What's Best Next

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

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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.

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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:

1. Why does management matter?
2. What is management?
3. Is it possible to integrate theology and management?
4. What does it look like to integrate theology and management?
5. What are some of the main practices of effective management and how does a Christian ethic inform them?
6. What does effective management look like in various organizations?

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My view of management is that you don’t control behavior with rules, but instead shape behavior through values. You do need some rules, but the principle is to minimize the number of rules you have, and not to default to “making a new rule” when you encounter a problem.

(I distinguish rules and principles, by the way — principles are enduring and guiding; rules are particular applications which are context-specific. And, I am a big fan of standards that capture the essence of what really makes certain things tick, although the standards need to be open to revision.)

Anyway, why minimize rules? There are lots of reasons, and it would be interesting at some point to go into detail. At this point, here are two reasons:

1. A reliance on rules tends to dehumanize, treating employees as potential problems to be controlled rather than adults who are responsible stewards. A default, “what can it hurt” approach to rule-making seems to assume that the manager always knows best, which is not the reality in our knowledge economy. By definition, a knowledge worker is one who knows more about his job than his manager.
2. The tools that eliminate risk often eliminate action.

This approach also syncs with how I think society best functions. “He who governs least, governs best.” That is true in government and management.

So often, the multiplication of laws (in government) and rules (in management) is more about enhancing the power of the ruler (or manager) than serving the person.

Here is an excerpt from a great manager interviewed as part of the research for First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. His words here are typical of what they found most great managers to be saying:

Interviewer: Tell us a couple of the ideas that have helped you over the years.

Manager: Well…I suppose the first would be, pick the right people. If you do, it makes everything that much easier.

And once you’ve picked them, trust them. . . . If you expect the best of people, they’ll give you the best. I’ve rarely been let down. And when someone has let me down, I don’t think it is right to punish those who haven’t by creating some new rule or policy.

People often say: “Are you sure that it’s such a good idea to trust employees by default? Won’t they let you down?” The answer lies in what this manager said: You have to pick the right people. And once you do, trust them because you get what you expect.

There will be some times when people let you down, but it won’t be as much as you think. And when they do, it’s not right to create a stricter set of rules that hinders the 95% of the people that haven’t.

I have a guest post today at Abraham Piper’s blog 22 Words. It’s on an easy way to tell if you have a bureaucracy, in just 22 words.

On this subject you might also be interested in my post avoiding the bureaucratic death spiral.

A good list from BNet.