| After
a successful career as an entrepreneur and business leader, Bob Buford began a
second career as founder of Leadership Network, an organization designed to assist
leaders of major churches. More recently he has focused attention on helping men
and women to fill the second half of their lives with meaning and purpose. Leader
Links editor Michael Duduit talked with Bob Buford recently about
his insights on leadership. Leader
Links: As Chairman and CEO of Buford Television, you led that organization
to some very significant growth. I'd be curious about some of the leadership insights
you gained from the process of leading that kind of company. Are there some unique
challenges in leading a family-owned company versus a public company? Buford:
A family-owned company is a very personal enterprise. My mother started the company
in 1954 and I was connected in one way or another to it for 45 years, until I
sold the company in 1999. So it was a big part of my life Joseph Stalin was quoted
at saying, "if you kill one man that's a tragedy; if you kill a million people
that's a statistic." Big public companies are very statistical in nature
and family companies are very personal in nature. In
my case, the company was begun by my mother; I actually worked as a carpenter
on building the first television station. I became the CEO of that company in
1971, and ran it as the senior management person until 1999, when I cashed in,
in order to redeploy the funds into Kingdom enterprises. Most
family companies are niche companies. And I think the most important leadership
idea about a family company is that you really need to find a logical niche among
all these big companies that are operating in the same field you're in. Buford
Television, Inc. operated television stations in small markets — Tyler, TX, Panama
City, FL, Sioux Falls, SD — and then kind of morphed that into building and operating
cable systems in even smaller markets, in tiny places where the Time Warners and
Comcasts of the world wouldn't feel like they could make money. And so I think
if you're small it's very important to be a primary supplier to whatever market
you're in, and to basically just constrain your companies to a point where you
can do that — where you really are people's first choice. We were arguably the
best small market television operator and probably the best small market cable
TV operator. Leader
Links:: To whom did you finally sell the company? Buford:
We sold to a venture capitalist in New York City who bankrupted the company. They
didn't know how to do what I just said. In the case of my company, all the people
who worked in my company came from small towns and went to small colleges. Then
their field of work — either in television stations or in cable systems — was
in very small towns and they just natively understood that. The people who bought
the company were a venture capital firm whose head was a chief financial officer
in Europe, and had several partners whose world was Manhattan and finance. It
didn't translate. Leader
Links: Let's talk a little bit about Leadership Network. You were
a successful business leader, working in a competitive arena, and then you stepped
into the church leadership arena and created Leadership Network. What sparked
your interest in church leadership? Buford:
Leadership Network is the application of what I learned as a business person to
what I cared about the most, which is the development and strength of God's kingdom
in the United States. I
was very intense about operating my company when I came out of college in my early
20s. I was married right away, had a child right away, and was just totally focused
on business. After I had done that for ten or so years, people began to say, "You're
kind of frightening because you're so intense about business." And I took
a bit of a time out and said to myself, "If my life really worked, my whole
life, what would be the elements in that life?" I wanted to make sure that
the answer to that wasn't only business. The
other question I asked myself was, "What am I going to lose with all this
gaining that I'm doing, all this focus and intensity?" And at age 34, the
answer to that question was to work on leading a more balanced life, and balanced
for me meant several things. It meant stay married to the same person I originally
married, for my son to have high self-esteem, for my company to grow — I put on
paper at least 10% a year, and in that period it was growing over 25% a year compounded,
and did so for a least a dozen years. So it was a pretty intense occupation. But
I said, "If I'm successful in making a good deal of money, what am I going
to do with that money?" And I resolved when I was 34, and still have this
written down, that I was going to redeploy that money into the highest cause I
could find, which was the cause of God and Christ, and that cause has two parts
to it. First the individual part that might be indicated by people trying to discover
purpose in their lives, and secondly the organizational part. And the organizational
part was the church in the United States. So
I said, "What could I do to be useful within that world?" And the answer
was — I felt, and still feel — that in any organization, whether it's a church
or parachurch organization or business enterprise, the x-factor is management.
So I began a parallel career when I was 42 in trying to find the people who wanted
to grow good-sized churches — basically who wanted to grow a church to the scale
to the need, rather than the way most churches were, which was growing the church
to the scale of 100-200 people and what a pastor wanted to do. The
way we went about that was to seek out the innovators and entrepreneurs in the
church world. Early among those were Bill Hybels and Rick Warren, and quite a
few others of that character. They became the two most visible of that type. Then
along came the Andy Stanleys and those that have learned from Bill and Rick and
a number of others. We asked them, "What can we do to be useful to you?"
And what they said — and we did a fair amount of research to discover this — is
"Put us in a room together with our peers and let us figure out from one
another how to operate these mega-church type structures." The world of seminaries
and denominations wasn't much concerned with those types, because they were probably
5% of churches, at the most. So that's what we did. The
current mission of Leadership Network is connecting innovators to multiply. And
that's in a way where we started. We put the smart people in a room together and
provided a safe and neutral environment for them to exchange ideas that really
had to do with leadership and management for the most part. Leader
Links: The folks leading those mega-churches are some pretty smart
leaders. As you've been around these major church leaders, are there insights
you've seen that they are developing that might be of interest to people who are
leading businesses? Buford:
Yes. The principles really aren't different. My mentor in this all along has been
Peter Drucker, who is the seminal thinker in management. He says that the purpose
of management within a church is to make it more church-like and not more businesses-like.
Let's take Bill Hybels and Rick Warren as indicative of quite a few others. Their
concerns are, first of all, to cast a vision for what's unique about that specific
enterprise that allows thousands of people to form themselves up in a coherent
way. For example, in Rick Warren's case, his vision is very clearly articulated
in his illustration of a baseball diamond, which is really a description of how
people grow in their faith sequentially. The target, which is really what a business
person would call market segmentation — that you do utterly different things for
someone who doesn't know Christ, who may be a seeker, who hasn't been to church
in 15 years than you do for someone who's been in Bible Study Fellowship for last
ten years. And they were very skillful at casting a vision in how to sequence
people how their life in faith, or — to use Willow Creek's expression — "from
irreligious people to fully-devoted followers." Most
churches are designed on the idea that one size fits all, so that when someone
comes to church they more or less come in on the middle of a movie and really
don't know the first part, because the first part started in September and they're
coming in in February. Or it began five years ago, and they're in the middle of
the movie. That, by the why, is the reason that Alpha is such a major force in
the United States now. The Alpha course goes back to basics and takes people —
some of whom have been going to church for years — through a sequence of who Christ
is, why Christ died, what's the power of the Holy Spirit. Just blocking and tackling
things that many people — particularly in mainline churches — have never heard
in an A, B, C, D, E format. These
people are very skillful about organizing teams and leading teams of specialists.
Their worship leader has a different sort of skill than men's ministry person
or the pastoral care person. And
I think they've done a very good job of keeping themselves rich in their original
intent. I think a good many pastors get worn out doing the mechanics of what they
do and ultimately lose track of why they got in that business in the first place.
I think these people pay careful attention to their own spiritual development
renewal. Or to use the opening sentence of Rick Warren's book, The Purpose
Driven Life, he says, "It's not about you." That's a very indicative
sentence. But
these guys are highly capable entrepreneurs. The likes of Andy Stanley would be
hugely successful in whatever they lent themselves to — thank God that happens
to be the cause of Christ. Leader
Links: You were the original chairman of the Drucker Foundation
for Non-profit Management. Clearly Drucker is very influential in management and
leadership circles. What are some of the ways Drucker has influenced your thinking
about leadership? Buford:
I'm going to respond to that question in two ways. First is what Peter Drucker
has contributed to me as a mentor. He defines the landscape: what's behind, ahead,
to each side — the context; the social ecology in which my work plays a part;
and the futurity of present events. He defines the opportunities, the void, what
is needed now. He helps me to clarify my strengths and capacities: to build on
strength; to avoid what I don't do well; to focus on making strengths productive;
to identify the strengths of others that I need to be effective. He identifies
the myths, the false paths, the incorrect assumptions of "the industry"
within which I am working — what used to be true that no longer is, and the conventional
wisdom that is wrong. He
encourages me to "go for it" — to commit myself and my funds to a new
and needed project in an unfamiliar landscape. He gives me the insight, courage
and confidence to go forward. Drucker helps me to sort out the right strategies
and he affirms results. He also points out wasted effort: he helps me to stop
doing things — When the horse is dead, dismount" — and when I have no results,
he suggests that perhaps I don't know how to do it. The
other thing would be to give you an idea of what he's doing for me lately. At
age 64 and fully embarked as a social entrepreneur, I still see him a couple of
times a year and he has been the pivotal figure in a book that has just been released,
called Finishing Well, which is basically an assignment from Peter Drucker.
He said, "You've stirred up a lot of thinking about half time, and how there
is work to be done in the second half of people's lives. Now go find some who
have been successful doing that, and find out what the characteristics are of
people who do finish well, who run through the tape so to speak." And that's
exactly what I've done. I've interviewed over a hundred people who are highly
capable and that's mostly what the book Finishing Well is about. Peter
Drucker is the seminal thinker about management — whether it applies to profits
or non-profits, in all its forms — and he is more or less the sun of a whole planetary
universe of folks who come to think about management. When he began to think about
it there were no business schools — and think how many business schools and business
journals like Inc., Forbes, and lots of others cover that subject
now. The Drucker Foundation basically grew from 350 thinkers about management
- people like Jim Collins, Warren Benis, or practitioners like Herb Kelleher of
Southwest Airlines — to basically make their thoughts available to the non-profit
world. And Peter Drucker is what drew them in. So we have published over half
a million books now and have developed what I think is the best strategic planning
tool, either of the business or the non-profit sort, which is the Drucker Foundation
Self-Assessment tool for organizations, which I'd recommend. Leader
Links: Can you tell me just a little bit about the self-assessment
tool? Buford:
It's as if you spend a day with Peter Drucker, in which he has five seminal questions
and then develops a kind of subheads under those questions. And it's a marvelous
strategic planning tool. It would start with a question like, "Who is the
customer?" "What does the customer consider value?" and then draw
your business is from that. And that tool is equally applicable to EDS or Microsoft
or some large company like that, and a Willow Creek Community Church, or First
Baptist Church in Decatur, Alabama, or Alpha. It's
a wonderful tool. We've trained over a thousand facilitators to do it and in my
experience, it works every time. (Click
here for more information about the Drucker Foundation Self-Assessment
tool for organizations.) Leader
Links: You started an organization that was originally called Faith
Works and the name now is Half Time. Can you tell me about that and what some
of the goals are with that project? Buford:
One thing Peter Drucker has taught me and quite a few others is encapsulated in
one sentence. He says, "All results are on the outside; on the inside of
an organization is only cost and effort." So the place to start talking about
Half Time is to start talking about what's happening today, external to whatever
ideas I and others might have had. First
of all, there's been a huge demographic shift as the baby boom ages. If you took
a bell curve distribution of the baby boom, it centers on age 50 right now. And
these are utterly different 50-year-olds than their fathers and grandfathers were.
They're affluent in a middle class way. For example, my father-in-law worked in
a big company his entire life and retired with enough money to be secure financially
and independent to do whatever he wished. The "whatever he wished" is
a big question; I think it's the big task of Half Time. The major of task of Half
Time is to find out what the work of your second half is. "Work
is the psychological glue that holds a person together," said Fred Smith,
Sr. to me years ago. And people need work for existential or purpose-driven reasons
as well as economic reasons. People now are utterly over-prepared for their first
half work and totally under-prepared for what to do when they're 50 or 55 years
old. Of the hundred people I interviewed for the book Finishing Well, virtually
none of them intend to retire in the conventional sense of discontinuing their
first half work and going off to the lake to fish for the next 30 years. A 50-year-old
person today has a whole 30-year lifetime before them, most likely, and they die
pretty quickly if they don't find a second half work. There
really is no university for the second half, and that's a thing I want to be working
on in the next ten years of my life, because these people represent an enormous
capacity for society in general, and for the church specifically. And if there
is a university for the second half of life, it likely is to be the church — or
at least to have a very strong religious component. The
second major trend, in addition to the huge demographic shift, is that there is
right now a major religious revival going on in the United States. I think that
religious revival has to do with two phrases. And I'll source both of them for
you. One is what is called "enthusiastic religion," as opposed to the
more reserved, highly liturgical form — the religion came to us from Europe. There
are all these made-in-America churches — that the Bill Hybels and Andy Stanleys
represent — that are enormously excited about Christ and religious life. That
has been documented in a book called The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future
of Egalitarianism, which argues we're in the middle of a fourth Great Awakening
right now. The book is written by Robert W. Fogel, a Nobel Prize winner in economics
from the University of Chicago who describes himself in the introduction as "a
secular Jew." But, he's a highly capable observer of what's happening. Another
indication is an article by the publisher of Forbes magazine, Rich Karlgaard,
"The Age of Meaning," in which he says something big is really going
on that all businesses need to understand, and that is that the concern for meaning
in life is rising proportionately as opposed to a material content. And he cites
two examples. One is Rick Warren's book The Purpose Driven Life, which
as has sold 20 million copies. It is the biggest selling hard cover book, except
the Bible, that's ever been published. I would call that a serious clue as to
what people are thinking about. And the other bit that the publisher of Forbes
cites is the surprising and phenomenal success of Mel Gibson's film The Passion
of the Christ, which is now over $350 million domestic revenues, before you
get the foreign and DVD and everything. It just shocked most everybody. Those
two things indicate there's something really important going on and it has a lot
to do with half time. People
come to a point in their life where they have enough affluence and enough skills
to think about doing something for the Lord — Ken Blanchard's a wonderful example
of that, and there are many others. There are 60 of those, more or less, in the
book Finishing Well. The implications of that, particularly for parachurch
and church organizations, is that people need a lot of help developing a vision
for the second half of their life. They need examples of people who have been
successful in making this change from success to significance. They need coaching.
Most people don't know who they are, independent from being what they work at. Leader
Links: In your book Half Time you talk about the first half
of life being a quest for success and the second half a quest for significance.
We've been talking about the things for which people hunger in that second half.
What do you think are some the mistakes that people tend to make in the second
half — and how can they avoid those mistakes and finish strong? Buford:
I think the biggest mistake of all is retiring from work. I think you can retire
from paid work, or you can be paid less or in a different form. But I really believe
work is a psychological necessity, not just an economic necessity. By work, I'm
not just talking about corporate work — something like being a mom and raising
your three kids would fall into that category. It's something where you use your
skills to make a contribution to another person. And when I use the terms "success"
and "significance," — "success," which is really what most
people are preoccupied with in the first half of their life, is developing and
using your knowledge and experience to build your own portfolio, your own network,
your own skill base, or things like that. Whereas "significance," which
I find to be very similar to success — in its methodology at least — is using
your knowledge and experience to benefit others. It's a slight change but an important
one. Another
mistake is they really don't change seasons. They cling to something that's out
of date and the corrective to that is to first of all read Ecclesiastes 3, which
says there's a time for everything. Correctly assess what's going on outside and
what's going on inside with you in the seasons in your life, and the second half
of your life is an utterly different season than the first half. Whether people
acknowledge that or not is a different thing. The
next thing I'd say is that people really don't know themselves. They know themselves
as a dentist or as a mom or as a cable TV entrepreneur as I was, but that's a
narrow definition of who you are. So when we do programs in Half Time, we really
start with helping people identify who they are, within that skin that they're
in, and we have a number of tools and processes in helping people do that. As
well, we've got a website www.halftime.org.
It has a very well-developed coaching program on there that asks a good many of
the right questions and it's free. Another
thing is that they don't really know the opportunities. The non-profit world is
a very different world than the full-profit world and they really just need a
guide to that world. And to use the Henry Blackaby idea, they basically need to
discover what God's doing and see where they can fit in that program. And I would
say that the course Experiencing God is a very useful tool for doing that.
A lot of them just fritter their time away working on trivial things that aren't
focused, that are kind of reactive to what people are asking them to do. One of
my friends calls the executive form of that "sanction dabbling" — where
you just dabble with lots of things, as opposed to really focusing on results
and getting really committed. Leadership Network has been doing its mission of
putting innovators together in order to multiply for 20 years, and a lot of times,
to do something really significant, either nationally or in a community, can't
be done in little bites of five volunteer hours a week. Another
mistake is that people wait until retirement. Ask anyone who hasn't seen the movie
About Schmidt, with Jack Nicholson in the lead role, who's thinking about
going cold turkey after 30 years of working for a company, and getting in their
Winnebago and exploring life as he did, to think it over. And begin doing right
now what I call "low-cost probes" in the ministry field or in the non-profit
field, where you kind of try things out without betting the store. Another
thing is that a lot of people do it alone. They wouldn't dare do in a business
circumstance what they do with their charitable or non-profit hours. Most work
really does require a team that is built around or in cooperation with other people's
unique abilities to fit your own. A
lot of people work on problems rather than opportunities. One thing Peter Drucker
has told me is that when you work on a problem and you solve a problem, it basically
just gets you back to zero. It doesn't get you further along. But what we work
on within Leadership Network particularly is what Peter has called "The Islands
of Help and Strength" — to build on what's trying to happen and the people
who are capable of making it happen, rather than to be more in the victim-rescuer
mode. A lot of
people as well try and work with others who are not receptive to what they want
to do. I think that happens a good deal across racial lines, and across profit
and non-profit. I think a better way of going about that is to find somebody in
the non-profit world that you're heart-to-heart with that really wants to do what
you want to do and to simply go ask them, "Is there anything I can do with
my particular skills and resources to help you do what you want to do anyway?"
Rather than attacking, confronting, trying to change people's minds…that's
a long road. Some people work on attacking rather than supporting. I don't. Leader
Links: What would be the greatest leadership challenge you have
ever faced? Buford:
It's a series of things that are similar. I basically like to start new things.
In the case of a business, it is building a business from a small base to a much
larger business by finding an ecological niche within the communications business,
and building a team and a company around that. In a way, that's the same thing
I did with Leadership Network. We found a group of people who wanted to grow dramatically
rather than just incrementally, who were willing to use innovations in form —
most of the mega-churches are doctrinally as orthodox as you can get. I mean they're
very biblical, very designed out of Scripture — their innovations are in the form
of what they do, rather than in the substance of what they do. But we built
Leadership Network around that particular group of innovators and entrepeneurs.
Peter Drucker
says I'm on my third career now. The first was building a television company,
the second was doing what we could to help churches to be better led and better
managed and to grow really to the scale of people's need, and the third is to
help people in half time — in the second half of their life — to make the transition
from success to significance. And in all of those cases, we're beginning a new
idea, or a new way to work on an idea, and attempting to build an ecological niche
where we're highly capable within the bounds of that idea. And it's a challenge
to do that. It's easier to recite the Episcopal liturgy. Or to operate a car dealership,
for example, where a lot of the things you're working on are givens — servicing
cars, advertising for new cars, selling used cars, to use that analogy, rather
than beginning something utterly new. Leader
Links: You've had a lot of different leadership roles over the
years. Which one has been the most enjoyable or fulfilling for you? Buford:
I'd answer that question more with a generic answer. The thing that excites me
most about getting up every morning, no matter what it's getting up to do, is
results. I think a lot people by the way stay in the business world because results
are easy to measure. You can measure them in terms of growth rate and net worth
and stock value or things like that. That's a lot of harder to do in the non-profit
world where the bottom line is basically changed lives. So we've had to work hard
on developing results. For instance, we have one program now that is a group of
17 or 18 church entrepreneurs; they will start 40 new churches and conduct over
300 teaching events. That's a result. More
at the personal level, just as a personal discipline I keep what I call a Book
of Days. For every day of my life, I have a blank pages book and I paste in something
which indicates that I contributed in some way to somebody else, to change lives.
It may be a letter or note I received from someone, it could be anything. Usually
those are small things, they're just one person responding to another person.
But at the center of all that, I guess I would say, is that I'd like to get beyond
good intentions and actually see something happen. Not something happen for me,
but something happen for those that I'm attempting to serve. Leader
Links: How long have you been doing the Book of Days? Buford:
Oh, six or seven years. My wife and I went to an art exhibit in New York City
where an artist had done an image using exactly the same technique and the same
size for each of 365 days and they were all displayed together in one gallery.
And I thought that's a wonderful idea, I think I'll do that. So that's the art
of my life — basically contributing to other people's lives and then putting some
little artifact in there day by day. Some day when I'm in a bad humor and think
I'm not contributing very much, I look back on those and it's fulfilling. Leader
Links: Your faith permeates the whole discussion of your career
and work. How has your own Christian faith influenced your role as a leader in
the different organizations you've worked with? Buford:
To begin with, Christian faith evolves out of the wisest person who ever lived,
Jesus -most people don't think of Jesus as a wise person but clearly He was —
and out of the greatest leader who ever lived. And just taking my comment on results,
look at the results of that one life. There's never been anything remotely approaching
that in any other life. So Christianity is pretty much about Christ. And as the
first chapter of John says, it's the invisible nature of God made visible. So
in a way, with Jesus, you can walk around via the tool of the Scriptures and see
how this wise and wonderful leader led and see what's come of it. But
at a more practical level, it gives me an ethical base against which to test my
own individual behavior. I think the highest accountability in life is that which
we will receive from God at the end of our lives. I like to visualize that there
is going to be a final exam and the final exam is going to have two questions.
A theologian might think it would have 50 or so, but there are two that I think
I'll be asked — and I think everybody will be asked. "What did you do about
Jesus?" is the first and the one that most religious organizations concentrate
on, and the second is, "What did you do with what I gave you to work with?"
Not your pastor or Billy Graham or Mother Theresa or somebody, but you. So that's
before me all the time. I
think the main thing I've learned from Jesus is that He has 47 different encounters
with people that are recorded in Scripture and He doesn't treat any two of them
the same way. His response to each one is utterly different — for instance, to
the people selling pigeons in the outer court of the temple in the one case, and
Mary and Martha or Zaccheus in the other case. They're very personal and different.
What I think I learn from that is it's utterly about relationships. And to the
degree that someone else shares my Christian faith in a business circumstance,
I believe that gives each of us a higher accountability than ourselves. I mean,
if someone is able to say to me, "I don't think that squares up with biblical
teaching," it's something I pay a lot of attention to. And I think I can
say the same thing to that other person. I
think the same rule applies in marriage — each of you have a higher accountability
to one another and as you draw closer to God, you draw closer to one another.
It's the best relational glue I know. Leader
Links: If you could go back 30 years or so, what would you do differently
the second time around? Buford:
You know I think I'd do very little differently. Let me describe my priorities.
If you could make in your mind a target where the bull's eye is the most important
thing and you get the most score for that and then less so as you work outward
- the central thing for me is my faith. The next ring out would be relationships.
I've been married to the same person for 42 years, still in love, and I had a
very admirable son, who unfortunately went to be with the Lord at age 24, but
he got more out of 24 years than most people do out of 100. The next circle would
be being successful in different projects, either non-profit or for-profit. And
the last circle out would be money. I've
made mistakes in all of those circles, but even the mistakes have had a lesson
in them. And I don't think I'd change much about the 30 years, including the mistakes.
I haven't intentionally set out to make mistakes in relationships or mistakes
in business or money matters or things like that, but those things aren't utterly
predictable. And if you're out in the fray every day, you're going to win some
and lose some. To quote a country western song, "You've got to know when
to hold 'em and when to fold 'em." And so I don't think I would change much.
I wake up most
mornings, with a prayer on mind, and most of my prayers are prayers of thankfulness.
______________ Click
on a title to learn more about these books by Bob Buford!
Finishing
Well
Halftime
| 