Stan Oakes taught me to ask Who? before I ask What?.
I’m a Birkman red leader. I’m a strategic thinker and planner. I tend to quickly see a path forward and launch aggressively. I tend to start towards a solution quickly and clean it up as I go. My mind gravitates toward questions like
- What are the success criteria?
- What are the milestones?
- What are the next steps?
- What resources are needed?
When we were conceiving of the Leadership University web project (www.leaderu.com), Stan would always lead by asking questions like
- Who else should we invite into this project?
- Who should lead this part?
- Who can contribute?
- Who has done something like this before and knows the pitfalls?
And I learned a new leadership focus.
Jim Collins addresses this Who? then What? focus in his powerful style. This is worth 3 of your minutes if you are a leader.
Using Who? then What?, Stan went on to re-launch The King’s College in the most famous address in the U.S., the Empire State Building.
What are you leading that could benefit from a Who? focus?
Keith, leaderu was a truly pivotal resource for me as a student and one of the only ones that sufficiently answered some of my many intellectual doubts as a new Christian. Thanks so much for your work to make that available.
It’s a little ironic that its only now I’m realizing how significant several digital strategies were in building my confidence in Jesus and really moving me along the spectrum to being a fully committed disciple. 🙂
Thank you for sharing your story, Claire. I was so encouraged to hear how LeaderU.com helped you as a new Christian. That was exactly why we created the site — to help those in university who were being bombarded with anti-biblical messages about biology, physics, literature, philosophy, etc.
So cool to hear your story, Claire! I used LeaderU all the time in college and it helped me recognize how much I loved theology and philosophy and one of the reasons that I went on for further study.
Somehow I never made the connection that it was part of Campus Crusade and only later did I realize Keith was a major part of it!!!!
Thank you for sharing, Karin. We intentionally minimized Campus Crusade’s ownership of LeaderU. It was mentioned in the About page, but not prominently. The “statement of faith” for LeaderU was the historical Nicene and Apostles Creeds. If a person or organization acknowledged these creeds as describing their faith, we accepted their content on LeaderU. Thus, some of the major contributors were outside the traditional evangelical realm. But because of the significance of their work in worldview areas applying biblical faith to intellectual understanding, we welcomed their participation.