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Prospectors & Defenders
Miles & Snow describe four basic archetypes – overarching categories – of how organizations tend to function. Defenders value stability and tradition. Their market focus is narrow and deep, surviving through price or product quality. Structure is formal with centralized control. They are avoiders of change. Prospectors are at the opposite end of the spectrum. They…
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Leadership: No Such Thing?
What is Leadership? I resonate with Richard Barker’s argument that leadership still isn’t really a construct. Leadership studies are all over the map and almost every scholar you read has a different definition, many of which are contradictory. It seems often that almost anything can be leadership to the point that everything is leadership, which…
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Trinitarian Leadership
The recent trends in organizational studies of spirituality, relationality, complexity, authenticity, and servanthood echo key themes in Christian theology, especially the doctrine of the Trinity. I’ve become convinced that looking at leadership through a distinctly Christian Trinitarian lens will provide a robust, holistic, and powerful construct for leadership theory and practice. While my own particular…
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Faith & Christian Scholarship
If we ‘unhook’ our Christian framework from the discussion of spirituality in the marketplace, we perpetuate the discouragement of “free intellectual inquiry” (Sirico, 2002, p.34), and, in so doing, offer nothing meaningful to academe. We become, in effect, theistic existentialists who say that although (for us) truth is rooted in God, it’s validity to the…
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Transcendence in Leadership
Max du Pree (Leadership is an Art) says that the primary responsibility of leaders is to define reality. Henri Nouwen (1989) wrote that the task of Christian leaders is to “identify and announce the ways in which Jesus is leading God’s people out of slavery” (p. 87) rather than making a “contribution to the solution…
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Leadership as Obedience rather than Service
I recently wrote an article entitled “Kenosis and the Leadership of Jesus: A Sacred Texture Analysis of the Philippians Hymn.” Here is the conclusion to that article. In summary, Jesus’ leadership as seen through a sacred texture analysis of Philippians 2:5-11 reveals three major truths. First, the beginning posture of Christ as a servant is…
