A Need for Innovation...Leadership Lessons from Motorola

If you had one of these Motorola Startacs back in the 90's, you were the man! This was the phone to have.

Prior to this, phones were carried in bags and looked and weighed as much as a brick.

Motorola absolutely dominated the cell phone market.

What happened? How did Motorola go from dominating the cell phone market to barely staying afloat today?

It wasn't that Motorola was not operated efficiently. During those years as Motorola lost market share, they were a well run machine.

You can run your business efficiently all the way to bankruptcy.

Just ask Kodak, Oldsmobile, Pontiac.

What made these once giants in their market become irrelevant and bankrupt?

Each of these companies failed to innovate. It wasn't that people stopped using cellphones, taking pictures, or driving cars. In fact, there are more cellphone users and  pictures taken today than at any other time in history. People are still buying and driving their cars.

When companies and institutions fail to innovate to connect even more with their customers they are bound to fail.

At one time, talking on a brick sized phone was really cool.

If you carried one of these around today, you'd be a laughingstock.

Churches will always be about Jesus Christ. We will always be about proclaiming and being the good news of Jesus Christ in our communities.

People in our world need Jesus than ever before.

What's needed is for churches to innovate and get creative about how we proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ to our world.

What we have been doing, what used to work for generations, no longer works.

I don't have the answers for what works, but I do know what doesn't.

We will need to keep searching and seeking for ways to communicate the good news of Jesus Christ by being good news in our communities.

What is needed today are new ways, innovative ways, to be the church that is good news, a church who proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ through its deeds as much as through its words.