Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Rich's blog 2.0

Most of my readers have probably gotten discouraged since I haven't posted since June 11. Sorry about that.

I've been doing some deep thinking about how to carry out the mission of Evergreen Leaders--helping nonprofits thrive. Early in the summer I condensed thirty years of leading secular and religious organizations into The 7 paths of thriving organizations. I think the 7 paths will be the treasure that Evergreen Leaders has to offer the world.

The 7 paths emerged out of two years of doing Evergreen Leaders workshops for nonprofits on the topics of listening, envisioning, and encouraging. The two years of workshops showed me that I needed to sharpen the message. Saying an organizations can thrive through listening, envisioning and encouraging is sort of like saying you can get to Chicago's Millenium Park from Wisconsin, Indiana, or Iowa.

True, but if you are in Nebraska and you stop and ask for directions to to Chicago's Millenium Park you need a little more specifics than "drive though Iowa and Illinois until you get to Chicago and then drive downtown and it's by the lake."

I'm very excited about the 7 paths because I think they will be as helpful in providing a map for organizations as Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People have been for individuals.

I think we have a treasure in the 7 paths. Part of my deep pondering has been: how can we create smart and friendly systems for people to discover, explore, and learn the paths?

I've decide to re-create this blog into a smart and friendly system for you to use to discover the 7 paths. To the left of the most recent entry you'll find a new section (thanks to Taher Baderkhan) called Categories. From now on each of the entries will be archived in one or more of the catgories. Over time there will be a treasure trove of information about each of the 7 paths.