Читать книгу The Shepherd and His Staff - Theodore Mistra - Страница 9

Foreword by Blaine McCormick

Make no mistake, servant leadership was a great idea and remains a great idea in the twenty-first century. Robert K. Greenleaf’s reflections on the nature of power and authority in a competitive world are as vibrant and challenging today as they were when they emerged in the early 1970s. Greenleaf spent much of his life in the business arena working for AT&T and was no stranger to the realities of organizational life. Later, he witnessed the cultural upheavals of the sixties and seventies and concluded that our thinking on leadership was deeply flawed. His ideas about servant leadership have stood the test of both time and practice. As a business professor, it gives me great pride to say that an idea of tremendous spiritual depth emerged from a businessman reflecting on his life and work. Maybe we underestimate the spiritual depths that can be plumbed by those of us who live and work in the marketplace.

Three decades later, another deeply spiritual model of leadership is emerging. More interesting, it appears that God is once again using businesspeople to bring a new way of thinking about leadership into the marketplace of ideas. This time, however, the vision is spread among a variety of people in a variety of locations.

In 1992, I left corporate America to enter the academic world. A little more than a decade later, after years of meditating on Psalm 23 as a leadership text, I co-authored a book titled Shepherd Leadership. Not long after this book hit the shelf, I learned that at least two other businesspeople had put pen to paper to clarify what it means to be a shepherd leader. Theodore Mistra is one of these people.

In this book, Mistra combines many years of business life and deep reflection to tell us what it means to be a shepherd leader. Not confining himself to only one psalm, he confidently guides the reader through the entire Bible. Time and time again, he shows that our world and decision set are much broader than we think them to be. Beyond this, he demonstrates by example the importance of caring for those on our path who need it most. Guiding us down new paths, creating for us a larger world, caring for us—that’s what shepherds do, and that’s what Mistra has done with his life.

It shouldn’t surprise us that businesspeople are capable of such spiritual insight. After all, God used an accountant to write the first book of the New Testament. And that King David fellow who wrote all of those psalms? Well, he grew up working the family business: shepherding. This book is evidence that the Spirit of God still moves in the marketplace.

Blaine McCormick

Co-author, Shepherd Leadership

Baylor University