Serving leaders. Ken Jennings
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s, John Stahl-Wert
The Serving Leader
FOREWORD
I am thrilled to have Ken Jennings and John Stahl-Wert’s excellent book, The Serving Leader, as a part of the Ken Blanchard Series. This book will challenge you to lead differently. I believe it will also cause you to want to live your life differently. It presents so beautifully the simple truths that uplift the value of people.
That Ken Jennings and John Stahl-Wert would write this book together is a testament to the surprising nature of the book. On the surface, Ken and John could hardly be more different. Ken is a hypervelocity management consultant in constant motion between multiple corporations. John is an inner-city leader who generally stays put to work with his diverse partners creating extraordinary results for the people of one city.
But together they have crafted a singular message for leaders in businesses, communities, churches, and nonprofit organizations. From two very different life paths has come a unified vision of leadership and an understanding of human change that will make a lifelong difference for you and the people you lead and serve.
What sets this book apart most of all is the beauty and quality of the storytelling. Ken and John have brought us a moving story that you will not want to put down. An estranged son, his dying father, and a wonderfully diverse group of innovative leaders in business, volunteer organizations, and civic groups work together to grasp and illustrate the basic daily actions that make a Serving Leader.
While The Serving Leader is presented as a work of fiction, the leaders and organizations Ken and John depict are based on real situations, and the results that are described match the incredible results being achieved in real businesses and communities. At the end of the book, the authors introduce us to some of these real-life leadership miracle stories.
On one level, The Serving Leader is the most practical guide available to implementing servant leadership in your life and work. On a deeper level, it is a book about the journey of growth that every great leader must be willing to take.
It gives me a special satisfaction to introduce you to the beautiful and life-challenging work of two of my good friends. Enjoy this book and be encouraged. You were born to make a difference!
INTRODUCTION
This is a story about leadership: leadership in teams, businesses, and communities. It is also a story about personal growth and how good leaders become great leaders through their willingness to face and be changed by the greatest challenges of their lives.
The story comes out of our friendship with Mike Wilson. Mike is a man we both know well. He shows up everywhere in the businesses and neighborhoods we serve. The circumstances of place and vocation vary, but Mike is always there. As a leader, he’s professionally talented and highly motivated to successfully reach his business and financial goals.
But Mike wants his life to be about more than success. He’s searching for the deeper significance of his leadership and for the satisfaction of living a life of real purpose. In this deeper search, however, Mike often feels very unsuccessful; sometimes, he feels completely lost.
As we’ve shared this story with our friends, these questions usually arise: “Is Mike’s story real? And if it is, where can I find him?” Here’s the best answer we have: Mike’s story is real. And the chances are reasonable that you’ll find someone like him occupying the office next to yours. She rides on the train with you each morning. You pass him in the hallway every day. Glance up from your reading and look around; she might be sitting right there in the room with you now.
Perhaps it would be helpful to say a brief word here about the friendship out of which this story was born. We two at first glance appear to have little in common. Ken is a business consultant who resides in the flight matrix that connects the great urban centers of America, Europe, and Asia. John is a community leader who resides and works in one great city. By strategic design, he leaves that city and his citywide colleagues as infrequently as possible. Ken works with bottom-line business leaders, John with frontline community leaders. Ken’s work focuses on the corporate sector, John’s on the faith-based sector. In terms of space and time, Ken’s work is space expansive and more time limited; John’s is the other way around.
These differences