Today was a pretty fun day. I had breakfast with Dr. Lew Sterrett, then had lunch with a friend named Stuart, who is in banking. Dr. Lew wore spurs to breakfast and Stuart was wearing a suit because he had some important bank business in the afternoon. Dr. Lew Sterrett is a horse trainer who had turned his training into leadership and ministry programs.  I was able take away new meaningful information from each of them.  The third item I learned came from our ERP consultant who was wearing khakis and a polo.  So I learned at least one valuable thing from a person wearing every major theme of work attire inside of a single day.  Pretty awesome!

http://sermononthemount.org/

I learned about goal setting and the value of making bold declarations from Dr. Lew. He was sharing how all goal setting is essentially making a bold declaration that will require work to complete, figuring out a plan, then work really hard to make it happen. Without the bold declaration we do not take risk. The declaration exposes us and makes us vulnerable because we now are expected, either by ourselves or by others, to achieve. The only way to be successful is to hit the goal.  But still, at the very least we will have undoubtedly made strong progress towards the goal. It is also unlikely we would’ve worked that hard towards achievement had we not made the bold declaration.

His specific commentary was comparing and contrasting the church world to the business world. The value of the bold declaration can be seen by this comparison. Churches rarely make bold declarations and thus move very slowly towards growth. The church tends to be very averse to change, but even when a specific church decides it would like to grow, the hesitancy to make bold declarations makes it look more like wishful thinking. The business world is almost the exact opposite.  Businesses understand that you must set goals and have complimentary metrics or measurements of those goals. Businesses set goals and track progress on everything: people, products, customers, vendors, the economy, etc. The point of the conversation was not to suggest the business model is the only one that works for church growth, but to indicate the consequences of not making bold declarations.

I learned a new strategic tool from Stuart. He shared with me The Business Model Canvas.  This is an interesting one page overview of key strategies. It links Customers to Internal Activities using the Value Proposition as the pivot point. Even though it was so simple, as I went through the exercise I was forced to answer some difficult questions and some I did not have ready answers for. Therefore, it made me mature my business strategy even further. This is the sign of a good tool.  I have provided a link below.

http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/business_model_canvas_poster.pdf

I learned some new economic theories and was able to do some calculus in order to understand the inner workings of our new ERP system. As most good economic theories go, the formula for trying to find the economic order quantity is the combination of one formula that increases as quantity goes up, and one that decreases as quantity goes up, which naturally makes a minimum. This minimum can be found using mathematic evaluation. This calculation is relevant to our business because we repeatedly buy the same things over and over. We had actually estimated it based on one aspect of the cost to purchase, but had not calculated it mathematically. It is always fun to see all the study of math pay off in the real world.  Link below for this one too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_order_quantity

One of my strengths as identified by the Strengths Finder is Learner. It is rare that I get to learn this many new things in a single day, which made yesterday special.