My article at the Catalyst website, which is an excerpt from my upcoming book.
The article is in two parts. This is the first part, with the first five myths. The second part should be posted tomorrow or so.
(Update: Here’s part 2.)
Supplementing Good to Great
Jim Collins’ book Good to Great is widely regarded and used by businesses and non-profits around the world, and with excellent reason. I regard it as one of the most important books ever written.
However, understanding the principles of Good to Great is not enough — and I think Jim Collins would agree. This is because Good to Great is about taking a good organization and making it great. It’s about principles of excellence. As such, it does not focus on or go into detail on the basics of how to run an organization at all. It assumes those things. Its focus is the next level — namely, once you know those things, how do you take a good organization and make it great?
Let me say this again: Good to Great assumes you know the basics of how to run an organization. Hence, it’s not enough simply to read it or even implement it. You also need to actually understand those basics.
To get those basics, here are the three chief books I would recommend. Interestingly, the first two are about entrepreneurship, or starting an organization. They’re on the list because knowing how to start an organization familiarizes you with the basics of how to run an organization at all (even though the start-up phase is very different from the ongoing phases). The third, on the other hand, is about the central concepts you need to know for understanding and running an organization.
Here they are:
It is Possible to Stay on Top of Your Work!
As I wrote my book, I thought hard about the question of whether it is truly possible to stay on top of our work. Sometimes, there is so much coming at us that it seems like it actually might not be possible at all, and that the solution is to give up the hope altogether. Further, in one sense that solution can sound very “spiritual.”
There will always be times in our lives where the realities of the situation exceed our capacities. The process of writing the book was one for me. I simply was not able to keep up with all of my work during that time. If I had more money, I would have hired lots of help to keep my day-to-day non-book routines and actions in motion. But given the limitations I had, I often had to let my email and other tasks build up. I eventually got through them all, but it took a long time to catch up.
Extreme situations aside, it is indeed possible to stay on top of your work. This is our natural instinct to believe, and if we reflect on it a bit, we see that it is indeed correct.
For example, if I’m at McDonalds and the lines are going really slow, I don’t think to myself “well, it doesn’t matter; I’m just glad I’m able to get lunch at all.” Not at all. Unless there is a crisis, emergency, or other extreme need, that would be a truly horrible over spiritualization; a denial of the doctrine of vocation. I don’t have that mindset, and the manager of the restaurant, let alone the corporate offices, doesn’t have that mindset either. If things are going really slow and are held up, they find a way to fix it and resume their standard of providing fast service to people. That’s part of the reason they exist. If you look at most successful companies, they’ve developed systems that enable them to meet customer needs in a timely way. This is one of the callings God has given to businesses.
And if businesses are able to keep up with demand, you are able to, as well.
What I’ve found is that the key determinant in whether you are able to keep up with your work is whether you believe that you can keep up with your work.
If you don’t believe you can keep up with your work, then you’ll never be able to do it. But if you believe you can, you will be able to figure it out.
The challenge is this: the practices for keeping on top of our work are not widely known. Developing the capacity to keep up with things takes effort and creative thought. It doesn’t come automatically. But if you take the time to step back, retool, and learn the practices for managing your work effectively in the knowledge era, you can do it.
Though I didn’t start our writing this post with the intention of pointing to my book, one of the reasons I wrote my book is to help you with this. The book will be coming out in March, and hopefully you will find it helpful practices for getting on top of your work and, even more than that, an overall framework of thought for how to do all of your work, in every area of life, for the glory of God and good of others — which is, ultimately, the essence of true productivity.
If you’d like to keep up with plans for the book launch, receive any early excerpts, or otherwise stay in the loop on things, I’d love for you to be a part of things as we get ready for the launch. Subscribing to the blog would also be the best way to do that at this point, and I’ll have more details for how you can be involved down the road.
Using Iterative Scheduling to Navigate Complex Projects
In traditional project plans, you scope out the major pieces of work in detail and then carry them out in a very well defined, predetermined sequence.
Sounds great. But the problem is that this only works well in stable environments. In unstable, ambiguous environments of volatile change, these predetermined schedules continually get thrown off — resulting in frustration.
What’s the solution? Iterative scheduling. Iterative scheduling is based on the recognition that in complex environments, the information you need in order to make detailed plans for tasks beyond the immediate future is simply not available. The result is that, if you do make those plans, they will often be inaccurate. The only tasks for which detailed plans can be made are those tasks that are right before you in the near future.
Hence, iterative scheduling proceeds by planning in smaller buckets of work. You have a clear vision and goal towards which you are working, but you do not create detailed plans for the upcoming tasks further out in the future until the current tasks before you are completed. Only then will you have the knowledge you need to do that detailed planning, not only because the environment will be different once you get to that point, but also because completing those buckets of work itself changes things.
Detailed planning is great. But when you are in an ambiguous environment and find yourself unable to create those detailed plans, take heart that the problem is not with you. Rather, you just need to adapt your planning method to your circumstances. Keep the large goal before you, and then proceed in smaller buckets of work by planning in detail the tasks that are right before you, but resisting the temptation to get too detailed about the tasks beyond that until you finish those items that are right before you.
Crossway's Greek-English New Testament
A few weeks ago I posted on Crossway’s new Hebrew-English Old Testament.
It turns out that they now also have a Greek-English New Testament, which is perhaps even more useful, since Greek is a much easier language.
So, as I said regarding the Hebrew-English Old Testament, I say regarding the Greek-English New Testament even more:
If you went to seminary, made your way through your Greek classes and then forgot most of it, this is for you. You can start to recover a lot of the Greek you’ve forgotten by simply seeking to read the Greek naturally, in conjunction with the English to help assist your memory.
This, in turn, can perhaps build your habits and capacity to the point where you will want to dig even deeper to recover the Greek skills you’ve lost. But even if it doesn’t, simply reading more in the Greek, even with the assistance of the English, will in itself be of great help and use.
Here’s the summary from the Crossway site:
Combining Greek with the English Standard Version text, the Greek-English New Testament is an essential resource for students, pastors, and scholars who work with the Greek New Testament. On each spread, one page displays the Nestle-Aland Greek text, 28th edition, while the adjacent page contains the corresponding ESV text. Simply formatted and easy to use, the Greek-English New Testament will be an invaluable resource for anyone studying and working from the New Testament in its original language.
So, what are you waiting for? Go get it!