• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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  • Kimi Cowden (Hannah's mother in law) on South Africa, Here We Come
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Jamaica and I have been saving up airline miles for several years so that we can get to South Africa. We love to travel and Africa has been on our list from day one. It helps that we have a few friends over there who can show us around and that this summer is our last hurrah before Jamaica starts law school.

So today, we’re taking off from Los Angeles and making the 21-hour journey to Johannesburg. We’ll be in Joburg for a few days and then fly to Port Elizabeth for a one-of-a-kind arts festival in Grahamstown. From there, we’ll do a road trip along the southern coast through wine country and then spend several days in beautiful Cape Town. We’ll finish our two-week escape with a safari in Kruger National Park where we’ll spend three days looking for the big five.

For the past few months we’ve been immersing ourselves in the amazing story of South Africa. In addition to reading books, blogs and biographies, we watched several great movies, including Yesterday, Amandla! and my favorite, Tsotsi.

South Africa, here we come!

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve had a peculiar interest in the magazine publishing industry. I remember taking advantage of free subscription offers before I would cancel after the trial period to avoid incurring bills at such a young age.

I was 15 when I started selling advertising for a niche magazine and by 16 I wrote my first business plan for a student magazine. It would launch a year later and continue until I was 20.

I’ve continued to love magazines and I subscribe to at least 20, including Fast Company, Time, Fortune, Christianity Today and Adbusters. I’ve seen many come and go over the years (George, Life and Portfolio have been missed) and many more struggle their way through tough times (Paste and Relevant are recent examples).

One of the trends I’ve noticed lately is the idea of having a celebrity editor. A magazine will turn an entire issue over to a “guest editor” and infuse their personality into a particular issue. Wired teamed with mister mystery man J.J. Abrams and Newsweek teamed with satirical news host Stephen Colbert in what was a hilariously historical moment.

It’s an obvious and admittedly planned publicity stunt intended to sell more copies on the newsstand. I kind of like the idea.

Tip: I read the majority of my magazines when I’m on the dreadmill (er, I mean, treadmill) at the gym.

I love magazines!

Kevin Kelly helped to launch Wired magazine back in 1993 and served as its executive editor until 1999. His blog gets a million visitors a month. The guy is super smart.

I’ve had the opportunity to be with him a couple times. This past May he and I served on a planning team for a nonprofit we’re both very fond of. In addition to talking about an article he had just submitted to Wired (see below), Kevin spent an hour talking to me about his forthcoming book. He says the book will make a moral case for why we need to create and use more technology, not less. That should be interesting!

His latest article in Wired makes another bold argument, this time about a “new socialism” of sorts. The rise of open source, crowd sourced social networks, “suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.”

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

Kelly continues…

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

“We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds,” he says. “Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective?”

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” — Dick Clark, former CEO at Merck

Jim Collins initially thought that How the Mighty Fall was a simple magazine article. An opportunity to rest his mind from six years of research working on his next book following Good to Great. I’m glad he didn’t try to fit this interim book into an article! However, if you’re looking for an article excerpt, Business Week did a decent job.

I love the way Jim Collins organizes information. His well-researched principles are so palatable and practical, mostly because he lets the story stay at the steering wheel. How the Mighty Fall is a darker book of sorts, spending the majority of its pages studying the five stages of decline, outlined here.

Stage 1: Hubris born of success
- Success entitlement, arrogance
- Neglect of a primary flywheel
- “What” replaces “why”
- Decline in learning orientation
- Discounting the role of luck

Stage 2: Undisciplined pursuit of more
- Unsustainable quest for growth, confusing big with great
- Undisciplined continuous leaps
- Declining proportion of right people in key seats
- Easy cash erodes cost discipline
- Bureaucracy subverts discipline
- Problematic succession of power
- PErsonal interests placed above organizational interests

Stage 3: Denial of risk and peril
- Amplify the positive, discount the negative
- Big bets and bold goals without empirical validation
- Incurring huge downside risk based on ambiguous data
- Erosion of healthy team dynamics
- Externalizing blame
- Obsessive reorganizations

Stage 4: Grasping for salvation
- A series of silver bullets
- Grasping for a leader-as-savior
- Panic and haste
- Radical change and “revolution” with fanfare
- Hype preceded results
- Initial upswing followed by disappointments

Stage 5: Capitulation to irrelevance or death

Whenever I read Collins’ stuff, I am always drawn to his repeated admonishment to stay true to your core values and principles.

“Discontinuous leaps into arenas for which you have no burning passion is undisciplined. Taking action inconsistent with your core values is undisciplined. Launching headlong into activities that do not fit with your economic or resource engine is undisciplined. To neglect your core business while you leap after exciting new adventures is undisciplined.”

“If you’re struggling with the tension between continuing your commitment to what made you successful and living in fear about what comes next,” says Collins, “ask yourself two questions:”

1. Does your primary flywheel face inevitable demise within the next five to ten years due to forces outside your control—will it become impossible for it to remain best in the world with a robust economic engine?

2. Have you lost passion for your primary flywheel?

“The #1 ingredient for a culture of discipline,” says Collins, “depends first and foremost upon having self-managed and self-motivated people.”

“The best leaders we’ve studied had a peculiar genius for seeing themselves as not all that important, recognizing the need to build an executive team and to craft a culture based on core values that do not depend upon a single heroic leader.”

“Reorganizations and restructurings can create a false sense that you’re actually doing something productive.”

At the conclusion of How the Mighty Fall, Collins channels the spirit of Winston Churchill and his famous “never give in” commencement speech from 1941. “We all need beacons of light as we struggle with the inevitable setbacks of life and work,” says Collins. “For me, that light has often come from studying [Churchill].”

Never give in. Be willing to change tactics, but never give up your core purpose. Be willing to kill failed business ideas, even to shutter big operations you’ve been in for a long time, but never give up on the idea of building a great company. Be willing to evolve into an entirely different portfolio of activities, even to the point of zero overlap with what you do today, but never give up on the principles that define your culture. Be willing to embrace the inevitability of creative destruction, but never give up on the discipline to create your own future. Be willing to embrace loss, to endure pain, to temporarily lose freedoms, but never give up faith in the ability to prevail. Be willing to form alliances with former adversaries, to accept necessary compromise, but never—ever—give up your core values.

After nearly 20 years of teaching, including stints at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard, Henri Nouwen moved to Toronto, Canada to live the rest of his life with mentally handicapped people at the L’Arche community. He moved “from the best and the brightest, wanting to rule the world, to men and women who had few or no words and were considered, at best, marginal to the needs [of] society.”

Upon moving to the L’Arche community, Nouwen would later say that “their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then.” “I was suddenly faced with my naked self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent simply on how I was perceived at the moment.”

In one of his most widely read books, In the Name of Jesus, Nouwen shares his thoughts on Christian leadership from a talk he gave in Washington, D.C. during the fifteenth anniversary of the Center for Human Development.

Nouwen begins this short book with three assumptions he had about leadership. A desire to be relevant, a desire for popularity and a desire for power was his prescription for leadership.

Nouwen came to understand that these three things were actually temptations. Instead, our approach to leadership should be a direct response to the question Jesus asks all of us: “Do you love me?”

Jesus sends us out to be shepherds, and Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led to places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people.

The “Christian leader of the next century,” says Nouwen, “is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”

“Power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God.”

“Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broken my leg.”

“When [Christian leaders] live their ministry mostly in their heads and relate to the Gospel as a set of valuable ideas to be announced, the body quickly takes revenge by screaming loudly for affection and intimacy.”

Nouwen begins and ends the book with a very moving story about Bill Van Buren, one of the mentally handicapped people he lived with at L’Arche. Bill and Henri traveled together on this trip to D.C., which is the backdrop for the whole speech/book. The experience they shared together is powerful. I’ll let you discover it for yourself.

“The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything.” —Charles de Foucauld

I’ve been thinking about fear lately. What am I really afraid of? A plane crash? Losing my job or a client? Getting old? The economy? My wife leaving me? Being wrongfully accused of a crime I did not commit? The list could go on about all the things we have feared, do fear or could fear.

Tim Ferriss did a TED Talk at the EG Conference a few years ago about smashing our fears. Ferriss said that sometimes fear shows you what you shouldn’t do, but more often than not, fear shows you what you should do.

A couple months ago I started writing down a list of the things I fear. The things that keep me up at night or worried about. As I worked my way down the list, I started framing my fears as a call to action. Instead of letting fears become obstacles, I’m attempting to use them as launching points.

Forgive me if this post sounds a little Tony Robbins-ish or like a Successories poster.

Speaking of things that scare me…

For Friday, May 15, 2009, a random assortment of things on my mind:

1. I can’t believe it’s May already. Another year flying by. I don’t remember being any less active when I was a kid, but life seemed to move so much slower 20 years ago. It might be that when you’re ten years old, a year is 10% of your life. When you’re 30, a year is 3% of your life. Life is indeed a mist, and then we’re gone.

2. My first visit to a Foursquare Convention was in 2002 when I rented a truck and drove 15 hours from Los Angeles to Denver to deliver a project (Foursquare was a client at the time). I’ve been every year since and for the past six years, I’ve be a co-director/producer/whipping boy. I love it and hate it every year. Next week I’ll move into a hotel for nine days and see 4,500 people come and go. A year’s worth of work and poof, it’s done.

3. I work with a really great team at Foursquare. In spite of major budget cuts (or shall I say decapitations?) and losing over half my team in layoffs, those that remain have been nothing less all-stars. I’d work with these people anywhere on anything.

4. I sat in a meeting earlier this week with a well-known and well-respected futurist. He spent 90 minutes talking through his notes on general expectations for the next six years. Amazing thinker. Amazing moment.

5. Jamaica and I have a big summer planned with trips to northern California (June), South Africa (July) and Hawaii (August). It’s our last hurrah before Jamaica starts law school this fall.

6. I’ve been working and consulting with two really cool clients the past eight months. They are both—in their own unique way—taking risks and shaping culture in ways I’ve always dreamed of. Having a front row seat has made the ride pretty exciting.

7. I think I’m done with Twitter. I appreciate its ability to connect with so many people I know and respect, but I don’t believe it’s realistic to think I can keep up with it. I could probably find a few minutes a day to keep my “updates” fresh, but that’s not a conversation, that’s a platform. That’s not me.

8. The nonprofit Center for Church Communication (CFCC) is finally gaining some momentum. I think 2010 is going to be a big year for the CFCC community, and ultimately for the Church.

9. Personality, the company I started in 1998, is going to take longer than I expected to become what it is meant to be. For someone that often lacks in the patience department, this has been a struggle. It’s a project that will take a lifetime to bring to fruition, but the results are going to be worth the wait.

I’ve been a longtime fan of Brennan Manning. From reading his books to hearing him live, he’s one of the most profound one-hit-wonders I’ve ever encountered. His message is the same in all he writes and speaks, told in many different ways. His latest book, The Furious Longing of God, is another concoction of re-told necessities. If you’ve never read Manning before, this book is any easy way to begin. The following are a few of my highlights:

“I believe that Christianity happens when men and women experience the reckless, raging confidence that comes from knowing the God of Jesus Christ.”

Theology is “faith seeking understanding” and spirituality is “the faith-experience of what we understand intellectually.”

“The men and women who are truly filled with light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.”

“The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change. It is reliable. And always tender.”

“Love by its nature seeks union.”

Referencing Luke 11:2-4, “Jesus is saying that we may address the infinite, transcendent, almighty God with the intimacy, familiarity, and unshaken trust that a sixteen-month-old baby has sitting on his father’s lap—da, da, daddy.”

“How is it then that we’ve come to imagine that Christianity consists primarily in what we do for God?”

“Our religion never begins with what we do for God. It always starts with what God has done for us, the great and wondrous things that God dreamed of and achieved for us in Christ Jesus.”

“I’ve decided that if I had my life to live over again… I would devote not one more minute to monitoring my spiritual growth. No, not one.” “What would I actually do if I had it to do all over again? Heeding John’s counsel, I would simply do the next thing in love.”

The ordinary pablum of popular religion caters to the idealistic, perfectionistic, and neurotic self who fixates on graceless getting worthy for union, while allowing the prostitutes and tax gougers to dance into the kingdom. Our strategies of self-deception persuade us that abiding restful union with Jesus is too costly, leaving no room for money, ambition, success, fame, sex, power, control, and pride of place or the fatal trap of self-rejection, thus prohibiting mediocre, disaffected dingbats and dirtballs, like myself, from intimacy with Jesus.

“The idolatry of ideas has left me puffed up, narrow-minded, and intolerant of any idea that does not coincide with mine.”

“What is the sign, par excellence, of authentic discipleship? The night before Jesus died, he left no doubt in anybody’s mind. ‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you… By this all men will know’ (John 13:34-35 NASB).”

“You have the power to give someone the courage to be, simply by the touch of your affirmation.”

“By extinguishing the spirit that burns in the gospel, we scarcely feel the glow anymore.”

“To prefer contempt to honor, ridicule to praise, humiliation to glory—these are some of the classic formulas of Christian greatness.”

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand new creations. Not to make people with better morals, but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all…

Thanks, Brennan, for the reminders, the reprimands and the relentless way you pursue the heart of God.

We are much too complacent. And we don’t even know it.
—John P. Kotter

Although familiar with John P. Kotter and his best-selling books Leading Change and Our Iceberg Is Melting, I am finally getting around to immersing myself in some of his genius. Kotter’s latest book, A Sense of Urgency, is both accessible and actionable, even if I can’t relate to all of his big biz stories and examples. After all, he is a professor of leadership at that place.

If you don’t have time to read A Sense of Urgency, it’s definitely worth skimming. Everything, says Kotter, must start with a true sense of urgency. Like most wisdom, the big idea here is not breathtaking. It’s the implementation of such wisdom that separates the wise from the weary.

The Strategy
Create action that is exceptionally alert, externally oriented, relentlessly aimed at winning, making some progress each and every day, and constantly purging low value-added activities—all by always focusing on the heart and not just the mind.

Kotter suggests four tactics to increase a true sense of urgency:

1. Bring the Outside in
Reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and hazards. Bring in emotionally compelling data, people, video, sites, and sounds.

2. Behave with Urgency Every Day
Never act content, anxious, or angry. Demonstrate your own sense of urgency always in meetings, one-on-one interactions, memos, and email and do so as visible as possible to as many people as possible.

3. Find Opportunity in Crises
Always be alert to see if crises can be a friends, not just a dreadful enemy, in order to destroy complacency. Proceed with caution, and never be naïve, since crises can be deadly.

4. Deal with the NoNos
Remove or neutralize all the relentless urgency-killers, people who are not skeptics but are determined to keep a group complacent or, if needed, to create destructive urgency.

“Might the future of business lie in encouraging shoulds rather than indulging wants? Could corporations help us bring out our better selves?”

As usual, Dan Heath and Chip Heath have a great column in the April 2009 issue of Fast Company. They write about why customers will pay to restrain themselves.

Think about a piggy bank, which is like a security system for a world where you’re the burglar. In purchasing a piggy, you’re paying $10 to protect $22 in spare change from your own hands. Life is full of piggy-bank situations, where we crave restrictions on our own behavior. Might your business benefit from helping your customers handcuff themselves?

From watching television while running the treadmill to the Antabuse pill used by alcoholics to make you sick when you drink, “All of us seek ways to save ourselves from our own weaknesses,” say the authors.

Time’s Michael Grunwald echoes this thinking in his April 13 article. Grunwald successfully argues how the Obama team is using the science of change and behavioral economics to fundamentally alter the way we live. Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, is “obsessed with behavioral economics.” Orszag took part in a recent marathon and, to ensure he finished, he setup a significant automatic donation to a charity he did not like in the event he did not cross the finish line.

It’s interesting to think how businesses could leverage this way of thinking. The Heath brothers have a few examples of their own, as does Grunwald’s article.

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