Musings: Notes From My Daybook

We often want to find ways of thinking about doing church and one place we often look is in the world of business.  But sometimes such the resources of business may well not be the right place to look at all.  Of course, as a student of Scripture, I would say that the world of agriculture or the world of family is a much more biblical place to look for models, but I recently reread Jim Collins best selling book Good to Great and found another voice that speaks to the weakness of blindly going to the business world for answers. 

Good to Great is a wonderful book about organizations, but Collins added a brief monograph about non-profit organizations--organizations like churches.  Here what he has to say:

“We must reject the idea—well-intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors (read “church”) is to become ‘more like a business.’  Most businesses—like most of anything else in life—fall somewhere between mediocre and good.  Few are great.  When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness.  So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?

I shared this perspective with a gathering of business CEO’s, and offended nearly everyone in the room.  A hand shot up from David Weekley, one of the more thoughtful CEO’s –a man who built a very successful company and who now spends nearly half his time working with the social sectors.  “Do you have evidence to support your point?” he demanded.  “In my work with nonprofits, I find that they’re in desperate need of great discipline—disciplined planning, disciplined people, disciplined governance, disciplined allocation of resources.”

What makes you think that’s a business concept? I replied.  “Most business also have a desperate need for greater discipline.  Mediocre companies rarely display the relentless culture of discipline—disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined action—that we find in truly great companies.  A culture of discipline is not a principle of business; it is a principle of greatness.”  --Jim Collins, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, 1.

How about that?  A well-known business leader saying that the answer isn't business--it's paying attention to greatness.  Maybe for those of us who make up the community of faith we should think that the place to begin with the One who is truly great--acting with great discipline in our devotion to Him.