Review: Lead Like It Matters to God

March 7, 2022March 6, 2022 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Lead Like It Matters to God, Richard Sterns. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021.

Summary: In contrast to many leadership books that outline steps to success, describes what it is like to give value-shaped leadership in both for profit and non-profit settings.

No question. Good leadership is a gift to any organization or political entity. Richard Sterns, out of his Christian faith, takes a different approach from many other leadership books. His focus is not on skills or “steps to success.” Sterns should know from work at Gillette and CEO experiences at Parker Brothers, Lenox, and World Vision. He contends that what matters most are the values that shape one’s leadership. After introducing this approach, Sterns devotes a chapter each to seventeen different values.

Beside values you might expect like excellence, vision, courage, self-awareness, and perseverance, Sterns includes values you might not associate with executive leadership. These include sacrifice, love, humility, integrity, generosity, forgiveness, balance, humor, encouragement and listening. He begins with surrender, describing his own painful experience of getting fired twice in a two year period and spending fourteen months unemployed. He describes this period of being “benched” by God as one that convinced him that God wanted his Mondays through Saturdays and not just his Sunday, a life of daily surrender. Likewise, he describes the value of trust, particularly trust in God, as one that enables leading in the face of adversity with calm.

Even typical corporate values like excellence are re-shaped by Sterns’ Christian commitments. He states that “excellence means that we will always strive to use the gifts and abilities that God has given us to the fullest extent possible.” He believes “good outcomes do not lead to excellence; excellence leads to good outcome” (italics in original). He argues for love for the workers in an organization, no matter the title.

One of the endearing things about this book is that Sterns not only values humor but he is practices it, usually laughing at himself. He illustrates humility with his experience of plugging up and surreptitiously plungering his private executive toilet on his first day as CEO at Lenox and describes the “shroud of Turin” he left on a glass window he mistook for a door as he rushed to a meeting with the governor of Tennessee, arriving bloody nosed, quipping, “You should see the other guy.”

He speaks compellingly of the power of encouragement by contrasting two bosses, the one who told him he had no marketing talent, while the second kept encouraging him and giving him stretch assignments that affirmed his confidence. He credits the second boss with grooming him for his first CEO position. He argues for corporate and personal matters, describing the time he was his angriest at World Vision, and it all had to do with pumpkin seeds. And in his description of the balanced leader, he notes the role of reading in the lives of great leaders. I might quibble with some of his examples though–while Harry Truman and Warren Buffett strike me as balanced and sensible, I’m not sure about Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk–all of whom are great readers.

The book concludes with a challenge for Christians to take God to work and offers several closing stories of the unseen acts of faithfulness through which God works, including the child sponsored by a couple through World Vision who became the sixth archbishop of the Anglican church in Kenya. I would commend this book to every aspiring leader. For all the reasons above, it is both substantive and engaging. Note the values that you want to cultivate more deeply in your leadership and get to work. If Sterns is right, it all matters to God.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

What I Learned From My Father

June 19, 2017June 18, 2017 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

My father, on a beautiful autumn day in 2011. (c) Robert C. Trube

I’m writing this on the evening of Father’s Day and I’ve been remembering my own father, who passed nearly five years ago. Remembering him is cause for profound gratitude for the kind of man he was, and the ways he gave himself to shape the man I would be. Whether I’ve lived up to that or not, I’ll leave to others to judge. All I can say is that while he was never famous, he is truly great in my eyes, a member of “the greatest generation” not only by association but by character. These are some of the things he taught me:

Any work is worth doing well, if for no other reason than you know whether or not you’ve done your best.
He taught me to assume responsibility to earn my own spending money. When I was ten he fronted me the money for a lawn mower to cut lawns. He helped me sign up for a paper route, and got up early on winter Sunday mornings to help stuff and deliver the Sunday papers.
He treated people with dignity, no matter who they were. I saw him treat hourly employees and company presidents and people of all races the same way.
I grew up in the Vietnam era. Dad taught me that military service could be honorable and something to be proud of. The military salute he was given at his burial was a fitting closure of his life.
Perhaps because he never finished college, he valued education and encouraged all of us to excellence. He took our grade cards seriously and responded to teachers’ comments and talked to us about them.
He communicated how proud he was of whatever achievements I made in school. Years later, he gave me a file he had collected of these various recognitions. He tracked my career and he gave me the wonderful gift of never having to wonder about his approval of my work, or wife, or anything else.
He taught me what love and faithfulness means in marriage. I watched him holding my mother’s hand as she passed, loving her to her last earthly moment before death parted them after nearly 69 years of marriage. Perhaps it is no coincidence that between us, my siblings and I have celebrated 123 wedding anniversaries of our own. Mom and dad taught us well.
Because of dad, I never struggled with the idea of God as Father. When I was little, we took walks in the park together and I loved the time where he taught me about different trees, birds, and plants and where I could ask him anything. It is what I think of when I think of “walking with God” or what we call prayer.
I work among academics and it is easy to intellectualize and “complexify” almost anything, including matters of faith. Dad often brought me back to earth with what I call his “watchword” which summarized for him what it meant to live as a Christian:

Read and pray;

Trust and obey;

Live God’s way.

My son and I had an interesting conversation today. I happened to use the word “adult” as a verb in a sentence, as some in his generation do. He rebuked me for that. He said adult isn’t something you act like, it is something you are. I think that would have made my dad proud (actually it made me quite glad that he felt this way). Whether it was military service, separation from family, scrambling to make ends meet, dealing with health emergencies, and more, my father just kept showing up, just kept being responsible. In a word, he was an adult. And so much more. He was a father.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — What We Still Have

February 7, 2015February 7, 2016 / rtrube54 / 6 Comments

How good it was. How much we’ve lost. These two phrases seem to capture the gist of so many of the online conversations I’ve had with present and former Youngstowners since starting this series of posts.

On the one hand, so many of us, especially those of us who grew up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, share these incredibly rich memories of working class Youngstown ranging from good jobs to healthy neighborhoods to close extended families to a surprisingly rich cultural life ranging from ethnic festivals to classical concerts, from baseball and bowling leagues to art shows at the Butler.

On the other hand, even with all the efforts to create a “new” Youngstown, we live with a communal grief for what has been lost–from the skies aglow with steel-making, to summers at Idora Park, to the sadness when we visit the neighborhoods of our youth to find an abandoned house or vacant lot where we once lived. It is not a simple thing to occupy, let alone maintain all that housing stock when you’ve lost 100,000 of your people.

I could go on but what I would rather focus on is what we still have, whether we are living in Youngstown or are part of the “Youngstown Diaspora.” What I’ve discovered as I’ve written and interacted and reflected is that having grown up in Youngstown, there are things we carry with us. You may take us out of Youngstown. You can’t take Youngstown out of us.

For one thing, we know good food. If nothing else, our mission to the world ought to be one of educating people about what makes a good pizza! It has been a delight to meet Bobbi Ennett Allen and see the great work she and her friends have done in Recipes of Youngstown to preserve so many of those family recipes and good ethnic dishes we grew up with. [2/8/15 update: There is now a second Recipes of Youngstown that will be coming out soon to benefit the Mahoning Valley Historical Society that may be pre-ordered at their website.]
There are values we grew up with that are worth preserving and passing along to our families and others. Youngstowners are no-nonsense, hard-working, family-oriented, and resilient. Youngstowners do not tolerate those who whine, indulge in self-pity, or self-adulation. We would say they are “full of it” (or something more earthy).
Not all our memories are nostalgia. We know what makes a good place. We know what the “new urbanists” are only just discovering–that a good place has sidewalks, home owners, and a diversity of businesses and services in walking distance. I’ve had a chance to talk to some working in the Idora Park area to renew the neighborhoods there and they get this–and that good places are not 90 day wonders but take years of hard work.
We cherish beauty. Somehow, we’ve managed to preserve and enhance Mill Creek Park and we return there whenever we visit. We’ve always supported the fine and performing arts. The gritty world of manufacturing taught us that it was not enough just to make things–we craved things of beauty. The world still needs people with this vision.
We are people who know how to celebrate. I can’t think of any place where the weddings are more fun than in Youngstown. Nobody else (except some Pittsburgh folk who probably got it from us) even knows what a cookie table is let alone what a good one looks like! We didn’t think all of life is a party. Much of it was hard, so when there was a wedding, or even a wake, you celebrated. When there was a holiday, you cooked and baked like crazy and you celebrated.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. There is so much we carry within us that has not been lost. But it can be if we keep it within because none of us lives forever. The best of our heritage can live on if we share it with our children, and bring our best into our communities, our places of worship, and our work.

Writing this series has been a fun project with a serious purpose. The experiences and memories that we’ve shared and enjoyed together are things that have shaped us. I think much of that is profoundly good–good to remember if we are seeking the peace and prosperity of Youngstown–and good to be mindful of and draw upon wherever we find ourselves.

Read all the posts in the Growing Up in Youngstown Series by clicking the “On Youngstown” category link either at the top of this page or in the left column of my home page.