Saturday, April 4, 2009

Failed Leadership Fill in the Blanks Story

Here's a fun little game using major excerpts from a current story which can readily be applied to a local church or to a denomination. You fill in the blanks and create the rest of the story. It's about a leader who has been axed and the reasons why his company has declined due to his leadership.

"He apparently was a nice guy who got along well with everyone else in the old-boy network."

"_____ _____ showed how much he and his whole insular, inbred industry hadn't learned when ________"

"...he demonstrated that he still hadn't learned very much, as he dragged his feet on doing the necessary and drastic things needed to give his company a chance to survive."

"What's wrong, in a nutshell, is that it is a narrow, insular culture. Those who make it to the top of the heap, like _____ , tend to be white Anglo-Saxon males who have worked at the same company their entire career, and have come up with the same set of buddies."

"It is very hard to fire your old pals or even do things to make them uncomfortable."

"They gave ___ ____ some time to fix it, but guess what?"

"Sadly, in the end, he seems to have been a smart guy with no vision beyond whatever pieces of paper lay in front of him."

" Three years ago, he actually conceded that his worst mistake was killing the _______ program and 'not putting the right resources into ________.'"

"Unfortunately, he was too dull to comprehend why. 'It didn't affect profitability, but it did affect image,' he said."

"Talk about not planning for the future! Wacky old Henry Ford I once said that if he had asked consumers before starting out, they wouldn't have said they wanted an automobile at all. 'They would have said they wanted a faster horse.'"

"Now, ___________ has a little less than two months to try to invent a future, in a corporate culture where vision has mostly been punished. For all of our sakes, good luck with that."

What does this exercise teach you about your organization? about your leadership?

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