The Motive

 

Issue No. 481 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (July 22, 2021) recommends a serious (but also hilarious) book—the latest poke-in-the-ribs from Patrick Lencioni. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book from John Pearson and Jason Pearson, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #7 below. Order Chick-fil-A milkshakes and host a “Milkshakes and Motives” team meeting. Will you enjoy peach, cookies-and-cream, or chocolate? Why Do You Want to Be a Leader? Best-selling business author Patrick Lencioni’s latest book will shock you. (Don’t skip a page.) He calls for “the end of servant leadership.” And this priority: “If someone were to dive into a stack of my books for the first time, I’d tell them to start with this one.” The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities is classic Lencioni. The “leadership fable” business story, plus end-of-the-book lessons, has a new twist—and it’s not subtle. The poke-in-the-rib: Why do you want to be a leader? Lencioni: “…the majority of the other books I’ve written focus on how to be a leader: How to run a healthy organization, lead a cohesive team, manage a group of employees.” (All good, right?) But he admits, “However, over the years I’ve come to the realization that some people won’t embrace the instructions I provide because of why they wanted to become a leader in the first place.” And by the way, don’t invite Lencioni to your commencement program! When Lencioni hears a graduation speaker admonish students to “go out into the world and be a leader,” he says he wants to stand up and shout, “No!!! Please don’t be a leader, unless you’re doing it for the right reason, and you probably aren’t!” I’ve read and reviewed my fair share of Lencioni leadership fables—and highly recommended them to others. So would I agree with him that new readers and both emerging and experienced leaders should read The Motive first? I get the importance of “why,” but don’t wanna-be-leaders need a good dose of “how” before they can fully understand the unhealthy “why” motivations they bring to the table?  My suggestion: ask your team members to read The Motive and then huddle over this question. Maybe call the event “Milkshakes and Motives.” No spoiler alert here—because I don’t want to reveal the business story (two CEOs: one healthy, one not so healthy). The story is just 125 pages, including blank pages. The lesson section is just 40 powerful pages.(You can read this over a long lunch at Chick-fil-A—or listen to it in just 2 hours and 37 minutes.)  In the leadership fable, you’ll see two competing motivations for being a leader. If you’re a CEO, does your motivation for being CEO align with how your team views your motivation? Interestingly, writes Lencioni, “As passionately as I feel about all this I almost didn’t write this book because one of my heroes didn’t agree with its premise.”  The hero? Alan Mulally, former CEO at Boeing and Ford, disagreed with a key premise in Lencioni’s book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. You’ll love the scuffle between Mulally and Lencioni on pages 129-131 of The Motive. Gratefully, Lencioni did write his twelfth book and (okay, I’ll say it), it’s a must-read. SURGERY AS DRUDGERY? Back in 2012, I picked The Advantage (a helpful summary of his earlier books) as my book-of-the-year. I recently quoted this gut-check wisdom to a leader:   Lencioni says that “bad meetings are the birthplace of unhealthy organizations and good meetings are the origin of cohesion, clarity and communication.”  He adds, “If someone were to offer me one single piece of evidence to evaluate the health of an organization, I would not ask to see its financial statements, review its product line, or even talk to its employees or customers: I would want to observe the leadership team during a meeting.” When discussing “the five omissions” of unhealthy leaders, The Motive enriches Lencioni’s very high view of the importance of well-led meetings—with these memorable metaphors:  “A leader seeing his or her meetings as drudgery would be like a doctor viewing surgery that way. Or a teacher thinking about class lectures that way. Or a quarterback seeing games that way. As I said earlier, meetings are the setting, the arena, the moment when the most important discussions and decisions take place. What could be more important? “Think about it this way. The best place to observe whether a surgeon is good at her job, a teacher is good at his, or a quarterback is good at his, is to watch them during an operation, a class session, or a game, respectively. What is the best place to observe a leader? That’s right—a meeting.” Read the book to learn the other four “omissions”—and then discuss all five topics at your “Milkshakes and Motives” team meeting. (I’ll have the Chick-fil-A peach milkshake please.) The business fable is hilarious at points (with a dose of locker room language) and it’s impossible to read it and not discuss it. Enjoy. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities, by Patrick M. Lencioni. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (2 hours, 37 minutes). And thanks to Jeff Gerhardt for recently gifting the book to me.  P.S. In addition to The Motive and The Advantage, check out these other books from Patrick Lencioni (after you’re read The Motive!): • Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business (read my review) • The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues (order from Amazon) • The Five Temptations of a CEO (order from Amazon) • The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and Their Employees) - (read my review) Note: listen to the books at Libro.fm YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) Patrick Lencioni lists two unhealthy results when “leaders accept the less-than-amazing status of meetings.” Have we ever had an “amazing” team meeting? What’s your guess on the two unhealthy results that occur with “less-than-amazing” meetings? 2) Lencioni defines management: “…the act of aligning people’s actions, behaviors and attitudes with the needs of the organization and making sure that little problems don’t become big ones.” He adds, “Avoiding this is nothing but negligence.” Do you agree with his definition? Do leaders really need to “manage”?     You’d think the new leader of the Christian MANAGEMENT Association (now CLA) could have orchestrated a drama-free move from Illinois to California on time and under budget. Oops!  MISTAKE #7 of 25: Minimizing Murphy’s Law Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned “I was not yet a believer that “If anything can go wrong, it will.” That’s the subtitle of Mistake #7 in the new book by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. Read the story and cringe at John’s cross-country move in 1994! And speaking of cringing…“I cringe when I recall some of the horrendous mistakes I have made during my lifetime,” writes Ted Engstrom. His suggestion: be transparent, keep going, and call your mistakes learning experiences (his italics).  John learned this from Ted: “Experience teaches us to leave room for the unexpected or to isolate ourselves in order to minimize interruptions.”  Click here to read John’s review of The Essential Engstrom: Proven Principles of Leadership, by Ted W. Engstrom (Timothy J. Beals, Editor).    Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. For supplementary resources, click on John's  "Bucket" book and workbook below:                   JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Patrick Lencioni preaches that CEOs must also be CROs: Chief Reminder Officers—constantly repeating, repeating, repeating the big ideas (strategy, etc.). If no one is listening to your “corporate speak” anymore—and you need some fresh communication tools—contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).  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. THE ESSENTIAL ENGSTROM MISTAKE #7 Book Recommendation: The Essential Engstrom: Proven Principles of Leadership, by Ted W. Engstrom (Timothy J. Beals, Editor). Here are three warnings from Engstrom’s Top-10 list. “There’s danger ahead if you… 1) Settle for the status quo, 2) Eliminate creative tensions, and 9) Lose the joy of service.” (Read my review.)

Next Job - Best Job

 

Issue No. 479 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (July 6, 2021) highlights a new street-smart guide for your “Next Job, Best Job.” It’s a must-read—even if you’re not yet in between jobs. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book from John Pearson and Jason Pearson, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #5 below. Imagine the chess match...if both the interviewer and the job seeker have read Next Job, Best Job! Avoid Sameness and Nonstarter Resumes In a perfect world, I would pay to be a fly on the wall and watch this job interview scenario: MANAGER: Wow, Joe! Your impressive resume got you past the first obstacle (our HR team). Nicely done! But beware: I just read Next Job, Best Job—so I know all your clever tactics for this 30-minute interview. JOE: Well then…you already know that I’m not your typical “Swiss Army knife”—hedging my bets by listing every job I’ve ever had. And you also know from my cover letter that my experience aligns extremely well with the specific needs you have. I’m guessing that your second quarter hiccup last year was a big challenge for your department? (LOL! I’ve read Next Job, Best Job also!) Really…I’d pay serious money (or at least chip in a generous Starbucks card) to observe the jousting in a job interview where both the interviewer and the candidate were fans of this new truthteller, Next Job, Best Job: A Headhunter's 11 Strategies to Get Hired Now, by Rob Barnett. Trust me. This is not your typical blah, blah, blah, blah bromide. Who should read this hot-off-the-press book?    • You—no matter your job status.    • You—if you’re not in your sweet spot.    • You—because your position might be eliminated in the future.    • You—because you’ll likely move on sooner than you think.    • You—because your HR team probably won’t read this!    • You (even if you’re retired)—because you’ll recommend Next Job, Best Job to dozens of family members, friends, and colleagues seeking your advice. If you’re currently in between jobs again (the author’s label: #iBJA), this is a must-read. And good news! The author feels your pain (he’s been there). Before I give you my “Seven Best” (below), please note this caveat. I had the privilege of leading three national/international associations over 25 years and—no surprise—about a dozen headhunter firms thought I worked for them! (That comes with the territory for association executives.) Some still email or call me: “John, who would you recommend as VP of Operations for XYZ?” Headhunters are a unique breed. Some are even good friends! But… …when they read that Rob Barnett, the author and headhunter, only became a headhunter in 2018—whew!—one’s natural tendency will be to dismiss the book, his ideas, and his 11 strategies. My counsel: don’t.  Perhaps because he’s been on the other side of the desk for decades, and just more recently put out his headhunter shingle, I’ve discerned that the author’s unique background has powered fresh, original thinking, enriched his savviness, and fueled dozens (actually hundreds) of insightful tactics that make this book so worth the read.  Here are my SEVEN BEST for Next Job, Best Job: #1. BEST CHAPTER. “The Perfect 30-Minute Interview” (Chapter 9) is unlike anything I’ve read on navigating your actual interview. Shocker: “…your number one goal in any first job interview isn’t to get hired.” (The goal: score that second interview.) #2. BEST JOB SEARCH REGIMEN. Read the detailed three-page schedule for organizing your daily job hunt routine from 9:00 a.m. to 5:25 p.m. (10:20 a.m.—get off social media! At 10:25 a.m.—“I’m not kidding. Turn your social apps off.”) Did I mention the author could do stand-up comedy? #3. BEST “WHEN TO WALK” ADVICE. When should you reject an offer—and how? The author delivers detailed nuances I’ve never, ever read before. When you say no to a new position—be prepared for four possible reactions from the interviewer, including this (the third version): “I respect your decision. I’m sorry we couldn’t make it work and I hope we stay connected.” Barnett calls this person: “A pro who took it like a pro.” And more good news: perhaps “that relationship can be revived again in another opportunity down the road.” #4. BEST THERAPY. The author won’t let you wallow in your in-between-jobs-again (#iBJA) status, but he’s unusually sensitive to the emotional challenges of being #iBJA. In his twenties, he joined a Tuesday evening group of seekers with Father A.A. Taliaferro, who invited them to join a “secret group” called the Worrier’s Club. Just one requirement: “We would be allowed to worry our heads off, but only for five minutes each day, because worrying accomplishes absolutely nothing.” (Listen to this three-minute excerpt at Libro.) #5. BEST NONSTARTER RESUMES. “Hiring execs want specialists—not generalists,” writes Barnett. “Don’t be a Swiss Army knife.” He lists 12 nonstarter career aspirations that should never see the light of day on your resume or on LinkedIn. Examples:    • Seeking my next career opportunity    • Storyteller    • Creative People Person    • Thought Leader    • Freelancer    • Consultant    • Experienced professional, passionate, dedicated, driven to succeed #6. BEST PROCESS. The author’s “North Star” theme oozes throughout the book and he walks you through a process to find your best job. “Branding yourself with a clear North Star in the headline of your resume and LinkedIn profile defines the role that best reflects your passion, expertise, and experience.”  (Be prepared to toss your current resume and do a major rewrite of your LinkedIn profile.) What does your heart compel you to be and do? Barnett admonishes: “If a company is looking to hire a butcher, saying you’re a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker doesn’t give you a leg up. Quite the opposite. You’ll be three times less likely to be hired if you tell everyone that you’re seeking three different jobs.” #7. BEST REBRANDING. Oh, my. The author gives away the store—for just the price of a book. The 37-page chapter, “Marketing Yourself,” is a crash course in your professional rebrand: a new resume, the strongest LinkedIn profile, the perfect headshot, the right wardrobe, a new bio, convincing recommendations, and a killer cover letter. Follow his detailed/detailed counsel and your stale LinkedIn profile will be rescued from “the world’s largest pile of sameness.”  I could go on…but I hope you’ll read the book. In the BEST chapter, Barnett counsels you on how to answer the common interview questions as well as the curveballs that good interviewers will speed your way. One big idea: recruit “preppers” to conduct mock interviews. You must prepare your best answer to: “What’s your dream job?” He also helps you structure a memorable response to “What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?” So…whether you’re interviewing or being interviewed, enjoy this book. Checkmate! One More Caveat: In Next Job, Best Job, the author uses a few “non-church words.” (That’s how Trey Gowdy labels his own occasional word choice! See Gowdy’s recent book on persuasion—also a helpful tool for job seekers.)  To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Next Job, Best Job: A Headhunter's 11 Strategies to Get Hired Now, by Rob Barnett. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (8 hours, 5 minutes). And thanks to Fortier PR for sending me a review copy. YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) Next Job, Best Job suggests (get ready for this!)…you review EVERY contact on your iPhone, plus EVERY friend and follower on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media accounts. Someone may be the perfect connection for you and your Next Job, Best Job.  2) Barnett urges, “Learn all you can about your next company’s social media policies before you start typing a single word.” Why might that be important for job seekers? And…is our organization’s social media policy clear to all insiders?      MISTAKE #5 of 25:  Thinking Leadership Is Learned by Magic Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned “I missed the memo about focusing on results and SMART goals.” That’s the subtitle of Mistake #5 in the new book by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. John describes the day that his wife, Joanne, rescued him from a low-priority workshop and redirected him to a management workshop led by Olan Hendrix. “That day-long crash course in Management 101 changed my life,” he notes. John writes, “In my early years, you could have rubber-stamped ‘Mistake! Mistake! Mistake!’ over much of my work. My biggest mistake: not understanding the importance and power of SMART goals. And aligned with that mistake (or rather, misaligned)—a frenetic focus on activity instead of results. I learned the hard way—but you can learn the easy way: identify and get buy-in on three to five annual SMART goals and report on them monthly. For Mistake #5, John shares what he learned from Peter Drucker and these two books:    • A Year With Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, by Joseph A. Maciariello (Read my review.)    • Drucker & Me: What a Texas Entrepreneur Learned from the Father of Modern Management, by Bob Buford (foreword by Jim Collins) - (Read my review.) Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. For supplementary resources, click on John's  "Bucket" book and workbook below.                      JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are your “Worrier's Club” moments inappropriately focused on your communication strategy? Jason can help you with both therapy and creativity! Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).  NEXT ISSUE! MISTAKE #6: Prioritizing Convenience Over Generosity. I failed to inspire and give permission for the staff to call audibles. Order from Amazon.  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.

Servant of All

 

Issue No. 429 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Feb. 16, 2020) highlights a new take (with a deeper context) on the perilous path to greatness. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my Top-10 books of 2019 and my Book-of-the-Year pick. “To Be Honest…” To be honest…I have this thing about political pundits, CEOs, board members—even colleagues—who, after five minutes or more into a conversation then preface a statement with “Well, to be honest…” (I wonder: Is this now the first time they’re being honest with me?) So—NEWS FLASH!—I’m saying this up front. To be honest, I really wasn’t motivated to read yet another book on servant leadership. We’ve all read them. We know (we know!) we could be and must be better at serving. Yada. Yada. Yada. But (to be honest), because Ralph Enlow’s book, The Leader’s Palette: Seven Primary Colors, was on my Top-10 list for 2013 (and I still quote from it), I was willing to give servant leadership another try. And to be honest, Enlow’s latest book is only 125 pages, with lots of white space. I can speed-read this, I thought. Whoa! Slow down, Pearson. Servant of All checks all of the boxes:    • Convicting.    • Motivational. Quotable.    • Short chapters—long on wisdom.    • Frequently, very, very funny. LOL funny.    • Dramatically changed my thinking on Matthew 18. As I’ve noted before, the measure of a great book is how often I’m reading selections to my wife, Joanne. And get this: Joanne picked it up and read it. Subtitled, “Reframing Greatness and Leadership through the Teachings of Jesus,” the author (his day job is president of the Association for Biblical Higher Education), walks us through the Gospels to pinpoint the fuller and deeper context of what many take out of context: “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.” (Mark 9:35) He writes that “some of the people who most often quote this simple and straightforward principle are among the worst violators of its true implications.” He adds, “…the disconnect between precept and practice is because much of our practical, theoretical, and even theological commentary on servant leadership fails to account for all the Bible has to say on the subject.” In the foreword, Barna Group’s David Kinnaman notes, “We have a surplus of Christian leaders who mistake the size of their platform for the impact they are having for Jesus.” We all see it. Who’s the greatest? Check my Twitter followers. What’s your open rate? The first five short chapters address how we misunderstand greatness. To be honest, I underlined most of the book. Example: “For all our talk about servanthood as Christ’s disciples, we just don’t like it when others are granted preference—especially in ways that expose our laxity or pettiness.” By page 57, Enlow has already called “Strike Four” on the disciples. “Are you kidding me?” Enlow asks. Why did Jesus organize an inner circle campout on the mountain top with just three of the disciples? “Nine of the twelve get excluded from the greatest private screening of all time.” I underlined this: “The emotional path between exclusion and resentment  is exceedingly well worn.” I could fill this entire review with quotable quotes—dozens, wonderfully word crafted by Enlow. Plus, dozens more from a few hall of fame servants (is that an oxymoron?). Examples:    • “What enables us to achieve our greatness contains the seeds of our destruction.” (Jim Valvano)    • “If you hug to yourself any resentment against anybody else, you destroy the bridge by which God would come to you.” (Peter Marshall)    • “Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.” (John Donne)    • “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.” (H.G. Wells)    • “A journey toward greatness is a journey down, not up.” (Larry Richards)    • “Nothing—it would seem—fuels a crisis more than ambiguity.” (Ralph E. Enlow, Jr.)    • “Not only did Jesus affirm that Simon’s answer was correct, he went way overboard.” (Enlow)    • On Peter: “Often wrong, but never in doubt.” (Enlow) In one setting, writes Enlow, “Matthew 18:15-20 was the go-to Scripture passage for addressing personal conflict on the team.” He describes the setting and then adds, “The frequency with which the passage was applied in an attempt to resolve these offenses became itself a source of irritation.”  Why the confusion over the Matthew 18 principles? Enlow: “One reason for this is that rarely, if ever, is this text recognized to be a continuation of Jesus’ lengthy discourse on greatness.” His insights in chapter 10, “The Pursuit of Greatness,” are worth the price of the book. (To be honest.) How I wish other authors could deliver powerful content in small packages like Servant of All:    • Five probing questions for each chapter (study guide quality)    • Six memorable and alliterative chapter titles in Part 2—perfect for six weekly staff meetings. (Add prayer—and it preaches!)    • Summary “In a Nutshell” sidebars contrasting “Worldly Thinking” versus “Godly Thinking.” Did I mention humor? On forgiveness protocols, when Peter “was looking for a rule that would quantify his moral obligation and validate his righteousness,” you’ll recall Jesus’ answer on how often we must forgive someone: 77 times (some translations say 70 times 7). Per Enlow, here’s how Jesus responded: “Put away your scorecard, Peter. You can’t count that high. In fact, if you’re keeping score on such things at all, it reveals that you have failed to understand what constitutes true greatness…” To be honest—and this is the last time I’ll use that annoying phrase—I will read this book again. Enlow, himself, is amazingly transparent—which is arresting. This is a 10 on the must-read scale. To order from Amazon, click on the title for Servant of All: Reframing Greatness and Leadership through the Teachings of Jesus, by Ralph E. Enlow, Jr. YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) In his conclusion, Ralph Enlow reminds us to pursue the context of Jesus’ teaching on greatness, and writes, “If you have the courage to engage it in this way, you will not come out unscathed.” OK, team—do we have the courage to read this book together? 2) Enlow: “The sort of greatness Jesus has been commending in this passage only comes by means of grace. Gratitude acknowledges and appropriates God’s grace. God’s grace appropriated engenders, in its turn, true greatness.” (Or as Anne Lamott says, “Grace always bats last.”) Do you agree?   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                    JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video), including the new book by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields, THIS. 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love. (Read John’s review here.) MORE LESSONS: Effectiveness, Excellence, Elephants! Click here to order More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom, by Dan Busby and John Pearson. Click here to follow the new blog with 40 guest bloggers. ECFA Tools and Templates Blog Click here to read John's blog series on 22 downloadable tools and templates for effective board governance, including a massive time-saving template, Tool #17, a Board Policies Manual. 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.

No Way Home: The Crisis of Homelessness

 

Issue No. 477 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (June 22, 2021) features a True or False Pop Quiz on a new book on how to fix homelessness. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book from John Pearson and Jason Pearson, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #3 below. “A homeless-industrial complex has arisen in California that acquires power and profit by pursuing an utterly dysfunctional strategy” and “has grown into a voracious leviathan, devouring billions in taxpayer’s money.” TRUE or FALSE: We Can Fix Homelessness Raise your hand if you’ve ever read a book on the crisis of homelessness—and how to fix it. (I thought so. Me neither until this month.) One of the avoidable mistakes in my career was reading too narrowly—just stuck in my lane (see Mistake #3 below). So when John Ashmen, CEO of Citygate Network, invited me to join a panel on “mastering mistake making” at his CEO Summit in San Diego this week, I decided to read a new book on homelessness. Whew! I urge you to read it also. No Way Home: The Crisis of Homelessness and How to Fix It with Intelligence and Humanity will shock you! The book quotes Edward Ring of the California Policy Center who warns that “a homeless-industrial complex has arisen in California that acquires power and profit by pursuing an utterly dysfunctional strategy” and “has grown into a voracious leviathan, devouring billions in taxpayer’s money.” If you’ve got any kind of a heart for every precious person created in the image of God, you must read this important book—with just 12 short chapters (138 pages, plus appendix and notes). It’s readable, but also upsetting. Last week I described No Way Home to a colleague, “A journalist, a filmmaker, an economist, and an attorney…walk into a bar and have a robust conversation on homelessness in California.” The four co-authors (not a typo: four!), Wayne Winegarden, Joseph Tartakovsky, Kerry Jackson, and Christopher F. Rufo, have street cred. As Stephen Moore notes in the foreword, this book project was organized by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI). “The PRI team visited shelters, listened to those who work with the homeless every day, researched problems and solutions outside the state, and studied the methods of successful private organizations that are improving lives.” The result: “…a unique guide that state and local policymakers, social service groups, academics, and grassroots organizations could draw from…” So how can I convince you to get unstuck and read outside your discipline? How about a True or False Pop Quiz? TRUE OR FALSE? _____ 1. “California has the worst homelessness crisis in the country [151,000 Californians were homeless in 2019]. More than 39,000, or 40.6 percent, of the nation’s more than 96,000 chronically homeless are located in California.” (Chronically homeless: “a person with a disabling condition who has been continually homeless for one year or more.”)  _____ 2. “Homelessness also puts the public at risk. This is particularly true in San Francisco, where the ‘streets are so filthy,’ reports National Public Radio, ‘that at least one infectious disease expert has compared the city to some of the dirtiest slums in the world.’”  _____ 3. In a Santa Clara County economic impact report on homelessness: “These costs arise because homelessness is an important risk factor for many adverse health outcomes. In part due to these health risks, the unsheltered homeless population die, on average, 20 years earlier than people who are sheltered.”  _____ 4. What would it cost to end homelessness just in the Bay Area “under the current methods of building and providing services?” To create “…a new unit of permanent housing (at $450,000 per unit) for each of the 28,200 people experiencing homelessness identified in PIT [point-in-time] counts…” the cost would be $12.7 billion. Plus: “Providing services (at $25,000 per person per year) to half of that population over 10 years would require an additional $3.5 billion.”  _____ 5. “Today, the old models of punitive workhouses and drafty police station ‘tramp rooms’ are memories of an unfeeling past. They have been replaced by ‘wraparound’ service shelters with professional staffs trained in medicine or social work.” Note: “In 2019, Los Angeles spent an average of $1.7 million a day directly on homelessness.”  _____ 6. “During the winter of 1935-1936, California and Florida set up border patrols to blockade indigents from entering.” Fast-forward to 2019 in San Francisco, where per Heather MacDonald, we find that “the city enables the entire homeless lifestyle”—and what the authors detail as “the mass migration of out-of-state residents in search of the ‘San Francisco Special’” (housing and generous benefits). _____ 7. In San Francisco, “Harm reduction methods and treatment goals are free of judgment or blame and directly involve the client in setting their own goals.” When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in 2020, “San Francisco placed about 1,200 homeless people in city hotels…” According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the city “provided these quarantined homeless with alcohol, tobacco, medical cannabis, and other substances ‘in an effort to prevent a handful from going outside to get the substances themselves.’”  _____ 8. “The Perilous Trifecta.” The data sheet “on the perilous trifecta is nothing short of catastrophic: there are 4,000 men and women in San Francisco who are simultaneously homeless, psychotic, and addicted to alcohol, meth, and heroin: 70 percent have been on the streets for more than 5 years; 40 percent have been on the streets for more than 13 years.”  _____ 9. In San Francisco, “The current policy regime can be divided into three domains—the hospital, the jail, and the subsidized apartment. Together, these institutions represent the new orthodoxy of the socialized state: they reduce homelessness to a set of social-scientific variables, to be manipulated through the intensive application of the medical and social sciences.” Yet…look deeper at San Francisco’s stats:    • “…70 percent of all psychiatric emergency visits involved a homeless individual and…66 percent of all visitors had co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders.”    • Not 80/20! “In total, the top 5 percent of ‘super-users,’ the majority of whom fall into the perilous trifecta, accounted for 52 percent of total systemwide service use.”    • “According to the San Francisco County Jail, the homeless account for 40 percent of all inmates.”    • “The problem is that members of the perilous trifecta are the least likely to seek services.” _____ 10. “Today, across Los Angeles’s 500 square miles, roughly 10,000 people live in some 5,000 vehicles.”  SPOILER ALERT: THE ANSWERS! How did you do on this True or False Pop Quiz? Sadly, all of the above statements are true. Is there hope for California and other major cities? Part III of No Way Home devotes the final three chapters to “Innovative Ways to Reduce Homelessness Despite Budget and Legal Constraints.” But note this: when I finally read a book on how to read a book (see Mistake #3), the author gave me permission to skip around, so I read Chapter 8 of No Way Home first. It’s a short course on “Housing First”—“the political class’s primary mantra on homelessness.” (Per the authors: It’s not working!) In 2015, the Washington Post crowed that the inventor of Housing First, Sam Tsemberis, had “all but solved chronic homelessness.” He boasted, “Give homes for the homeless, and you will solve chronic homelessness.” That was in 2015. The result now in 2021? Not so fast, Sam! Chapter 8 is a must-read—as is the entire book. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for No Way Home: The Crisis of Homelessness and How to Fix It with Intelligence and Humanity, by Wayne Winegarden, Joseph Tartakovsky, Kerry Jackson, and Christopher F. Rufo. And thanks to Encounter Books for providing a review copy and to Jim Palmer, whose book endorsement inspired me to read the book!     YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) According to a Housing First experiment in Ottawa, Canada, researchers divided up a study into two populations: an “intervention” group that received Housing First and numerous services, and a non-intervention “control” group that received no services and remained on the streets. Shockingly and sadly, after two years, “…doing nothing resulted in superior human outcomes than providing Housing First with wraparound services.” Question: before we trumpet our success stories, should we measure them against others who don’t receive our products, programs, or services? 2) Raise your hand if you’ve ever read a book on the crisis of homelessness—and how to fix it. In addition to No Way Home, click here for more resources from Citygate Network and the Invisible Neighbors book by John Ashmen and resource videos.    MISTAKE #3 of 25: Reading Too Narrowly—Stuck in My Lane Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned “I should have read a book on ‘how to read a book’ 50 years ago!” That’s the subtitle of Mistake #3 in the new book by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. John quotes Steve Leveen, author of The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life: How to Get More Books in Your Life and More Life from Your Books. To uncover the books that will change your life (the big idea of the book), the author suggests you have two libraries:     1) The Library of Candidates (based on your List of Candidates)    2) The Living Library (your library of well-read friends). Leveen cautions: “Do not set out to live a well-read life but rather your well-read life. No one can be well-read using someone else’s reading list.”  Each chapter features a brief and personal “mistake story,” (often a hilarious management mistake), and then what John learned after reading a recommended fork-in-the-road book. He recommends one book for each mistake: 25 must-read books! However, for Mistake #3, he couldn’t help himself and thus recommends TWO books! If you’ve been stuck in your reading lane too long, read “The Heroes Chapter” on Zheng He and Harriet Tubman in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s book, Leaders: Myth and Reality.  Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. For supplementary resources, click on John's  "Bucket" book and workbook below.                      JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. As you evaluate the effectiveness of your products, programs, and services—are you using outside eyes and ears to weigh in on your sacred cows and dead horses? Check in with Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).  NEXT ISSUE! MISTAKE #4: Not Learning How to Listen. Way too late in life, I’m learning the “case for listening.” Order from Amazon.  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 YOUR WELL-READ LIFE Mistake #3 Book Recommendation: The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life: How to Get More Books in Your Life and More Life from Your Books, by Steve Leveen. When should you give up on a book? “A few years ago I gave up on Crime and Punishment. I found it not enough crime and too much punishment.” (Read John's review.) 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.