An Evening on Gospel-Centered Productivity in Orange County
For those in the Orange County area next week, I’ll be speaking at Sovereign Grace Church on gospel-centered productivity on Thursday night, June 7. I’ll be giving two messages:
- Why We Need to Think Theologically About the Practical for the Sake of Love
- Overcoming the Greatest Challenges Christians Face in the Marketplace
It would be great to see you there, and also feel free to bring your hardest questions. You can find out more details and RSVP (it’s free) on their site.
(I’ll also be speaking at the Biola Digital Ministry Conference next week as well — would be great to see anyone there also.)
And the Greatest Enemy of Creativity and Innovation Is…
Efficiency.
Patrick Lencioni makes the case very well in his article, The Enemy of Creativity and Innovation. Here’s a great part:
I’ve become convinced that the only way to be really creative and innovative in life is to be joyfully inefficient….
Efficiency requires that we subdue our passion and allow it to be constrained by principles of logic and convention. Innovation and creativity require us to toss aside logic and convention, even without the near-term promise of a payoff. Embracing both at the same time seems to me to be a recipe for stress, dissonance and mediocrity, and yet, that is exactly what so many organizations—or better yet—leaders, do.
They exhort their employees to utilize their resources wisely and to avoid waste and redundancy, which makes perfect sense. They also exhort them to be ever-vigilant about finding new and better products or processes, which also makes sense. And yet, combining these two perfectly sensible exhortations makes no sense at all, and only encourages rational, responsible people to find a middle ground, something that is decidedly neither efficient nor innovative.
This is why I don’t talk about efficiency a ton. It matters and has its place. But my goal is effectiveness, and often times the greatest path to effectiveness is quite inefficient.
More on this in my book.
The Job of Top Management is Not to Sit in Judgment on New Ideas
I’ve seen this happen, and it’s not pretty. It’s a waste and it’s a tragedy. Peter Drucker:
“Professional” management today sees itself often in the role of a judge who says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to ideas as they come up…A top management that believes its job is to sit in judgment will inevitably veto the new idea. It is always “impractical.”
Managing Your Weaknesses
A few thoughts:
1. Avoid working in your weaknesses if at all possible.
2. If you can’t, then seek to become competent in your areas of weakness. You won’t become extraordinary in areas of weakness, but competence is sufficient.
3. Continue to spend the most time sharpening and harnessing your strengths. This is where your contribution will shine. As long as you are competent in your weaknesses, they won’t detract and your strengths will stand out and make an extraordinary contribution.
An example (a slightly risky one since I’m not huge into basketball, but you will get the point): Let’s say you are a basketball player and you are great at making baskets but pretty bad at getting rebounds. You need to become solid at getting rebounds when they come your way, so you don’t do harm. But your focus should be on putting yourself in a position to take shots, not get rebounds, if that’s where you make an incredible contribution.
And here’s an example of avoiding your weaknesses altogether: if you are a great quarterback, it doesn’t matter if you are terrible at defense. Don’t play defense. This is so obvious as to be completely undisputed.
Why, then, do we feel like there is some sort of virtue in focusing on our weaknesses in our work?
Seek to contribute where you can make the greatest contribution.