Leadership, Change, the Future: TOP SETH GODIN QUOTES FROM LINCHPIN

My latest Kindle read- Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin. Out of several hundred quotes I marked, here are my top quotes, organized under the categories of leadership, change, and the future:

LEADERSHIP

Leaders don’t get a map or a set of rules. Living life without a map requires a different attitude. It requires you to be a linchpin.

There’s no script for leadership. There can’t be.

“I don’t know what to do”—this one is certainly true. The question is, why does that bother you? No one actually knows what to do. Sometimes we have a hunch, or a good idea, but we’re never sure. The art of challenging the resistance is doing something when you’re not certain it’s going to work.

What does it take to lead? The key distinction is the ability to forge your own path, to discover a route from one place to another that hasn’t been paved, measured, and quantified. So many times we want someone to tell us exactly what to do, and so many times that’s exactly the wrong approach.

CHANGE

Real change rarely comes from the front of the line. It happens from the middle or even the back. Real change happens when someone who cares steps up and takes what feels like a risk. People follow because they want to, not because you can order them to.

Wikipedia and the shared knowledge of the Internet make domain knowledge on its own worth significantly less than it used to be. Today, if all you have to offer is that you know a lot of reference book information, you lose, because the Internet knows more than you do.

The executives in the record business, for example, loved their perfect business model. They were attached to their lifestyles and to the way their artist and fan relationships made them feel. When even a turnip could see that their business model was doomed, they soldiered on, apparently oblivious to the crumbling going on around them. Were they stupid? No. They were blinded by their attachment to the present and their fear of the future.

The newspaper industry can’t untangle news from paper, can’t see the difference between delivering the news around the world for free and putting it on a truck for shipment down the block. As long as each of these elements is seen as inseparable from the others, it’s impossible to untangle the future. That’s why outsiders and insurgents so often invent the next big thing—they don’t start with the tangled past.

THE FUTURE

The diamond cutter doesn’t imagine the diamond he wants. Instead, he sees the diamond that is possible.

The linchpin is able to invent a future, fall in love with it, live in it—and then abandon it on a moment’s notice.

Rockbridge Seminary students that have completed the fully online course “Leading Change,” may be helped by watching two brief videos in which Seth Godin explains WHY he wrote Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Part 1:

Part 2:

Read Seth Godin’s blog

Free web apps that can help your ministry focus

Tony Morgan, author of Killing Cockroaches and Other Scattered Musings on Leadership (on my Kindle 2), shared on his blog the top 25 free apps that he uses in his ministry:

1. Gmail
2. Google Calendar
3. WordPress
4. Twitter
5. Google Reader
6. PeopleBrowsr
7. YouVersion
8. Mint.com
9. Google Documents
10. Lala.com
11. Google Analytics
12. FeedBurner
13. ChurchMetrics
14. Delicious
15. ScribbleLive
16. Facebook
17. YouTube
18. Hulu.com
19. Skype
20. Mogulus
21. Google Groups
22. Pandora
23. Woopra
24. YouSendIt
25. Bringo

Thinking about switching to a free app (like Gmail) but hesitant because of the lost productivity getting used to a new system? I understand. When I switched from Outlook to Gmail last year I had a learning curve I knew I would have to endure and dreaded, but now I’m more productive than before and wouldn’t go back.

Seth Godin wrote in a recent blog:

There’s always a gap between the short-term results of a well-polished system and the first results of a switch to a more efficient one.

If you stick with that thing you’ve worked so hard to perfect, the next few hours or weeks or months will surely outperform the results you’ll get from the new thing. That’s because there are switching costs, glitches and a learning curve.

The end result is that organizations that choose to switch are usually the ones with the least to lose. The upstarts and the outliers. One reason they’re always leapfrogging the market leaders.

One way to stay innovative is to understand that this gap exists and to budget for it. Denying it won’t make it go away.

If you are interested in the broader discussion about the use of technology in ministry, listen as Mars Hill pastor Rob Bell interviews Shane Hipps, author of Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith.

Hat Tip: Solar Crash

Learning to say NO in ministry

It doesn’t seem right … saying “no” sometimes in the practice of ministry, especially when the “no” is to people and rather than projects.  In a recent blog post, Seth Godin commented about the importance of saying “no” in business leadership. Perhaps he comments apply to ministy leadership as well.

If you’ve got talent, people want more of you. They ask you for this or that or the other thing. They ask nicely. They will benefit from the insight you can give them.

The choice: You can dissipate your gift by making the people with the loudest requests temporarily happy, or you can change the world by saying ‘no’ often.

You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.

Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

Who are the loud people in your life getting more ministry attention than they truly need? Who are the quiet people in the background who really need you?

I’m thinking in particular of Rockbridge Seminary students who completed the online course “Pastoral Care” and the difficult ministry priority choices that sometimes have to be made. Should you be saying “no” more often as a ministry strategy of caring … to reach the people who really need you?

Go to Seth Godin’s blog post