The Greatest Commandment for an Employee
Probably going to get yelled at by the Blasphemy Police on this one. I could argue my case, but I won’t.
Jesus was asked “In all the law, what is the most important commandment?” Jesus’ answer was “Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, mind, soul and strength.” Then He said “The second one is like it “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
People ask, “How can I succeed in work/business?” The same principle applies.
The first and greatest commandment is this: “Add value to the brand”.
The second is like unto it “Make the corporation money”.
On this rests all the laws of the Marketing and HR departments.
Truth be told, just like that incident 2000 years ago, it really is that simple. You can’t do one without the other and they both have to come from a genuine place in your heart.
“But what if I work for a church?”
Seems to me like whenever anyone asked Jesus a follow-up question, the real question they asked was “How can I do an end-run without following what you just said?”
Add value to the brand.
Make the corporation money (or, if you must, in the church world, steward the resources well).
Or, again to paraphrase Jesus “Don’t think about yourself all the time. Think about others and how you can serve them.”
Membership data meets Outlook
This is my Outlook address book: 
This is my Outlook address book four minutes later:
Any Questions?
Couple of points of clarification:
- Yes, the time stamps are real. It took about a minute to sync, and three minutes for me to save the first capture and reload the snipping tool
- Columns are resized and whited out to protect the innocent
- Note the size of the slider bar. 1600 member names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses imported in about a minute
- Windows 7 compatible (XP and Vista as well).
- All the normal view options in Outlook are available
So, what is this? It’s an Outlook(2007) plug-in that goes to AccessACS, grabs your data, and imports it. It creates an additional contact folder much like hotmail.com does if you use the Outlook connector. The official post from ACS Technologies is here.
Notice the miniature icon in the tool bar? That is your sync button. Everything is “One-way” so no one can change records in their Outlook and mess up your data. You cannot (at least I could not) create a distribution list from this contact list. You can add categories and filter that way, but the next time you synch, they will be overwritten. To interact with a group, your best bet is still the web login. However, you now have your member database in Outlook. Which is where our people work. This makes it SO easy to look up a member address, email, telephone, etc.
AND it is linked to an indvidual’s AccessACS login. So, this can go out to the whole staff (technically your members too, but you will have to support them).
The beauty? A member changes their personal info, church office does an upload, you sync your Outlook. All addresses are the same. There is now no reason for staff to maintain email addresses of members in their Outlook “silo”. Beauty.
No logging into ACSW or even into AccessACS or your self-branded version of it. In our case www.pinkpres.me.
I as well as members of our staff have been using the beta “look-up only” version for about a year. In fact, it was that original beta version that finally got our technologically challenged Sr. Pastor to handle his own email. No more printing it out and him dictating a response. This tool alone probably saved a dozen trees and at least one secretary from a nervous breakdown.
Member data within Outlook really is that handy. I personally had three instances yesterday where I had to respond to an email but needed to include a third and fourth party in the conversation. This tool made everything possible from right where I was.
Too bad it doesn’t work on the calendar…
But wait, there’s more!
Shameless Plug Friday 6-19-09
Been a few weeks, but here are a few things that derserve a shout out:
1. Andy Andrews and his book The Noticer. That review I have been promising is coming. Honest. However, the short version of the review is that so much of life is about “perspective”. I once saw a cartoon that said “I’d have a more positive outlook if a lot of good things started happening to me.”
This book shows that not only are good things probably already happening and you are just overlooking them, but by intentionally noticing them, you can can have a positive effect on others.
2. Wes Harris from Extend Support. We have an image on our site that has an irregularly shaped border. When the image displays, it would have the faintest of gray outline box. After double checking photoshop to see if it was part of the image, I called our CMS and got Wes. We found out it only happens only on certain high resolution monitors-none of which were his or his co-workers. Inspite of not being able to duplicate the problem we did find a solution.
The reason Wes makes the list is even though he couldn’t see the problem, he was NOT going to let it go. I really appreciate it when customer service people are tenacious. It’s the difference between “the soup is on aisle four” and “let’s walk to aisle four together and I will help you find the type of soup you are looking for”.
Lord, help me to be like this.
3. Summer break. Seems like I can get so much more done!
4. Tweetpsyche.com. Plug in someone’s twitter name and it gets the last 1000 posts and gives you a psych eval on them. Interesting to see how many of us in the church world talk about “upward motion” and “positive emotions”.
