If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Read a great autobiography, ‘Pour Your Heart Into It’ by Howard Schultz, currently doing a second stint as CEO of Starbucks Coffee. Maybe it’s just where I am in life, but I’m finding I enjoy and learn a lot more reading about leaders’ life experiences than reading abstract principles by them on how to be a good one (a la John Maxwell).

Schultz discovered Starbucks when he was a well-paid marketer for a large house-wares company and knew almost immediately that he wanted to give everything up for this startup. It took him a year of persistence in the face of rejection before he was offered the job of a marketer. A little later on, he became convinced that Starbucks (which was then a retailer selling coffee beans) should open sit-down cafés. The company founders however disagreed, so he left to form his own company. In the course of one year, he pitched the idea to 242 potential investors and 217 turned down his request for seed capital! Eventually, he made it, and 3 years after leaving Starbucks, he returned and bought the company. Since then, Starbucks has grown from a local business with 6 outlets to a global giant with 16,000 outlets in 44 countries and $10 billion in annual sales!

Schultz has some great gems about perseverance...

‘Life is a series of near misses. But a lot of what we call ‘luck’ is seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future... It’s seeing what other people don’t see, and pursuing that vision, no matter who tells you not to. No great achievement happens by luck... Vision is what they call it when others can’t see what you can see’

Good stuff! The only difference in approach for me would be the starting place. That’s beginning by asking God what assignment he wants you to focus on. There are many good things I could spend my life pursuing but you just know that good is often the enemy of great! Once you know you’re where He wants you, then dig in and pursue your God-given dreams with all your heart whatever comes your way.

And if at first you don’t succeed…

Earthquake In China

I'm staggered by the magnitude of the disaster in China. The 7.9 magnitude earthquake near Chengdu is believe to have resulted in over 12,000 deaths so far and rendered thousands homeless. Just read about an estimated 900 students who were buried in their school building; no one's sure whether they're still alive.

My mind is numbed by the figures... Several years back, 200 deaths caused by a bomb here at home resulted in so much national shock & grief... 12,000 is completely unimaginable to me. I remind myself though, that these are not just numbers and statistics, but each represents a story of deep pain and suffering. My heart and prayers go out to my Chinese brothers and sisters.

Tribalism Is Not The Issue…

In the US for a couple of weeks… very interesting to hear the campaign rhetoric here and compare it with our own from a few months ago. And am struck by an amazing fact… Americans are just as tribalistic as we are! One of the people I’ve really enjoyed getting to know here said in a conversation that Barrack Obama is the closest thing there is to the anti-Christ. Another person, a good friend of his who goes to the same church and that I also greatly enjoyed getting acquainted to, confided that the last president America needs right now is another rich white guy or another Clinton. Sounds so familiar! I was struck by how much alike we all are … day-to-day decent, ordinary people, yet deep down driven by suspicion & ethnocentricity to self-protective stereotyping; ‘us verses them’.

Reminded me of back in the day when I made another startling discovery. Although California highways are extremely clean & orderly compared to ours, I stumbled upon a hidden, out of the way section where it seemed people littered at will. Shock on me! Also, many had radar-detectors in their cars, which detect police radar guns so that you can slow down before they catch you! And then later, Enron and Arthur Andersen as well as Watergate and Irangate before that helped me understand that American’s are not closer to the God-side of the corruption scale than us; with our Goldenburg, Anglo Leasing and Francis Thuo (stock brokerage firm that recently went under after underhand dealings with investor funds)

If Americans are just as tribalistic, dirty and corrupt as we are, then why aren’t they grabbing ‘machetes’ and killing their neighbors, drowning in dirt and being labeled as corrupt? I think the answer is simple. The law here works. In Cali, you could be charged up to 1000$ for littering on the highway. Ouch! Even though not perfect, the system here ensures that evil-doers are brought to the book - mostly. And like the much-beloved-and-mourned-for Michuki Rules taught us, even matatu drivers comply when there’s a consistent and firm message against bad driving.

Romans 13:4 defines the primary role of government as God’s agents for our (citizens) good, to execute wrath on those who practice evil. A good sign that government is working, is that evil doers (even though still present) are restrained by their fear of the consequences from doing evil!

That’s why I think one of the priorities of our coalition government needs to be setting up independent institutions that work. Let’s begin with the judiciary and police-force. Let’s overhaul our constitution so that the presidency, parliament and judiciary have clearly defined roles that regulate each other. Let’s also figure out the roles that the media and civil society should play. Entrenching tribal equations in our government and civil service is not a real solution. It’s dealing with the short-term symptoms and ignoring the genuine long-term issues.

Rest

Just had a really great weekend! I tried to make sense of what made it so good. Sure, many things worked out well. We got to spend some quality time with both sets of parents. I also got to hang out & have fun with my bambinos. And to watch a really gripping Sunday-afternoon movie (Will Smith in ‘I Am Legend’ – warning – not for the faint hearted!). And as usual, we had a great time at Mavuno. But as good as that all was, it wasn’t all there was to it. There’s a certain energy in my step and more psyche and zeal for the week. Then it struck me. The weeks when I feel this way are when I actually take the time to truly rest and unwind after the hectic weekend!

So amazing how much our bodies need real rest (not just a change of activity!). We live in a frantic, fast-paced and noisy world. Too much to do, too little time, too many meetings, too many responsibilities, too many friends, too many books on our shelf we plan to read one day. We are addicted to coffee/Red Bull and adrenaline to help us get through our day. Email, sms, instant messaging, face-book and now Google-Talk have only made life more frantic. Many of us are expected to work Sundays and public holidays. The worst thing is - we’ve started to see this as normal!! We live to work, instead of work to live. We have become human doings, not human beings…

And yet the bible tells us that God himself rested on the 6th day after some strenuous creative work. And that He commands (not suggests) that we do the same, not for His but for our benefit (actually that’s probably true of all His commands). Must be the most disobeyed law in the book! We need time for rest, reflection and refuelling. And it’s not going to just happen unless we diarize it and insist on it.

One of the reasons I so often struggle with this is because I sometimes think the world depends on me. And yet when I drop dead, I have this sneaky suspicion that life will - after an appropriate pause and some minor adjustments of course – continue on as before!

So… say it with me… ‘there’s only one God, and it's certainly not me!’

Leaders on Leadership

Had a wonderful Leader’s Day at Mavuno last weekend (5th April)... The most incredible feeling in life is to have a passion worth dying for, and the best friends in life are those who share that passion. Maybe that’s why 300 is one of my movie favorites! And - speaking of leaders, I find the following quotes by leaders about leadership quite inspiring…

*To accomplish big things, I am convinced you must first dream big dreams(Conrad Hilton)
*Where there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18)
*Our aspirations are our possibilities (Robert Browning)
*The secret of success is consistence of purpose (Benjamin Disraeli)
*Leaders articulate and define what has previously remained implicit or unsaid; then they invent images, metaphors and models that provide a focus for new attention. (Warren Bennis and Burt Wanus)

And, my favorite…

*The only institutions that have enough resources to perform their tasks are those with small visions (David Allen Hubbard)

Here are fun pictures from our team building time:

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Your Love Has Set Me Free

Here's the latest single from the Mavuno Worship Project. And of course I should add ~ available at all leading book and media stores :-)

National Cake – Lessons From Sunday School

As our leaders struggle for the best formulae to distribute power, I wonder if what is needed is not some esoteric political knowledge but simple, homely wisdom. I heard of a book entitled, ‘the most important lessons in life I learnt in Sunday School’. Here are a couple of growing up, Sunday School lessons that may be of help in our national impasse…

1. How to ensure a cake is divided fairly – when we needed to share a piece of cake with a sibling, the easiest way to do it was to get the first child to break it into two pieces, and then to ask the other one to pick first which piece they wanted. It ensured the person dividing was extremely fair!
2. How to ensure you don’t run out of cake –Mom was an equal opportunity parent who taught her children, both sons and daughters, that the best way to deal with cake limitation is to learn to bake cake! That cake is not a fixed resource but a renewable one.

Our support of our politician’s obsession with sharing national positions comes from the mistaken belief that once politicians/technocrats from our tribal group are in charge of certain positions, then our people’s problems will end. In a country of 30 million, this is short-sighted thinking at best. My fear is that this squabbling may obscure our focus from cake baking. Crafting our national vision together and ensuring that it creates new opportunities for the generations to come. Asking what processes we need to put in place that will give us good leadership long after we’re dead and gone.

In the globalized, flat world we live in, our child’s competition is not Nyanza or Central province, but in Egypt and China. We need to learn to bake cake!