Jobs: He being dead yet speaketh

Ever since I went on telly suggesting Apple was in some sociological respects a religion, people have asked me about Steve Jobs as Messiah. So today’s sad news does call for some comment, perhaps.

This may be time to stop all the clocks and disconnect the telephone, but I do not anticipate a literal resurrection.

Howbeit, quite apart from anything of historic import Mr Jobs may have achieved in his garage with Woz back in the eighties, he did resurrect a corporation.

I sometimes encounter the idolisation of business leadership, even among those appointing vicars. I never quite want to drink this particular kool-aid. When I was a lad the UK had the third or fourth greatest trading economy in the world. Its slippage to the low twenties has to have something to do with the quality of its business leadership since the sixties, that has not always been stellar. The Church hath little need for more of the UK's often class-ridden, stale, vain, self-indulgent business leadership. It’s already riddled with that stuff.

Furthermore what passes for business leadership often turns out to be no more than grumpy old men sounding off about their control fantasies, or low grade Pelagian boasting about their deservings, or saying nice things about a religion that is no more than top dressing for their own greed and prejudices.

Not so Mr Jobs. As well as providing a creative context in which the world’s greatest designers, men like Jonathan Ive, could flourish he did provide genuine moral leadership on occasion, rooted in his own experience, and free for all. In the often murky world of business leadership it shines out, as a Monty Python character once said of Oscar Wilde’s wit and wisdom, like a stream of silver bats’ pee in a dark cave.

So here, in memoriam, are two passages for pondering from Mr Jobs’ famous Stanford Commencement Address:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart..

Not to labour the point, he went on to discuss his own diagnosis of terminal cancer and say:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Microfinance: trading Real Futures

One powerful moment in the Leadership Summit was an appeal by Andrew Rugasira, founder and CEO of Good African Coffee, social enterpreneur from Kampala, for Trade not Aid. He drew attention to the distorting effects of aid on economies with significant proportions drawn from overseas aid, that could unintentionally suppress the life and economic skills of poor people, whilst feeding a huge and sometimes corrupt panjandrum of dependency. We need a new paradigm that will read Africa in terms of potential as well as need and deficits.

This is not to say all aid is simply bad, but that it has to be applied for emergencies, short term or infrastuctural pump priming, not as a substitute for regular economic activity. By analogy, you can employ people in a social or vokuntary enterprise, but there is a law of diminishing returns about the benefit, and whatever you do, it is important to build, not kill off the voluntary capacity of the organisation.

This put a great context around the session with, IMHO, the most impressive entrepreneur at the summit, Jessica Jackley, founder of Kiva.org, a microfinance site that lets anyone with computer access invest small loan sums in a targeted way, mainly in the developing world. The clever bit is marshalling all the agents into a slick process that connects loaner and entrepreneur as directly as possible, making it easy for anyone with a credit/debit card or paypal to get involved at the click of a mouse.

This is not an entirely rose-tinted process — some have criticised Kiva’s recent inlusion of US small businesses in its portfolio, as well as some interest rates the other end (not astronomic by UK small finance standards, but high and largely dictated by the partners who make it happen, in a way that’s almost inevitable with microfinance). Potential collywobbles some feel about child sponsorship might apply; Microfinance investing from home may not be for everyone. That said, Kiva does boldly go to places conventional banks don’t and makes the connections. Kiva would be the first to say microfinance is not the magic bullet to end poverty — but some involvement in microfinance certainly seems as defensible as sitting around on your spotty behind, beefing up the bottom line of conventional banks to the tune of £3,000 a taxpayer, which is what we’re all compulsorily doing anyway.

In terms of Leadership learning, kiva.org shows how someone in their twenties can impact world development to the tune of 86 Million dollars in four years with a good idea, creative use of technology, and the guts and stickability to pursue her vision out of Sunday School, through Business School, and out onto the streets.

Valuable Values make Visual Visions

Working through a Vision ’n Values statement the other day a light came on about why these things are so often turgid objects of derision.

A Vision has to be visual. “A Personal Computer on every desk” is visual. “To be the best distributor of prime punnets in the UK” isn’t visual. Actually it’s just a bunch of crap — a clumsy manipulative soundbite that leaves wide open the question of what they mean by “best.”If the vision isn’t visual, it’s just a jingle. “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge” (Thanking you, Dr Einstein). Imagination is kindled by clear visual stimulation, not waffle.

Values have to be truly and recognisably valuable. “Not to impose things from above but do everything bottom up” isn’t a value. It’s prudent behaviour in many circumstances but it isn’t universalizable. Anyone can easily think of actions that should be done from the centre; like making laws or printing money. A value has to be something people click with straight away (like “humility”, “realism”or “self-respect”, for example) and recognise as something they hold dear, or it won’t inspire anyone. And if the organisation’s values are vague, the mower won’t start because the fuel’s not flammable any more. A value also has to be something to which people can hold themselves and the organisation acccountable...

Rant ends.

Vicarage Allsorts: Clergy Quality

The most important person in a business is always, in a way, the person on the front desk. The wellbeing of clergy is, in that obvious sense among others, vital to the wellbeing of the Church. Since Chaucer’s time there’s been public anxiety about this subject. 200 years ago Sidney Smith lamented the decline in the quality of clergy since the enforcement of residence was preventing gentlemen from desiring ordination. In the roaring 20’s, Hensley Henson bemoaned the decline in the quality of ordinands since the first world war. The document quoted in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, however, is barking up a very different tree. A more accurate headline than “poor quality of vicars alarms church leaders” would probably be “desperation to dramatize drab HR questionnaire twits journalist.”

Faced with a round robin inquiry from the training department no bishop, if you think about it, is going to say that everything’s 100% tickety boo and there’s no need to bother; mainly because neither of those statements could possibly be true. But quantifying exactly what is less than tickety-boo, and by how much, is a finger-in-the-air mug’s game. So, in a way, the figures in this document are inconsequential. Take them too literally and they imply most bishops are unhappy about ordaining large proportions of the people they do in fact ordain. If that really were the case, the remedy would lie in their lordships’ own hands — keep your mitts to yourselves! But that’s obviously rubbish, and a complete travesty of what this straw poll was about. It probably only took straw poll form so as to enable MinDiv more easily to prioritse the results, which are pretty much obvious, into strategic proposals.

How stands the quality of clergy? Well, the role is more complex and demanding than hitherto, and the social infrastructure to affirm and support clergy weaker than ever. Anyone who thinks this job is easy ought to have a go at doing it. The roles we perform in a thousand different contexts are damn difficult and impossible to win at half the time. English clergy have to straddle the fears, fantasies and expectations of people who go to church and people who don’t, multitasking with spindly resources from a home where the phone never stops ringing. It’s a tall order and, frankly, I'm amazed at how well the vast majority of colleagues habitually cope.

This is all the more amazing because the freedom of not being directly supervised in the workplace can easily turn into a vacuum, an unnerving feeling of being lost in space. All this and lousy pay, too. But, before you get the violins out, there are great satisfactions and joys to be had, too.
Could all of us clergy raise our games? No doubt, in a thousand ways, especially bishops and archdeacons, perhaps. Does that mean we’re all useless? Well, of course, yes, I suppose every one of us is a bit useless some of the time. Bishops, priests and deacons are all wounded healers, and do well to remember the wisdom of Chesterton’s Hymn for the Church Militant:

Great God, that bowest sky and star,
Bow down our towering thoughts to thee
And grant us in a faltering war
The firm feet of humility.

Lord, we that snatch the swords of flame,
Lord, we that cry about Thy ear,
We too are weak with pride and shame,
We too are as our foemen are.

Yea, we are mad as they are mad,
Yea, we are blind as they are blind,
Yea, we are very sick and sad
Who bring good news to all mankind.

The dreadful joy Thy Son has sent
Is heavier than any care;
We find, as Cain his punishment,
Our pardon more than we can bear.

Lord, when we cry Thee far and near
And thunder through all lands unknown
The gospel into every ear,
Lord, let us not forget our own.

Cleanse us from ire of creed or class,
The anger of the idle kings;
Sow in our souls, like living grass,
The laughter of all lowly things.

The fact is, however, that all over the country God still blesses people richly, left right and centre, through the prayers and hard work of most ministers, most of the time, and often in ways they will never know. Things break down incredibly rarely, given the sensitivity of the work clergy do, and their vulnerability. But go wrong they sometimes do.

Most failures are about human interaction, not theology or even ethics. Many are driven by misunderstanding, desperation or exhaustion. If there’s any way people can go over the top with better weapons and body armour, I’m all for trying it. Who wouldn’t be?

It’s interesting to note the suggestions bishops made: Clergy need to focus on the realities of the Church they represent. They need support in missional thinking, doing and living. The Church needs to get its act together about consistency of training and deployment. Anyone disagree? presumably not. But How to do it? There’s the rub...

Contemplating this question, we could take a moment out to celebrate earlier, kinder times, when absolutely everybody really could cope faultlessly with their jobs and associated expectations, and nobody needed to push the boat out on training for this kind of public role:

Big or Dispersed Corporate? Hard or Fluid Lines? Starfish or Spider?

An interesting post on Mike Croghan's Rude Armchair Theology Blog, about open and closed social networks.

Social networks like Facebook and Myspace require you to sign up to participate and then keep you within their "walled gardens." Mike was railing against them, then became a Facebook addict! But not before reading this BBC piece by Canadian Networking Guru Michael Geist, suggesting the future belongs to walled gardens that manage to to pull down their walls a bit, if not a lot.

This got me going about Church. How grasping and imperialistic is the way people do Church? Some denomintions require a hell of a signing up to pass go, and others wall their gardens high, to the point that some of their members end up believing their denomination is the whole bang shoot, or at any rate the normative model. Incredible, but true.

Which brings me onto starfish and spiders. Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom describe two types of organisations. Spiders derive their strength from command 'n control and centralisation. They are powerful and mobile, but, here comes the catch, bash the body/head complex and the thing dies; so a lot of their energy goes into resourcing and defending the centre. Starfish are strong and powerful but in a different way. You chop one leg off, it scuttles off and becomes another starfish. There's a hilarious tale in the book about some beefy Aussies who charged off down the beach in their tiny speedos to go deal with the starfish on the reef. When they got the machetes out they had 300 starfish, and by the end of the day they had 3,000. That's the power of starfish, and to tap it you have to be a radically decentralised network, but strongly held.

The Church is obviously both starfish and spider. Viewed as a whole (sorry your holiness) the Christian Church is rather more starfish than spider. That's how the early Church grew in the face of persecution. That's why when Christians gather for conferences like, say, Kirchentag, Greenbelt or the Leadership Summit there's an obvious unity much bigger than any denomination. You don't have to work out the head office niceties to get you going. It just happens.

And the Church of England? By historical accident, whilst holding onto historic accountability lines, it has devolved authority radically, in a subtle and complex way — Incumbents and parishes have had tremendous autonomy, and Dioceses have traveled light. Right on, I say, but being starfish involves a high degree of trust... Do we have it within us to be the kind of (Starfish) organisation that, if Michael Geist is right, the world really needs, or are we going to put our energy into chasing after empire dreams, empire games?

Innovation vs Tradition or by Tradition? — Alternative thoughts

"Adopt, adapt, improve" say Rotarians. So do Christians. A living Church always changes. "In some other world it may be otherwise, but here below to live is to change and to have lived long is to have changed often." (Cardinal Newman, 1845) So tradition isn't setting things in stone. It's a living stream of constant innovation, emerging as it's lived, and passed on in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Is innovating always good? How? A few years ago Jim Collins and Gerry Porras researched the difference between good and truly great companies. In the current Harvard Business Review, Christian Stadler has done the same for good vs. great European engineering, commercial, technological, and pharmaceutical businesses. He's pinpointed the differences that single out the truly great long term gold medal winners from their silver medal rivals, and found four habits that seem to go with long term greatness:

1. Exploit what you've got first — If you can't make anything of the things you know and understand, you aren't likely to make much of the things you don't
   
2. Diversify your portfolio — keep your supplier / customer base as broad as you can
   
3. Remember your mistakes — retell the stories of failures so you don't repeat them
4. Be conservative and very selective about change — and very careful about planning and implementing change because how you do it matters as much as what you do
   

What, I wonder, are the implications of this research for the ways we do education, health care, business... and the dear old C of E?