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Practical wisdom for living a simpler life

When we fritter away our one and only life doing things that don’t really matter, we sacrifice the things that do matter, according to Bill Hybels in his book Simplify: Ten Practices to Unclutter Your Soul. Simplified living requires more than just organising your closets or cleaning out your desk drawer. By examining core issues that lure you into frenetic living, and by eradicating the barriers that leave you exhausted and overwhelmed, you can stop doing the stuff that doesn’t matter and build your life on the stuff that does.

The ten practices involve replenishing your energy reserves, prioritising and restricting your schedule, mastering your finances, aligning your job with your passions, forgiving, overcoming fears, deepening relationships, finding a life verse, moving on to new seasons in your life, and finding satisfaction in God’s purpose for your life.

As is the case with any book by Bill Hybels, this book is filled with practical wisdom, mostly garnered from his own extensive ministry experience. Bill has worked harder, seen more success, encountered more problems, found more solutions, and had his life more open to public scrutiny than the vast majority of Christian leaders. This means that he has plenty of entertaining personal anecdotes, but it also means that his advice comes with the genuine conviction of one who has been there before.

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A powerful challenge to engage with the poor

The challenge for the first world church in the twenty-first century is to radically reform itself, such that people who are poor are not merely the subject of outreach efforts, but are found right at the heart of our worshipping communities, according to Greg Paul in his book The Twenty-Piece Shuffle: Why the Poor and Rich Need Each Other. Sadly, a great many churches have not even got to the point of doing the outreach. They’re too busy trying to figure out how to develop a more relevant and attractive worship style.

The book tells the fascinating stories of numerous characters from the author’s church community, Sanctuary, which serves the poor and marginalised in downtown Toronto. There are homeless people, drug addicts, sex workers, disabled people, office people and ordinary suburbanites all sharing together in the richly textured community.

Rather than adopting the triumphalist tone of an aid agency, spruiking the number of people served and saved and providing an address to send more donations, the author puts the failures and immense personal costs of street work front and centre. What began as a mission to serve the poor turned into a humbling journey in which the author learned how to accept friendship and ministry from the people he had set out to serve.

There are stories of amazing personal transformation, of people becoming followers of Jesus in the most unlikely ways, but these stories occur towards the end of the book, to avoid the impression that the author might be trying to claim credit for what God has been doing. This book definitely provides a compelling challenge to the prevailing concept of what a “church” should be.

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Why mid-sized firms need strong leadership infrastructure

Many of the problems that midsized companies must deal with are not obvious; these problems grow out of sight, unrecognised by management until they emerge as full-blown crises that can threaten the present and future of the business, according to Robert Sher in his book Mighty Mid-Sized Companies: How Leaders Overcome 7 Silent Growth Killers.

My full review of the book is available at my business book reviews website.

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How to increase your productivity

With reduced staff, wasting time at work is unconscionable – that’s why we all feel so guilty when we find ourselves doing just that, unwillingly, unintentionally, but definitely doing it, according to Edward Brown in his bookThe Time Bandit Solution: Recovering Stolen Time You Never Knew You Had. The book outlines a number of actions which can significantly reduce the amount of time lost through interruptions or distractions.

My full review of the book is available at my business book reviews website.

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What the Pope can teach us about leadership

Francis may be a self-described “sinner”, but he is, without question, the right man for the right job at the right time; and the planets seldom align themselves as neatly as they have for this modest yet brilliant figure, according to Jeffrey Krames in his bookLead With Humility: 12 Leadership Lessons from Pope Francis. The author even describes Francis as the anti-Hitler, the twenty-first century’s answer to the twentieth century’s most malevolent mass murderer.

My full review of the book is available at my business book reviews website.

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How corporate learning is changing

Learning is an integral part of great workplaces, and as our world changes, continuous learning becomes not a luxury for the few but a necessity for the many, according to Nigel Paine in his book The Learning Challenge: Dealing With Technology, Innovation and Change in Learning and Development. In a new age, we need new models of business, and to match these we need new models of learning.

My full review of the book is available at my business book reviews website.