| And last, my all time favorite Super Bowl commercial, “Halftime in America” by Clint Eastwood. |  |
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| And last, my all time favorite Super Bowl commercial, “Halftime in America” by Clint Eastwood. | |
Success to Significance Becomes a Global Phenomenon
For the past twenty years, I have focused on a mission statement given me one morning in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles by my guide and mentor, Peter Drucker. He said, after eight years of working together, “It is your mission to work on transforming the latent energy of American Christianity into active energy.” That mission statement has served me well but it is becoming increasingly obsolete as the United States is no longer the center of the world.
Let me give you two examples from just this past two weeks. This past Wednesday I received an email titled “Greetings from Korea.” The writer described himself as a senior researcher of a Christian Research and Education organization in Seoul, Korea. He said, “For the last several years, (a colleague and I) have been studying theological topics closely related to Halftime. We have read all of your books from Halftime to Finishing Well and ever since then been constantly teaching and preaching their main ideas in different colleges and churches.
“We think our ministry’s mission and goals correspond with yours and this vocational similarity encourages us to contact you to see if there is any possibility of our ministry to be connected with yours in one form or another. Mr. Buford, we don’t just appreciate your past achievements and works but we also look forward to what your unceasing commitment would bring in the future.”
The writer did his PhD at Princeton Theological Seminary in Christian Ethics with particular focus on economic life and culture. He was joined in his request by the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Seoul that has 30,000 members.
The writer continued, “(Both of us) share a common view that the Korean Christian community as well as Korean society in general are in much need of Halftime ministry. As you may understand, Korea has accomplished a very compressed form of economic growth over the last forty years. But rapid economic growth has been accompanied by a highly competitive and success-driven culture.”
Just a week earlier I had received a similar email from a man from Ghana. The writer had followed an eighteen year career in the corporate world by starting what he called a small Christian Retreat Centre as his success to significance transition. He said, “I have for some seven years now had this strong desire to help people move from the small mindset of ‘me, myself and I’ disease that plagues most successful Africans largely because of where we are coming from. As a result, Africa has a stunted growth in the face of a huge unimaginable potential and fortune.” He, too, desires a working relationship with our Halftime group.
What’s going on here? Success is spreading around the world rapidly. It is obvious that the United States is not going to be the only big dog on the block anymore. We may be the biggest military power, but most indications are that places like Singapore, Brazil, and other previously “third world” powers are breeding a class of highly successful entrepreneurs. A large and growing number of people across the world are going to be much better off in terms of financial capacity than anybody in history has ever seen. But, of course, they face the same challenges of money vs. meaning that we are so familiar with in the work of Halftime.
Wealth and recognition bring with it a host of other issues, hubris being somewhere near the top of the list. Charles Dickens wrote in the eighteenth century, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” That is probably a pretty good description of our situation as well. The best of times because so many more people have the advantages of money and social mobility; the worst of times for prosperous people (the top 20%) because many of them begin to live for themselves lives of pleasure, idleness, and running up the score as fast and as long as the law will permit. I confess to being a recovering member of that class though I, thank God, balanced my intense competitive desire with other goals (marriage and family, serving God by serving others).
Others, wiser than I, saw the danger for the US culture as we entered the 1980′s. Listen to what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his now-famous Commencement speech to Harvard University graduates in the spring of 1978, “I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system – to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced socialism, I certainly will not speak for it…But should someone ask me whether I could indicate the West such as it is today as a model…frankly I would have to answer negatively.” He goes on to say that in the West he sees spiritual exhaustion, materialism, manipulation of the law, and misuses of freedom. “All the glorified technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as the 19th century. Only voluntary inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
Solzhenitsyn’s Address stirred up all manner of controversy, but in retrospect both Dickens and Solzhenitsyn seem to be a good prediction of the both/and time we are living in right now.
Hear this from my friend, Patrick Morley, now a prominent author, who talks about his former life, “My unspoken credo was ‘money will solve my problems and success will make me happy.’ I would set a goal, work hard, meet the goal, and then experience euphoria. But two weeks later, the good feeling was gone, and I would have to set a new goal. The new goal, of course, always had to be bigger, brighter, faster, or more expensive than the one before.
“But all those met goals became a string of hollow victories increasingly unable to deliver the fulfillment I craved. I had a disease they might call success sickness. It is the disease of always wanting more but never being happy when we got it. I was miserable. And angry.”
As you can tell from the emails at the beginning of this museletter, this success sickness is a disease people are beginning to be concerned about around the world. It is a pursuit that squeezes God out of the equation in many cases. Life begins to go on autopilot. Solzenitzen sums up, “Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?”
That seems to be a question increasingly being faced in Korea, Ghana and the now developing Third World. I guess I need to expand my now obsolete mission statement. What do you think?
Recommended Reading:
Solzenitzen’s Harvard Address (www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolzhenitsynHarvard.php)
“The Great Divorce” by David Brooks, NYT, January 31, 2012. Brooks says, “I’ll be shocked if there is another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society. Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society.
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray (Jan 31, 2012). A great read.
Man Alive: Transforming Your Seven Primal Needs into a Powerful Spiritual Life, by Patrick Morley (Jan 17, 2012).
How The Mighty Fall, by Jim Collins (May 19, 2009). The five stages of decline. Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success.
Eight Critical Life Questions for a Fresh Start
The beginning of a New Year is always an apt time for reflection. I am indebted to Kim Ratliff, an investment banker in Birmingham and a consistent reader of these museletters, for sending me a set of insightful questions for the second half of life. Come to think of it, these questions are pretty valuable at any stage of life. I recently sent them to a 28 year old.
Questions are a great way to get yourself “thinking your confusion out loud” in preparation for a productive meeting.
Eight Critical Life Questions for a Fresh Start
My New Year’s challenge to you is to find a quiet space and see how your intuition and a prayerful inner spirit prompt you to answer these queries. It might take a while. It might be a good idea to capture your answers in writing. If you want to go one brave step further, you might discuss your answers with someone who knows you well – maybe even someone who loves you well.
Learning by Listening Lessons from a Great Leader
One of my favorite people in this life is a noble man named Wilson Goode. He taught me a valuable lesson about listening when I interviewed him for my fourth book, Finishing Well. Wilson was the first African American Mayor of Philadelphia. The son of an illiterate share cropper in North Carolina, he won against all odds defeating Frank Rizzo, a two-time mayor and former police chief. Wilson told me he ran for mayor because he was convinced it was what God wanted him to do. Later, after he finished his term in office, he felt God was calling him to recruit mentors for some of the toughest kids in the country. He founded a ministry called Amachi. So I asked him, “Wilson, what was the size of your budget when you were mayor?” He said, “Two billion dollars with 30,000 employees.” I asked, “How many employees do you have now?” He said, “Just me.” When I asked him how that made any sense in terms of what he was doing before, he said very simply, “It’s what God wants me to do. If I listened to man and not God, I would be nowhere.” So I asked him, “How do you figure out what God is telling you?” And he said, “I listen.”
I asked, “How do you go about that?” And Wilson replied, “I think that most of us are so noisy, we can’t hear God’s will. We are so busy talking and listening to ourselves, and listening to other people’s advice that we don’t get quiet long enough to let God speak to us. Consequently, we end up very unhappy. I know its God’s will when I am directed to something because I listen.”
Still curious, I wondered, “How do you know its God?” Wilson told me, “Sometimes I just go in my living room and I just listen. Early in the morning while the sun is coming up, I listen to God speak. Sometimes it is hard to put into words, but you just know when you are in sync with God’s way and with God’s will for your life. You know it works and there is harmony between you and God when that happens.”
About Amachi
To find out more about Amachi, see www.amachimentoring.org. Amachi currently mentors 250 children-of-prisoner-programs in 48 states. They have partnered with more than 6,000 churches and served at least 100,000 children!
About Finishing Well
Finishing Well is currently published in trade paperback version from Zondervan. There are sixty-two inspiring stories of people including Peter Drucker, Roger Staubach, Jim Collins, Ken Blanchard, and Dallas Willard who have pioneered the art of finishing well in these modern times.
Quick Guide to a Balanced Life – the Four Essential Questions
Most of us begin each New Year full of good intentions to lead a balanced life. The prior year we found we had over allocated to some area of our life (usually work) and sadly sacrificed other areas leading to exhaustion and all manner of mischief.
Over the holidays, I read an exceptional piece by Michael Lewis (author of The Big Short). The subject was a hot young broker who was consumed by his quest for money and the eighty-hour ethos of his rapacious work environment. Lewis recounted that the broker “routinely ranked in the top percent of revenue producers in whichever firm he happened to be working for. In his best years, he grossed more than $1 million. Only now he had a problem. He was quickly becoming the world’s unhappiest man … A fellow broker had told him, “You are confused about your job. Your job is to turn your clients’ net worth into your own.” This young “master of the universe” told Lewis, “Everyone I worked with had a drinking issue. You can’t continue to hurt people and feel good about yourself.”
Read more ...The Fringe Benefits of What I Do
One of my ten stated values that everybody I work with knows by heart is:
“The fruit of our work grows up on other people’s trees.”
At this season of the year, I am both the recipient and the giver of gratitude for the line of work I am practicing now. I receive emails, Christmas Cards (everyone is doing pictures this year) and catch-up letters on not only the happiness of this season but the results of their good work. The Drucker Institute, Leadership Network, Halftime and the personal portfolio I call “Bob Inc” are all in the business of serving the dream I wrote down at age 34 to “serve God by serving others.” There is a plaque behind my desk that says “The joy is in the results.” The year-end for many of us, me included, is a time of summing up God’s work God allowed me to be a part of and the unspeakably noble people I work with. They are all people who are doing well or finishing well. Let me give you some examples of finishing well stories I have intersected in the past month:
Tom Wilson, who had been my CEO these past ten years came to me a couple of months ago saying that he had fulfilled what he came to do at Leadership Network and Halftime. Tom called this afternoon to say that his next venture is to work as CEO of John Snyder’s venture to engage churches in providing healthcare for the disadvantaged. Tom called to say that everything he had learned about churches and about Halftimers seeking their change from success to significance is just what is needed for Snyder’s bold venture in volunteerism through local churches. John Snyder is a brilliant strategist, having been CEO for years of Snyder Oil Co. (NYSE). He built a company, but in the Second Half of his life he no longer had the desire to run a large, complex enterprise on a daily basis. His new healthcare-in-churches venture began just across the hall from where I sit as a Leadership Community. John wants to sponsor it, but not run it. Tom has strong managerial skills, ten more years of tread on his tires and he loves fixing messes. Healthcare is certainly a field that cries out for innovation and entrepreneurship. Tom is just aglow to do one more undertaking with major social impact.
Not long ago, I had a long phone conversation with Randy Frazee, who has joined Max Lucado as co-pastor of Oak Hills Church in San Antonio. Max is a great writer who has sold probably 40 million books. Randy is a great systems builder who has spent the last twenty years developing a great process for spiritual growth in large churches. The two of them are working together to help people across the nation discover the quality of their relationship with God and thirty key areas to spiritual growth. Max is a great storyteller, maybe the best. Randy is a great connect-the-dots systems guy who turns all the stories into usable processes. He also preaches half of the weekends which give Max time to speak around the country and to write. What a team!
Dave Travis, the genius behind our megachurch ministry, is going full tilt at building systems and practices to scale large churches. It wasn’t long ago that Harvard Professor Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, told me that large churches were the most important organizational invention in the last fifty years of the twentieth century. Leadership Network, along with others, has had a prominent role in that movement. We have hosted twenty-four innovation-oriented meetings in our Collaboration Center in the last twelve weeks alone.
On a completely different note, I have a story that is better told anonymously. A couple of weeks ago, two men visited my office. I didn’t recall meeting them before, but one of them told BJ that the book, Halftime, had literally saved his life which was certainly enough reason to take a meeting. The man, from a prominent and wealthy family, brought a friend from another state along for moral support and unfolded a dramatic story that his life was in such disarray that he had decided to commit suicide. He actually pulled his car into an enclosed space and turned on the engine. As he was getting more and more dizzy, he heard a voice in his mind saying, “Go see John.” John ran a big part of this man’s ranching operation. Taking this as a heaven sent message, he turned his engine off and began walking down a road reviving himself with fresh air but with no clear sense of where he was going. Not long after he began walking, he turned around a bend where was John fixing a tractor. John gave him a copy of Halftime which my now very happy visitor said convinced him that he should not commit suicide because he had a whole other life to lead.
Earlier this week, I talked to Chip Ingram whose journey has been from building a big church in California to developing a program “Living on the Edge” now on hundreds of radio stations in the U.S. For a season of his life, he was CEO of a big parachurch organization called Walk Thru the Bible. He produced great results but didn’t enjoy the executive parts of the work. I invited him to come to a Halftime Institute to think through “what next?” This very dynamic minister told me that he has re-oriented his radio program to encourage people to be in small groups. Starting from zero, he has produced 100,000 small groups with something like one million people. Chip directs them with CDs and has furnished curriculum through “Living on the Edge.” The objective is to help “Christians act like Christians.” He is focused on action – serving others. Usually when I have conference calls, I ask the person on the other end of the line to write me a long, rambling letter about what they want to talk about. Chip sent eight handwritten pages of his progress (lots), his family life (always good and getting better now that he doesn’t travel the world for Walk Thru), his opportunities (overwhelming), his challenges (how to structure to take advantage of his opportunities. It was a remarkable document that I have saved in my Book of Days. It encouraged me enormously.
Back to the idea of “fringe benefits,” perhaps the most fun and most satisfying part of working to “bear fruit on other peoples’ trees” is to hear stories like these. Rich Stearns, who left his high-paying job as CEO of Lenox China to be President of WorldVision USA, came by our offices two weeks ago. It is an enormous job, but the way he described his emotional response to his big role was to quote Mother Teresa saying, “I am just little pencil in the hand of God.” That is a pretty good description of the way I feel this Christmas.
One of the great blessings that being almost continuously in the presence of virtuous people is the enlargement of my heart, not just my check book, and hearing their encouraging stories of changed lives is a fringe benefit beyond comparison. I don’t miss the television business even a little bit.
Merry Christmas!