An inspired vision can be cast that both inspires and motivates a team to reach for more. This is not something an outsider can craft and design, but merely cultivate from the team.  A well defined vision provides the destination from where you can craft powerful strategic initiatives and action steps to make sure it is realized.  With our clients, we commit to work for as long as it takes to get them in a strong rhythm for execution of those plans and any other issues that incidentally occur.

At the end of the day though, company leadership is going to make sure all this happens or not. It doesn’t matter how powerful, comprehensive, or well-defined the processes are, success will still be contingent on the endorsement and support of your leadership. That cannot be outsourced.

Re-filtering the most challenging circumstances of your life through a redemptive filter might be one of the most freeing things you will ever experience.  If you can look beyond the struggle to the redemptive perspective that is there, you go from victim to victor in almost every situation.  I can learn to not lament the rain, but actually get out there, splash around in it, and begin reaching forward to what lies just beyond all that water.

We’ve all heard the concept of the stage dad or mom.  That parent standing just off-stage, off the court, or even outside the classroom.  Their child’s success is somehow attributed to their success in life.  If the little “me” can somehow make it onto that team, make it into that college, or fit into that crowd, it somehow redeems the fact that I didn’t find the same success.  I think it can translate into repressed hopes, dreams, and desires of the heart as well. 

The organizations you lead and the roles you play there, should support and fulfill the purpose for your life, not the other way around.  More often than not, we see leaders completely unaware of their calling or purpose other than what their vocational role might dictate.

It is our contention that you are not only created for a particular purpose, but that your Creator desperately wants you to know what it is.  The clues are written on your heart, have been evident throughout your life, and are fully embodied in the things that bring you greatest joy, deepest pain, and get you out of bed in the morning.

One of the exercises we had to go through in route to simplifying our messaging, is the distillation of our purpose.  At the end of the day, what is the essence of what we are doing and what are we primarily about.  If we had to sum everything up into a single word, what would it be?

The reality is that the first thing we understood about our true Father, came from how we knew our earthly one.  If God is the same “yesterday, today, and forever,” then the fact we all seem to know Him differently must point to the unique experience we have had with Him and our particular perspective of Him.

Turns out that the way we “learned” the Father not only affects the way we view Him and our relationship with Him, but also the posture we carry in our approach to life.  The “orphan spirit” we find in many senior leaders is closely aligned with the entrepreneurial spirit required for launching into life and uncertainty on their own.  One is the shadow effect of the other.

It was always intended this way, from the very beginning.  His plan is that His love would make all of us complete through His love.  That obviously implies that we were incomplete.

As a leader who resides in the United States at this point in history, how does that word “incomplete” hit you?  There is something in me that recoils at the thought.  An author I love says that we are all “unfinished” men and women.  I feel a little better about that word, but nonetheless, both imply that there is something lacking.  How dare they?

Revolutionaries of every generation have typically been embraced by a few and ostracized by the multitude, before the traction was finally found.  Revolution is not for the meek or the timid.  If we want to change the direction of our culture it is going to take more than minor course directions.

At this point, we need more than minor shifts… we need tectonic ones.