When I read this from Tom Barnett, I thought of a neighbor of ours. I’ve heard the mom consistently remind her daughter to “be careful” when she’s tempted to tell friends that her (Algerian) father is Muslim. Like the Economist article says – being Muslim in America is a challenge. God (Allah) help us.

The economics are simple.
Your church provides a service to the customer. She – the customer – values your service.
How do you know? She pays.
Today.

Next week if you don’t provide such service, what happens?
She walks.
Enough walkers and you’re no longer in business.
That faithful customer isn’t so faithful anymore is she?
You can blame her, sure. Maybe she misunderstood you or your service. Maybe she got cynical and didn’t understand that you had such good intentions.
The scary thing is that none of that matters. She’s paying someone else for church now – not you.

You can come up with all kinds of reasons why she left – some of them might even make you feel better but there’s no changing your bottom line (without her).
In order for your economics to work, you need another paying customer. Any ideas?

None? Really.

Better pray for some manna then because if you won’t go out and find new customers then, by default, you’re waiting for them to fall out of the sky.

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change. – Peter Drucker

I’ve been a teacher for 17 years and I’ve never seen a good teacher that didn’t get this “joint-ness” of performance. Bad teachers typically Read the rest of this entry »