Just back from the Winter Conference in Gdansk, where I had the privilege of speaking to Christian Young people from all across Poland. The passion and enthusiasm felt throughout the conference was both encouraging and inspiring. It’s good to know that the future of the church in Poland and wider Europe is in great hands.

Many thanks to Piotr Grochowski and his wife for hosting us with such excellence and sharing their vision with us… great people.

You can see picture highlights here

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us – we are dependent on him. Unknown

Be everywhere, do everything, and never fail to astonish the customer. Macy’s Motto

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success. Henry Ford

Common sense is of paramount importance in business and customer service. Unknown Customer

Complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn. Unknown

Customer service is awareness of needs, problems, fears and aspirations.
Unknown

Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.
Kate Zabriskie

• To realize the value of ONE YEAR, ask a student who failed an exam.
• To realize the value of ONE MONTH, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.
• To realize the value of ONE WEEK, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.
• To realize the value of ONE HOUR, ask two people in love who are waiting to meet.
• To realize the value of ONE MINUTE, ask a person who missed the plane.
• To realize the value of ONE-SECOND, ask a person who just avoided an accident.
• To realize the value of ONE MILLISECOND, ask the person who won a silver medal in the Olympics.

1. Influence
2. Character
3. Drive
4. People Skills
5. Intelligence

1.    Confidence.
2.    Integrity.
3.    Respect.
4.    Legacy.
5.    Momentum.
6.    Strong, Life Long Friendships.
7.    Stamina.

Be determined. Be tenacious. Be a finisher.

To be a great person to have on the team and a top level leader, you’ve got to add value.

Here are ten ways you can begin to build value:

1. Be a problem solver.
2. Stop complaining about insignificant things.
3. Be positive more often than you were yesterday.
4. Don’t insist on telling everyone how hard you’re working.
5. Save money.
6. Add income.
7. Make your leader look better than they are.
8. Find inspiration and pass it on.
9. Stop blaming someone else.
10. Be yourself - even with all your faults.

In his book Free prize inside Godin makes the case for “soft innovation” as the best way to grow a business, instead of relying on big ads or big innovation. He says that anyone can think up clever, useful, and small ideas to make a product or service remarkable. He calls this kind of innovation a free prize because it generates much more revenue than it costs to implement.

More interestingly for me, he goes on to explain that finding a free prize doesn’t involve just brainstorming, but “edgecraft”. According to Godin, “Edgecraft” allows individuals and teams to identify the soft innovations that live on the edges of what already exists.”

I think the church could benefit from edgecraft - that is, not changing who we are but going to the edges to seek innovations that can spur the church forward. The trouble comes when we change the very core of who we are and alter our beliefs - this isn’t the way forward. The church needs to remain the church - instead we need to innovate, identify opportunites without compromising or morphing into something we were never called to be.

I love what Numatic have done. Many people are familiar with the little red vacuum called Henry. Well now there is someone else on the scene and she’s called Hetty. The difference is she is pink - she still sucks up dirt, travels along on wheels and needs to be plugged in to get power - she’s still a vaccum cleaner but someone has gone to the edge to find a soft innovation. Great lesson for the church.

Go to he edge to find the soft innovation but don’t go over the edge!

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act but a habit”

Aristotle

Here are some great commitments I think are worth listing here..

1. Build a team to surround you in order to enhance your strengths and make up for your weaknesses
2. Surround myself with people who will tell you the truth and not just what they think you want to hear
3. Become a great listener
4. Be an Extraordinary Follower of those who are your leaders
5. Help others develop their skills
6. Dream big dreams and encourage others to do the same
7. Stretch your team enough to make them grow but not so much as to discourage them
8. Be driven by vision, mission and purpose, not by circumstances
9. View the world through optimistic eyes
10. Embrace the concept of change as a positive force for improvement
11. Be tenacious in your pursuits
12. Give more than you receive and to be characterized by generosity
13. Show courage in the face of challenge
14. Be an example of dedication and commitment

Love them!

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”