Writings

  • Making Good Tables

    Making Good Tables

    Some musings about holiness, work, and redemption. I am doing some work with a university that is unashamedly in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition and that is more and more making the idea of the redemption of the world the core of its identity. So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the link between holiness and…

  • Great Questions

    Great Questions

    The longer I work with teams in organizations, the more I realize the power of asking the right questions. Here’s a sampling from Bob Tiede’s Great Leaders Ask Questions ebook. General questions for meeting with a client, customer, team member, or employee: 1) What is going well? 2) What’s not? 3) Where are you stuck?…

  • 4 Things Leaders Do in Healthy Organizations

    4 Things Leaders Do in Healthy Organizations

    The longer I go, the more I become convinced that “leadership” — whatever it actually is  — is something that we only discover on the way to something else. The recovery of leadership may well begin when we stop trying to find it. Of course, the immediate objection is “everything rises and falls on leadership!” That’s…

  • Asking the Right Questions

    Asking the Right Questions

    “What builds a relationship, what solves problems, what moves things forward is asking the RIGHT questions.” Ed Schein in Humble Inquiry. Machiavelli’s The Prince, written centuries before organizational development was a thing, noted that a great prince must “certainly be a great asker of questions.” What are the RIGHT questions? They are the kinds of questions that push us beyond…

  • Why Don’t Students Like School?

    Why Don’t Students Like School?

    I’ve started in on Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School. The sub-line is more informative: “A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom.” Here are some of the more fascinating insights I’ve gained thus far. I’m sharing them largely as tidbits for reflection rather than being…

  • The Death of the Good

    The Death of the Good

    Great video here from Prager on why modern art is so bad. But it applies to the question of truth in general. The loss of an objective aesthetic in art has led to a loss of the meaning of beauty, the celebration of the scatalogical, and the move, as he puts it in the video,…