The Enigma of Failure: Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall – 1

I enjoy business books.

Even though I’ve been in campus ministry and out of the for profit sector for six years now, I still think much about my time spent at Intergrated Project Management Company as hugely formative, and realized the power a great company can have on both individuals and communities. The Wall Street Journal seems to agree as well, naming IPM as one of the top 15 small workplaces in the country last year.

It was there when I was first introduced to Jim Collins, and his two business classics: Built to Last, a book primarily based on how enduring companies are built, and Good to Great, a response born out of a question from Collins’ friend who didn’t know how to take his good company and help it become great.  Jim Collins has spent a lot of time talking about success.

Until now.  In How the Mighty Fall, Collins turns to the dark side and analyzes how those companies that had all the advantages fell from the top.  And it isn’t pretty – it’s like analyzing a train wreck.

How the Mighty Fall is going to be criticized pretty heavily by several folks. People will likely talk about how it doesn’t have the same rigor as the other books, and they may be right.  They’ll probably say that Collins had an idea and sought to prooftext under the guise of research in order to align with his works in Good to Great and Built to Last.

Whatever.  They may be right, but I think there is something else that is deeper than people’s criticism that underlies their motivation: America has an aversion to failure.

We are scared of it.  We love winners – when the US Olympic Basketball Team lost for the first time, which was inevitable, the players felt like they let the country down.

How the Mighty Fall is an analysis of tragedy. Perhaps it’s just the dark side of me, but I kinda like looking and analyzing failure.  I remember my freshman year of college having dinner with one of the lead engineers in the Challenger Shuttle explosion, and hearing his seething anger combined with intense sorrow over what had happened. It shook him to the core. It shook me, a 17 year old freshman, in a way that I’m still not sure if I understand.

Even (and especially) in my own life, I’ve learned more from my failures than any of my successes. An old high school friend that I’d lost track of long ago facebook messaged me and asked me about being successful. I laughed out loud when I read the message.

I think several people can look at me on the outside and think I’m successful – and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I wanted to be considered successful. But I truly think I’ve failed more than I’ve succeeded. I hide failure well – but I can point to at least one epic fail I’ve had in school, in business, in ministry, in relationships, in family, in church, etc.

It’s so much so that when I speak openly about failure, people have this strong need to correct me that I didn’t fail because I learned from it. That’s true – but it’s like saying that you prefer to buy a pre-owned car rather than a used car.  A subtle change in terminology doesn’t change the fact that someone else used the car before you. Similarly, a subtle change in terminology doesn’t change the fact that I really screwed up.

Failure used to scare me – a lot. I still don’t like it, but more than ever I believe failure has been the genesis of my growth. Why? To quote Rich Lamb, “Grace is only possible past the limits of our success.”  And our limits of success are discovered only through experience. Experiencing failure. We can only experience epic grace when we’ve epically failed – or, as Jesus said, “she has loved much because she has been forgiven much.”

I only really understand grace through entering failure.

The biblical characters who haunt me most are Saul (the tragic Old Testament King) and Judas (the disciple who betrayed Jesus). Both were filled with the presence of God, either being filled with the Holy Spirit or being with Jesus. Why did they fail? They were more preoccupied with the perception of others view of their success and managing their images than true obedience to what God called them.

I’m going to be looking at each of Jim Collins stages of destruction of a company – both looking at what Collins says regarding business, but apply it to other areas – in ministry, and in our own lives with God.

From How the Mighty Fall, by Jim Collins

Why? Because the exposing the dark side for what it truly is allows for us to strip it of it’s power. Evil that presents itself clearly as evil is so easy to detect. We watch films and hear the darker musical score and know evil’s coming. Life isn’t the movies – real evil doesn’t have a soundtrack.

The power of evil comes through masquerading as goodness. The best lies aren’t the bold face ones – it’s subtle deceit that twists the truth and leaves us in a place that we never wanted to be, wondering how we got there.

We are afraid of failure because we’re afraid of being exposed – that what we be seen for what we really are.  Shame and failure are linked. Fear of failure is a lie that keeps us from really knowing that we can be loved unconditionally. Exposing failure for what it is allows us to see more than we could ever dream – but it requires a rigorous assessment of what’s really there without dressing it up.

So, let the failure stripshow begin.

On Thankfulness

“We are only grateful people when we can say thank-you to all that has brought us to the present moment.”

Henri Nouwen

I confess, I’m not naturally a thankful person.

I used to be a much more critical person. I still am sometimes – it rears its ugly head often. But it was about seven years ago when I wanted to be more gracious and affirming of others.  And I have honestly changed significantly – I’m happy to say. But I’m not there yet.

Thankfulness for me is a discipline. I like being among the poor because they are more often thankful and they remind me that simplicity helps us recognize our need for God. I used to always wonder why the Bible said, “Blessed are the poor,” in both Matthew and Luke.

Some people like to qualify that statement by saying Jesus wasn’t talking about the material poor – the “poor in spirit.” And while it is true that is what Matthew says, Luke just leaves it at “blessed are the poor.”

I don’t think we can just leave that statement to be hyperbole.  It’s much more comfortable when we leave it that way – but I don’t think it was intended to make pie-in-the-sky happiness that seems to be a never attainable ideal.

To understand our need for God is to be blessed.  To rejoice and be thankful is a result of being satisfied that God provides.

How do you cultivate thankfulness in a life?

Law and Order? Outlawed Pigs in an Outlawed Land

The New York Times ran a feature on Mokattam and interviewed a couple of my friends in Cairo among the garbage city with the recent order to slaughter the entire pig population in Egypt in scare of the swine flu.  This order was given despite no recorded cases of the swine flu in Egypt, and the fact that pigs do not transmit the disease to humans.

In other words, my brother who closed down the school of which he is principal in southern rural Wisconsin had more actual dealings with H1N1 than the folks in Egypt who decided Wilbur and friends can’t play with Charlotte in the barn anymore because they have a date with the butcher.

So why in the world would the Egyptian government do such a thing?

I don’t know the certainties, but I can certainly can speculate.

The government is responding with the line that they are “trying to make things more sanitary for the Zabeleen.”

I’m sorry, but political rhetoric belongs with the organic waste being eaten by the pigs. Perhaps the officials have more in common with them than they thought.

The truth is the land where the Zabeleen live is attractive, and beginning the systematic removal of a people for the expansion of tourism by first dismantling their income source is the most strategic way of enabling their removal.  But covering it up with lies is disgusting.

It’s sad when power is abused to silence voices without power, but even worse when those in power use lies (actively telling falsehoods) and deceit (passively – concealing the truth for the purpose of misleading) for the sake of maintaining power and suppressing what might actually expose the truth.

If you are an American reading this, your privilege is all the more apparent and I’m grateful for those we honor on Memorial Day who have provided it for us. Thank-you to our service men and women who continually provide freedom for us.

But if you were among the Zabeleen, an oppressed minority without access to power, how would you address this issue?

Fear of Swine Flu vs. Knowledge

From graphjam.com

Courtesy of graphjam.com

Working Together: The Whole Word to the Whole Campus

This was completed several months ago, but it was recently released by 2100 Productions, InterVarsity’s Multimedia company (who are simply awesome).

done

This is part of a training cirriculum we are using with students across the country in helping building authentically multiethnic ministries in colleges and universities across the country.

Enjoy!

Reasons of the Heart, Part 1

From Reasons of the Heart, From John Dunne

“Now my soul is troubled” even Jesus can say, even in the Gospel of John, when he is facing death.

“Now shall the ruler of this world be cast out,” he says, though, when he goes through fear to courage.

One goes through fear to courage, it seems, through desperation and despair to hope, through sorrow to joy, through conflict to peace, through circumstances to heart’s desire.

The way to necessity is the way of circumstance and conflict and suffering and guilt and death.  The way of possibility is the way of “going through.”

“God is how things stand,” for the one who sees only the way of necessity.

“God is that all things are possible,” for the one who sees the way of possibility.

What is God we can ask, for one who actually does “go through?”

What’s wrong with the world? I am.

I thought that as I aged I would become more wise and understanding of how to deal with evil in the world.  There are times when I wish I was more tolerant of evil for my own sanity.  Case in point – an older gentleman at my church decided to tell a university student to stop talking on his cell phone in a very curt and rude manner today at the worship service at my church.  Me? Let it go?

No way.

I tracked him down, and sternly told him that was not acceptable behavior (all while quivering in anger and fear at confronting someone at least thirty years my senior as his “elder”) for becoming a welcoming community.

Wouldn’t it just be easier if I could accept evil? Why don’t I just let it go and make my life easier?

G. K. Chesterton, when asked to write an essay by The Times of London on the subject, “What’s wrong with the world?”

Chesterton gave this simple response.

Dear London Times,

I am.

Sincerely Yours,

G. K. Chesterton

As much as I and other folks like Bono in today’s New York Times still expound on the problem of evil, and the church’s lack of response, the problem will never be addressed in full until we come to understand in our minds, hearts, hands, guts, and soul that the problem lies first and foremost within us.  Bono lauds Buffet and Gates – but they give out of their abundance, not sacrificially.  What if Buffet and Gates chose to give sacrificially in solidarity with those who they seek to serve – like the woman who gave her two copper coins?

The values that I and other staff have had for becoming agents of justice and righteousness in the world have infected many of our students.  One of the blessings that I have seen over the years is that many of my students have been involved in the global engagement summit at Northwestern University – a way they can engage the campus, partner with those who are far from God in engaging God’s purposes.

Sometimes I wonder if what we are seeing is an authentic revival of the activism we saw in my parent’s generation in the 1960’s that could truly change the world.

At others I cynically wonder if it’s just youthful optimistic high from an overdose on the self-esteem movement that will crash at the experience of real evil – the kind that etches it’s way into your mind and heart like a tattoo that can never be removed.  Students who I have taken among the poorest of the poor suffer often suffer from depression because the despair they encounter is contageous.

Sometimes I wonder if they will cope in the same way we saw those 60’s Hippie’s that today drive the SUV’s, built the big homes, ran businesses like Enron and Arthur Andersen, and now blame others for our planet’s problems.

Those are the days when I want to throw in the towel, and wonder if it is really worth it…am I just enabling a faith that is a “college thing” that will die once students hit the real world and the hot idealism is tempered.

This is why I need hope as much as any – for giving up means I’m just as much a part of the problem.

Today was especially impactful – when the liturgy of my church gives words when I have only groans.

O Risen Christ, you asked for my hands, that you might use them for your purpose.  I gave them for a moment, then withdrew them, for the work was hard.

You asked for my mouth to speak out against in justice. I gave you a whisper that I might not be accused.

You asked for my eyes to see the pain of poverty.  I closed them, for I did not want to see.

You asked for my life, that you might work through me.  I gave a small part, that I might not get too involved.

Lord, forgive my calculated efforts to serve you – only when it is convenient for me to do so, only in those places where it is safe to do so, and only with those who make it easy to do so.  Father, forgive me, renew me, send me out as a usable instrument, that I might take seriously the meaning of your cross.

Then later we sang from Christ is Alive:

“In every insult, rift, and war, where color, scorn, or wealth divide,

Christ suffers still, yet loves the more, and lives, where even hope has died.

Christ is alive, and comes to bring good news to this and every age,

Till earth and sky and ocean ring with joy, with justice, love, and praise.”

The hope of Easter is that Christ is alive.  Hope is only needed when it seems absent, and that the hope of all was killed made hope disappear.  But the resurrection proves that death doesn’t win in the end and that my job is just to hold on, be faithful, and not give up.  The setbacks of today will be pushed forward with or without me,  just as he will make all things right in the end and judge justly. Or as Fydor Dostoyevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov,

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

Saturday: Waiting

Last night was much about waiting in the Emergency Room for a diagnosis of my friend – it was very difficult.  But one of the things we did to pass the time was talk about when he lived in Israel and experiencing Easter there.

The big thing in Jerusalem is not Good Friday, nor is it Easter Sunday. It’s Holy Saturday.

Holy what?

Exactly – here in the west we don’t celebrate Holy Saturday…because what would you do on this day? Nothing. Jesus didn’t die, nor did he rise again.

Which is exactly what those in Jerusalem are doing (or did) right now.  They gather together and await the flame to be passed from person to person to person and then walk out together.  It’s their belief that the Spirit came on this day and arose Jesus from the dead on Sunday.  The fire represents the Spirit.

But really, I think this day typifies what it means to be a Christian.  Philip Yancey, one of the most influential authors in my life, ends his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, with this profound truth:

The other two days have earned names on the church calendar: Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Yet in areal sense we live on Saturday, the day with no name. What the disciples experienced in small scale – three days, in grief over one man who had died on the cross – we now live through on cosmic scale. Human history grinds on, between the time of promise and fulfillment.  Can we trust that God can make something holy and beautiful out of a world that includes Bosnia and Rwanda, and inner-city ghettos and jammed prisons in the richest nation on earth? It’s Saturday on planet Earth; will Sunday ever come?

That dark, Golgothan Friday can only be called Good because of what happened on Easter Sunday, a day which gives a tantalizing clue to the riddle of the universe. Easter opened up a crack in a universe winding down toward entropy and decay, sealing the promise that someday God will enlarge the miracle of Easter to cosmic scale.

It’s a good thing to remember in the cosmic drama, we live out our days on Saturday, the in-between day with no name. I know a woman whose grandmother lies buried under 150-year-ld live oak trees in the cemetery of an Episcopal church in rural Louisiana.  In accordance with the grandmother’s instructions, only one word is carved on the tombstone: “Waiting.”

Waiting is hard for me, but I’m learning. I’m learning to believe in hope, and to perservere that hope is certain and Resurrection Sunday is comin’.  That the not-yet of the Kingdom will be now, and that someday all sad things will be made untrue.

I’m waiting.

Unexpected Goodness: Good Friday

I’m blogging from the emergency room.  My housemate is feeling some severe abdominal pain, and we both think it’s appendicitis.  We’ll see what the diagnosis brings.  But it was certainly unexpected, to say the least.

So was the last ad on the waiting room television: “Viva Viagra.”  Is it me, or is that just weird to see in an emergency room?  Or the Hannah Montana film preview?  Unexepected, to say the least.

Good Friday is my favorite church holiday of the year.  It seems appropriate that something unexpected happened on the day – because it’s unexpected that we could ever call this day good.

Think about it for any length of time – why do we call this day good?  It is only seen as good in retrospect – but I wonder what it would have been called by those who experienced it as it happened.

I never celebrated Good Friday growing up – Maundy Thursday was great because it was when the Lord’s Supper was instituted, and we would arise early for the sunrise service for Easter Sunday (complete with a great potluck afterwards)

My church celebrates Good Friday in a very solemn way – with a Tenebrae service of darkness.  The service is at dusk, and the last sunlight is softened by the blue stained glass as darkness comes. The seven last words of Christ are read, with seven sets of seven candles lit throughout the sanctuary, With each word that is read, one of each candle set is darkened until complete silence and darkness sets in.  Through sad, mourning songs, my soul opens up in pain and I truly feel deep sorrow.

Kinda like my housemate right now – who is in a lot of pain.

I’m hoping that it isn’t appendicitis – but if it is, the pain led to a deeper understanding of the weight of what was real.

I wonder if the pain that was felt on the first Good Friday (when we didn’t know yet it was good) by Jesus was more about the physical suffering or about being abandoned by his Heavenly Father.  How could goodness be found in such tragedy?  The weight of what was real was Jesus screaming on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” For the first time in all time, the Son of God became God-forsaken.

There dying as a criminal between two thieves, bloodied and humiliated, was the God of the universe, who endured pain and shame until he committed himself into the hands of his loving Father.

How could this Friday be good? Because, as Jurgen Moltmann sais, “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”  The older I get, the closer I hope that day is.

On Feet and Maundy Thursday

I have a toenail fungus.

I finally got embarassed to the point of getting it fixed when a certain friend pranked me with a pedicure, and I felt so bad for the nail technician (or whatever you call the person who hacked away at my blocks of feet.)

It’s kinda gross – the nail gets all yellow and thick.  I finally went in about three weeks ago to get medication for it, and there is a sad side effect to the drug. Since the drug slightly effects the liver, I’m not able to enjoy adult beverages.  So, no tasty malt beverages for 3 months.

Feet are an interesting thing.  One of the common faux-pas I had in Egypt was crossing my legs and exposing the bottom of my foot to the person next to me.  It’s basically the equivalent of giving your neighbor the finger in the Middle East.

More than once I caught myself doing it, and learned how to apologize in Arabic real quick.

What is it with feet, anyway?  I was at a baby shower yesterday, and the father-to-be noticed that the first three cards all had little baby feet on them.  They are cute…

…until they look like mine when you get old.  All calloused with toenail fungus.

Ewww.

It makes me think even more about what happened on Maundy Thursday.  Maundy is a derivative of the latin mandum, or command.  It’s when Jesus washed his disciples feet and gave them the commandment to wash one another’s feet.

If you’ve never participated in a footwashing, it’s a trip.  There is nothing like looking at someone when you are sitting and they look you in the eye and wash your feet.  I remember clearly in Cairo when one of my students went out of her way to wash my feet.  I was speechless, and there is something that gets me everytime when I read John 13.

Why would Jesus ever stoop so low as to do the offensive task of washing his disciples feet? The line that gets me every time – “he loved them to the end.”

I’ve read each of the gospels probably close to 100 times. Maybe more. I’m still fascinated each time I read that line.

He loved them to the end. To the end of washing the feet of those who would deny him and betray him.

He loved them to the end. To the end of enduring their stupidity, yet welcoming them back and restoring them from their guilt and shame.

He loved them to the end.  To the end of allowing them to doubt and leave and return and believe.

He loved them to the end.