Five Axioms

I recently completed a graduate class in leadership and mentoring. It was a great class, but because of time constraints and cost, I opted to audit the class.

One of the tasks that I did not participate in was an assignment to develop five leadership axioms, based on a book by Bill Hybels titled Axiom: Powerful Leadership Proverbs. In the book Hybels shares the convictions that have directed and shaped his leadership strategy over the years.

Someone in the class asked if I was going to share mine, and I off-handedly said that I only had one, and tried to verbalized it in a coherent manner.

So, better late that never, I decided I would share my five axioms. Here is number one:

 You don’t need a big desk to be a great writer.

“…Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts. (Zech 4:6).

The desk pictured on the right is the desk used by J. R. R. Tolkein, where he wrote the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

The desk, which is found at the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton College, is not very large or imposing. But the intellect and imagination of the one who penned these works was amazing.

Carson Pue, one of the professors leading the class, is the person who coined this phrase. It’s not the equipment or necessarily the environment that counts, but the “right stuff” in us, or how we are used in a situation.

I remember a film clip of W. C. Fields playing pool. I was a fairly decent player at one time. The most important item for playing pool is the cue. I would site along the cue to make sure it was as perfect as a cue could be. A cue stick with a slight bow pretty much ensured that I would play poorly. However, in the clip, Fields has about the worst cue stick –twisted, bent, and pretty much a hopeless cause. But he could beat almost anyone using that cue, showing that it is the skill in the person and not the architecture of the pool cue.

This is the conclusion I’ve come to in leadership: programs, systems, or planning will not guarantee success, nor does the experience or education of the leader. It is the presence of the Spirit in the life of a follower of Christ, and the submission of the leader to the Spirit.

I suppose one could probably draw an analogy between Field’s pool cure and us. In the hands of an expert, great things can happen. So also with someone in the hands of the Spirit.