What were your books of the year? My runner's up for book of the year honors are: Tribes by Seth Godin; and Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero.

Gandalf…Dumbledore…Yoda… fictional icons of wisdom and in the minds of many the epitome of the perfect mentors. The only thing is, they aren’t real. They are part of the fiction that actually inhibits mentoring.

In a culture where habitual drivenness is the water we swim in, there is an invisible pull to say yes to more. However, impact is directly related to focus and focus is about doing fewer things not more. Impact is not the result of doing a lot more.

It is time for a conversation about the darkside of leadership. For some reason, even when heinous leadership behavior occurs in Christian circles it is common to gloss over these behaviors with polite and spiritually baptized verbal gymnastics.

We all joke about it, but there is part of us that still believes, "he who dies with the most toys wins." We are seduced by the illusion that the legacy of our lives will be measured by the cumulative value of the stuff we create-acquire-build-plan-say-do. What if the true legacy of our lives is something completely different?

Yeah, I know you know the joke. But the thing is, sometimes the squirrel is just a squirrel.

Good leaders with good ideas and good plans still fail on a regular basis...and, as often as not, the reason a new project or initiative fails is nothing less than a lack of endurance.