A few days ago, in my first post on the Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, I noted that one of the strengths of the book was that it didn’t major on offering new ideas.

One of my weaknesses is that I seldom read only one book at a time. A short attention span, you know. One of the other books I’m reading right now is Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. There’s a bunch of good stuff here, but at this point I thought I’d share a comment in line with my earlier comment on Schnase’s book. Friedman says,

The pursuit of data in almost any field, has come to resemble a form of substance abuse, accompanied by all the usual problems of addiction: self-doubt, denial, temptation, relapse, and withdrawal. Leadership training programs thus wind up in the codependent position of enablers, with publishers often in the role of “suppliers.” What does it take to get parents, healers, [pastors] and managers, when they hear of the latest quick-fix fad that has just been published, to “just say no?”