www.SpurLeaders.org Goes LIVE

Thanks to Jon Jennings and his team, we are actually a day EARLY in launching the Spur Leaders website. The first post offers a sample of where this resource is coming from and where we're headed with it. The most significant offering you'll find there is the vision for Spur Leaders.

Obviously, the main event for this year is the SPUR LEADERS CONFERENCE, coming to Austin on Thurs., Oct. 2. Beginning today, registration is open. In fact, we have already received our first registration--even before the announcement that the site was active.


QUESTION: To help you as a leader, what topic or message would you most want a conference speaker to deliver to your team?

Opening Friday & Random ?s

This Friday, we're going to be launching the Spur Leader website. On one hand, it's going to be the result of months of planning, work, interviews, and research. Jon Jennings, Vic Dominey, DeAnn Wilson and a lot of other people have put in some serious hours to bring this public.

On the other hand, it's just the beginning of a concerted ministry and effort from LHC to provide real-world, soul-deep encouragement and equipping for anyone who leads and influences in the marketplace or ministry.

macrichard.com will continue and be used for more personal and LHC-specific postings once spurleaders.org goes live. I'll have more info and the URL later on this week in this space.

On another note, I have a few questions:

What do you think about Twitter?
Do you use it?
How often do you Twitter to let other people know what you're doing?
How many people are you following on Twitter?

Touching Them All

A lot of sports news happens off the field and isn't exactly the kind of stuff that inspires. But, then you see something like this story below. There are multiple lessons in what those young women did, but specifically, what are the leadership lessons? How do we cultivate that kind of character? Reward it? Feed the fire?



(Thanks to John Lewis for the headsup on this.)

Spur Leader

Today was a milestone day in the life of our new leadership resource Spur Leader. We had a hugely clarifying conversation that helped us define our role, purpose, goals, methods--all of which will soon be manifested in the launch of the website, spurleaders.org, and the opening of registration for the Spur Leader Conference, coming October 2, 2008.

The lineup of speakers for this one-day event looks like this:

Rick Barnes, UT Men's Basketball Coach, a proven winner at every stop of his career, Rick Barnes has led The University of Texas basketball program to a level of national prominence never before seen at the Forty Acres. In his first nine years at the helm of the Longhorns, the 52-year-old Barnes has guided Texas to a school-record nine consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances and a school-best eight straight 20-win seasons entering the 2007-08 campaign, which saw the Longhorns reach the Elite 8.
Ed Young, Founding and Senior Pastor of Fellowship Church, one of the largest, fastest growing, and healthiest churches in America. Located in the heart of Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, the church’s main campus sits on 141-acres just north of DFW Airport. The church also operates four satellite campuses, one in downtown Dallas, one in the northern suburb of Plano, one just north of Fort Worth near Alliance Airport, and the fourth in Miami, Florida.
Steve Price, Dell, Inc. Steve currently serves as vice president, Human Resources for Dell’s Global Consumer Business. In this role, he is responsible for the overall HR strategy and execution for World-Wide Sales and Marketing, Global Product Development and Engineering, and Consumer Customer Experience and Support organizations located across North America, Latin America, India, and the Philippines.
Rocky & Janet Mountain, Rocky is a venture capital entrepeneur, formerly Exec. VP of Consumer Sales, Dell, Inc. Janet, also formerly with Dell, Inc. is currently the Executive Director of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, overseeing the administration of more than $150 million of philanthropy.
Les Csorba, Heidrick & Struggles and leads the Houston office. He is a member of both the firm’s Industrial Practice and the Board of Directors/CEO Practice focusing on the Petroleum Industry. Previously, Les served in the White House as a Special Assistant to the President of the United States for Presidential Personnel during the George H.W. Bush Administration. He is the author of Trust: The One Thing That Makes or Breaks a Leader.
Mac Richard, as Himself

On Friday, May 23, we're hosting a Spur Luncheon gathering a handful of business and community leaders who will be playing a role in the development of Spur to begin redefining leadership both in the marketplace and in ministry.

Mother's Day Blessings

This weekend I get to do one of my favorite things in ministry: Share the preaching with my bride Julie. She has such a gift and a passion for encouraging and challenging women and moms in particular that her passion reignites my own for what is possible through a God-honoring worship experience and study of Scripture.

We're going to be starting a series that speaks specifically to the blessing and purpose of Woman. We live in a world that has so cluttered and clouded the image of God that women are fashioned to represent. The whole male-female thang has gotten really muddled. This weekend and through the next few weeks, we're going to un-muddle, clarify, and celebrate true femininity.

Men, I promise you that our service this weekend will thoroughly bless the women in your life. Anyone who has a hand in blessing them is blessed themselves. Take some time and make the time to be with them throughout this series. There's an old saying that goes like this: If Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. There's an element of truth in that, but the reverse is equally true and substantially more powerful: If Momma is blessed, everybody's blessed.

Whether you're a mom or not, or a dad or not, married, single, or undecided, truly celebrating God's creative genius in authentic masculinity and femininity is something that blesses all of us.

4 Books

Just finished one book and am in the middle of another one, both of which are absolute gotta-reads. And, then, there are two others I finished over the last couple of months.

The one I just finished is by Leif Enger, whose first book was Peace Like a River and also a gotta-read. This book I just finished is his latest (his second?), So Brave, Young and Handsome. Both are good stories well told. It's not Shakespeare or War & Peace on the gravitas scale, but So Brave is a great read that tells a great story of redemption, second chances, and consequences for decisions made. It's not neat and tidy, but it rings true. Would be super for a summer book in the mountains or at the beach.

The second is one that's taking a little longer, but is so worth it. Reason for God by Tim Keller may be the most essential read for any person of faith or for someone considering the Christian faith. But it is not religion lite. To read this book, strap it on and buckle up. Keller is well thought-out, humble, and direct in his defense of the Christian faith in the face of some of the most withering attacks it has ever encountered (i.e. Hitchens, Dawkins, et. al). I don't think it's overstating the case to say that Reason for God can more than hold its own with Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

If you're a Christ-follower, you'll be strengthened and equipped, convicted and encouraged. If you're not, you'll appreciate Keller's low-key, non-dogmatic arguments for the man called Jesus, and perhaps even a little surprised by some of his admissions re: religion's failures, pitfalls, and hypocrisies. But, know also that he won't patronize you by not pointing out failures, pitfalls, and hypocrisies of atheism, pluralism, and universalism as well. He's too kind for that.

The other two books that are great for very different reasons: Not Between Brothers, by David M. Wilkinson. It's a "sweeping epic" that tells the story of the settling of Texas from 1816 to 1861. Very well written--on a par with Lonesome Dove. The last book I'll mention is an incredible memoir of two men who never should've met: Same Kind of Different As Me, by Ron Hall & Denver Moore. It's too long a story to even set up. Trust me: Read it.

Investing In People--Ken Blanchard

Below is a cut from the current issue of Inc. Magazine in which they interview leadership and business consultant Ken Blanchard. Below the interview, I posted a couple of questions for comment.


Twenty-six years after publication of The One Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard has written The One Minute Entrepreneur. Blanchard, co-founder of an eponymous, 300-employee consulting firm in Escondido, California, spoke with editor Mike Hofman about leadership and fair pay.

Your new book says that a leader's job is to make sure that the people in a company are taken care of. Does that mean that entrepreneurs who set strategy and demand results, no questions asked, are ineffective?
If your employees are disengaged, and they don't take care of your customers, it doesn't matter how good your strategy is-your customers will still go somewhere else. There's so much competition today that no customer has to put up with abuse. As a leader, you absolutely must expend your energy engaging your frontline employees so that they will take care of customers, who will tell stories about how great your company is to other people, who will become new customers. It's interesting to me that the distribution of salaries at most companies gives top managers a huge premium for their supposedly great strategic thinking, while people who deal with customers and operations are paid much less on average. This is not to say that strategy isn't important. Leadership is about taking your organization somewhere. But the how is as important as the where.

Do you practice what you preach at your own company?
We take steps to ensure that pay is fair. We try to make sure that nobody earns more than 10 times the lowest-paid full-time employee. And we have something we call a gain-sharing program, which means that when we hit a profit target, everyone in the company gets a check for an equal amount. Let's say in a given year it's $2,000 per person. For the people who make $30,000 a year, an extra hit of $2,000 besides their annual raise—well, I think that's a powerful way to engage them.

How do you handle questions of fairness and pay equity when the company isn't hitting its targets?
That happened to us in 2001. Much of our business is conducted at conferences and corporate events. After 911, we had a slew of cancellations. Nobody wanted to travel. We lost a million and a half dollars in revenue. I responded by opening the books to people so they could understand our financial situation. Then the question was, Should we have layoffs? I have three criteria for making decisions like that:
What is legal, what is fair, and what will the effect of the decision be on my self-esteem?
Layoffs would have been legal. I'm not sure they would have been fair. And I know they would have destroyed my self-esteem. So we decided instead to institute a hiring freeze and salary cuts across the board for six months. The cuts were higher for people who made more, and people who made below $50,000 a year were exempt. We felt that a salary cut at that level would have been too harsh. Everyone in my family who is on staff—five of us, including me—took a 25 percent salary cut. We also suspended matching 401(k) contributions for a year. And we told people that when we pulled out of the slump, we would take all 300 employees on a four-day, all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.

What happened?
The business did rally, eventually, and we made good on our promise in 2005. The trip cost us $625,000, and in my view it was worth every penny. Can you imagine a public company worried about its quarterly numbers investing that kind of money in its people? We wouldn't take our company public if our last breath depended on it, precisely because you can't do things for the long-term benefit of your people when you're public. The problem with American business today is that Walt Street demands short-term thinking, which means that businesspeople focus on results and forget about the important people part of their jobs.


Questions:

How should non-profits/churches "take care of their people"?

Why or why shouldn't non-profits/churches reward and recharge their employees financially or with trips and retreats?