I couldn’t help but think of many pastors, teachers and friends that complain about the speed at which their worlds are moving too. Here’s a pic of the new (speeding) ball:

1. What are our broad aspirations for our organization & the concrete goals against which we can measure our progress?
2. Across the potential field available to us, where will we choose to play and not play?
3. In our chosen place to play, how will we choose to win against the competitors there?
4. What capabilities are necessary to build and maintain to win in our chosen manner?
5. What management systems are necessary to operate to build and maintain the key capabilities?

Where and what seem to be key questions as to what you (or your org) should deal with before you got ga-ga on mission, values etc.

Barnett’s gist on our Generation X president:

In his pragmatism and carefulness, Obama is a tinkerer — nothing more. And most Americans intuit that, while such leadership suffices for now, it does not satisfy. We don’t merely want to know how American can accommodate the global future, but how we can actively shape it.

As a voter and a leader, I couldn’t agree more. We need to lead towards shaping futures, not simply accommodating them.

What would you do if

• you worked for a local TV station,
• had video of a cop beating an innocent man,
• and couldn’t get them to run it?

This guy, who used to work for the Seattle Fox station, decided to put the video on “>YouTube. Guess what his station did. Fired him and started showing the video – only after another rival station showed it. In this new world, you can’t hide stuff anymore. The Vatican is learning this, and now our (Seattle’s) local Fox affiliate is learning this too.

• Do not lie,
• do not hide stuff

- especially if you’re a news outlet.

Stage 3b cancer – she will be starting Chemo in 3 weeks. She is getting the best care at one of the best cancer facilities in the best country in the world. Please keep Diana in your prayers – specifically this week for her to see progress in her recovery from the initial surgery

Of course we continue to be blessed by your prayers and your words.
J

• What’s the point of church?
• Does it energize you?
• Are you a better person post-game then before you went in?

As I’ll show tomorrow, there’s a very different reality – church-wise – from a few decades back, but for right now the USA Today article is simply pointing out what most of us are already saying,

“Why bother with it?”

Does this, for a second, mean that church can’t be transformative? No, of course not, but again, my response to that question is a question

“Is it transformative for you?”

If it is, great, help the rest of us see why it is, but if it’s not, please, please stop with these “sky is falling” polls in the USA Today or anywhere else.

When & Where
May 7, 7 PM to 9 PM at Vineyard Community Church in Shoreline.

Specifics
Event Specifics are here.

EYI Site
Website is here.

Slideshare of Program
Powerpoint of EYI Program is here.

We hope to see you there.

Twitter Tag
Twitter tag is: #eyi

U-Stream (Hopefully)
I’ll soon be supplying a u-stream link in case you cannot attend.

Little House on the Prairie
The inherent belief in this system is that the funnel is key. In Little House on the Prairie, that funnel was the church/school. If you wanted to learn what the outside world was doing or thinking, you heard about it (largely) through the church/school. Most organizations are led in this paradigm – an elite (who understands more than the front-liners) that is the funnel – they literally filter the world. (Or at least they think they do.) By definition these leaders are oligarchic. They think they know best and that the peasants don’t.

You don’t know what you don’t know
The real bummer for these elites is not that they’re not smart – they are. Their biggest problem is they don’t know what they’re dumb about – they literally don’t know what they don’t know. When technology (like smart-phones) makes any and all information potentially available, a C-level executive must differentiate herself in a different way. Instead of being the only one to see a special report, she’s now got to know what to do with it – in real time – because chances are, everyone knows about it.

In a word, these disruptive technologies have moved the former audience into a co-creating role. We’ve moved from oligarchies to polyarchies – where the power of connection trumps the power of the money or the information machine.

They were the most transformative (and largest until Generation Y) generation in American history.

We number only a measly 70 million and thus haven’t been all that impactful.
Because of several Boomer marriage attempts and later-in-life babies, they and Generation Xers constitute the parents of the largest generation in American history – Generation Y.

They are massive, they are digital and they are uber-connected.

Different World
In a word, they inhabit a different world than we do. Born into the most saturated advertising market in the history of the world, these Millenials did the only thing they could – they stopped trusting the incessant lying of advertisers and authorities and began trusting each other. Combine this connective impulse with technologies like instant-messaging, texting and Twitter, and you have a group of 100 million digitals that possess asymmetrical b.s. detectors.

Hemingway and B.S. Detectors
Taking Hemingway’s advice that the essential ingredient for every good writer was an A-1 bulletproof b.s.detector, they can smell a sell from a mile away. Unlike their Gen X parents, who grumbled but ultimately went along with the dominant authority, this generation is defined by what Seth Godin accurately describes as “the age of heretics”.

The Former Audience
Armed with blogs and electronic bull-horns (historically reserved for those with the money or the power), this generation embodies Dan Gilmor’s exquisite definition of the “former audience”.
They want to play and they’re here to stay. Instead of receiving and even consuming content, they co-create it while consuming it. If TV was the technological metaphor of their moms and dads, the interactive game (Zelda or War Craft) is the technological metaphor of theirs. They want it now, interactive, open-ended and robust enough to take their tweaks (authorized or not).