Management

Imagine a savvy organization that does a leveraged buyout and buys a company, and the company is losing money. It's awash in red ink. What does the company do? The takeover buyer knows that this company that it's bought is just full of incompetent management. Management stinks from top to bottom.

So, what do you do? Fire them all? Block them out? Put in new people? Is that illegal? No, the buyers have that right. Is that impractical? No, they have the power. It's smart.

In the biblical story God comes to us. Because he's powerful, he's got the right to blot us out. Why? Because look at the world. It's incompetent. Morally incompetent from top to bottom. He's got the power, so it's not impractical. He's got the holiness. He's got the right, but thank goodness he's also got the mercy, because if he was just powerful and holy, he would do what any good company would do who has just bought out another company that's incompetent. Every head rolls. Fire them all! They have the right; they have the power. It's the smart thing to do. But God's also merciful, so he will restore us. He will redeem us. He'll cut the head off of our sin instead of cutting the head off of our bodies and that's the reason…the hymnwriter said, “for his mercies endure, ever faithful, ever sure.”

An article in The Wall Street Journal noted a new highly prized management skill—empathy. According to the article,

Empathetic leadership has long had corporate disciples. But the concept has become a bigger focus of [corporate leadership] as businesses seek ways to bolster staff worn down by the pandemic’s stresses, or at least show they are trying. Appreciating co-workers’ points of view and understanding their struggles, some executives say, leads to more engaged, happy, and productive staff. Many workers say that is lacking.

For example, the ticketing company Eventbrite Inc. began an empathy-focused leadership development program in 2020 that all managers can take. It includes lessons on active listening, showing vulnerability, and building trust with employees. Cisco Systems Inc. says it is building leader and team-coaching courses that weave in empathy. In one course, participants spend eight hours learning about each others’ strengths and personal styles, as well as how to better understand and trust each other.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Of course, empathy is a good quality, but the Bible and Jesus identified this human need before any management experts did.

Sales were stagnant at the insurance company where Daniel P. Amos worked as the chief executive. So, he decided to take a huge risk with a novel ad campaign that poked fun at the company’s name. The TV commercials featured an obnoxious white duck often getting injured and then loudly quaking “Aflaaaac.” The little-known business soon became a household name. Aflac’s stagnant US sales doubled between 1999 and 2003.

Amos told The Wall Street Journal that leading a company always involves taking risks. He said, “I like to manage risks [since] everything we do is risk related. [If you avoid risks] you are really not taking a broad enough perspective for a company to succeed.”

Amos, now 70, learned to evaluate risks while studying risk management and insurance at the University of Georgia’s business school. Among his risk-taking advice he gave this nugget: Never risk a lot for a little. He added that he lives by that risk principle every day of his life.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Many things about following, serving, and leading for Jesus involve risk. We can’t avoid it. But with Jesus we never have to worry about risking a lot for a little. Our risks for him are always worth it.

In his book, Heath Adamson describes the process of correctly diagnosing a problem:

Horst Schulze, the former COO of Ritz-Carlton Hotels, told the story of one manager's discovery of a problem that seemed to confuse almost everyone. Numerous complaints came in to management because room service was repeatedly delayed. The eggs were cold, the toast was hard, and guests were inconvenienced. Mr. Schulze described a typical response as being something along the lines of scolding the supervisor for being incompetent. As one could expect, the discouraged supervisor would then gather their staff around and do the same to them. Blame would cascade down from one person to the next. But this isn't what happened at the Ritz-Carlton.

The Ritz-Carlton manager assembled the team, and they studied the problem. The kitchen staff prepared the food on time. The staff quickly took the trays to the elevator for delivery. They discovered that the issue had nothing to do with the kitchen staff but rather the service elevators were not always available. This delayed delivery. Then, they continued to study the situation by using a stopwatch to time the elevators for an entire morning.

The reason the food was delayed and arriving to the rooms cold had nothing to do with irresponsible kitchen staff or faulty elevators. A decision by management to reduce the number of bedsheets on each floor was causing the housekeepers to use the elevators more frequently, thus tying them up more. Trying to save money by reducing the number of bedsheets purchased, stored, and washed actually created more challenges in the long run and resulted in angry customers and poor room service. Misdiagnosing a problem never results in solving it.

In 1958, Mao Zedong ordered the extermination of every sparrow in China. He could scarcely have guessed the magnitude of the disaster he had set in motion. They called it “The Four Pests Campaign.” As part of the Chinese Communist Party’s notorious “Great Leap Forward,” the public health effort called for the elimination of disease-carrying rats and flies, malaria-ridden mosquitoes, and sparrows, which ate grain seed and fruit. A propaganda poster from the time reading “Exterminate the four pests!” depicts the four pests, impaled like grotesque shish kebabs on a Chinese sword. In another, a boy aims his slingshot, a dastardly sparrow in his sights.

Urged on by their leaders, the people shot sparrows from the sky by the thousands and hunted down and destroyed their nests. Children would bang pots and pans at sparrows resting in trees, chasing them until the little birds plummeted from the heavens, overcome by exhaustion. Within a year, the sparrow population in China had been decimated, pushed nearly to extinction.

At first, it seemed as though the plan had worked. But the problem was, sparrows eat more than just grain and fruit. They also eat many kinds of insects, including a species of short-horned grasshopper commonly known as locusts. With their natural predator gone, the locust population skyrocketed, and hordes of ravenous grasshoppers swept through the countryside, devouring everything in their path and contributing significantly to the Great Chinese Famine. By 1961, tens of millions of Chinese peasants would be dead—starved to death by a tragic convergence of economic mismanagement and ecological imbalance.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What we see as unnecessary trouble or a thorn in the flesh, God allows into our lives because he can use it to refine us, strengthen us, and turn our hope toward heaven.