My wife told me that when I do these posts on recommended books, I should mention that I read 50-100 books a year. So, I’m not recommending things off the cuff here. These are the best books I know of on the subjects.
When it comes to management, here are the top seven books I recommend:
1. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
I’ll be continuing off and on for the next few weeks our discussion of rules, and why they should be minimized. Let me give an example from personal experience.
This is the story of the time a cashier would not sell me Gatorade, even though I was in dire need, because of a rule.
I’ll be doing some posts this week and next recommending some of the top books I’ve read on various subjects. First off are books on managing non-profit organizations.
Here I have three primary recommendations:
1. Managing the Nonprofit Organization, by Peter Drucker
2. Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant
3. Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great by Jim Collins
Josh Etter interviewed me a couple of weeks ago with three questions on productivity. The questions are:
A paper delivered at the 2009 meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society
I want to give you today a theology of management. This will consist of six parts.
First, I want to convince you that good management matters. Specifically, I want to convince you that it should matter to you as Christians—whether you are a pastor, in the leadership of a ministry, or a lay person in the workplace.
Second, I want to show you what great management is so that you can become better at it insofar as you may be in a management role and so that you can support its practice in your organizations and churches even if you are not.
Third, I want to use the field of management as an example to demonstrate how we as Christians can think more effectively about how our faith relates to all of life—to typically “secular” areas that nonetheless are very central to our lives. This means asking the fundamental question of whether it is even possible to think theologically about management without depreciating theology and ruining management.
Fourth, I want to show the very neat ways in which a Christian ethic informs this very important discipline. This is some incredible stuff.
Fifth, I want to apply this by looking at what effective management looks like in various organizations – including, briefly, churches. Many of us are scared off from seeing a role for management in the church because of the off-biblical trajectory of the pastor as CEO model. I want to show that that the problem is wrongly applying management. Management can matter to us in the church without being made ultimate, and I want to show how.
To this end, this paper has six sections: