Posted on Sunday, 20th July 2008 by chris wignall

The real measure of an organization’s strategy is often not found in the results when they have their best people performing, but when the human resources are below the desired level. Top notch people can overcome the deficiencies of almost any structure. Mediocre people need the advantages of developed approaches to be effective. You can [...]

Tags: Catalyst, Leadership
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Posted on Monday, 16th June 2008 by chris wignall

There is no doubt that Jesus was and is a leader. However, in our quest to develop leaders we are often guilty of abusing the Biblical accounts of his life, death, and resurrection. My shelf contains several books claiming to draw leadership principles from the life of Jesus that we can all apply to our [...]

Tags: Leadership, Resources
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Posted on Wednesday, 4th June 2008 by chris wignall

At the dentist’s office this morning I saw a sign that said something like “The greatest compliment we can receive is you recommending our services to your friends and loved ones”. Since the dentist is my brother-in-law I guess I’m included there. The thing is; most of us involved in nonprofit work (like the for [...]

Tags: Leadership
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Posted on Saturday, 24th May 2008 by chris wignall

Today our mentoring program is really underway. I had initial goal setting sessions with two of our participants. Goal setting is really the heart of the individual mentoring sessions. It’s a pretty simple process, but extremely valuable. The value comes in setting not only annual goals, but monthly targets toward those goals; and meeting monthly [...]

Tags: Leadership, Vision
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Posted on Wednesday, 14th May 2008 by chris wignall

Randy Cain is the President and CEO of Pinty’s Delicious Foods, a prominent Canadian poultry company. Over lunch yesterday (yes it was chicken) we talked about his understanding of leadership as someone who has been involved in turnarounds in the corporate sector for several years. One of the intriguing things he said was that when [...]

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Posted on Friday, 9th May 2008 by chris wignall

Lunch today with Darrell Winger, Community Development Pastor at The Meeting House; one of the fastest growing and most intriguing churches in Canada. I blogged about a previous with their Teaching Pastor recently. I wanted to understand more about the uncommon leadership culture they have developed. Darrell (whose role makes him essentially the bishop of [...]

Tags: Catalyst, Leadership
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Posted on Saturday, 26th April 2008 by chris wignall

It was very nearly a month ago when I set out to use this space to describe how we’ve identified our priorities for funding and other support. In the unlikely possibility that you’ve been checking back looking for the rest of those thoughts I apologize for the delay and hope that what’s been posted in [...]

Tags: Catalyst, Great Stories, Leadership
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Posted on Tuesday, 22nd April 2008 by chris wignall

One of the challenges for our work is trying to figure out how to evaluate not only the proposals and opportunities we come across, but(even more difficult) evaluating organizations and projects that we are supporting. This is an ongoing challenge in this field, as I’ve commented on before. In a couple weeks I’ll be attending [...]

Tags: Leadership, Philanthropy
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Posted on Tuesday, 15th April 2008 by chris wignall

With my planned trip to Haiti not happening I found myself with an essentially blank schedule this week. I had pretty much complete freedom to fill it because when I did my planning for this quarter I assumed I would be away, so all the other projects were on track without any time right now [...]

Tags: Catalyst, Leadership
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Posted on Monday, 14th April 2008 by chris wignall

I got to spend a very enjoyable lunch eating ribs with an old friend Bruxy Cavey, teaching pastor at The Meeting House, one of the most intriguing and impactful churches in Canada. As always, the conversation was very thought provoking. Among the topics was the paradox that Bruxy has become one of the premier Christian [...]

Tags: Leadership
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