A Cultural Christmas Letter
Merry Christmas and “God Jul!” I pray that you and yours are experiencing the joy of this season with snuggly clothes, good foods, and heart-warming friend and family traditions. As I’m writing this, I’ve been spending the morning rolling our family’s traditional Christmas Eve dinner – Swedish meatballs! I love sharing the Christmas traditions of my Swedish family with my household: recipes like potatis korv and persimmon pudding from “the old country,” exchanging gifts on Christmas Eve (after dinner is cleaned up, of course), and 11pm services featuring Swedish prayers and carols at Grandma’s Swedish Lutheran church. As the Institute for Cultural Communicators celebrates more and more cultural communication by…
Multi-Generational Teams
Originally posted at the Christian Leadership Alliance Blog Shifting from Frustration to Momentum “Nobody wants that!” These words expressed the sentiment of just about every organizational leader at the end of our annual international convention. Senior leaders left frustrated and exhausted. Younger workers felt devalued and overlooked. I was annoyed… angry…hurt… numb. Did I cause this? How could I have worked against the very ministry I passionately toiled to advance? I replayed their painful words of misunderstanding for days. The next week our ministry got intentional about creating multi-generational teams. I devoted myself to designing a culture fueled by multi generational leadership. I studied multi generational teams inside and outside of…
Becoming Transformers
In the 1980s, the Japanese playmaker Takara launched a series of toys called the Transformers. Shortly after that, the Transformers film series was released, generating a global sensation and taking us on a journey through an out-of-this-world story. You might know the story. There is war in another galaxy far, far away between the Opticons and the Decepticons. (Not too hard to figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, is it?) They bring their war to planet Earth. To continue the warring, they need to inhabit other bodies, so they take the forms of vehicles. They become working cars and fire engines and helicopters.…
