The Problem With Change

 

Issue No. 608 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (May 17, 2024) recommends another candidate for book-of-the year that changed my thinking about change! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies). Also, read my recent review of The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress.  The author of The Problem With Change lists five major problems in “Blender Land” (our workplaces) when change is unwittingly foisted upon normally-healthy team members. One biggie: “The problem of lack of control.”     I Changed My Thinking About Change! If there were a Pulitzer Prize or a Booker Prize for “Best Beginning of a Nonfiction Book,” this year’s prize would certainly be awarded to: The Problem with Change:  And the Essential Nature of Human Performance by Ashley Goodall (May 7, 2024) Listen free to the first 5 minutes of the audio book. The author invites us into a corporate setting (“for the sake of illustration”). It’s Friday and the Wall Street Journal reports “that the company you work for is in advanced discussions of some sort with your largest competitor.” Then, after 48 hours of “much frantic pinging of your peers and little concrete news, late on Sunday comes the official press release: The two companies are merging. There follows a flurry of announcements from your senior leaders, who are, to a person, both ‘excited’ and ‘thrilled’ by the news—some are even ‘energized.’” It gets worse (I mean, funnier). A fanfare heralds “the Arrival of the Management Consultants” and finally, “white smoke emerges from the regulatory chimney, and the deal is given the go-ahead.” (For more “white smoke” and change examples, view the movie, We Have a Pope.) What follows? • Reorganization! • Listening Tour! • Bad Old Names replaced by Obviously Better New Names! • And worse! “In all of this, you will marvel that things were quite so broken in the old world…” It gets worse! Musical chairs, one step forward, two steps back—and more “fanfare heralds the Arrival of the Rival Management Consultants”—and, of course, a special PowerPoint template. The new Model emerges and all of this will “help people who were, last week, working happily alongside one another to continue to do so, but with betterness.” LOL! (There’s more: the new open floor plan, “because collaboration.”) “This is life in the blender,” writes Ashley Goodall, a leadership expert and former Chief Learning Officer for Leadership and Professional Development. (He’s seen it all—and it ain’t pretty.) And speaking of floor plans, had the publisher asked me, I would have suggested a new subtitle for this Very Important Wake-Up Call: THE PROBLEM WITH CHANGE:  Before You Play Office-Layout-Musical-Chairs Again, Reorganize Your Organizational Chart, or Rewrite Another Shiny New Mission Statement—Read THIS Book! Frankly, I fear my feeble review will cause you to delete this and move on—but that would be your biggest mistake this year (honest). I love this book and I couldn’t stop reading excerpts and one-liners to my wife. She loves it! Last week I emailed five colleagues—urging them to listen to the free five-minute audio and then read (or listen to) the entire book. But here’s my problem. My last review, The Illusion of Innovation, trumpeted the power of disruption. This week’s book, The Problem With Change, takes a contrarian view—and I appreciate both sides of this debate! I hinted that last week’s book might be my 2024 book-of-the-year. Yikes! I may need two books-of-the-year.  Why? Page after page, learning about the unhealthy results of change foisted on previously healthy team members, I was reminded of the many missteps in my leadership years—totally missing the trauma that I unwittingly perpetrated on employees. (So sorry, friends—if we’re still friends.) My entire view of CHANGE has changed. EXAMPLES: • “Toxic Positivity.” The dozens of interviews with people enduring workplace changes are stunning, even eye-opening. “Leslie” grew tired of the “toxic positivity” when new leaders would babble “…there always being an upside to change, or a lesson, or that when one door closes, another one opens.” • In the first chapter, “Life in the Blender,” the new leader arrives and mandates that the microwave in the office be replaced because it was “nonstandard.” When employees exited—unable to deal with all the small and big changes—it became a joke: those employees were “nonstandard.” • First 90 Days. “Leaders are told to spend their first ninety days in a new role figuring out a plan for change, and then to launch that plan on day ninety-one, needed or not.” (Ouch! See more on the first 90 days.) • “No one has ever made a name for themselves by saying, ‘Let’s stay as we were and see where it takes us.’” • And if, while leaders are explaining upcoming changes, “they manage to say the word ‘disrupt’ a lot, they get extra-bonus-biz-dude points. A few years back, it was cool, in certain circles to describe yourself as a Change Agent; now all the change agents are looking sad and slow, and all the cool kids are Disrupters.” “CHANGE-Y WORDS” AND “MEANING CREEP.” In the chapter, “The Cult of Disruption,” the author doesn’t hold back: “Before Disruption, the job was to move things up and to the right. After Disruption, the job is just to move things. In this way, the advent of disruption was also the occasion for an insidious bit of meaning creep. Right under our noses, all the change-y words—innovate, disrupt, change, renew, transform, update, reimagine, reinvent, refresh—came to share a single, unquestionable meaning: better!” Oh, my. Ashley Goodall is a writer’s writer. I’m on my second black felt tip pen—underlining his pokes-in-the-ribs glossary: • “Financification of business” • “Tagline-ification” and “big shiny change levers” and “shiny new mission statements” • “Hubris Syndrome” and the “Altitude Sickness” of higher-than-ye leaders who “wall” themselves off from the changes (“assaults”) they inflict on their people • Why “foosball and free food” doesn’t cut it anymore Here are the problems with the changes you’re throwing at your people: • The problem of uncertainty • The problem of lack of control • The problem of unbelonging • The problem of displacement • The problem of loss of meaning Hard-headed (and hard-hearted) leaders will skip this book—thinking there’s no room for the “softer” side of leadership. They will do this at their own peril. Read this book—and it will change your thinking. Warning! Your misguided changes (yes, you!) often produce: • Dizzy spells and nausea. (Yes, in your people!) • Nostalgia. (It’s a thing. Documented in the U.S. Civil War to have “caused the illnesses of 5,537 soldiers of the Union army and the deaths of 74 of those.” Oh, my!) • Loss of meaning. (It’s not the same for each person.) “Meaning isn’t a property of a company, and it isn’t something stapled onto us by someone else. It is a property of a person, and if we are to find it, it must be discovered by each of us for ourselves.” The simplest next steps in the Internet’s “10 Critical Changes in 10 Weeks” blather will likely backfire and boomerang on you—if you are not a student of how change impacts “the essential nature of human performance.” (Did I mention eye-opening?) Need to change your tagline or brand promise? “These are attempts to engage in some way with higher human purpose, and yet they are some of the more bland and non-goose-bump-inducing things that companies say.” It’s part of the “seldom-challenged belief that things that can’t be said in one pithy sentence aren’t worth saying at all.” Must-read: the power of story-telling in the section, “The problem of loss of meaning.” I gotta end this review—but I haven’t yet coaxed you into the deep end of the pool—how to RETHINK change. Goodall includes nine next steps—all beginning with verbs: Make space, Forge undeniable competence, Share secrets, Be predictable, Speak real words, Honor ritual, Focus most on teams, Radicalize HR, and Pave the way. In the section, “Focus most on teams,” the author notes the “engagement” research of Gallup, Deloitte, and his co-author of an earlier book, Marcus Buckingham. He cites studies on the performance of the “best teams” at Cisco using eight questions in three categories: company experience, individual experience, and team experience. The first two “are shaped by their overall team experience.” The eight questions, alone, are worth the price of the book! You may become a believer: “Focus MOST on teams!” Read why Goodall is so passionate about healthy teams: “This is nothing short of criminal. Companies are clueless—and incurious—about their single most important organizational unit.” There is so much value in this book, I’m tempted to write a second review, maybe a “Zoom Review” with willing zealots. Any takers? This is already another nominee for my 2024 book-of-the-year. To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance, by Ashley Goodall. Listen on Libro (7 hours, 58 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.    YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) Ashley Goodall quotes management prof Jeffrey Pfeffer that when team members experience a lack of control in the workplace, it “compares unfavorably with exposure to secondhand smoke in terms of physical health, mental health, morbidity, and mortality, and that diminished agency has a greater correlation with heart disease than does smoking.” Yikes! QUESTION: Of the five major problems that change creates in our workplace, is “a lack of control” our most challenging problem? 2) In the book, Belonging Rules, Brad Deutser writes, “Most leaders think about belonging as yet another squishy, amorphous concept more easily relegated to Human Resources than as a function under the vision, direction, and responsibility of the C-suite. Our work and research in this space says emphatically ‘No!’” QUESTION: So who should read this week’s book? Click on the title to order The Problem With Change. 3) Bonus Book! Patrick Lencioni wrote the foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, by William Bridges. I recommend this book often. (Read my review.) See also the blog I wrote for ECFA, “Beware the Emotional Effects of Transition.”        Mastering 100 Must-Read Books Part 14: Leadership & Management at War Book #78 of 100: Operation Mincemeat For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by featuring Book #78 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.  Operation Mincemeat:  How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory  by Ben Macintyre (now a Netflix movie!)   Books #77 through #81 spotlight five fascinating books with military viewpoints on leadership and management. On June 6, 2024, we will commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day in World War II, when the Allies invaded Western Europe in the largest amphibious attack in history. In this page-turning book, the leadership and management issues jump off the pages—including how to recognize the twin sins of “wishfulness” and “yesmanship.”     • Read my review.     • Order from Amazon: Operation Mincemeat     • Listen on Libro (11 hours, 17 minutes).     • Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson). In World War II, following the successful North Africa campaign, a tiny team at British Intelligence in London attempt to create the biggest ruse in war history—convincing the Germans that the Allied invasion of Europe would come through Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. The big idea: find a corpse, build an identity, dress and drop it off the coast of Spain by submarine—and deceive the German spies in Spain into believing that the officer’s secret documents contained the invasion plans. It’s a true thriller—and the details and insights are extraordinary. The small team in London (about 20 men and women and just five typewriters in a stuffy underground office) executed the plan with spy movie genius.   CLICK HERE FOR BOOKS BY JOHN          MORE RESOURCES: • BLOG: Pails in Comparison • SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon  •WEBSITE:  Management Buckets • BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations IMPORTANT NOTICE! Effective Oct. 1, 2025, all 657 eNews issues, previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to a new website here. New book reviews will also be archived at John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. Or, click here for John’s recent book reviews on Amazon.

Finding Courage

 

Issue No. 673 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Feb. 23, 2026) suggests you slow way, way down in your quest for courage and—get this—expect trouble along the way. Plus, click here for recent issues posted at the NEW site for John Pearson’s Buckets Blog, including my recent review of A Board Prayer: Explore Seven God-Honoring Board Practices, by Dan Bolin. Also, check out the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and more book reviews at the Pails in Comparison Blog. Steve Brown—on his quest for spiritual courage—begins his daily prayer, “Before my day even starts, I admit I’m in over my head today.”   Prayer of Incompetence Steve Brown writes: “I start most days with what I call a ‘Prayer of Dependence’ (I also call it a ‘Prayer of Incompetence’) that reflects the posture of Psalm 70:5.” On Day 26, “Posture Matters,” of his 28-day courage journey, he confesses: “Dear God, I need You. Before my day even starts,  I admit I’m in over my head today.” Oh, my. When I completed the 28th day in this expedition for the soul—I wondered if I could inspire Steve Brown to write 28 more chapters. Actually, I would read 100 chapters from this transparent college president. (Who admits they need more courage?) This is a very special book. Bring a pen and an open heart.   Finding Courage:  A Four-Week Devotional Journey by Steve A. Brown (May 1, 2025)   Brown adds to Day 26, “On my own, I’m in deep trouble. But with and in Christ, everything changes. Fresh courage comes by humbly depending on and trusting God." The book’s daily format is perfect: two pages on a courage topic—and then two short pages with his “Bottom Line” summary, plus “Action and Reflection.” (I love it when an author suggests next steps.) Each day features a prayer “inspired by” several Bible passages. (I love that too.) I found morning treasure every day. Examples: Day 1. “As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters, ‘Courage isn’t simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” Short reminders about Queen Esther, Nathan, Peter, and Joshua punctuate this first chapter. Brown suggests a courage definition for Jesus followers: “Courage is choosing to follow Jesus even when your knees are knocking.” Day 2. Noting that the disciples of Jesus “were slow learners and frequent on-the-job sleepers,” Brown contrasts their courage with this: “Despite His identity as the Son of God, Jesus rejected entitlement. He didn’t buy into the temptation that He deserved unique perks or was due special treatment.” In his Day 2 prayer, Brown gifts pastors with a four-point sermon outline: “Thank you for choosing sacrifice, servanthood, submission, and seeking the Father’s glory about all else.” (The “4 S’s” will preach!) Day 3. On the theme, “Expect Trouble” (John 16:33), the author quotes J.R.R. Tolkien: “The birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus mean that one day everything sad will come untrue.” Day 8. Read why Brown memorized Psalm 16:8 and why he has a framed picture of the verse on his office wall and in his living room. Day 9. “In the midst of this difficult journey, our Omega juicer taught me an important lesson,” admits Brown. He elaborates: “When you are faithful, God sees your faithfulness and delights in it. Thankfully, you don’t need to drum up faithfulness on your own. While faithfulness is a choice and a commitment to persevere, faithfulness is ultimately a fruit of the Spirit. Its source flows from the unquenchable resources of our faithful God.” Day 10. LOL! “To me, it totally seemed like God had somehow penetrated Uber’s booking software to get me in the back of Darren’s car with a tangible reminder that God sees him.” And this: “But now, as I reflected on Darren praying for me, it seemed like God had just done a two-for-one miracle.” Day 11. Stunning! Steve Brown reached out to a trusted mentor, Evon, who was in his early nineties at the time. Read how the Bible verse, “Be still, and know that I am God,” ministered to Brown’s stress and anxiety. (Note to self: Who are my 90-year-old mentors?) Day 13. “Being a nonanxious presence is a critical trait and practice when you are responsible for others. It’s also critical for anyone facing a challenge. If your spirit is settled, steady, and filled with peace, then you will think more clearly and act more courageously. Your example will also help those around you be more steady, settled, and courageous.” Day 14. “Come Alongside” shares the poignant story of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. View this short YouTube video as Great Britain’s Derek Redmond courageously hobbles to the finish line of the 400-meter semifinal. (See who comes alongside.) Day 16. You’ll quote frequently from the chapter, “Get Some Sleep.” Brown lists three spiritual realities about why you should take naps and get adequate rest. Number 2: “Sleep is a reminder that we are not God.” Day 19. On this day, we’re urged to remember that we’re surrounded by others (Hebrews 12)—and to make a list of eight to 10 people whose example in faith have inspired us. My list was a trip down numerous memory lanes—spiritually powerful. PTL! Day 21. Have you ever read this? “Seeing people is a prerequisite for being a courage giver. If we don’t see people, we won’t be courage givers. And simply seeing people can give them courage. Noting Mark 5:32, Brown writes, “Every single person matters. You won’t ever see someone who doesn’t matter.” How do I do this?    • Include in your prayer: “Please slow my cadence down so I can see people in my everyday moments today.” (I’d add, listen to this Chuck Girard song, Slow Down.)    • And pray this: “Help me to leave deposits of courage where I go and whatever I do. I pray this in the name of the One who sees me and says I matter.” Day 23. After reading that the Lord’s compassions never fail—and are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23), Brown reminds us that “Back in the Old Testament days, when God did something significant, people would often mark the event by giving the place a special name or building an altar." The big idea: “Remember Faith Markers.” These markers became “an educational and encouragement tool for future generations. When a young person asked about the pile of rocks on a memorial altar, they would then hear and be encouraged by another story of God’s provision and protection. These stories were fuel for courage.” Oh, my. I was blessed recently to be part of a chain of God-orchestrated moments for my brother’s celebration of life service. Read the story here on the God Reports website—and learn about the “marker” (a shepherd’s staff!) for Jim’s grandson, who serves at SAMBICA, a Christian camp and retreat center. This 23rd day devotional was jammed with encouragement. Brown notes Mary Oliver’s poem, “Sometimes,” that “provides a profound template for remembering God’s faithfulness and work in our lives.” Oliver writes, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Steve Brown reminds us that “Too often, we move too fast to pay attention to what God has done or is doing. As a result, we aren’t astonished, and we have nothing to tell about.” Day 24. Steve Brown is also the author of Great Questions for Leading Well (see my “Questions Issue”), and other books, and on this day he urges us to “find an hour or two per month with two or three peers (in-person or online if needed)” and ask these six questions:    #1. How are you really doing?    #2. What can you celebrate right now?    #3. What are you learning?    #4. What are you grieving?    #5. What’s hard?    #6. How can we pray? Day 25. Referencing Tim Keller’s insights, Brown writes that “You are a spiritual billionaire because of the magnitude of what Christ has done for you and in light of your identity as a joint heir with Christ.” Oh, my. I immediately wrote the words, “SPIRITUAL BILLIONAIRE,” in the prayer guide I use frequently.  Need courage? Know someone who needs courage? Read this four-week devotional journey (28 days). I’ve spotlighted just 15 days, but I could have highlighted all 28 insights on courage.   TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the title for Finding Courage: A Four-Week Devotional Journey, by Steve A. Brown.     YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) Finding Courage, by Steve Brown, is one of 12 “Inspirational Resources” I featured in the Dec. 17, 2025, issue of Your Weekly Staff Meeting. See my mini-reviews here, plus a new addition, Reconstructing Faith: 365 Days to Reconsider Jesus, by Dick Daniels. QUESTION: What’s your favorite devotional book? What are you reading now? 2) I featured Steve Brown’s book, Leading Me: Eight Practices for a Christian Leader's Most Important Assignment, on my list of Top-10 books in 2016. Read my review here. QUESTION: Without asking ChatGPT, or looking on your team member’s paper, list eight best practices about leading yourself. (Then, read the book for Brown’s answers.) 3) As a sidebar to Steve Brown's book on courage, delegate your reading and ask a team member to read The Courage Gap: 5 Steps to Braver Action, by Margie Warrell. (Read my review.) QUESTION: What's one new insight on courage you gleaned from this book?       SECOND READS: Fresh Solutions From Classic Books You have changed—and your problems have changed—since you read this the first time! Book #41 of 99: The Choice For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by featuring Book #41 of 99 in our series, “Second Reads.” The big idea: REREAD TO LEAD! Discover how your favorite books still have more to teach you and the people you’re coaching and mentoring.   The Choice:  The Christ-Centered Pursuit of Kingdom Outcomes by Gary G. Hoag, R. Scott Rodin, and Wesley K. Willmer (March 14, 2014) DON'T READ THIS BOOK! You read that right...if you're good with what Hoag, Rodin, and Willmer label "The Common Path." Or if... "production-driven leadership, expansion-focused strategies, earthly oriented metrics, results-based management, and a utilitarian view of resources" ...is working out for you—then don't read this book.     • Reviewed in Issue No. No. 297 (April 13, 2014).    • Read my review on Amazon.    • Order from Amazon.    • Management Bucket #1 of 20: The Results Bucket. DON'T READ THIS BOOK...if you strongly disagree that "defining success may be the most important decision we make as God's people." That's line one, chapter one, in this radical book, published by ECFAPress. And don’t read this book—if you've drummed all the critical thinking out of your strategic planning and SMART goals process—and have not examined your presuppositions since...well, maybe never.    CLICK HERE FOR BOOKS BY JOHN      “When the horse is dead, dismount!” That’s from The Results Bucket chapter (free download) in Mastering the Management Buckets. See page 21, in the workbook, for a list of 21 ways that church leaders respond when they discover that their ‘horse’ is dead!” (Hilarious thanks to Elmer Towns and Warren Bird!) IMPORTANT NOTICE! Effective Oct. 1, 2025, all 657 eNews issues, previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to a new website here. New book reviews will also be archived at John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. Or, click here for John’s recent book reviews on Amazon. DOES OUR BOARD REALLY OWN THE STRATEGY? More than 300 board governance blogs by John Pearson (and guest bloggers) are archived at ECFA’s Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations Blog. View the index to 14 questions/blogs from the book, Owning Up: The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs to Ask, by Ram Charan. My favorite question: “Does our board really own the strategy?” 12 Inspirational Books Here are a dozen inspirational books (and one do-it-yourself option) for you, your family, friends, and co-workers. Here’s one book-a-month for 2026. Some are designed as 30- or 40-day devotionals or for weekend reading.   MORE RESOURCES: • BLOG: Pails in Comparison • SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon  •WEBSITE:  Management Buckets • BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations

The Illusion of Innovation

 

Issue No. 607 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (May 10, 2024) warns—fasten your seatbelts! This new book on innovation is contrarian, very readable, and a bit mind-blowing! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies). The new book, The Illusion of Innovation, mentions this one-minute scene from the 2019 film, Ford v Ferrari, contrasting Ford’s engineers with a smaller enterprise, Shelby American. It’s the perfect example of the author’s bias towards experimentation that includes “fast, cheap, and weird!”     Scrappy, Messy, Cheap, and Weird! SPOILER ALERT! In the short conclusion to his new book, Elliott Parker, a startup expert, describes his consultation with a company in India that was losing $1 million per day! His analysis and presentation to the CEO involved—wait for it—the unique business cards used by the firm’s chief competitor! Must-read chapter: “Conclusion: Change Is Hard, But Not Changing Is Much Harder.” This book will change the way you think and work: The Illusion of Innovation:  Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress  by Elliott Parker (April 16, 2024)   Elliott Parker has harsh words for most companies, including the dozens of Fortune 500 companies he’s worked with over the last 25 years. “I have concluded that most of the tools large organizations rely on to innovate do not produce the change they seek and need.” He should know. He worked with Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma. INNOVATION THEATER! The author, founder and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, writes, “Innovation efforts pursued inside corporations too often look like theater—people acting busy doing something so executives can explain to the board and investors that innovation is definitely, without a doubt, a top priority. But when reviewed after the fact, most of the effort produces little impact.”  Parker warns that “…this type of investment in innovation theater is actually value destructive, not neutral in its effect: organizations would be better off doing nothing (or actively accepting and managing their decline) instead of pretending to innovate—instead of engaging in an illusion of innovation.” Here’s the kicker. The author wants “…our scaled institutions—our businesses, governments, universities, and churches—to be more effective at solving big problems.” His playbook is creative and contrarian:    • “This book explains why innovation naturally emerges from deliberate inefficiency.” (You read that right.)    • It’s now easier for small teams and individuals to “disrupt the status quo.”    • “In actuality, creativity results from collisions, from taking an idea from one context and applying it to another.” NEW LEXICON. Much like the book, In Search of Excellence, this also introduces a new business lexicon and I’m predicting that The Illusion of Innovation will pick up the slack. Here’s the new lexicon for 2024: • Scrappy, messier, frequent misses • “It is that messiness, that purposeful error making, that creates resilience.” • Corporate hospice workers • “In people and in companies, growth results from actively seeking surprises, not from predictability!” • Novelty and serendipity • Treasure hunters and patient capital • Weird! (mentioned frequently—and my favorite!) The takeaway in Chapter 9, “Selecting Shots,” will be challenging for most—but critical: “Run more experiments: fast, cheap, and weird.” (Fascinating: what happened when the NBA adopted the three-point line in the 1978-1979 season—a metaphor for innovation.) VETOCRACY. The author’s poke-in-the-ribs notes the term, “vetocracy,” coined by a political scientist. It describes “an environment in which many more people are empowered to say no than to say yes.” To combat this tendency for organizations to play it safe and avoid risk, Parker’s how-to book urges companies to embolden individuals (or a small team of “changemakers”) to go off the grid and innovate. He quotes advertising pioneer David Ogilvy, who once quipped, paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton: “Committees can criticize, but they cannot create.  ‘Search the parks in all your cities,  you’ll find no statutes of committees.’” TEASERS! Would an outside consultant give your organization high marks for innovation? Are you still funding sacred cows and dead horses? My opinion: this could be the book-of-the-year that your senior team members must read. Some teasers:    • The extraordinary account of the innovator that—amazingly—was given authority to launch the Federal Witness Protection Program.    • “The most dreaded sentence a corporate innovator can hear may be, ‘Show me your revenue and profit projections for next year.’ This is an impossible request of anyone building something new, when there are more assumptions than known facts.”    • Wow! In the chapter, “The Power of Small Teams,” the author notes that Instagram had just 13 employees, servicing as many as 30 million customers, when it was sold to Facebook for $1 billion!    • Parker argues that most corporations are not positioned to create something new within the organization. “A corporation trying to act like a startup is like a high school marching band trying to play improvisational jazz: it may sound like a fun idea, but the result is chaos.” INNOVATING WITH AI. After reading the author’s musical metaphor (above), I couldn’t resist. My son, Jason (founder of a new startup), introduced me to Udio, the new AI site for generating music. So my prompt was: “a marching band song about inspiring innovation, yet with an improvisational jazz feel.” In about three minutes, Udio produced two half-minute songs:    • Innovator’s March    • Innovation March Not Grammy-quality yet, but hilariously fun! TOO MUCH EFFICIENCY! “…too much efficiency inevitably leads to failure in the long run.” Example: It took San Francisco 27 years (1995-2022) to build a two-mile bus lane on Van Ness Avenue at a cost of $300 million or about $110,000 per meter. “In contrast, all 1,700 miles of the Alaska Highway connecting eastern British Columbia to Fairbanks, Alaska, were constructed in 234 days in 1942” at a cost of about $1,000 per meter in 2023 dollars. Yikes! (I’m tempted to write lyrics for a song about this!) THE WRONG OBJECTIVE! Must-read: the devasting 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., was “the direct result of dramatic institutional effectiveness directed toward what is now, in retrospect, understood to be the wrong objective—fire eradication instead of fire management. We prioritized efficiency and the illusion of near-term safety over long-term resilience, and are now paying the price.” In California, between 1999 and 2017, land management burned, on average, 13,000 acres per year. Almost meaningless, we now know. As of 2018, experts estimated that the state had accumulated a “fire debt” of about 20 million acres! “…it means an area the size of Maine might need to burn before California can restabilize.” THERE’S MORE!     • Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix: “Think of the standard model as clear, efficient, sanitary, sterile. Our model is messy, chaotic, and fertile. In the long term, fertile will beat sterile.”    • Even though large corporations invest millions in “innovation,” they have little, if any, results. “The corporation as we once knew it is dying and may already be dead.”    • “Experimentation, when done right, is chaotic, natural, and messy—not hierarchical, planned, or objective driven.” (Yikes! So much for SMART goals!)    • The Innovator’s Dilemma. Should you launch a new venture internally or externally? (See the chart on page 162.) FORD v FERRARI. View this one-minute scene from the 2019 film, Ford v Ferrari, contrasting Ford’s engineers with a smaller enterprise, Shelby American. The test driver, Ken Miles, “no fan of corporate stodginess,” tosses the engineer-installed computer in the Ford GT40—and replaces it with strips of yarn and masking tape to observe drag on the vehicle at racing speed. (Hmmm. Sounds like “cheap” and “weird!”) SPOILER ALERT: BUSINESS CARDS! Don’t skip the 2 x 2 on page 232, “Rewards Go to Those Who Are Contrarian and Correct,” in the hopeful chapter, “The Optimists Will Win.” But you must also read the “Conclusion” chapter when Parker is helping a company “stop the bleeding” with a long-term strategy. In his research in 12 cities in India, he meets “an impressive entrepreneur” who played “an instrumental role in building and running one of the most successful automobile manufacturers in India.” Obsessed with keeping costs low, this entrepreneur handed Parker his business card, “which was clearly made by hand. His secretary created ‘cards’ on a sheet of paper that she printed in the office and cut with scissors. The edges and angles were imperfect, but the message was clear: this is a company that keeps costs low.” He took the business card with him to his next meeting and said this in his presentation to the CEO and senior team: “Until you’re ready to print and cut your own business cards, you’re going to have trouble competing with this company on cost.” (Read the rest of the story in the conclusion. You won’t believe it!) That prompted me to ask ChatGPT, “Give me 10 possible titles for my new business card, including humorous titles. I'm now retired, but I was previously a management consultant.” The list included:    • Chief Retirement Officer    • Ex-Management Whisperer    • Retired, Not Expired    • Boardroom to Boredom Expert    • Former Corporate Magician    • Unpaid Golf Intern Now I just need to find my scissors and I’ll be all set. To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress, by Elliott Parker. (And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.)    YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) Does your team experiment enough? According to Elliott Parker’s book, Pablo Picasso created a minimum of 26,075 pieces of art—which means “Picasso averaged 1 new piece of artwork every day of his life from age 20 until his death at age 91.” 2) In the chapter, “Manufacturing Serendipity,” the author suggests this: “Instead of judging possible experiments for their potential to ‘succeed,’ choose experiments based on their ability to spawn more experiments, enabling you to accumulate more knowledge over time. Novelty and learning compound.” What are we experimenting with this quarter? Is it fast, cheap, and weird?        Mastering 100 Must-Read Books Part 14: Leadership & Management at War Book #77 of 100: It's Your Ship For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by featuring Book #77 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.  It's Your Ship:  Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy by D. Michael Abrashoff   Books #77 through #81 spotlight five fascinating books with military viewpoints on leadership and management. In this bestseller, Captain Abrashoff’s dominant core value jumps right out: “It’s your ship, take responsibility for it. Don’t ask permission; do it.”     • Order from Amazon: It's Your Ship     • Listen on Libro (6 hours, 24 minutes).     • Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson). Captain Abrashoff covers almost all of my 20 management buckets: lead by example, listen aggressively, communicate purpose and meaning, create a climate of trust, look for results—not salutes, take calculated risks, go beyond standard procedure and build up your people. And get this! He urges his sailors: “If a rule doesn’t make sense, break it.”   CLICK HERE FOR BOOKS BY JOHN          MORE RESOURCES: • BLOG: Pails in Comparison • SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon  •WEBSITE:  Management Buckets • BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations Note: This is the NEW location for John Pearson's Buckets Blog. Slowly (!), the previous 650+ blogs posted (between 2006 and 2025) will gradually populate this blogsite, along with new book reviews each month.

Irreplaceable

 

Issue No. 599 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (March 13, 2024) introduces a new book that connects the dots between strategy and design. So applicable! Plus, click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies). I appreciated the Harley stories in the new book, Irreplaceable. I won a 100th anniversary Harley at a trade show in 2003. That year, our Christmas card featured our new triplet grandkids, with the tagline, “Born to Be Wild!”   Ridin’ a Lawn Chair at the Harley Store! I was hooked on this book just reading Kevin Ervin Kelley’s introduction, “Ernie the Tow Truck Driver Meets Kevin the Watcher.” I couldn’t put it down and it’s already a finalist for my 2024 Book-of-the-Year: IRREPLACEABLE:  How to Create Extraordinary Places  that Bring People Together  by Kevin Ervin Kelley (March 12, 2024) Just published yesterday, March 12, this book is absolutely fascinating. Think of the book title as “IrrePLACEable”—and you’ll get this strategic design architect’s big idea: “Something so special it can’t be replaced if lost or destroyed.” I know 20 colleagues who would love this book.  Kelley is an award-winning architect and experience designer. “I’ve spent my life trying to bring people together through the timeless interactions and primal qualities of place.” He adds, “…my job is to make the everyplace places of our lives extraordinary.” How does he do this? “I’m the guy who pulls up a lawn chair in a parking lot to watch people walk in and out of a steak buffet chain, and I’m the guy who studies consumers buying Fig Newtons in the cookie and cracker aisle of a grocery store. It’s an odd job.” “Standing around for weeks on end watching people look at Harleys may not be for everyone, and it created an awkward moment when I first met my wife and told her how I spend my days in disguise as a customer. But it’s what I do.” He adds, “But I’m not just a watcher. I’m also a fixer, adjuster, tinkerer, rethinker, and experience designer.” Consulting with Harley-Davidson, Kelley interviewed people (mostly men) at 30 Harley dealership across the U.S. After seeing Ernie a second time and at a different Harley store, he listened to his story. “Ernie’s desire to ‘hang out’ in the store told me a lot about his needs and wants and how we ought to be rethinking the purpose of the dealership, less as stores and more as clubhouses for wandering souls.” (Ernie already owned two Harleys!) Kelley and Ernie joked about Harley bikers: “The purchase they sought to acquire was ‘the end of loneliness for midlife-crisis-males-fading-in-strength.'” And speaking of joking, the author’s unusual approach when his team is stuck on solving a client’s problem is to “find the funny.”  He explains “find the funny” in Chapter 9, “Articulate”—one of five parts to his design firm’s “comprehensive system we’ve developed that has allowed our clients to retain or regain their edge over outside influences for the last three decades.” The five parts: Extract, Distill, Articulate, Crystallize, and Maximize.” (The “crystallize” steps—I hope—will be covered in his next book.) Timely! I’m guessing the author has already sent his book to the new CEO of Macy’s. Read this March 1, 2024, article in the WSJ: “Macy’s Stores Aren’t Fun Places to Shop. Its New CEO Wants to Fix That. Tony Spring is drawing on his hospitality training to turn around the department-store chain.” LOL! You’ll laugh when you read that as a kid, Kelley rearranged the furniture, lighting, and music volume in his parent’s home! When he got bored, he took on his classroom and friends’ bedrooms! He believes that “great things happen at the intersection of commerce and community.” Kelley writes that “…we set out to create a multidisciplinary field called convening, which we define as the art and science of bringing people together around an idea, forum, and experience.” He cofounded the strategy and design firm, Shook Kelley, in 1992 with his friend and lifelong mentor, Terry Shook. I thought this was insightful: “Terry was good with acres and me inches.” (Where are you on that continuum?) Their firm “helps people connect the dots between strategy and design.”   And speaking of convening, I had read only four pages when I recommended this book to Greg Leith, CEO of Convene. Who else should read this book? All of my camp and conference center friends, pastors and church leaders, university presidents, rescue mission leaders, board members, and others—and then this list of others—as suggested by the author: “This book is for those who own, manage, design, or inhabit a physical place or human experience as part of their business model or operation. These places include anywhere people convene in the public realm, whether a local grocery store or pub, a religious facility or an office building, a bowling alley or university, or an urban district or zoo. This book is also for parents, teachers, and students wanting to know more about how the environment of a place affects human behavior, social interactions, and our mental health and well-being.” The book oozes with practical insights (relevant to your space), but let me pause here to apologize to my wife who endured my reading meaty paragraphs to her from almost every chapter! Here’s a taste: • Visual Harmony vs. Visual Noise. “Ideally we want customers to walk into our venues feeling one way and come out a changed person with more energy and inspiration.” (Is that not the aspiration of every pastor and priest?) • The 7 Layers of Signage System: Orientation, Evocative, Address, Values, Process, Promotional, Whisper/Nudge. (You’ll see stores and restaurants with new eyes!) About those giant grocery store letters that spell PRODUCE—“First of all, when’s the last time you heard mom and dad telling their kids to ‘Eat your produce!’” • The Theater of Space. Must-read: the author’s five guiding principles for “the art and science of scene-making.” Using retail as his example, the first principle is “A Good Retail Scene Has a Beginning, Middle, and End.” Principle 2: “A Good Retail Scene Has a Mini-climax Inside of It.” There’s much, much more: • The 10 preliminary questions the design firm asks to get their “observation pumps primed.” • Why only 3 out of 10 clients can do “groundbreaking, breathtaking, and game-changing innovation work.” The other seven? They’ll “do better than where they started but won’t reach the level of excellence they initially desired.” He explains. • Don’t skip the 3x5 card facilitation process, the 3 dials (rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10), The Place Brand Constitution, and the “6 Tips of the Brand Spears.” • Plus: why you need a Brand Stewardship Committee, and how to inspire team members to become “black belt evangelists” and “shepherds of the brand.” • Creative idea: In what they jokingly called their “civil disobedience workshops,” the firm launched an urban renewal project with “the technique of communicating our big strategic idea in the tight confines of a movie poster.” (Brilliant—worth the price of the book!) The winners and the losers (Blockbuster and others) are noted in this book including the innovative L.A. shopping center, The Grove (he takes his clients there to observe), Trader Joe’s, and Texas Roadhouse. Irreplaceable reminded me of two books: Growing Weeders Into Leaders and The Power of Moments. More Brilliance! “If you suddenly got hired by your fiercest competitor and were now sitting at their strategy table, how would you recommend they beat your old employer?” “Too Enthusiastically." I was intrigued with Kelley’s design observations and recommendations (a list of 21) following his travel to the city of Makati—the financial center of the Philippines. (I’ve been there.) No one except Kelley noted “…this small but curious anomaly: groups of maintenance crews applying a notable amount of hazard-yellow paint all over the place…” He adds, “While they intended to alert the public to potential hazards, they did their jobs too enthusiastically.”  Trust me. You can’t be too enthusiastic about this one-of-a-kind book. It’s a must-read in your lawn chair or your Harley!    To order from Amazon, click on the title for Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places that Bring People Together (March 12, 2024), by Kevin Ervin Kelley. Listen on Libro (7 hours, 39 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.     YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) How intentional are you in connecting the dots between strategy and design? Max De Pree (1924-2017) was the CEO of Herman Miller,  a company well known for design. In his book, Called to Serve: Creating and Nurturing the Effective Volunteer Board, he writes: “Hospitality has to do with equity for each member. Enabling each to feel authentic and needed and worthwhile is an act of hospitality. The way we provide for the needs of the group in the physical setting is part of this.” Read my 30 blog posts (not a typo!) on De Pree’s book. Or, read Lesson 3, “The Productivity Payoff of Intentional Hospitality,” in More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom. 2) Who, on your team, is focusing on the “inches” and observing from a lawn chair? Perhaps Joan Kroc, the wife of Ray Kroc, McDonald’s founder, did not use a lawn chair—but she did “hang out anonymously” at a Salvation Army community center in San Diego. Kevin Ervin Kelley, author of Irreplaceable, would love these story about the Kroc estate gift of more than $1.5 billion to The Salvation Army! Read “Big Blessings Abound When Management Faithfulness Flourishes” (Christian Management Report, April 2004), and Lesson 1, "Big Blessings Abound When Governance Faithfulness Flourishes,” from More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom (2019).        Mastering 100 Must-Read Books Part 12: Historical & Political Commentary (U.S.) Book #69 of 100: Rumsfeld’s Rules For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by featuring Book #69 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.  Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons  in Business, Politics, War, and Life by Donald Rumsfeld Books #66 through #70 spotlight five fascinating books on U.S. politics and more. Admiral Hyman Rickover warned, “If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.” That’s just one of over 400 “rules” in this wonderful book by Donald Rumsfeld (1932-2021). The quotations, axioms, rules, and corner office wisdom ooze off almost every page. In the front of my book, I noted 36 rules that I will use again.     • Read my review.     • Order from Amazon: Rumsfeld’s Rules     • Listen on Libro (9 hours, 3 minutes)     • Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson). In the section, “Running a Meeting,” Rumsfeld advises: • “The first consideration for meetings is whether to call one at all.” • “If you can find something everyone agrees on, it’s wrong.” (Rep. Mo Udall) • Rumsfeld adds, “The default tendency in any bureaucracy, especially in government, is to substitute discussion for decision-making. The act of calling a meeting about a problem can in some cases be confused with actually doing something.” • “If you expect people to be in on the landing, include them for the takeoff.” • “Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no basis other than the complaining question, ‘Why wasn’t I consulted?’” (Pat Moynihan) • “As drill sergeants are fond of saying, ‘If you’re five minutes early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. If you’re late, you have some explaining to do.’” MORE RESOURCES: • BLOG: Pails in Comparison • SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon  •WEBSITE:  Management Buckets • BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations Note: This is the NEW location for John Pearson's Buckets Blog. Slowly (!), the previous 650+ blogs posted (between 2006 and 2025) will gradually populate this blogsite, along with new book reviews each month.