The other night I spent an hour watching a web clip. It wasn’t anything from Youtube, it didn’t have a high entertainment factor, but it was nonetheless one of the best I have seen i quite a while.
It was quite simply Gary Hamel, the famed strategy guru, who spoke in front of an audience in his church in Menlo Park, California. The church’s name is Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, MPCC, and the congregation seems highly affluent, not the least when it comes to creativity, tech-savviness, etc.
Gary Hamel, who reach the status of world-famous a couple of decades ago through books that proliferated like wildfire through business schools all over, took his analytical skills to the world of the Church. It wasn’t all nice things he had to say of how the Church is conducting business, espcially its core business – reaching out to people.
With hard data he showed how the Church has a very different view from the peple on the outside, concerning what it stands for in terms of openness etc.
Gary furthermore put the awkward question if we tend more to focus on organizational issues and tradition, than to actively do what the Church should do – namely reach out. The comparison with corporations, that start out as agile beings and that later on become more and more sleepy before they eventually demise, was also to be had.
Gary encouraged us to put our creativyty and abilities to work in order to change the downward trend. And, as they say, everything starts with recognizing the problem.
I have put the film in the hands of everybody I think has the task of re-inventing the Church. Now, please pass it forward.
http://mppc.org/series/ripple-effect/gary-hamel/shifting-tides
Johan Jorgensen, CEO and Founder