How The Mighty Fall

TEAM: An article from Tony Morgan:

On my trip to Florida this week, I had the chance to read the newest book from Jim Collins.How the Mighty Fall is a quick read with some pretty insightful thoughts that have application not only for business leaders, but also for leaders in the church. Here are some of the key thoughts that grabbed my attention:

• “When you are at the top of the world,…the best player in your game, your very power and success might cover up the fact that you’re already on the path to decline.”
• “When an organization grows beyond its ability to fill its key seats with the right people, it has set itself up for a fall.”
• “Organizational decline is largely self-inflicted.”
• “A core business that meets a fundamental human need – and one at which you’ve become the best in the world – rarely becomes obsolete.”
• “When institutions fail to distinguish between current practices and the enduring principles of their success, and mistakenly fossilize around their practices, they’ve set themselves up for decline.”
• “Innovation can fuel growth, but frenetic innovation – growth that erodes consistent tactical excellence – can just as easily send a company cascading through the stages of decline.”
• “If a great company consistently grows revenues faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth, it will not simply stagnate; it will fall.”
• “When bureaucratic rules erode an ethic of freedom and responsibility within a framework of core values and! demanding standards, you’ve become infected with the disease of mediocrity.”
• “Every person in a key seat should be able to respond to the question “What do you do?” not with a job title, but with a statement of personal responsibility.
• “The best leaders we’ve studied had a peculiar genius for seeing themselves as not all that important, recognizing the need to build an executive team and to craft a culture based on core values that do not depend upon a single heroic leader.”
• “Those in power blame other people or external factors – or otherwise explain away the data – rather than confront the frightening reality that the enterprise may be in serious trouble.”
• “Whenever people begin to confuse the nobility of their cause with the goodness and wisdom of their actions, …they can perhaps more easily lead themselves astray. Bad decisions made with good intentions are still bad decisions.”

Is it just me, or! is it pretty easy to see a correlation between these thoughts from Jim Collins and the decline of once-great churches and denominations?