Here are my notes from the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit. If you saw me tweeting last week with the tag #WCAGLS it was related to this.
I took about 50 pages of notes, so I realized I needed to break them up some. These are my notes from the first session which was Bill Hybels’ welcome and intro.
(For the true geeks out there, my notes were taken using Sketchbook Express on an iPad 2 using a stylus. The thing I like about this was I could get some of my own emotion into my notes beyond typing.)
He asked us to make a chart and mark where we were on the chart.
You can already see the benefit of being able to make my notes fat with red ink!
I know some of you are going to understand this better if I explain that Red Shirts in Star Trek are basically glorified extras. They always get killed off. Yellow shirts are the stars you think of when you think of Star Trek. Even when they die, they come back to life in the sequel.
I know this slide is pretty blank, but it’s true, and I didn’t want to leave anything out.
There are 2 good thoughts on this slide, one about problem solving, and the other about realizing that every activity in your organization has a lifecycle.
And this is what you do when things start to decelerate and tank.
So you revisit your mission. As an example, Bill Hybels broke the Gospel down to 5 words. (He did say that these were just his, and that Willow Creek as a whole was still discussing this. I thought that was interesting. The point isn’t are these the right five words, though. The point is to explain YOUR mission in five words.)
This ends the first presentation with a call to continually strive to grow and learn and receive instruction. I think I’m going to have to break these talks up into separate posts, otherwise this would get out of hand!
Stay tuned for part 2: Leonard A. Schlesinger on Action Trumps Everything