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Self-Preservation: The Biggest Obstacle to Making Customers Happy

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Gary Vaynerchuk starts his book The Thank You Economy in a way that illustrates this truth perfectly:

I’ve been living the Thank You Economy since a day sometime around 1995, when a customer came into my dad’s liquor store and said, “I just bought a bottle of Lindemans Chardonnay for $5.99, but I got your $4.99 coupon in the mail. Can you honor it? I’ve got the receipt.”

The store manager working the floor at the time replied, “No.”

I looked up from where I was on my knees dusting the shelves and saw the guy’s eyes widen as he said, “Are you serious?”

The manager said, “No, no. You have to buy more to get it at $4.99.”

As the man left, I went over to the manager and said, “That guy will need come back.”

I was wrong about that; he did come back. He came back a couple of months later — to tell us he would never shop with us again.

Now, I wasn’t any nicer than this manager, nor have I ever been a softie when it comes to business. However, though I was young and still had a lot to learn, I knew deep in my gut that he had made the wrong call.

The manager believed he was protecting the store from a customer trying to take advantage of it; all I could see was that we had missed an opportunity to make a customer happy.

Al Mohler: It is Not Enough to Have Good Theology — You Also Need to Know How to Lead

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In his excellent book The Conviction to Lead, Al Mohler has a great section on “the two cultures of modern Christian leadership.”

The Believers

The first group knows a lot of theology, but not so much about leadership:

The problem is that the evangelical Christian world is increasingly divided between groups we might call the Believers and the Leaders.

The Believers are driven by deep and passionate beliefs. They are heavily invested in knowledge, they are passionate about truth. They devote themselves to learning truth, teaching truth, and defending truth. They define themselves in terms of what they believe, and they are ready to give their lives for these beliefs.

The problem is, many of them are not ready to lead [emphasis added]. They heave never thought much about leadership and are afraid that thinking too much about it will turn them into mere pragmatists, which they know they shouldn’t be. They know a great deal and believe a great deal, but they lack the basic equipment for leadership. As one proverbial deacon said of his pastor, “Oh, he knows a lot, but he can’t lead a decent two-car funeral procession.”

This is a big, big problem in my view. There are lots of reasons, but one of the biggest is that good theology actually gets discredited when nobody who holds that theology can actually lead. For example, when you are able to make great and true statements about the great doctrines of the Bible, but the things you say about leadership are completely wrong, it undermines your credibility. (Let me also add that just because you understand theology, it does not automatically follow that everything you think about leadership is right just because you think it; leadership is a discipline in its own right, and you need to learn it.)

Further, if people with good theology don’t know how to lead, then the church will eventually be led by people with bad theology. Hence, people who care about theology ultimately have no choice — they have to learn about leadership and learn to do it well.

The Leaders

On the other hand, there are many in the church who care much about leadership, but aren’t as clear on what they believe. Mohler continues:

The Leaders, on the other hand, are passionate about leadership. They are tired of seeing organizations and movements die or decline, and they want to change things for the better. They look around and see dead and declining churches and lukewarm organizations. They are thrilled by the experience of leading and are ardent students of leadership wherever they can find it. They talk leadership wherever they go and are masters of motivation, vision, strategy, and execution.

The problem is, many of them are not sure what they believe or why it matters. They are masters of change and organization transformation, but they lack a center of gravity in truth. They often ride one program after another until they run out of steam. Then they wonder, What now? 

The Solution

What’s the solution? The solution is that these groups need to come together. The believers need to learn more about leadership (and stop making fun of it! it is not mere pragmatism) and the leaders need to recognize the great value in diving deeper theologically (it does not have to distract from loving people or turn you into a rigid dogmatist).

Some people will always be more leadership oriented, and others will always be more doctrinally oriented, but at the end of the day the amazing thing is that good, biblical leadership is actually very theological — and good theology is also very leadership-oriented.

Here’s how Mohler brings things together:

You deserve to know exactly who I am and why I am writing this book. I want to turn the Believers into Leaders and the Leaders into Believers. My goal is to knock the blocks out from under the current models of leadership and forge a new way. I stake my life on the priority of right beliefs and convictions, and at the same time I want to lead so that those very beliefs are perpetuated in others.

If our leaders are not passionately driven by the right beliefs, we are headed for disaster. At the same time, if believers cannot lead, we are headed nowhere.

My goal is to redefine Christian leadership so that it is inseparable from passionately held beliefs, and to motivate those who are deeply committed to truth to be ready for leadership.

I want to see a generation arise that is simultaneously leading with conviction and driven by the conviction to lead. The generation that accomplishes this will set the world on fire.

Message Notes from Day One of the Global Leadership Summit

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The Willow Creek Association Blog has a great summary of each of the messages yesterday from the Global Leadership Summit. Here they are:

They will continue posting notes from the messages throughout today as well, so check their blog periodically to stay up to date.

The Global Leadership Summit: Beginning Now

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The Global Leadership Summit is today and tomorrow. For those who aren’t familiar with it, here’s a brief description:

The Global Leadership Summit is a two-day, world-class leadership event experienced by more than 170,000 leaders around the world, representing 14,000 churches. This event is crafted to infuse vision, skill development and inspiration for the sake of the local church.

Speakers this year include Susan Cain (author of the great book The Power of Introverts), Jeffrey Immelt (president and CEO of GE), Patrick Lencioni, Carly Fiorina, Louie Giglio, Bill Hybels, and more.

This is the Summit’s twentieth year — a great milestone. I’m excited for the Summit every year because Bill Hybels and the Summit leaders actually understand leadership. Their thinking is in line with the best contemporary research and studies on leadership, and the Scriptures. This is, unfortunately, sometimes a rare thing in the church today.

So, it would be worth your while to follow along with the Summit online these next two days. Here are three chief ways to follow the Summit:

  1. The Summit Facebook page
  2. The WCA blog
  3. WCA on Twitter

Through those avenues you’ll also find links throughout the day to posts by some of the blogging team for the Summit, which are always a highlight.

I’ll also try to post a few thoughts or quotes if I can.

 

Is it Really the Case that People Don't Value that Which is Free?

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When I was at Desiring God and we were implementing the vision of posting everything online for free, this was a common objection.

I think the people who make this objection are very smart. Further, they have some good evidence for their thinking. For example, who hasn’t returned home from a conference with a huge pile of free books that they are not interested in and might actually just throw away? Or who doesn’t get annoyed by marketers trying to stick them with “free” stuff as they walk by.

And I have to say that one of the most annoying things to me is websites that try to promote their newsletter or other stuff by putting FREE in all caps, as if we are dogs programmed to salivate at any idea of “free” and as if we don’t have enough to do already. My question whenever I see that is always “who cares if it’s free; will it actually add value to my life?” Much of what is “free” actually takes value away from you by taking your time and creating hassle.

In other words, “free” is often a value vampire.

Of course, though, the problem here is that in these cases, we really aren’t dealing with free at all. We are dealing with low-value stuff that imposes a cost on us — the cost of time and hassle, all in the service of the marketers aims, not the recipient’s aims. By definition, that is not free. That’s called taking. It’s taking in the guise of “FREE.”

Back to something like abundantly free online sermons (like at Desiring God) or even the case of free books. The fact is, sometimes we do value free stuff — and sometimes we don’t.

You can’t just make a blanket statement that people don’t value free stuff, or that they do. Experience constantly contradicts this.

For example, think of your favorite TV show (if you have one). If it’s on one of the major networks, it is free to you. Does that make you value it less? For years my favorite show was Lost, and I didn’t value it less because of the fact that I didn’t have to pay to watch it. Likewise, just because I do pay for an episode of something now on iTunes doesn’t mean I am going to value it more. I value it based on how much I like it, not based on how much it cost me.

The biggest factor here of all, though, is the issue of salvation. Salvation is fully free (Romans 6:23). Does that make us value it less?

Of course, based on the behavior of some Christians, some people might actually argue that the answer is yes! But we know that can’t really be the case, for God would not set things up such that the way he grants the right to heaven is intrinsically flawed so as to make us devalue it.

I think the answer is this. People value free things when those free things meet immense needs or enable them to invest in things that matter. 

In the case of free online sermons, if a person simply has a consumer mentality, they might not be valuing those free sermons the way they should. But the free sermons aren’t there for such people. The sermons are there for the people who want to take what they learn from those sermons and invest it into their lives and into other people. 

Note that in these cases, the person is actually doing a lot of work. But the work is not to earn the right to the free items (in this case, sermons), but in learning from them, applying them, and living them out. That is very demanding, and causes people to value the sermons very much. (I’ve spoken to pastor after pastor, for example, that has remarked on how they use the sermons in their research as they are preparing for their own sermons.)

And that’s why making something free does not necessarily diminish its value. Sometimes, it actually enhances its value by enabling the person to focus on the real purpose of that which is free — namely, putting it to use.

Why distract people from that purpose by putting up additional barriers?