What's Best Next

  • Newsletter
  • Our Mission
  • Free Resource
  • Contact
  • Coaching
    • Center for Coaching
    • 2-HOUR DARE
    • Our Coaches
  • Speaking
  • Store
    • Online Store
    • Cart
    • My Account
  • Resources
    • Productivity
    • Leadership
    • Management
    • Web Strategy
    • Book Extras
  • About
    • Our Mission
    • Our Core Values
    • Our Approach to Productivity
    • Our Staff
    • Contact
You are here: Home / 2015 / Archives for August 2015

Archives for August 2015

Leadership Lessons from Nehemiah

August 27, 2015 by Matt Perman

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.

Filed Under: 3 - Leadership

The 4 Phases of Developing Your Creative Voice

August 25, 2015 by Matt Perman

 

Very helpful, from the 99U. The four phases are: discovery, emulation, divergence, crisis.

Filed Under: Creativity, Innovation

GoFundMe Update

August 24, 2015 by whatsbestnext

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.

Filed Under: WBN News

Gospel in Life Now on YouTube

August 22, 2015 by Matt Perman

Gospel in Life now has a YouTube channel. There are currently about 90 of Tim Keller’s audio sermons posted for free, and moving forward it sounds like they will be releasing more and more.

This is great news and is worth checking out and subscribing.

Filed Under: Gospel Movements

The 2015 Global Leadership Summit Highlight Video

August 21, 2015 by Matt Perman

This is really fantastic. It is well worth the 4 minutes. You can learn more about the Summit and find more videos here.

Filed Under: 3 - Leadership, Global Leadership Summit

6 Lessons from What’s Best Next

August 20, 2015 by Matt Perman

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

Filed Under: WBN the Book

Being Gospel-Centered at Work

August 19, 2015 by Matt Perman

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).

Filed Under: 7 - Theology, Grace, Work

Emailing with Empathy

August 18, 2015 by Matt Perman

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.

Filed Under: Email

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

August 13, 2015 by whatsbestnext

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.

Filed Under: Innovation, Social Media, Technology, Web Strategy

8 Characteristics of GLS Leaders

August 12, 2015 by Matt Perman

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.

Filed Under: 3 - Leadership

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »

About

What’s Best Next exists to help you achieve greater impact with your time and energy — and in a gospel-centered way.

We help you do work that changes the world. We believe this is possible when you reflect the gospel in your work. So here you’ll find resources and training to help you lead, create, and get things done. To do work that matters, and do it better — for the glory of God and flourishing of society.

We call it gospel-driven productivity, and it’s the path to finding the deepest possible meaning in your work and the path to greatest effectiveness.

Learn More

About Matt Perman

Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

Learn more about Matt

Newsletter

Subscribe for exclusive updates, productivity tips, and free resources right in your inbox.

The Book


Get What’s Best Next
Browse the Free Toolkit
See the Reviews and Interviews

The Video Study and Online Course


Get the video study as a DVD from Amazon or take the online course through Zondervan.

The Study Guide


Get the Study Guide.

Other Books

Webinars

Follow

Follow What's Best next on Twitter or Facebook
Follow Matt on Twitter or Facebook

Foundational Posts

3 Questions on Productivity
How to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day
Productivity is Really About Good Works
Management in Light of the Supremacy of God
The Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards in Categories
Business: A Sequel to the Parable of the Good Samaritan
How Do You Love Your Neighbor at Work?

Recent Posts

  • How to Learn Anything…Fast
  • Job Searching During the Coronavirus Economy
  • Ministry Roundtable Discussion on the Pandemic with Challies, Heerema, Cosper, Thacker, and Schumacher
  • Is Calling Some Jobs Essential a Helpful Way of Speaking?
  • An Interview on Coronavirus and Productivity

Sponsors

Useful Group

Posts by Date

Posts by Topic

Search Whatsbestnext.com

Copyright © 2023 - What's Best Next. All Rights Reserved. Contact Us.