Check out our “2008 NFL Draft: Road to Sundays” March 1, 2008
Posted by Steve in : Weblog , add a commentJosh Wright, Steve Raquel and I are making great strides in building out the underlying technology for Fanfuego.com, the premier social network for sportsfans, whcih will launch in early April (and all of you will love it and regular users!).
As we get ready for the launch, we are beginning a multi-episode series looking at five players who are hoping to get drafted in the 2008 NFL draft in late April. There will be a new episode each week, and each episode will be roughly 3-4 minutes.
Check out the series — it chronicles the ups and downs and real-life experience of athletes who want to move up to “the big dance” .
Here is the promo — please help us by passing this along to others.
How’s Your Dialogue? June 21, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Methods & Strategies, Leader Zone , add a comment“When it comes to improving performance, most organizations’ problems can be traced to their inability to think and talk together at critical moments.”– Paraphrased from William Isaacs’s book Dialogue, p.3
How do you talk to your staff? How do you conduct a meeting? Do you generally have good dialogue with your staff, first talking, then listening and then responding appropriately? Doug Sundheim of Fast Company tells us that “What passes as “communication” in most organizations is nothing more than people talking AT each other. Firing different opinions around a room with little structure to productively move any action forward. The dialogue is dysfunctional - meaning that it doesn’t produce a deeper understanding of the issues at hand. Eventually, when a decision must be made, it’s often the person who has spoken the loudest, longest, or with the most conviction that wins - whether it was the best idea or not.”
Good dialogue can be boiled down to 5 key elements - Listening, Respecting, Suspending, Voicing, and Inquiring. When dialogue breaks down, it’s usually because one or more of these are missing between the players involved.
Think of an unproductive conversation you’ve recently had. Consider the following questions to see where you might have been contributing to the problem.
1. Listening - Did I truly hear what the other person(s) said?
2. Respecting - Did I respect their opinions - even if I didn’t agree with them?
3. Suspending - Did I suspend my own opinions long enough to create an opening for new perspectives?
4. Voicing - Did I say what I truly thought and felt in a responsible way?
5. Inquiring - Did I probe for clarification when things weren’t clear?
6. When you find that one or more of these are missing, experiment with ways to bring them into the conversation.
SUNDAY: Why Me? Why Did I Survive? March 24, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Chicago, Sunday Services, Church , add a commentUnited Airlines Flight 232 was a scheduled flight operated by United Airlines between Denver and Philadelphia via Chicago. On July 19, 1989, the Douglas DC-10 operating this flight suffered an uncontained failure of its number 2 engine (mounted in the tail), which destroyed all three of the aircraft’s hydraulic systems. With no controls working except the power levers for the two remaining engines, it broke up during an emergency landing on the runway at Sioux City, Iowa killing 110 of its 285 passengers and one of the 11 crew members. See the video. Owing to the skill of the crew and a DC-10 instructor pilot, 175 passengers and 10 crew members survived.
Why me? Why did I survive? Why did I receive life why others died? These are some of the questions survivors were asking after surviving the crash. Our own Teaching Pastor, Ron May, was among those who survived the harrowing experience, while traveling at the time to take a deposition in a legal case, and will talk about God’s grace among the wreckage. This is an awesome opportunity for you to invite your non-churched friends to answer some of life’s real questions. Join us at Park Community Church this Sunday —we meet at Francis Parker School at 2233 N Clark Street at 9:00 am, 11:00 am and 5:30 pm.
Future Web: What is eBay Focused On? March 4, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Technology , add a comment
As church technology evolves, we need to look to bellwether representatives to see where technology (specifically the internet) is headed. Recently, Max Mancini, the recently appointed senior director of platform and innovation at eBay, spoke to IDG News Service about where eBay is devoting a majority of time and resources over the next 12-18 months. I love the name of one of the groups he heads — it is called the Disruptive Innovation team, which was started last year.
eBay started with innovating around consumer-to-consumer commerce and the auction format online, then progressed just to keep up from scale and growth perspectives, with its main focus on scalability, performance and (more…)
