Peter Drucker’s book The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization in my opinion is one of the most helpful books out there for pastors and church leadership teams.
The 5 questions are:
- What is our mission?
- Who is our customer?
- What does the customer value?
- What are our results?
- What is our plan?
Why this book matters for pastors is many churches are aimless in what they are trying to accomplish. Yes, they quote the great commission or great commandments or say something like, “We exist to love God and love people.” While all of that sounds nice and biblical, it creates some fuzziness for the people in the church. What does that look like? What things should we do to accomplish that? Because of fuzziness around question #1, churches end up doing too much. In fact, Drucker points out in the book that churches could stop doing 50% of what they do right now and immediately become more effective. I totally agree.
Where I think many churches would benefit has to do with the other questions: who are we trying to reach? While most pastors will not like Drucker’s language of customer, I think it is helpful. Who are you as a church trying to serve and reach? The answer is not everybody, even though you think it is. Your church is uniquely equipped, wired and placed in a particular context to reach a particular context.
Here are a few other things that stood out to me in my reading:
- The mission inspires; it is what you want your organization to be remembered for.
- The danger is in acting on what you believe satisfies the customer. You will inevitably make wrong assumptions. Leadership should not even try to guess at the answers; it should always go to customers in a systematic quest for those answers.
- If you have quick consensus on an important matter, don’t make the decision. Acclamation means nobody has done the homework.
- A mission cannot be impersonal; it has to have deep meaning, be something you believe in—something you know is right.
- The mission says why you do what you do, not the means by which you do it.
- Your core mission provides guidance, not just about what to do, but equally what not to do.
- To do the most good requires saying no to pressures to stray, and the discipline to stop doing what does not fit.
- The best companies don’t create customers. They create fans.
- Our business is not to casually please everyone, but to deeply please our target customers.
- What does the customer value? may be the most important question. Yet it is the one least often asked.
- One of the most important questions for nonprofit leadership is, Do we produce results that are sufficiently outstanding for us to justify putting our resources in this area? Need alone does not justify continuing. Nor does tradition. You must match your mission, your concentration, and your results.
- Leadership is a responsibility shared by all members of the organization.
- The leader does not sit on the fence, waiting to see which way the wind is blowing. The leader articulates clear positions on issues affecting the organization and is the embodiment of the enterprise, of its values and principles. Leaders model desired behaviors, never break a promise, and know that leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do it.
