I think there is a lot churches and pastors can learn from business and entrepreneurs. Whether that is Pixar, Amazon or Ben Horowitz, there has been a bunch of books published by these great leaders recently sharing what they learned in building their companies. Add to the list How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg. There are a lot that leader can learn from Google’s practices.

Here are 9 takeaways from google that can help pastors and churches:

1. The way to challenge Microsoft, we said, was to create great products. The way any church challenges anything they face is to be great at what they do. This doesn’t mean you set out to be better than another church (although plenty of churches see other churches as competition sadly), it means you figure out what you can do, who you can reach and be the best at it. 
2. Smart creatives, though, place culture at the top of the list. To be effective, they need to care about the place they work. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider. The old adage, “Culture trumps strategy” is still true. It determines what gets done, who you hire and who stays with your church. Before working on a vision or strategy, make sure your culture is what it needs to be.
3. People who believe in the same things the company does will be drawn to work there, while people who don’t, won’t. This is one of the hardest thing for a pastor to get: your church is not for everybody. Your church will not reach everybody, and that is okay. The faster you as a leader can help someone determine if they should be a part of your church, the better. Whenever we have a newcomer’s lunch, I am very clear about who we are, who we feel called go best reach and how we go about that. I talk about what we do AND what we don’t do as a church.
4. When it comes to the quality of decision-making, pay level is intrinsically irrelevant and experience is valuable only if it is used to frame a winning argument. Too often, leaders hold tightly to decision making and who makes decisions. Bring people into conversations, tap into their expertise when you are making a decision. Get their insight, even if they aren’t on staff, an elder or have been at the church for awhile.
5. Small teams get more done than big ones, and they spend less time politicking and worrying about who gets credit. Small teams are like families: They can bicker and fight, or even be downright dysfunctional, but they usually pull together at crunch time. I’m a fan of smaller teams with less people. I think committees in most churches are too big and keep the church from accomplishing things quickly.
6. Determine which people are having the biggest impact and organize around them. Decide who runs the company not based on function or experience, but by performance and passion. A leader always needs to be on the lookout for the mover and shakers, who people gravitate towards, who has their pulse on a church and be around them. Learn from them about what is happening and what they are hearing and why people are following them.
7. Burnout isn’t caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you. Burnout is something I’ve written a lot about and so I found this take on it interesting. I wonder if many pastors burn out because they wish they were doing something different in their job or were spending more time on things they aren’t spending time on or spending time with people they don’t spend enough time with.
8. A problem well put is half solved. I love this. What are you trying to solve? What is the problem? Most issues that churches are trying to solve aren’t the issues or aren’t that important. Make sure what you are solving is actually the problem.
9. Spend 80 percent of your time on 80 percent of your revenue. This is such well-known, old advice that you might wonder why I include it as a great takeaway. It is true. And pastors do not often abide by it. They waste so much time on things that do not bring return or aren’t things they should be doing. Every year, a pastor should take stuff out of their job description so they are focusing on the most important things.

The book was a great read and if you are a leader, you should add it to your reading list.

One of the best leadership books I’ve read in a long time was Leadership Blindspots: How Successful Leaders Identify and Overcome the Weaknesses That Matter by Robert Bruce Shaw.

In it, he defines the term blindspot to refer to an unrecognized weakness or threat that has the potential to undermine a leader’s success. But this is bigger than leadership. Every person has blind spots in their lives. These blindspots are often what other people see but rarely do we see our blindspots, hence the name. Our blindspots though stop our careers before they get started, creating a ceiling on our effectiveness and keep us from having the life we long for.

• An executive I know believes that leadership, when all is said and done, is simply making better decisions than your competition. I’ve said before that the longer I am a leader, the more I believe leadership is simply making decisions. It is the same with getting ahead in any area of your life.
• Leadership strengths are often found in close proximity to blindspots. An overpowering strength, in particular, usually has an associated blindspot—one that is sometimes problematic and sometimes not, but always close at hand. If you want to know what can hinder your success in any part of your life, look at what you are strong at. If you are an eternal optimist, always believing and hoping for the best, this can easily derail you when pessimism would be more helpful. 
• The question that a leader should ask about each weakness or threat is, “Will this weakness or threat, if not addressed, cause serious harm to me or my organization?” Or, stated differently, “If my thinking about the impact of this weakness or threat is incorrect, can I live with the potential consequences?” Not all blind spots can be changed or should be changed. Some should be noticed and managed, not ignored. It is important to know what your blind spot will do if left alone. 
• Solving problems is sometimes easier for a leader than identifying the problems that must be solved. This is true and one of the reasons many people do not overcome weaknesses in their lives. They don’t see them, they don’t look for them. Instead of solving the issue of why people are leaving a church, we argue about songs or the carpet. Instead of looking at sin in our lives, we point it out in someone else’s life.

All in all, this was a helpful, helpful book. I loved how Shaw looked at not only personal blind spots, but also team dynamics and organizational blind spots and how they can miss opportunities because they aren’t ready for them.

I just finished The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone. As a reader and a parent who buys Christmas gifts, Amazon has gotten a lot of my money and time. The book was a fascinating look at their culture and the leader who started that culture.

Two things stood out about Amazon and Jeff Bezos: their focus on the customer and their desire to be the biggest and best store online, hence the title.

Here are 9 things I learned and what pastors can learn from Bezos and Amazon:

1. “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to something else. And they prefer to be close-followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different. Very few companies have all of those three elements.” This is the driving force of everything Amazon does. How many churches can say they have that kind of clarity, and that kind of clarity on reaching people who don’t know Jesus. Churches get lost in committees, programs, finances and lose sight of what we are called to do. We lose sight of those who don’t know Jesus while trying to appease those who are already there. Making discipleship only about growing believers, losing sight of the fact we are called to help those who lost be found.
2. Looking at things in new ways can enhance one’s understanding. Pastors need to get out of their camps and their bubbles to learn new things and new ways of doing ministry and leadership. If you haven’t learned anything new, been made uncomfortable as a leader recently, that is a problem.
3. Bezos chose to start his company in Seattle because of the city’s reputation as a technology hub and because the state of Washington had a relatively small population (compared to California, New York, and Texas), which meant that Amazon would have to collect state sales tax from only a minor percentage of customers. Your location as a church says a lot about you and who you are trying to reach. Have you thought proactively about it? Why are you where you in your city? How does that translate into your vision?s.”
4. Figure out what you can do better than anyone and do that: This was a key part of Amazon’s early strategy: maximizing the Internet’s ability to provide a superior selection of products as compared to those available at traditional retail stores.  Too many churches and pastors try to be someone or some church they are not. Be you. What can you as a leader do that no one else can? What passion, wiring do you have that no other pastor has? Who are you passionate about reaching that someone else isn’t? The greatest companies and churches have this clarity. 
5. Our biggest mistake was thinking we had the bandwidth to work with all these companies. When you get to complex, disaster strikes. Like most churches, Amazon has had seasons of complexity. Whether they were buying companies or starting new things. When this happened, Amazon got off track and they felt the cost of it. Burnout, turnover, loss of profit. When churches get busy or complex, they get off track. The problem is that you don’t feel the effects of that until down the road when you are playing catch up. 
6. During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn’t take that well. “The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority,” he answered bluntly. “That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can’t excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.” While I’ve written about the work-life balance and health and don’t necessarily agree with how Bezos drove his employees into the ground, he was at least clear on his objective as a CEO and company. He was more concerned about the customer than his employees. He was at least clear and clarity is something a leader can never lose. This was so clear for Amazon that stone wrote, “Bezos was obsessed with the customer experience, and anyone who didn’t have the same single-minded focus or who he felt wasn’t demonstrating a capacity for thinking big bore the brunt of his considerable temper.”
7. Every product, shelving unit, forklift, roller cart, and employee badge has a bar code, and invisible algorithms calculate the most efficient paths for workers through the facility. Pastors and churches need to think about how to be more efficient. Time is wasted in meetings, programs, setting up and tearing down, follow up. Things and people overlap tasks because pastors have not asked, “how can we be as efficient as possible?” Does this matter? Yes because this is a stewardship issue. Every moment I spend on something is stewarding my time for God. It needs to be on the right thing.
8. Amazon invested heavily in technology, taking aggressive swings with digital initiatives like the Kindle. Amazon also focused on fixing and improving the efficiency of its fulfillment centers. EBay executives searched for high-growth businesses elsewhere, acquiring the calling service Skype in 2005, the online-ticketing site StubHub in 2007, and a series of classified-advertising websites. But it let its primary site wither. Customers became happier over time with the shopping experience on Amazon and progressively more disgruntled with the challenges of finding items on eBay and dealing with sellers who overcharged for shipping. Amazon had battled and mastered chaos; eBay was engulfed by it. Just like #4, eBay tried to be Amazon and Amazon tried to be Amazon. Guess who won?
9. “When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers,” he said, reciting a well-worn and, considering the past few years of competition with Zappos, credulity-straining Jeffism. “We pay attention to what our competitors do but it’s not where we put our energy.” I love the laser focus of Amazon and wish more churches had that. Think for a minute about why focus matters. It clears up what you will do, why you will do it, how you will spend your time and money. Now, what is at stake for your church compared to Amazon? Eternity versus selling things. And Amazon has more clarity than most churches.

All in all, I loved this book. Tons of wisdom for leaders in it and a great story about a great company. I thought it was fascinating.

I kept hearing about Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm by Mark Sayers on different blogs and at different conferences and then a leader I respect said it was the best leadership book he’d ever read. I decided at that point, it was time to pick it up.

I was not disappointed.

One thing you will notice quickly, it is unlike any other leadership book out there. It has history, stories, art and a lot of soul in it.

The point of the book of the book is to show how leadership has changed, how culture has changed and what leadership looks like moving forward. I am thankful as Sayers points out, we are moving away from deconstruction in our leadership and culture and moving towards rebuilding. I’m hopeful Christians get this idea as many leaders seem to be behind the times and keep talking about deconstructing.

Here are a few things that jumped out:

• Leaders are men and women who can influence a group of people toward a common goal. Their leverage comes from their ability to envision, communicate, and embody a better future. They see something wrong and want to change it. Yet for a group to be motivated they must come to some level of disillusionment with the status quo; they need motivation to change. The difficulty for those of us who are called into leadership in this era, in a society of the spectacle riddled with passive spectatorship and intermittent distraction, is made increasingly difficult.
• Before we can lead others out of the culture of illusions, our illusions must die.
• For leadership to be awoken, the modern myth that, like Nemo, we can hide away from the storms of life in comfort must be cast aside.
• Our understanding of leadership is markedly shaped by the myth of the hero, the idea that through sheer effort and determination we can reshape reality. The myth of the hero tells us that dynamic, charismatic, and glorious individuals can heal cultures through their personal guile, skill, and glory.
• The age of the image has created a whole industry that specializes in managing the public perceptions of leaders.
• As leaders, influencers, and creatives, we all have dreams. Would we be satisfied if God made those dreams come true but we received no personal recognition?
• Without realizing it, leaders can paint their own dysfunction over churches, ministries, and mission fields. All too easily, the effort to preach the gospel becomes about appeasing fears and insecurities, turning leadership into a tool used to primarily gain a sense of personal meaning. 
• Emptiness seeks out thrills and excitement to escape the mundane. When this happens in Christian circles, churches recast mission, ministry, and leadership as adventures. 
• Christian leadership is a strange beast. In its truest form it runs counter to almost everything the world has taught us: To create ourselves by accumulating riches, experiences, and relationships, and, most importantly, to broadcast them to the audience that will mirror back to us the messages we wish to hear. 
• At its heart, biblical faith is a creed of the antihero. It is the story of men and women who come to the end of themselves and must discover God. 
• Leaders do not avoid the storm when it comes, instead they step into the storm and discover the one who comes in the storm. 
• Biblical leadership is so much more than just leading people. The biblical leader is a symbol who lives at the intersection of God’s breaking into history, into life. The leader can never be distant from God, His word, or the world. 
• Those who avoid God’s holy storms fail to feel their pain, but they also fail to grow.
• It is easier to reimagine church structure than it is to reimagine what it means to live a life fully devoted to God in modern culture.
  

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman & Greg McKeown is a book every leader should read. In it, the authors compare what they call Multipliers and Diminishers. They look at how some leaders are able to get maximum effort from their teams and people and how others don’t even scratch the surface.

Multipliers make us better and smarter. They bring out our intelligence. While diminishers drain intelligence and capability out of the people around them. Their focus on their own intelligence and their resolve to be the smartest person in the room had a diminishing effect on everyone else. For them to look smart, other people had to end up looking dumb. So the question this book asks: How do some leaders create intelligence around them, while others diminish it?

According to the authors, there are 5 things that set Multipliers apart from other leaders:

1. They attract talent.
2. They liberate their teams to reach their potential and beyond.
3. They challenge their teams.
4. The create healthy debate in their teams and meetings.
5. They invest in their team members.

Here are some specific things I learned about becoming a Multiplier from my reading:

• The biggest leadership challenge of our times is not insufficient resources per se, but rather our inability to access the most valuable resources at our disposal.
• Leaders rooted in the logic of multiplication believe: 1. Most people in organizations are underutilized. 2. All capability can be leveraged with the right kind of leadership. 3. Therefore, intelligence and capability can be multiplied without requiring a bigger investment.
• Multipliers don’t necessarily get more with less. They get more by using more—more of people’s intelligence and capability. Diminishers appear to believe that really intelligent people are a rare breed and I am one of the few really smart people. They then conclude, other people will never figure things out without me.
• Multipliers lead people by operating as Talent Magnets, whereby they attract and deploy talent to its fullest regardless of who owns the resource. People flock to work with them directly or otherwise because they know they will grow and be successful.
• Multipliers establish a unique and highly motivating work environment where everyone has permission to think and the space to do their best work.
• Multipliers operate as Challengers by seeding opportunities, laying down a challenge that stretches an organization, and generating belief that it can be done. In this way, they challenge themselves and others to push beyond what they know.
• Multipliers make decisions in a way that readies the organization to execute those decisions. They operate as Debate Makers, driving sound decisions through rigorous debate. They engage people in debating the issues up front, which leads to decisions that people understand and can execute efficiently.
• Multipliers deliver and sustain superior results by inculcating high expectations across the organization. By serving as Investors, Multipliers provide necessary resources for success. In addition, they hold people accountable for their commitments. Over time, Multipliers’ high expectations turn into an unrelenting presence, driving people to hold themselves and each other accountable, often to higher standards and without the direct intervention of the Multiplier.
• Talent Magnets are attracters and growers of talent and intelligence. Leaders who serve as Multipliers provide both the space and the resources to yield this growth. But Talent Magnets go beyond just giving people resources. They remove the impediments, which quite often means removing the people who are blocking and impeding the growth of others.
• Talent Magnets remove the barriers that block the growth of intelligence in their people.
• Diminishers are owners of talent, not developers of talent.
• How smart you are is defined by how clearly you can see the intellect of others.
• Multipliers understand that people grow through challenge.
• Multipliers invest in the success of others.
• When leaders fail to return ownership, they create dependent organizations.
• The Diminisher operates from a very different assumption: People will never be able to figure it out without me.
• When you delegate, you probably let people know what you are expecting of them. But take this to the next level and let people know that they (not you) are in charge and accountable.
• When we protect people from experiencing the natural ramifications of their actions, we stunt their learning.

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