One person who has greatly influenced my thinking about organizations is Dr. Ted Engstrom, former president of Youth for Christ and later World Vision.. When he teamed up with Dr. Ed Dayton to do a series of management seminars for Christian leaders, they soon became known as the Ted and Ed show.
As someone who benefited greatly from their work I remember being specially impressed with one axiom:
You can never do as much in a year as you think you can, but you can almost always do more in five years than you think you can.
My observation is that most ministry leaders are so over-whelmed at what is currently facing them, that they seldom, if ever, take a step back to consider what might be done over the longer horizon.
A major benefit of long-range thinking for organizations is that it focus on "direction" more than "accomplishment." In most cases, it really doesn't matter how much we've accomplished if we're moving in the wrong direction.
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