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Archives for August 2015

Leadership Lessons from Nehemiah

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This looks like a great new book from Dave Kraft: Learning Leadership from Nehemiah. Here’s a summary:

A leader is a person who has a vision from God, firmly believes in that vision, and doesn’t move toward its fulfill­ment alone. Real leaders possess the ability to get others motivated about this new idea. They know the problem, but they also have a solution in mind. A leader is a per­son who is dissatisfied with the ways things are. He has a burden, a vision, and a call to see something different. He wants to see something change, to build a new fu­ture.

He then begins to communicate what he thinks, and where he wants to go. Nehemiah gives a “vision talk” to the troops. When he finishes they are ready for battle. He is able to motivate and enlist them by sharing that God’s fingerprints are all over this vision, evidenced by the great answers to prayer and the generous offer of the king.

GoFundMe Update

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Thank you to everyone who has given to the GoFundMe campaign so far! It is making a big difference.

The campaign is shttp://web.archive.org/web/20150914181305/http://www.gofundme.com/mattpermantill going on. If you would like to give to the vision, you can do so here. It would be a huge help, and I appreciate everyone’s support.

6 Lessons from What’s Best Next

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I really enjoyed this review of What’s Best Next by Luke Simmons over at Faithful and Fruitful, a blog dedicated to equipping ministry leaders to be more faithful and fruitful.

He so well captures six key lessons from the book, which I underscore:

  1. The gospel makes productivity about love
  2. Everyday life provides many opportunities for good works that honor God
  3. Know what’s important and put it first
  4. Systems trump intentions
  5. Weekly planning is crucial
  6. Plan your day

Being Gospel-Centered at Work

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More and more people are asking today the important question, “How does the gospel relate to my work?”

There is a lot that can be said on this, and for the best treatment out there I recommend Tim Keller’s excellent book Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work. 

But for immediate application, if you are looking for a few simple ways to begin letting the gospel impact your work right now, here are two things that go to the heart of it:

  1. Do your work from acceptance with God, not for acceptance with God. Realize you are fully accepted in Christ apart from anything you do, through faith alone. Hence, you do not have to fall into the grueling race of working to prove yourself or validate your worth.
  2. Do your work for the good of others. Because God accepts us apart from our works, we are free to truly do it for others. This is a simple but radical shift. It means seeing your work as a way of serving and benefitting people, not just a way to make money or accomplish your goals. Do your work truly from love, from a good will toward others, just as everything in the Christian life is to be done from love (1 Corinthians 16:14). This is what it means to be “rendering service with a good will” (Ephesians 6:7).

Emailing with Empathy

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This is a great post at the 99U. It starts:

When speaking face-to-face, it’s the verbal and nonverbal social cues that allow us to gauge the best way to arrange our wording in order to get our point across clearly. In email, we don’t get such real-time feedback. Once our message is in the hand of the recipient, we’ve lost all control.

This, of course, often leads to miscommunications, guessed intentions, and a total unawareness of whether an email was typed in red-faced anger or while sipping a martini by a pool. What really leads to those miscommunications is a lack of empathy….

“The most important thing is understanding each other’s language,” founder Drew D’Agostino said. “It’s not me completely adapting the way I communicate with you, but being aware and considerate of how you communicate best. Everybody’s different, and if we can just learn to recognize the communication styles of each other we can create much clearer interactions and productive communications.”

So how do we write emails that enable empathy—especially with people we might have never met in person before? And how can we be more empathetic when reading the emails of others? We asked D’Agostino to share Crystal’s best tips on how to bring more empathy to emails; both in the ones we receive and in the ones we send.

Read the whole thing.

4 Reasons Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Are Making the World a Better Place

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This is an excellent post by Michael Hyatt. He begins:

It’s popular to complain about social media and talk about how it is destroying our culture, but what if the exact opposite is true?

I joined Twitter on April 6, 2008. A friend urged me to check it out. He was already using it and loved it. So after some initial eye-rolling, I tried it and fell in love with the medium too.

It wasn’t long at all before I discovered that Twitter is one of the most powerful communication tools ever invented. It also wasn’t long before I got an earful from critics who said social media was bad news.

He goes on to discuss some of that pushback, and then shows how the critics had it backward. He gives four reasons that, contrary to the criticisms that social media is making the world more selfish, it is actually making the world more generous and a better place.

Read the whole thing.

8 Characteristics of GLS Leaders

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As many of you know, the Global Leadership Summit was last week. It looks like it was another great year, as always.

Here is a great summary of a message Bill Hybels gave on the types of leaders the Global Leadership Summit is seeking to raise up.

I think he gave it before the actual summit to a meeting with their international partners. Nonetheless, it is useful for everyone as it summarizes very well the vision of the entire summit.