Not Fair

As a staff we have been rereading Good to Great by Jim Collins. Reading it again and discussing it has been refreshing and insightful. The book is excellent and simply a must read for anyone who leads an organization in any endeavor, including a local Church.

In one chapter, Collins describes great companies as having a “culture of discipline.” He compares Kimberly-Clark , who had the courage to sell all their paper mills and invest in consumer products like Kleenex with another company in the same industry.

He writes, “I had an interesting conversation with some executives from a company in the paper business. It’s a good company, note yet a great one, and they had competed directly with Kimberly-Clark before Kimberly transformed into a consumer company. Out of curiosity, I asked what they thought of Kimberly-Clark."

‘What Kimberly did is not fair,” they said.”
‘Not fair?’ I looked quizzical.
“Oh, sure, they’ve become a much more successful company. But, you know, if we’d sold our paper business and become a powerful consumer company, we could have been great, too. But we just have too much invested in it, and we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.’”

Essentially this executive admitted his company didn’t have the discipline and the courage to change. They lacked the courage to change what they knew would lead to certain success.

Success and winning when we apply our minds to it is really predictable. In my business of running a local Church, we have been successful, but what we do is not rocket science. We are not any more talented or smarter than anyone else. We have simply followed and learned from successful models and applied them to our setting.

The sad reality of the local Church is that there could be so many more successful parishes if more leaders had the humility, discipline and courage to simply go where God is blessing and what God is doing.

Do you think I am oversimplifying the matter? Or do you agree we just need more Churches willing to follow the principles and practices that are winning?