By LeRoy Lawson
Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do? (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
Gary Hamel with Bill Breen, The Future of Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2007).
Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (New York: Penguin Group, 2008).
Does WWGD? look familiar, like maybe WWJD? If so, then Jeff Jarvis has made his point. As Christians ask what Jesus would do, Jarvis argues that organizations wanting to prosper in today”s brave new world need to ask what super-Internet-searcher Google would do, because Google does it right.
No company in history has grown like it. Jarvis has “reverse engineered” Google to find the nuts and bolts (and bits and bytes) that explain its worldwide dominance. The author believes what Goo-gle does can be replicated and that imitating Google”s operational principles and procedures can lead companies, institutions, and governments to achieve their goals. I would add that much of his pretty good advice could be applied in churches and parachurch organizations as well.
Here”s what he found: Google offers its services for free or next to nothing; who can resist? Google invites customers to help design the product and students to design their curriculum. Google has revolutionized how knowledge is obtained, books are published, and encyclopedias written. And Google ties the world together in social networks unlike any we”ve had before. The result? End users are in control, middlemen are doomed, and privacy has given way to the public”s right””and means””to know.
I turned to What Would Google Do? because along with everybody else, I”ve been blown away by how this company is reformatting our culture in ways no one could have imagined just a decade ago. This cyberspaced world keeps getting newer. This means the church, like any other living organism, must learn how to adapt to the evolving environment.
Google succeeds not by controlling, but by adapting and serving. The company never stops asking, What”s needed? How can we provide it? The answers are Google Maps, Google Voice, Google Videos, Google News, Google Earth, Google Groups, Google Docs, and so on to Googles yet unnamed.
The best lesson for the church in WWGD? Never to stop asking, What”s needed? How can we provide it?
WWGD whetted my curiosity but seemed a little extreme, so for balance I turned from the maverick Jeff Jarvis to someone with a more conservative voice. He is Harvard scholar Gary Hamel, and since he”s one of America”s leading business analysts, I shouldn”t have been surprised that he, too, thinks we should ask what Google would do. And what does W. L. Gore (maker of Gore-Tex) do? And Whole Foods? They, too, are getting it right.
HYPE-FREE
The Future of Management is as free of hype as the title suggests. It borders on the stodgy””what you might expect from an academician. But though their styles are different, Hamel sees what Jarvis sees: the future of management looks very much like the Internet. That means management needs to become more democratic, must foster creativity and imagination, must reallocate resources to get the biggest bang for the buck, must resist the dictatorship of old ideas and practices that stifle innovation, and must invite the customer into the research and product development. The greatest danger organizations face is not risk, but institutional drag””shackled by the same old same old.
While reading Hamel, I couldn”t help thinking of my undergraduate classes on church administration. Professor Siefke was the least flashy of lecturers. Creativity and inventiveness were not his forte. But he taught some of the same principles that are inspiring America”s most successful businesses.
His source was not Harvard Business School nor What Would Google Do? He did ask WWJD and urged us to put Jesus” principles into practice. He didn”t care much about bureaucracy and budgets and profits, but he had a lot to say about mission and purpose, servant leadership, “customer” input, releasing people”s creativity and imagination, and about staying very close to the community and asking, What”s needed? How can we provide it?
Professor Siefke would have smiled to read the guiding values of Whole Foods. Here they are, according to Hamel: “Whole Foods” unique management system is based on a nexus of distinctive management principles: Love. Community. Autonomy. Egalitarianism. Transparency. Mission.” My professor would have required us to take notes. “This, gentlemen, is how you run a church!”
JUST A TOOL
I read Seth Godin”s Tribes on assignment. Several Christian leaders and Standard Publishing executives huddled in a retreat earlier this year to ponder the future of churches and agencies in the Restoration Movement. After all, this movement has been around since early in the 19th century. What kind of future can something born two centuries ago expect to have now?
Christian Standard editor Mark Taylor thought Tribes could focus our discussion, so he made it our assigned reading. It worked.
Godin is a best-selling author (Permis-sion Marketing, Purple Cow, Meatball Sundae) and popular business blogger. Tribes is a quick read. In fact, several of us expressed our initial disappointment. He”s too simple, too cutesy, and too superficial for serious thinkers like us, we thought.
But we had to admit we actually finished the book. Not a huge accomplishment. It”s all of 147 pages and the type is large and there”s lots of white space.
And some good ideas.
Godin, too, sees the Internet revolutionizing how business gets done. (Same song, third verse.) It cuts costs, crosses geographical barriers, saves time, and creates communities””that is, tribes, which he defines as “any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea.”
Tribes can do amazing things, and the Internet is helping to get them done. But it is just a tool. What tribes really need are leaders. So this is a book about leading. Not in the old way, with hierarchical structures and domineering bosses and rigid org charts with their chains of command””but leading in the Internet way.
“Leadership,” he says, “is about creating change that you believe in.” It”s not management, which is about making widgets, but about making the changes demanded by a world that wants more than widgets, or at least better widgets than we have now. Tribes need chiefs who will lead.
We didn”t answer all our questions at the retreat. We didn”t even deal with all the challenges Godin throws at his readers. But we did get his message. Our tribe, like all tribes, will flourish when creative, curious, passionate, inspiring leaders rise up and lead followers who seriously want to get unstuck from the miry bogs of the status quo.
LeRoy Lawson is international consultant for Christian Missionary Fellowship, a contributing editor to CHRISTIAN STANDARD, and a member of the Publishing Committee. His column appears here at least monthly.
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