Barnabas File

As is my annual custom, I attended a satellite presentation of the Global Leadership Summit last week.   My primary reason to attend is to be introduced to new speakers in the field of leadership development and be exposed to some cutting-edge ideas in the field.    About a third of the participants are church leaders, one-third business leaders, and the rest are not-for-profit leaders, educators, and others.  The mix is ministry meets marketplace, and it is done well. The Summit still originates in South Barrington, Illinois, from the facilities of Willow Creek Church, but there is a bit of distance between the church and the Network since accusations arose about former church pastor Bill Hybels who was also a key player in the Willow Creek Association, now rebranded as the Global Leadership Network. Although the Summit was broadcast to hundreds of sites across the United States with about 135,000 participants (and will be re-packaged and translate...

As usual, I attended a satellite location of the Global Leadership Summit this year.   I heard some great speakers and will share more about them and the Summit in a subsequent post.     In this session, I want to share the books that I bought as a result of hearing several speakers and why I purchased them. The first is Never Split the Difference:  Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator and CEO of the Black Swan Group.   After serving with the Kansas City, Missouri, police department, Chris Voss joined the FBI where he moved from SWAT team member to hostage. Negotiator.  He eventually became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator.  What caught my attention in Voss’s interview was the intersection of negotiating and coaching.  He talked about actions such as being genuinely curious, asking “how” not “why” questions, using open-ended questions, and “mirrori...