his original intention, and it wasn’t an easy decision. In addition to having to tell Donald he was taking over, he was re-immersing himself in a company that was increasingly becoming viewed as one of the poster children of the recession (i.e. “save money, don’t drink at Starbucks”); people were being encouraged to look elsewhere for coffee easier on the pocket.

As he jumped back into his role as CEO, Schultz said, he realised that the issues he’d brought up in that now-infamous email back in 2007 were even larger and deeper than he had then thought. This was through no fault of people working there, he said — it was due to the fact that Starbucks was rewarding the wrong things. Factors like speed of service were praised, rather than keeping focus on the customer and the quality of the product.

SCHULTZ’S REACTION?

On February 23, 2008, “I closed every store to retrain 115,000 people – I said we were going back to the roots of the company.” Of course, the media frenzy that ensued from this decision brought many to believe that the end of Starbucks was near – that they were no longer relevant. Schultz admits it was a bold decision to retrain every single employee. His explanation? “It was honest, it was authentic, and it was necessary.” The company lost $6 million that day. And as he said, Starbucks still had a long, long way to go in solving their mounting problems – but this was a start.

Starting over, he said, involved metaphorically asking the question of employees, What does it mean not to be a bystander? “From this point, we had to create, attract and create new customers.” Gone, he says, was the time that Starbucks could do no wrong — that the company was on a “magic carpet ride” – and that profitability and likeability would happen automatically with every move the company made. Gone was the time that Starbucks was leading the conversation — now, they had to find a way to take part in the larger conversations that were happening.

Later in 2008, one month after Wall Street’s meltdown and a few weeks before Starbucks would announce significantly reduced profits for the fourth quarter, Schultz decided to get all of the store managers together — all 11,000 of them — for a leadership conference. They’d always done the conference in Seattle, and even though nearly every major city wanted to host them, Schultz said they chose a place very much in need of assistance: New Orleans. Despite the odds, Schultz knew it had to be done, to start rebuilding trust between Starbucks and its employees and invest in Starbucks’ continuing transformation — and New Orleans was the right place to do it. Not only did they have a week-long meeting with interactive galleries, roundtables, and panels, but they also did service in the 9th Ward and helped to rebuild some of the city’s most devastated neighborhoods.

“I’ve always loved this company,” Schultz said in Onward. “Love is why I had some back as ceo and why I feel so personally responsible for its failure and success. Yet somewhere along our journey, the love our people had for Starbucks had blurred. New Orleans had brought it back into focus, and once again our values stood in stark relief… because of everything we experienced in New Orleans, it was apparent to all of us what it meant to love something — and the responsibility that goes with it.”

Moving forward

What’s happened since Schultz and the Starbucks team took major risks to turn the Starbucks experience around? Well, instant coffee (Via), for one. And Starbucks’ performance in the Q3 of fiscal 2009 marked its first earnings growth since Q1 2008 — the company earned $152 million, compared to its loss of nearly $7 million just a year earlier. As Schultz remarked in Onward, “for the first time in a long time, I felt as if we were winning.”

In July 2009, after riding out the December 2008 choice to make 401(k) retirement plans discretionary instead of automatic in light of a weak economy, Starbucks was again able to match the 401(k) contributions of eligible employees, which, to Schultz, “would not make headlines or mean much to shareholders, but for me… was as important as anything we were able to accomplish all year.”

In fiscal 2010, Starbucks revenues increased to a record $10.7 billion, and its operating income increased to $1.4 billion, up from $562 million in fiscal 2009. What’s next for Starbucks is anyone’s guess, but as Schultz says that every company must push for self-renewal and reinvention, constantly pushing the status quo, it appears he will continue to do just that.

Q&A WITH HOWARD SCHULTZ & BILL KURTIS

After Schultz gave his initial thoughts on Starbucks’ journey over the past few years, Schultz sat down with Kurtis to answer some questions about what the Starbucks brand really means, his ideal employee, and more.

Q: How do you define success to your employees?

A: “’Howard Schultz is not going to serve any customers — it’s you,’ is what I tell employees.” Schultz tells store managers they are responsible for what takes place in their stores, and that “The essence of what they do every day is the difference between success and failure.”

The greatest reason for the enduring relationship Starbucks has with its people and its customers is due to the values of the company, Schultz said. “We’re not perfect; we’ve made mistakes, and we’ll make some more.” “The last 12 months has been the most successful in Starbucks’ history,” Schultz said. “However, we did not leave people behind.” Part of that decision not to leave employees behind while striving to be financially successful involved keeping 401(k), cash bonuses, and benefits. Starbucks was, after all, the first U.S. company to offer both comprehensive health care coverage as well as stock options to part-time workers.

Which leads us into another question…

Q: Why are you not willing to cut the price of coffee?

A: “We will never – and I mean never – turn our backs on our employees,” Schultz replied. The company wasn’t willing, he added, to get cheaper coffee or cut health care benefits for each of Starbucks’ employees to cut coffee prices. The premium price is tied into having the best quality beans and treating their employees well.

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Q: What will be the future role of businesses on a macro level?

A: As social services continue to lessen in government, Schultz said businesses will have to do more to provide a safety net for people, as well as provide a safety net for people to serve their communities. Social requirements of the business world are changing, and people expect more from the businesses they patronize. People have become more cost conscious, environmentally aware, health-minded and ethically driven — and are holding businesses to higher standards. Seismic changes with social and digital media, he added, are changing the way businesses must communicate with their customers; people are making buying decisions based on companies they trust and those that align with their values.

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Q: What is the Starbucks brand?

A: Schultz admitted this was a tough question to answer, as the brand really means so many different things. Instead of spitting out a textbook definition, Schultz said he wanted to explain by telling the story of Courtney, an employee in the Queen Anne, WA store. The story goes like this: Schultz walked into a Seattle store one day, and an employee there told him he was in the wrong place, and that he really needed to get to the Queen Anne store as soon as possible. When Schultz asked him why, the employee said, “You’ll know why when you get there.”

So, Schultz got in his car and drove to the Queen Anne store – a store where a long-time employee with special needs and past behavioral issues, Courtney, worked. When he walked in, customers were laughing and chatting, and he noticed that they had thrown a birthday party for Courtney. Schultz says this was such a testament for him as to the emotional relationship between the staff and customers at Starbucks. “You can’t invent or describe it,” he said –“you just know it’s real.”

Starbucks, he added, is defined by those who wear the green apron and what they stand for.” In corporate America, there’s been such a fracturing of trust; for whatever reason, there’s a lot of cynicism and unwillingness to believe.” Consequently, people are hungry to work for a company that’s larger than themselves, he said, a company in which they can find their unique place. Many people go from job to job with bad experiences, becoming increasingly cynical, and when they start working at Starbucks, expect the experience to be the same and are in disbelief that it’s actually different – that the employees and the experience is actually for real.

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Q: Who is your ideal employee?

A: “We want people to join Starbucks who have like-minded values. We need happy people – we’re a people company that serves coffee, not the other way around,” Schultz said. He added that while Starbucks is creating organic, fair trade coffee, people come into the store for a different reason. “The human, emotional experience our people create is why customers come in – it’s more than just for a cup of coffee.”

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Q: What leadership qualities do you look for?

A: Again, Schultz stressed that like-minded values are key. He said that when he returned as CEO, he had 11 direct reports, and he asked them all the same question: “If you don’t believe we can do this, or you don’t believe in me, this isn’t going to work – we’re going to have to have a private conversation.” In the next six months, he said, nine of the 11 people left the company. He needed people who believed in the dream; who believed in the business – and that candor left him with those who did.

Schultz said that as far as employee qualities, it’s important to have:
- People who trust one another
- Those who leave their egos at the door.
- Those who understand that success needs to be shared.
And to not have: People who do a great job of managing up but not managing down.

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Q: What is Starbucks’ biggest win in the last couple of years since you came back on board?

“Instant coffee,” Schultz said without hesitation. Why? “Because we were able to bring quality to instant. Great companies and entrepreneurs have to continue to push for innovation. People thought when we added instant coffee, it was the beginning of the end. But really, we did it to prove to themselves that they could replicate the taste of brewed coffee – and we did.”

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Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to take a leap of faith to pursue his or her dream?

A: In addition to getting a mentor, Schultz advised, “Dream big, then dream bigger. You have to put yourself in a position to win, and surround yourself with people who’ve done it before — with those with experience and the skill set to complement you.”
6 Things A Leader Mustn’t Lose

February 26, 2016

I was looking back at some notes and found these thoughts that I had been asked to prepare as a back up for a Ground Level (our network of churches) leaders meeting. I didn’t get to use them that day so I thought we could enjoy them here

Romans 12:6-8

“We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.”

Exodus 40:33-34

And so Moses finished the work. Then the glory covered the tent…

I love this verse about Moses. It shows us that there’s God’s work happening but it also shows us that there’s our work that is happening and that God is willing to partner and participate with us. That God is willing and wanted for us to participate and partner with him in his work.

One of the ways we can do that is by stewarding well the following 10 things, making sure that they are never lost to us.

1. NERVE:

A leader mustn’t lose their nerve. Even when it seems that you are moving slowly or in the wrong direction. Even when you are not sure about the destination…just keep going, keep your nerve, stay patient, don’t jettison this moment. Remember, success is doing the right thing for long enough.

2. THE ATMOSPHERE

The environment that you create is vital to growth and life. Make sure that there’s some buzz around within your world. Don’t let the atmosphere around your life and your work be controlled by other forces, especially if those forces are negative and toxic. Take responsibility and take control of the atmosphere.

A leader mustn’t lose the atmosphere.

3. PASSION

Do what you have to do to keep your passion high for what you do. Learn how to replenish. Learn how your unique personality responds to life and situations and don’t apologise for what you need to do in order to keep your passion high.

A leader cannot lose their passion.

4. SENSE OF FUN

I am amazed at how young people can go from wild activity (like tribal wars) to worship so quickly. I know at one point I would of questioned the authenticity of their worship, but not any more. Ps 100:2 says,

Serve (Worship) the Lord with gladness

Whatever our field of work we need to keep our fun side alive.

“The number one premise of business is that it need not be boring or dull. It ought to be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re wasting your life.” – Tom Peters

5. COURAGE

Leading requires courage, we all know that. Not everything is settled as you step forward, not everyone will agree. Be strong and very courageous. Michael Jordan’s quote sums this up.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. – Michael Jordan

A leader cannot lose courage.

6. RHYTHM

Rhythms possess more power than encounter. The reason that I say this is because it is our habits that form our deepest loves. It is highly likely that our Rhythms have contributed more to the people that we are today than anything else.

A leader must find and keep their rhythm, their groove. An encounter (one-time dramatic experience) may well change the rhythm of our life but undoubtedly it is the rhythm itself that holds sway. What is your rhythm? What are the things that you do that make you who you are?

Keep Your Rhythm
Trump is Proof – We’re Not As Open Minded As We Think

February 23, 2016

I remembered becoming old enough to vote for the first time and along with that having some interest in politics, mainly so that I was making an informed decision about who I would vote for. I soon realised that whoever I voted for, however, would not make any real difference. People used to say,

Put a red rosette on a donkey and people would vote for it

The opposition would quip, “That’s exactly what they do.” The reason that this humorous exchange rings true is because, as the blog post suggests, We are not as open minded as we think.

When someone or something challenges our beliefs, you would think that we would take that new information and reassess how we feel. Yet, the reverse is usually true. When we’re challenged with new information, it just makes our preexisting belief stronger.

When scientists had people watch Bob Dole debate Bill Clinton in 1996, they found supporters before the debate tended to believe their preferred candidate won. In 2000, when psychologists studied Clinton lovers and haters throughout the Lewinsky scandal, they found Clinton lovers tended to see Lewinsky as an untrustworthy homewrecker and found it difficult to believe Clinton lied under oath. The haters, of course, felt quite the opposite.

The same thing is happenening right now. Trump is popular because he’s entertaining, either good or bad, but primarily he’s popular because he reinforces how people think, once again, good or bad.

The short of it is simple: challenge my beliefs, and instead of thinking critically about your challenge, I’ll sit around thinking how right I am and how stupid you are. When we’re shown something that undermines what we believe, we get confused, maybe even angry, but we rarely change our minds. This happens independent of the tone of an article or conversation. People may argue that if a belief is challenged in a more neutral manner, it leads to better discourse, but that’s never the case. The more neutral an argument is, the easier it is to dismiss (or just flip it to your side).

Sadly, there’s not a lot we can actually do here to fix this. The best you can do is accept the possibility you’re wrong, wait a heated debate, or an anger-inducing article out for a little while, then reassess once you’ve cooled off a little.

So why does this matter?

We Are Human Beings – We Were Created to Change – The Future Requires Change

This probably doesn’t surprise or shock you. The reality of it, however, is indeed a shock to the system. We crave safety, security and rest but the dream within us requires transformation, growth and risk. It’s not that rest, safety and security are wrong, not at all. It’s just that growth requires change.

In relation to our politics this may not matter at all. Our fixed ideologies may well be helping. In the realm of theology I find that some things having been settled for a couple of thousand years is really useful. I often remind myself, we settled that, remember Athanasius, remember the council of Nicea and so on. In life, however, the better future we crave will require some shift and change for all of us.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw

I’ll be writing further on this over the next few weeks. For now determine to live with some unreasonableness…to become extraordinary in some way…

When someone thinks everyone should think, feel & react like they do, it’s blindness. It creates conflict & blocks getting to truly know others – Dr Henry Cloud
NYC GOING LIVE WITH PUBLIC WIFI

February 20, 2016

New York City Officially Launches Free Public Wi-Fi
After a soft launch of four hubs in January, the LinkNYC system officially goes live today.

02.18.16 11:51 AM
New York City will see the official launch of its new citywide LinkNYC free Wi-Fi system today. At noon on Thursday, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is announcing the public launch of the Wi-Fi hotspots that have replaced old payphones at the northwest corner of 16th Street and 3rd Avenue. Mayor de Blasio will be joined by members from CityBridge, the consortium of companies behind the LinkNYC system.

Though the LinkNYC system had a soft launch in January, with the Wi-Fi at four LinkNYC hubs turned on on Manhattan’s Third Avenue, today’s official rollout includes more hub locations and support for LinkNYC’s tablet capabilities.

Each LinkNYC hub is a 10-foot-tall structure made of aluminum, which connects to a newly laid fiber Internet network in the city. The hubs act as wireless routers that New Yorkers and visitors can connect to for free with their devices to get ultrafast Internet. But each LinkNYC hub also includes a built-in Android tablet, which allows passersby without their own device to browse the web, access city services, contact 311, view maps and directions, and even make free Vonage phone calls to anywhere in the U.S. With the official public launch of the LinkNYC system today, existing LinkNYC hub tablet capabilities will go live for the first time.

originally from fast company