The Peanut Butter Manifesto

I read about Brad Garlinghouse's 2006 memo to Yahoo employees in Ken Auletta's book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. (For the record, the book is just OK - don't rush out & buy it.)

It became known as "the Peanut Butter Manifesto" due to the following passage:

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone. We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don't talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn't to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like -- rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

While I disagree on one point with Mr. Garlinghouse (I actually like peanut butter, esp. the crunchy kind), his message should is vital for church leadership. I'm gonna paraphrase a bit - call this the Living Memo version of his words...

Our church lacks a focused, cohesive vision. We want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone. We feel compelled to create, support, fund & staff a smorgasbord of ministries that that make your average Chinese buffet look like a one course meal.

We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out... we are afraid that if Church X down the street has a growing [fill in the blank] ministry that we will be left in the dust if we don't create a [fill in the blank] ministry ourselves. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course.

We are separated into small groups & leadership teams & deacon bodies that far too frequently don't talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn't to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy for making a God-sized dent in our community & world, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside our church community results in disparate visions of what winning looks like -- rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities to reach people for Jesus Christ. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.