Spears Center for Servant Leadership | SpearsCenter.org

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Dear Servant-Leader,

Hello again. This is the first newsletter since June. I decided to concentrate on several different projects this summer, and to take a break.

I am reminded of my childhood when school would resume and we would be asked to write a page on the theme of what I did over the summer. With that thought in mind, I thought that I would mention some of the servant-leadership highlights from this past summer—

•My colleague Shann Ferch and I completed work on the next servant-leadership anthology and signed a contract with Paulist Press. The Spirit of Servant-Leadership is scheduled to be published around Jan. 1, 2011.
•Shann and I also brought to publication the 2009 edition of The International Journal of Servant-Leadership. Now in its fifth year, the Journal is an annual publication of Gonzaga University and The Spears Center.
•My colleague Paul Davis and I launched the publication of a new book, The Human Treatment of Human Beings (Essays by John Donnelly, The Scanlon Foundation, paperback, $20).
•In June I travelled to Gonzaga to co-teach a doctoral course in Servant-Leadership that I designed. I continue to teach the online Servant-Leadership course for Gonzaga’s M.A. program in Organizational Leadership.

These and many other activities are vital expressions of The Spears Center’s mission to raise awareness and practice of servant-leadership around the world.

Warm regards,

Larry Larry C. Spears,
President & CEO
The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership

Dear Servant-Leader,

I am writing to humbly ask for your support.

It has been six wonderful months since we received the news that The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership, Inc. had been approved as a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit organization. As a recognized public charity, we are now eligible to receive contributions, grants, bequests, and other kinds of financial support. Financial donations to the Spears Center are now tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the tax laws.

Over the past two decades, I have devoted myself to the joyful task of encouraging a better world through expanding our understanding and practices of servant-leadership. Much of my work has focused on communicating these ideas through a series of books, journals, articles, newsletters, essays, interviews, the internet, radio and television appearances, and hundreds of public presentations around the world. Slowly-but-surely, public awareness and practice of servant-leadership has grown.

The Spears Center board and I are working hard to put into place the basic building blocks for growing The Spears Center as a long-term resource for servant-leadership information and inspiration. Evidence of the fruit of our work may be found throughout this newsletter.

As a young start-up organization, we are running a very tight ship. Indeed, I continue to do this work without being paid a salary, while also making significant personal financial contributions myself to The Spears Center. While this has enabled us, as an organization, to get off to a quick and extraordinarily productive start, it has also taken its toll on our personal savings. Long-term realities require the ongoing development of various financial sources, including the possibility of your own support.

As chief steward of our precious resources, I have recently and reluctantly decided not to attend the upcoming Greenleaf Center conference after eighteen years of close involvement with it. While I will miss being there in the flesh, my heart and spirit will most certainly be there.

My primary concern at this time involves doing what I can to begin to reach out to those of you who value my work, and to ask for your support of The Spears Center’s ongoing initiatives in servant-leadership.

If you are willing-and-able to do so, I would be most grateful at this time to receive your support in one of the two following ways—

1. By sending a check with your financial contribution to The Spears Center, 329 Garden Grace Drive, Indianapolis, IN 46239. Any and all amounts will truly be helpful and deeply appreciated.

2. By donating some of your unused air miles to The Spears Center. This can also be a big help by allowing for the possibility of increased travel, while simultaneously freeing up limited funds for other important uses.

Foresight is a characteristic of servant-leadership. Robert Greenleaf called foresight the central ethic of leadership. He went on to say that the lack of foresight is, “sometimes the failure to make the effort at an earlier date to foresee today’s events, and to take the right actions when there was freedom for initiative to act.” I would add that the smallest of absences in life can sometimes create the largest of losses, in unexpected and unpredictable ways. I am inspired by Bob Greenleaf, and by my own sense of foresight, to take the right action at this early date, and to ask for your financial support.

With sincerity, and humility, I hope that you may be willing to accept this call. Together, we are truly making a difference in the world.

Warm regards,
Larry
Larry C. Spears, President & CEO
The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership

Dear Servant-Leader,

My mother-in-law passed away last month, following a long struggle with Alzheimer's.  She was 94 years old.  Verona Blesse Lafferty was a devoted nurse for fifty years.  She served as a Captain in the U.S. Army during World War II as a member of the 21st General Hospital Unit, serving in N. Africa, Italy, and France, where she earned a Bronze Battle Star.  As an anesthetist and as a nurse, she cared for thousands of wounded GIs; and, after the war, for tens of thousands of patients at hospitals in Colorado, South Dakota, and Indiana.  At her funeral, the minister spoke of her legacy as a wonderful "servant-leader."  While she was "Mom" to my wife, I most often saw her through the eyes of our sons--as "Grammie."  Our sons are now grown, but the image that I have of her is that of a grandmother who was happy to sit on the floor and play with matchbox cars with our then-young boys.  They could always count on hugs and cookies from their Grammie.  And while Alzheimer's gradually took her away, bit-by-bit, it is clear to me that she was, indeed, a servant-leader who made a real difference in the lives of many people over the course of her life--soldiers, civilians, grandsons, and many others.

I am reminded that servant-leaders are not the exception.  In reality, we are surrounded by real servant-leaders every day--imperfect human beings who are also genuine servant-leaders.  Many have never heard the term before, but they live their lives in a sincere effort to serve and lead as best they can.  Others are genuine servant-followers:  they have no desire to lead others, but they have a strong desire to follow only servant-leaders. 

Together, servant-leaders and servant-followers can-and-do make a difference.

Warm regards,
Larry
Larry C. Spears, President & CEO
The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership

Dear Servant-Leader,

I am blessed to know a great many wonderful people.  Some of them are people whom I see frequently.  Others are friends and colleagues whom I see only occasionally. Then there are a few whom I have never actually met, and yet I feel close to them because of years of shared correspondence and phone calls.  One person in the latter category is Lane Baldwin.

I first encountered Lane around 2001, when The Men’s Wearhouse began a special webpage called “Common Threads,” in which The Greenleaf Center was the first non-profit organization to be profiled.  At the time, Lane worked for The Men’s Wearhouse, and he and I had a flurry of contact around the creation of the Common Threads/Men’s Wearhouse webpage. 

Over the past eight years, Lane and I have had intermittent email exchanges and phone calls—mostly around servant-leadership.  His has been a consistently encouraging voice—and he is someone whose spirit I value.

Lane leads an interesting life.  He is a multi-talented person who simultaneously carries on three or four different careers as business writer and consultant (www.lanebaldwin.com), volunteer and community activist (www.lifewithspirit.org); and, as a talented musician (www.laneonbass.com).

Lane has recently created the Life with Spirit Foundation, which seeks to use servant-leadership principles to strengthen community bonds by bringing people together to serve those with the greatest need.  One of the exciting projects of Life with Spirit Foundation is Foodstock Charities, in Danville, Illinois.  The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership is honored to serve as a co-sponsor of their work, including a series of monthly dinners for those in need.

“All faiths teach that the key to fulfillment is our service to others,” writes Baldwin.  “This is our service to our community, our way of helping to make things better.  We can’t think of anything more basic, more necessary, than providing food for those in need.  And, it’s the best way I know to demonstrate servant-leadership in the community.”

Foodstock Charities began as a way for Baldwin’s band, Deeper Blues to commemorate the release of its first CD in 2008, Dig the Hole.  In 2009, Foodstock is going national, with concerts scheduled in several cities.

As I write this, I am listening to Dig the Hole.  Lane serves as chief songwriter, bassist, and vocalist of Deeper Blues.  The songs are reminiscent of some of the very best of Stephen Stills’ blues-rock.  [Longtime friends and family can attest to my now forty-year love affair with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in their many different configurations, and of my concert visits to see them in the 1970’s, 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s!]  If you are in the mood for new blues music, I invite you to check out the Deeper Blues website at www.deeperblues.com. 

Dig the Hole CD Cover A talented writer on servant-leadership themes, I am pleased to include in this issue of Servant-Leader News an excerpt from a longer essay by Lane Baldwin titled, “Learning Servant-Leadership from Native America--Again.”  Those who would like to read the entire essay may do so by clicking on the link below.

Warm regards,
Larry
Larry C. Spears, President & CEO
The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership

Dear Servant-Leader,

My dictionary defines “collaboration” thusly:  “to labor, especially in literary pursuits, as the associate of another or others.”  As an editor, and as an author, collaboration has been at the heart of my own work in servant-leadership for the past 20 years.  Indeed, it is so much at the core of my own being that I have seldom felt the need to talk about it.

Since 1990, my personal commitment to servant-leadership and collaboration has led me to bring to the reading public the writings of nearly 200 authors through conscientiously and consistently seeking out new writings on servant-leadership, and then editing their writings for a great many publications:  books, journals, newsletters, articles, and more.  While the act of editing someone’s written work is sometimes a solitary act, it is always a collaborative one when understood as being part of a connected circle that involves authors, editors, designers, readers and others. 

Even the process of editing, itself, can be a collaborative endeavor.  Besides working with authors, I have had the great privilege of working on selected books and journals with a series of co-editors, including Hamilton Beazley, Julie Beggs, Paul Davis, Shann Ferch, Anne Fraker, Don Frick, Michele Lawrence, and George SanFacon.

The role of an editor is usually that of working with a living author; and, there is considerable satisfaction to be found in such collaborations.  I have also had the rare experience of conceptualizing and editing numerous books by three deceased authors.  In the instance of Robert K. Greenleaf, over the past two decades I created a series of five books from his unpublished and published writings, including  On Becoming a Servant-Leader (1996), Seeker and Servant (1996), The Power of Servant-Leadership (1998), The 25th Anniversary Edition of Servant-Leadership (2002), and Seeker and Servant (2003).  Over the years, tens of thousands of readers have been introduced to servant-leadership through these books, and all royalties on these and other books went to support The Greenleaf Center.

Recently, I had the experience of unearthing some previously unknown writings by my friend and mentor, Bill Bottum (Townsend & Bottum Family of Companies), who died in 2005; and to collaborate with George SanFacon and others in the creation of a forthcoming book of his writings.  Simultaneously, I have also been involved in a collaboration with Paul Davis, in which we have gone through some 800 articles and speeches by the late business leader, John Donnelly (The Donnelly Corporation), who died in 1986.  These books by Bill Bottum, and by John Donnelly, are both due out this year.

When editing the works of those who are no longer here with us, I have found that by immersing oneself in their writings, it is possible to develop a feeling of collaboration that is every bit as real as that of working with a living author.  As I have reflected upon my involvement in the creation of seven books by Greenleaf, Bottum, and Donnelly, I have drawn strength from the discipline of faithfully representing their thoughts and ideas to others, when they are no longer able to do so. 

In Old Age: The Ultimate Test of Spirit (Chapter 8, The Power of Servant-Leadership, 1998), Greenleaf wrote, “I have long pondered those lines with which Robert Browning opens his poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra”:

                  Grow old along with me!
                  The best is yet to be;
                  The last of life for which the first was made.

For some of us, and especially for me, the last of life for which the first was made is inextricably linked to the idea of spirit and service to one another.  It provides a deeper understanding of what it means to be a servant-leader. 

It is an honor to labor on behalf of servant-leader authors, living and dead, and to help encourage readers of their works, for the greater good of others:  Collaboratively.

Warm regards,
Larry
Larry C. Spears, President & CEO
The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership

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The Spears Center is a charitable, non-profit organization, and your contribution is tax-deductible to the extent allowable. Our federal tax ID number is 26-1555344. We invite your donation by check to The Spears Center, 329 Garden Grace Drive, Indianapolis, IN 46239.  Thank you!

 

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