Replies

The Willow Creek Church (Barrington Illinois) puts on a Global Leadership Summit event running two days which was held a couple of weeks ago. This is intended primarily for the management echelons of churches, nonetheless its appeal extends to business organizations and government agencies, and the thing amounts to about as good a $100 - $200 ticket as you'd ever find in the world dealing with human motivation and management philosophies. Attendance, both live and via closed circuit, was massive. Several of the recent presentations were stunningly good, particularly those of Patrick Lencioni, Brene Brown, Vijay Govindarajan.

List of speakers

In general, Ballmer's ideas about management would find no takers in that group; the ideas they were promoting were all pretty much 180-degrees opposed to what the article you've posted here describes.

I think there was an article about Ballmer’s upcoming retirement, and this article seemed like a nice companion piece. I don’t think much of his management approach, but we need to remember than Microsoft was handed over to him by its founder, and doing the old me-too approach isn’t in the bloodstream of the small number of people who manage whole companies. He wasn’t there to see the reasons that things had gotten to where they were, which must have been a problem for him, even if he wasn’t aware of it.

Church management is different, not just due to the budgets involved, but also in the way in which income is generated. Typically the local churches have longterm participation by an ever-transitioning (that is, they die) board, all of whom know each other.

As long as they don’t do anything daffy like spend $20K on a networked copier/printer/fax/scanner/document server (the latter of which rarely works) for use by the very small staff that works in the office, and keep recruitment efforts high (that’s more important now than ever before), they should be all right.

Thanks but no thanks.

Since 1995, Willow Creek Association has held an annual Leadership Summit. Speakers at the Leadership Summit have included President Bill Clinton, Karen Hughes, who served as Special Advisor to former President George W. Bush, Lady Vols' women's college Basketball coach Pat Summitt, Dallas, Texas pastor Bishop T.D. Jakes, business consultant and author Jim Collins, University of Southern California president Steven Sample, Yahoo!'s Tim Sanders, business author and leadership consultant Marcus Buckingham, and Rick Warren, pastor and author of The Purpose Driven Life. The 2005 Leadership Summit had over 53,000 attendees in over 100 locations across North America. The 2006 Leadership Summit featured Bill Hybels interviewing U2 frontman Bono.

The 2007 Leadership Summit served 80,000 leaders in over 130 cities. Speakers included Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, John Ortberg, Richard Curtis, Reo Anderson, Carly Fiorina, Michael E. Porter, Marcus Buckingham and Willow Creek Community Church's Senior Pastor, Bill Hybels.