Gary Hamel was ranked as the #1 Business Thinker of 2008 by The Wall Street Journal and called “the world’s leading expert on business strategy” by Fortune. An author, speaker, professor, and innovative management consultant, he is most widely known for originating concepts such as “strategic intent” and “core competencies.” The founder of Strategos, a worldwide strategic consulting company, his vision for the workplace revolves around releasing human potential and creativity. Hamel will address the paradigm shift needed to fully engage the potential of people and explain how tomorrow’s most successful companies will be organized. He is the author of Leading the Revolution and The Future of Management.
- The most important question facing the church: Are you changing? Are you the vanguard or the old guard?
- Since 1990, the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation has quadrupled.
- In 2005, only 17% of Americans attended a religious service on a Sunday morning.
- The “Christian” brand has taken a beating among young people… most have a neutral view of Christianity.
- We’re not very different than the world around us.
- A healthy church will have a healthy conversion rate of 20:1.
- Only 3.5% of churches are evangelistically healthy.
- 9 out of 10 Americans say they have faith in a spiritual being.
- 9% of Americans say they are non-religious or non-spiritual.
- 1/3 will say they are spiritual, but not religious.
- What’s the problem? God’s Message or our methods?
- Christians are loosing “market-share” because of apathy
- Messages, Marketing, Programs, Giving, Staffing, Facilities and Organizations need to be evaluated.
- Vision becomes strategies; strategies become policies; policies become practices; and practices lead to entropy. (missed the end of this one!)
- Churches need to learn to morph, and it usually takes a crisis for change to happen.
- We haven’t been powerful magnets for people to be drawn to Christ.
- They haven’t been potent catalysts for the Gospel.
- Our churches have turned into weekly convocations for the converted and the content.
- Young people view the “big church” like they view big government and big business.
- We should look at it as a blessing that people are seeing through religion so they can have a real life.
- Unprecedented changes bring unprecedented opportunities. But you must have unprecedented strategies.
- Our problem is inertia.
- The pace of change has gone hypercritical.
- Change happens at an accelerated pace.
- We live in the world that’s shaken, not stirred.
- You’re either going forward or backward, you’re not standing still.
- The world is becoming more turbulent faster than organizations can become more resilient.
- Most organizations end up shackled to one model, and when it atrophies, so does the organization.
- Success is always self-correcting.
How do you become the enemy of entropy?
1 – You have to overcome the temptation to take refuge in denial.
- We convince ourselves that things are going better than they are.
- Denial follows a familiar pattern.
- Dismiss > Rationalize > Mitigate > Confront
- When an organization misses the future it’s often because it’s unpalatable.
- Deal with the future by facing the facts.
- Question your beliefs.
- Understand that humility is not a virtue, it’s a survival strategy.
- Listen to the renegades.
- Learn to be positive deviants.
- The future has already happened.
2 – Generate more strategic options
- We clutch the familiar because we can’t see compelling alternatives.
- Change needs to seem more exciting than standing back.
- We rush prematurely to closure.
- We have to diverge a lot.
- Generate new ideas.
3 – Deconstruct what you already do
- We need a lot more business models and innovations in church.
- Every organization is filled with orthodoxies.
- We’re in a race to uncover and challenge our orthodoxies.
- Look at everything you do and ask: What hasn’t changed for 3-5 years?
- If it hasn’t changed is it because we’ve explored other options and it still is the best option or because we’re stuck on tradition.
- When everything in the world is changing, we have to learn how to be contrarians.
- The longer your in the trenches the more you mistake the edge of the rut for the horizon.
- Compare yourself to other churches and see what you are doing differently… or if you’re doing the same things.
- Why is church a lecture, not a discussion?
- God expects us to be unconventional in how we do His work.
- Are we more committed to reconciliation and renewal than programs and policies?
- Are we willing to sacrifice our programs and methods
- Top down structures will not last.
- Organizations fail when the mental models of the leadership team depreciates faster than it’s power.
- It’s dangerous in a world of change to give a few people a monopoly on decision making.
- Is the challenge finding great leaders or building organizations that can survive without super humans at the front?
- Is there any alternative?
- The leaders job today is less in vision, command, and control and more focused on mobilizing, connecting and supporting.
- Our organizations were never built to be adaptable.
- We need organizations that are radically different than he ones we have today.
- Power comes from below, not above.
- This generation doesn’t want to work for a Fortune 500 company and I’m not sure they want to go to a church that looks like one.
- Churches have been trying to turn themselves into businesses while businesses are trying to turn themselves into causes.
- Every idea gets a fair chance.
- Participatory, open source, etc.
- People feel part of a community, not a hierarchy.
- The web is post-bureaucratic structure.
- Many people have a hard time finding Jesus in the long shadow of organized religion.
- The problem isn’t the religion part, it’s the organized part.
- Churches need to be fervent and flexible communities.
- We need to try disorganized communities.
- The early church was spiritually powerful and institutionally weak.
- We will not get fundamentally better at changing lives until we change our churches.
- Jesus is the answer to the fear, disillusionment, alienation and loneliness that destroys human lives.
- The Church is His hope for humanity.
- God doesn’t have a “plan B.”
- Our churches need to be the most vibrant, resilient and adaptable institutions in the world.
