Leadership for Gen F

Gary Hamel wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal about how "Generation F" - the Facebook generation - will change expectations in the workplace.

Here's his list of 12 characteristics of online life he believes will be applied to the work environment:

All ideas compete on an equal footing.
Contribution counts for more than credentials.
Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed.
Leaders serve rather than preside.
Tasks are chosen, not assigned.
Groups are self-defining and -organizing.
Resources get attracted, not allocated.
Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.
Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed.
Users can veto most policy decisions.
Intrinsic rewards matter most.
Hackers are heroes.

Are these global characteristics??? Are you seeing them affect your context? How will they shape Asian cultures, like Singapore's? How will they shape the Church around the world? How will they affect the people you lead, and your leadership style?

No Scalejacking

I resonate with this way of thinking from Seth Godin, and want to live it out in my life and work.

Will you join me in resisting scalejacking? Let's reject the quest for size and do all we can for the ones who need and want our service! Sounds like Jerry Maguire's manifesto.

Scalejacking - Dave Balter coined this great term. It describes the quest of marketers for size at all costs. Because marketers were raised on the scale of mass—TV, radio, newspapers—they have a churn and burn mentality. The internet turns this upside down. The internet is about who, not how many. The internet lets you take really good care of 100 people instead of harassing 2,000.

Yet, panicked marketers still look for scale (How many followers can we get? What can we do with a Facebook fan page?) and then hijack that attention, hoping to filter out the masses and get a few sales.

Scalejacking inevitably tarnishes most communities, because individuals (people) hate being treated like numbers just standing by to be filtered.

Stephen Stills wrote, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." I think he was wrong. On the Internet, the mantra that works is, "Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.)" Ignore everyone else. It doesn't have good internal pentameter, but it's true.

Changing US Demographics

What will the US look like in 20 years? The ethnic makeup of the country is rapidly changing.

Young Americans who are minorities outnumber young whites in almost one of every six U.S. counties. It's a demographic wave that is transforming more parts of the nation and raising questions about who is a minority.

The multiplying effect of diversity is rapid. In 2008, 34% of U.S. residents were minorities, but 48% of babies born in the USA were minorities. The number of white youths has dropped 5.3% since 2000 while the young minority population grew 15.5%. "It will be hard to define who is a minority in the future...."

Change is happening so quickly that the youngest Americans are much more likely to be minorities than those who are a few years older, says Johnson, who did the research with Daniel Lichter, demographer at Cornell University.

Among youths ages 15 to 19, 60% are non-Hispanic whites. Among those 4 or younger, 53% are white.

A London Guide

London sounds like a great vacation!

The London I've finally discovered is as rumpled and comfy as old corduroy (which I like) and as stylish and smug as the sassiest fashionistas (which I don't).

But what a buzz fest. London is a city on the verge of a nervous breakdown yet so sated on its own glories that nothing seems to bloody bother it. At this European crossroads, I found the mad pace and the musty masterpieces a perfect contrast. Just when you can't take another minute of London's twitchy streets, you can slip into some spectacular ancient hall and, like Sherlock Holmes himself, spend an afternoon seeking Anne Boleyn's bones.

Or, more festively, you can take a day and just sample the pubs, which are everywhere, a drinker's dream.

What's Really Happening in Iran

Read about social, political, and religious realities in Iran from this fascinating article in Mission Frontiers from Sep-Oct 2008:

"By the late 1980s, the number of Persian Muslim-background believers had grown into many thousands. Then in the 1990s, two things converged to turn this momentum into one of the greatest watershed events in the history of Persian Christianity. The first was a wave of government-organized crackdowns and assassinations of Christian leaders....

In the year 2000, Christian satellite broadcasting began beaming the gospel to almost every home in Iran. This was made possible by the fact that millions of satellite dishes had been illegally smuggled into Iran by corrupt members of the same government that had outlawed them. The Christian satellite programs became a lifeline for the church in Iran. Much more, when the Iranian people learned that the government was trying to scramble the broadcasts, they became an overnight sensation. Recent nationwide surveys reveal that over 70% of the population is watching Christian satellite programs. These same surveys indicate that at least one million have already become believers, and many millions more are on the verge. This growth has happened so fast, the underground church can hardly keep apace....

Starting churches in Iran is easy! Everywhere you go to evangelize, people are ready to receive the gospel, or they have already become believers through satellite broadcasts. ”Training leaders is also easy, remarks another leader. The government has left young people with nothing to do. So believers spend time with one another every day. They are constantly gathering for prayer, Bible study and evangelism. When a group reaches 25 people, they divide in half and begin again. Within two years, a new believer is expected to become a leader of a new house-fellowship and a discipler of new leaders...

Cars, cars, cars

The growth of the car market in China will cause huge headaches, where roads are built for bicycle traffic and there are few parking lots for all the multistory apartment buildings. It will also keep pressure on oil prices for years to come.

China is on track to sell 11 million vehicles this year, according to the China Passenger Car Association. That would be up 17% from 2008, and a stunning 20 times the number of vehicles sold in China just a decade ago. Zhang says this year China likely will overtake the USA, where expected sales are around 10 million units, and become the world's biggest car market for the first time.

China's 1.3 billion people "are simply wild about cars," says Michael Dunne, a Shanghai-based managing director of J.D. Power and Associates, an auto industry group. He says the surprising strength of China's auto market has been driven not just by economics, but also by a kind of psychological shift that has come with prosperity.

"There is the thrill of individual mobility, going from point A to point B in their own time, and on their own terms. But it's also an opportunity to declare and project their own success," Dunne says....

U.S.-style suburbs, where cars are a virtual necessity, are sprouting everywhere....

China has one-seventh as many autos on the road as the USA, Dunne estimates, but nearly twice as many traffic deaths — 73,484 last year, according to the Chinese government.