Once again our friend Bradley J. Moore kindly graces the front page.

Several months ago I reported that happiness was a hot topic in business reporting these days. But unfortunately, some depressing news has recently developed in the happiness department.

Apparently worker happiness is on the fritz.

A January survey by the Conference Board revealed that more Americans than ever before are unhappy at work, representing the nadir of a steady decline that has been ebbing away for the last 30 years.

According to the research, only 45% of Americans are currently happy at work, compared to 52% in 2005, and 61% in 1987.

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There’s no doubt about it. As I’ve crisscrossed the country advising companies large and small on leadership issues, my observation is that most companies are in deep trouble. Most firms lack the emerging leaders who will capably take over as senior leaders retire. In some cases, the successor is basically the same age as the retiring leader. That doesn’t make sense. In other cases, the owner/founder/CEO has not built a leadership team, but rather a supporting cast with him in the starring role. The problem is that when the “rock star” retires, the supporting cast can’t carry the show. Others just have anemic teams for a variety of causes…lack of understanding of the importance of developing people, not investing in the development of people, and many other reasons.

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“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
— Jesus, John 4:13, 14

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To repent means to turn around, to stop what you’re doing and do the opposite. To repent means that even though you used to assume one thing was true, you now know it’s wrong – all wrong – and you will now believe and act upon something totally different. Repent is a good, strong word, full of hope and new beginnings. In the context of Jesus’ kingdom, repent is an invitation to another world, another life, a way of being that was supposed to be all along and can be now.

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Many of us are taught that the Greeks started to make great intellectual, scientific, and economic progress until the Christians came along and cast everyone into the so-called “Dark Ages.” Then, as the story goes, secular thinkers in the Renaissance and especially in the Enlightenment saved humanity from backward Christianity and ushered in an age of progress and reason.

Now, along comes the remarkable sociologist Rodney Stark, acclaimed historian of religion and science, and author of numerous books that, among other things, aim to demonstrate that the above storyline is nonsense. Were there problems, religious conflict, and sickness in medieval times? Sure, but to say that the “Dark Ages” were dark is a historical lie, says Stark.

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"Did you know," begins a brief article in the March 2010 edition of Wired Magazine, "that 62 percent of all cited statistics are bogus?"

Of course they made that up as a backdrop for the results of a UK poll that found a supermajority of British citizens don't trust published statistics. Parliament responded by setting up a truth squad to monitor the numbers coming out of government agencies.

Until such time as you've mastered Darrel Huff's 1954 classic, How to Lie with Statistics, or people who should know better stop abusing "hard data" to misdirect each other, here are Five Guidelines for Using Statistics from Harvard Management Update (Vol. 11, No. 3, March 2006)with a little InsideWork embellishment...
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In an interview with Religion & Ethics Newsweekly Pultizer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson (Gilead, 2004, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) lamented the loss of seriousness in contemporary thought. "I have a feeling," she said, "that there has been a pressure away from seriousness in much modern thought, as if we could sort of scale reality down to a size that we are more comfortable dealing with."

Is this not the never-ending story of leadership; to occupy the golden mean between overcomplicated, overreaching blue-sky schemes on one hand and oversimplified diagnostics and myopic strategies on the other? "I have a feeling," Marilynne Robinson said, "that there has been a pressure away from seriousness in much modern thought, as if we could sort of scale reality down to a size that we are more comfortable with.

That might be a prejudice, but I feel that we have not come up to the standards of seriousness that others have reached at earlier moments.

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Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God. Not that we were competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. Since we have such a hope, we are very bold. — Paul, II Corinthians 3:4, 5, 12

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Grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is a gift. All that is good is ours not by our right but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God. While there is much we have earned – our degree and salary, our home and garden, a Miller Lite and a good night’s sleep – all this is possible only because we have been given so much: life itself, eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love. We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh. We have the power to believe when others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt. This and so much more is a sheer gift; it is not reward for our faithfulness, our generous disposition, our heroic life of prayer. Even our fidelity is a gift. “If we but turn to God,” said St. Augustine, “that itself is a gift of God.” My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
— Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, p 23-24

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Guy Kawasaki—founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures, co-founder of Alltop, husband, father, author, speaker, hockey addict—writes:

The fallacy of partnerships—and how “partner” became a verb—is rooted in the dot.com days of 1998-2000. During these years, most startups didn't have a business model, so they blew smoke about having “partnered” with big firms. Surely if a company partnered with Microsoft or IBM, it would be successful.

Calling the relationship a partnership doesn't make it so. Mr. Kawasaki's has some thoughts on what qualifies as "partnering" in a brief manifesto on The Art of Partnering.

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Sunday nights bring new possibilities for business leaders seeking insight beyond the executive offices...

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I'm watching my high school sophomore daughter blasting through her homework. And it dawns on me that I never did homework this way.

Her base station is a 24" iMac. But it's only the starting point for the tools she uses. Texting is a constant as her classmates ask each other questions, working collaboratively on assignments. (Can we really call it a "phone" when the voice feature is just that, "a feature" and one that is not used as much as the other communications features on the device?) Assignments are given via the school's website.  Files are uploaded via class servers to the teacher.  Presentations are designed on Sliderocket with material gleaned using Flickr, Google, and Bing. Wikipedia is not allowed as a source by most teachers.

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Once again, Bradley J. Moore graces our front page.

I was talking to a friend recently who is second in command at a publicly traded billion-dollar company. He was telling me about an important project he was responsible for, and how at one point he became completely overwhelmed. It had gotten complicated, he said, and he wasn’t sure what to do next.

“I went into my office, shut the door, and stared at the information in front of me.” He told me. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just let the wave of panic and anxiety wash over me.”

Panic? Anxiety? This does not sound like someone who should be in charge.

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