Entries from February 2008 ↓

i like this one… it makes the world of sense…

asides, albert was a very clever guy, so i figure he would know something.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”
– Albert Einstein, in a letter to his son Eduard, February 5, 1930.

this is actually a very insightful thought, worth reflecting on deeply.

did some sermon prep this morning at a local cafe, and it was just a staggeringly beautiful day out at the foreshore – absolutely magnificent!

Just read the most awesome article I have had on ice in my inbox for ages. I kept it because my initial skim had given me the heads-up to read it, but I only just got to it this morning and wow! VERY insightful!

Basic big idea – leaders are people who ought to be mostly focused on the future and what is next, not so much on the present and what is now. Unfortunately, with all the technology that constantly keeps us connected, we tend to find ourselves dragged into the present, dealing with too many real-time issues, and in essence increasingly beginning to do the work of the people we are meant to be leading and growing, actually getting in the way of that process by being over-involved in decision-making and execution. This creates a self-perpetuating spiral of more activity as the people on the coalface become less and less capable or confident of doing the job, and require more and more of your attention as a leader. So, instead of helping to develop and coach and teach them, you end up doing more and more for them, and therefore have less and less time to do what you ought to be doing.

I think this article is amazingly insightful, and more than timely for me as I’ve been discovering exactly this in my own life recently, and have begun to reshape the ways in which my time and energy are invested.

An excellent read. i commend it to you…

[http://www.bluepointleadership.com/books-article/newsletter/2008/Feb.htm#article1]

[via http://www.goodexperience.com]

i want one… now at borders bookstores… has a cool sliding action and moveable arms…

had to whiz up to kalgoorlie today for a quick visit on ACOM business. it was a very good day connecting up with students and others up in kal, and it continues to amaze me how much that city has changed over the past couple of decades.

it was chilly and overcast up there, and apparently only 15 degrees yesterday, which is kind of weird weather for that part of the world. felt strange to be feeling chilly on a summers day in kal. flight back was interesting, with perhaps the roughest landing i have ever experienced in a plane – i honestly thought we were going to crash, and i don’t panic easily about these things. the guy was bobbing all over the place, and actually bounced off the runway on one wheel before nearly tipping over the other way. seriously, i fly a fair bit, and this was scary. thing was, you could tell for miles out that it was going to be hairy, and it had to be a pilot issue because the plane only started going all over the place when the guy took over from auto as we began our descent into perth from about 50kms out.

by the way, a condundrum occurred to me as i stood watching the “crowds” walking through kal at lunch time – what happens when everyone is wearing safety gear? do we stop noticing them because they all stand out? hmmm…

every so often, i come across little storms like this one, which seem to generate a lot of heat and not much light. a debate about whether senior pastors should look like corporate CEOs is silly, in my view. i see all this angst about the title “CEO”, which also seems oddball to me – “chief executive officer”… well, that title is all about the senior person in the organization who makes executive decisions on behalf of the corporate body… what is so evil about that title?! it perfectly describes the function of the leader in that environment, and in many ways also describes exactly what most senior pastors do – they make executive decisions on behalf of the corporate body (the church) as the leader. what’s so weird or odd about that?

i think the issues are really more about stereotypes and baggage, most of which aren’t always very accurate, and at the heart of many of the discussions as i attempt to interpret the naysayers is largely an “anti-leadership” perspective, which i have argued against in the past as totally unbiblical. the bible is replete with example after example of God instituting and using leaders to guide and manage his people on his behalf. this kind of stewardship is everywhere, and i defy anyone to try and show that leadership doesn’t matter or is somehow not the way God works in and through his community. these leaders carrid a variety of labels and tags, but they all had one thing in common – their function as leaders within God’s holy community.

so, i don’t think these debates are about titles at all – in the end, i think they actually are about whether or not you believe in leadership. at the end of the day, i don’t particularly like the “CEO” tag for leaders in the church because i think the label is tainted with way too many connotations from the business world that are not great examples of what is otherwise a perfectly sensible moniker describing what most senior pastors and church leaders actually do. frankly, i’m not sure i even like “senior pastor”, because i think that has its own issues as a tag, so just call me “mark” (matt 23:8) – i’m not too interested in titles, just the calling I have in jesus to lead his people towards greater love and obedience of the Lord.

The RSS feed on my blog was conked for a while but is now back in good working order. Sorry about that – I had no idea, which is ironic for a guy who uses rss a lot!

i’m not a rabid ebay sort of guy, but i have bought a lot of stuff through ebay, and i think it’s a pretty useful way of picking up stuff at a great price.

on the whole, i’ve had mostly excellent experiences with ebay sellers. i’ve had one small hiccup with a person who was new to ebay and who didn’t really know what they were doing, but other than that it’s been smooth sailing. and, i’ve always tended to use paypal for purchases because of the guarantees of having backup should something go wrong. i’ve heard some horror stories of people doing direct debits and then losing decent chunks of money on a seller who was obviously a fraud and did a runner. so, i almost always use paypal for that reason.

and now, i’m getting to see whether paypal is all it’s cracked up to be. i purchased a backup blackberry phone from hong kong in late december because my pearl needed to go in for repairs, but the phone that was sent out to me was faulty and kept shutting down. so, i contacted the company and they said to send it back and they would refund me. and here’s where the fun and games begin. i sent the phone back by registered mail (which would normally take a few days max to get to them), but they claimed for weeks that they hadn’t received the phone back yet. i confirmed they had, and they have promised several times to refund me, but haven’t done so. after getting tired of chasing them since mid-january, i opened a paypal claim against them, but discovered that this is also a long-winded “wait and see” effort. my claim has finally apparently got someone reviewing it, but the communication from paypal about this is minimal, at best.

so, i decided to leave negative feedback on the seller, having got tired of more promises about paying me money back over the past fortnight. boy, did that suddenly get some action! i got an email from the seller telling me that a) they hadn’t received the phone yet (which is a lie, since they already confirmed to me that they had received it), and b) they would refund me after i removed the negative feedback, and again lots of promises and asking me to trust them, which i thought was a bit of a joke at this point in the game.

i was actually surprised that the negative feedback (from a seller who has massive numbers in the feedback area) suddenly provoked a response and an attempt to blackmail me into removing it in order to get my money back. i told them that trust had long since disappeared, and i’m still waiting now on paypal to sort this out, so it’s an interesting experiment. so far, i’m not inspired with any great hope due to the lack of communication with a real person from paypal.

so, i have been well and truly dinked around on this deal, and i’m curious to see whether the great paypal is up to scratch. if not, i’m going to go after them with visa, since that’s who the payment was actually made through into paypal, and the credit card companies are also meant to go after fraudulent activities like this, but i guess we’ll see. i’ll let you know how it goes. it wasn’t a huge amount of money, so i suppose if i never see it again, so be it – but, you’d like to think that there are some real protections offered through services like paypal whose marketing tag is “the safer, easier way to pay”… we’ll see…

ok, i couldn’t resist this one… i particularly like the hemingway one, but i think dr. phil may be on the money… :-)

so, here goes… why did the chicken cross the road?

DR. PHIL : The problem we have here is that this chicken won’t

realize that he must first deal with the problem on ‘THIS’ side of the

road before it goes after the problem on the ‘OTHER SIDE’ of the road.

What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he’s acting by not

taking on his ‘CURRENT’ problems before adding ‘NEW’ problems.

OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems,

which is why he wants to cross this road so bad. So instead of having

the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part

of life, I’m going to give this chicken a car so that he can just drive

across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens

GEORGE W. BUSH : We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the

road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road,

or not. The chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle

ground here.

COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the

satellite image of the chicken crossing the road…

DR SEUSS : Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with

a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I’ve not

been told.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY : To die in the rain. Alone.

GRANDPA : In my day we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road.

Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good

enough.

JOHN LENNON : Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads

together, in peace.

ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2007, which will not

only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and

balance your chick book. Internet Explorer is an integral part of

eChicken. This new platform is much more stable and will never

cra..#@&&^(C% ……

reboot.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the

road move beneath the chicken?

BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What is

your definition of chicken?

COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?