One of the first questions I ask when I think about donating to a particular charity is what their overhead is – that is, how much money the spend on personnel and marketing and everything else it takes to administer their relief efforts. This kind of information is readily available and I use it to determine a sense of the charity’s efficiency – the lower the overhead, the more money goes directly to the recipients of the aid I and others give. Of course I assume the reverse is true as well: the higher the overhead the more wasteful the charity is and less deserving of my support. In this provocative TED Talk based on his book...

Leadership is about the future. It’s that simple…and that difficult. Max DePree began his influential and elegant little book, Leadership Is an Art, by saying that “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality” (11). I would suggest that the most important element of the reality to be defined is the future. What future do you imagine? What future are you hoping for, working toward, dreaming of? The future matters so much simply because it defines the present. A friend of mine – who is a remarkably capable pastoral leader – shares the same story each time she meets with a new group of people in her congregation. There...