Issachar Thinking - Overview p1

Permission is granted to make copies for non-commercial distribution on condition that this document is kept as a whole, and no changes are made.

ISSACHAR THINKING – an Overview

Every christian leader I’ve spoken to wants to be as effective as possible in the mission to which they have been called and into which they are pouring themselves. But most will acknowledge that they and their enterprise are very often not as effective as they believe they should be. Looking around at faith-based enterprises, one sees a small number of highly effective and dynamic enterprises, a larger number of moderately effective enterprises, and the largest group – the less than truly effective enterprises.

One of the key drivers of effectiveness is a well considered, finely crafted and enterprise-wide shared strategy. To this end most organisations spend days each year in strategy planning sessions, but many of these are little more than operational and budgetary reviews. In fact even in the secular corporate world many leaders are bemoaning the time and cost of strategy planning in the light of the apparent low level of practical return recovered. For leaders of Christian enterprises this is compounded by the fact that the strategy practices used are highly secular, commercial and competitive, and are in many ways non-biblical in ethos.

At the same time the need for a cohesive way forward is being dramatically increased today by both the sheer mass of change taking place as well as the constantly accelerating rate of change – from incremental and gradual change to rapid dynamic and discontinuous change.

...next page (p2)