Many partnerships between churches in developed countries and churches in developing countries fail because the parties do not communicate well or do not understand each other’s culture and expectations. Mary Lederleitner sets out to remedy this situation in her book Cross-Cultural Partnerships: Navigating the Complexities of Money and Mission. The book explores a range of difficult issues including differing cultural beliefs about financial resources, the relationship between accountability and paternalism, and dealing with misunderstandings and conflict.
Westerners tend to have an individualistic approach to money, whereas people in many other cultures have a collectivistic approach. Americans often think of partnerships in terms of short-term transactions, whereas Africans may think of partnerships as lifetime commitments. Westerners may view the use of designated funds for a non-designated purpose as stealing, whereas people from other cultures may view the failure to share resources as stealing.
The author explains a wide range of concepts which should be considered to ensure successful partnership including communication and harmony, “face”, status, the meaning of gifts, ambiguity, perspectives about time, dependency, possible negative effects of foreign funding, dignity, mutual accountability, capacity building and sustainability, conflict management, and dealing with embezzlement.
Although the subject matter is very important in the context of current trends in global mission, I was expecting the book, based on its title and cover, to be fairly dry and academic. This turned out not to be the case at all. The author’s writing style is highly engaging and the content is presented in a very readable manner. In my opinion this book should be at the top of the reading list for any church which is involved, or thinking about becoming involved, in a cross-cultural mission partnership.
To succeed in business you need to be good at what you do, but you also need to have a good network of contacts. There is both an art and a real science to developing social and business relationships, according to John Timperley in his book Network Your Way to Success. To read my full review of the book, please visit my business blog.
What does an African schoolboy do if his family is reduced to abject poverty by a severe drought and he is kicked out of school because his parents cannot afford to pay school fees? In his book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, William Kamkwamba describes how he went to the library to study books to try to keep up with his classmates, and in those books he found some ideas that could be used to improve his family’s situation.
A school textbook called “Explaining Physics” showed how a rotating power source could be used to generate electricity to power a light globe, and another called “Using Energy” contained pictures of windmills. William decided to build a windmill to provide electrical power to his house and eventually hopefully to power a pump that would enable his family to irrigate their crops even if there was a drought. Using parts gathered from a scrapyard and some remarkable ingenuity, he made a windmill which worked, much to the surprise of the people in his village.
I found the book to be very moving in the way it described the privations and gradual starvation brought on by the drought and the government’s failure to respond, and then the resourcefulness of William in understanding and building advanced technology that no-one in his village had ever seen, merely on the basis of photographs and drawings in school text books. It is a great story, well told and intriguing to the very end. I highly recommend it.
Unfortunately there is often little relationship between the merit of an idea and the amount and quality of press coverage that it attracts. In order to get ideas publicised, the person with the idea has to acquire skills in communicating through the various media, and William Tyson’s book Pitch Perfect: Communicating with Traditional and Social Media for Scholars, Researchers and Academic Leaders is designed to explain what those skills entail.
The book provides a basic description of how the media work and how to develop a media strategy, and it goes on to give advice on a range of different interactions with the media including: presenting your story in writing, contacting the media, presenting new research findings, how to respond when a reporter calls, conducting media interviews, writing opinion articles, delivering speeches and promoting books. A number of useful traditional media contacts in the US, Canada and the UK are listed in appendices.
I was a bit surprised to find that instructions on how to communicate using social media were limited to one chapter (although the chapter on book promotion also referred to social media). In my view the book provides a very useful manual for academics to use in communicating with traditional media, but for a complete overview of how to get ideas publicised academics will need also to consult other resources which deal more extensively with non-traditional media.
Is there anything to be gained from studying the leadership style of someone who is most remembered for having caused more slaughter, devastation and destruction than anyone before him? John Man would have us believe so, in his book The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan. To read my full review of the book, please visit my business blog.
Although many business books promise business success, one of the strongest themes of academic criticism of this literature should be that, in business, success does not last, according to Tony Michell in his book Samsung Electronics and the Struggle for Leadership of the Electronics Industry. The book tells the story of the rise of the Samsung group of companies and the spectacular success in the last decade of Samsung Electronics.
Most business books written in English relate to businesses in the US, the UK or other predominantly English-speaking countries with similar cultures, but the rising importance of Asian businesses in the global economy makes it increasingly necessary that Westerners understand the driving forces behind successful Asian businesses. Although this book is not written by a Samsung insider, it is written by an academic with extensive knowledge of the Korean business environment.
Particularly interesting insights include: the influence and control that a single founder and the founder’s family seem to have had over Korean businesses that have grown very large; the degree to which Korean laws have resulted in the unusual corporate structures; the ways in which Korean culture has helped and hindered the success of Samsung; and the continuing struggle between old and new cultural forces within the company.
There is some repetition in the text, and I found some parts of the book less interesting than others, but on the whole I found it both interesting and informative, and I would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the electronics industry or who is just curious about the story behind the company that makes those mobile phones, LCD displays and other consumer electronic devices.
If you tried to fit everything there is to know about planting churches into one book, it would probably look like Ed Stetzer’s book Planting Missional Churches. This encyclopaedic work, which is an updated and expanded version of Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age, covers big churches, small churches and house churches, but predominantly from a relatively conservative Western cultural viewpoint.
The author provides useful chapters on the Biblical basis of church planting, models of church plants and planters, church structure, leadership issues, emerging culture, developing a launch team, small groups, handling finances, choosing a name and logo, finding a meeting place, children’s ministry, and many other topics. These provide a comprehensive guide for the “normal” style of church plant. Other chapters cover “missional/incarnational” churches and “koinos” or house churches, but these are covered in less depth, and there is not much about non-Western churches and ethnic churches.
The book contains material gathered from numerous different sources, and various resources for further reading are listed at the end of each chapter. It was published four years ago and some of the content is a little bit out of date in view of rapid developments in culture and church planting trends since publication, but the vast majority of the content remains highly relevant. This book is an important reference for church planters and for churches which plant churches.
“One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time,” according to Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. To read my full review of the book, please visit my business blog.
What leadership lessons can we learn from General Eisenhower’s leadership of the Allied forces in Europe at the end of the Second World War? Geoff Loftus outlines what he believes the lessons are in his book Lead Like Ike: Ten Business Strategies From the CEO of D-Day. The book tells the story of Eisenhower’s time in Europe from June 1942 until May 1945, and leadership principles arising from his conduct and decisions are highlighted as the story progresses.
The ten strategic lessons distilled by the author are: determine your mission; plan for success; stay focused; prioritize; plan to implement; communicate; motivate your people; manage your people; avoid project creep; and be honest. Whenever the book describes an action or decision relevant to one of these lessons, it is highlighted in a text box.
In my view the principles which the author has listed do not amount to a significant contribution to the field of leadership theory, and his portrayal of some of the characters in the story seems a bit limited. For example, Winston Churchill comes across as a time-wasting nuisance and General Montgomery as a pompous incompetent fool. The descriptions of Eisenhower’s interactions with such people appear to reflect poorly, and probably unfairly, on his leadership abilities, leaving me thinking that I might not want to “lead like Ike” after all. Notwithstanding these objections, I enjoyed reading the narrative parts of the book, and I think that the idea of seeking leadership lessons from Eisenhower’s career is a good one.
Disclosure: I received my copy of the book for free from BookSneeze.
Many partnerships between churches in developed countries and churches in developing countries fail because the parties do not communicate well or do not understand each other’s culture and expectations. Mary Lederleitner sets out to remedy this situation in her book Cross-Cultural Partnerships: Navigating the Complexities of Money and Mission. The book explores a range of difficult issues including differing cultural beliefs about financial resources, the relationship between accountability and paternalism, and dealing with misunderstandings and conflict.
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