How Willing Are You To Look Foolish?

What do each of these characters have in common?

• A deluded engineer
• A magician
• A waiter
• A nudist
• A beggar
• A lunatic
• A harem girl
• An improper woman
• A blasphemer

They were roles assumed or assigned to the following:

• Noah - designed and built an ark in the middle of a desert
• Moses - turned water into blood
• Nehemiah - was a cupbearer to a king
• Isaiah - went naked for three years
• Elijah - has to ask a widow for food
• King David - acted insane to escape his captors
• Queen Esther - made her way to the top of the King's list
• Mary - conceived a child before marriage
• Jesus - claimed to be equal with God

God has little use for people whose main concern is "What will the neighbors think?"  Leaders must be willing to sacrifice and take risk with their pubic image.

Can you imagine a group of bankers sitting around a table when a young earnest man looks them in the eyes and says, "I'm going to build a billion-dollar empire based on a mouse, a fairy and seven dwarfs.  Will you help me?"  He would have been laughed out of the building.  This earnest man, as you probably surmised, was Walt Disney.  How, however, the bulk of the current Disney teams activity consist of distributing and managing the ideas and characters created by this silly cartoonist.

Ron Grover, in his book The Disney Touch, tells the story of Roy Disney.  Roy was Walt's more fiscally minded brother, who was always trying to put the brakes on Walt's foolishness.  After Disneyland was built, Roy lovingly to Walt that they did not need any more new ideas.  In fact, Roy forbade Walt from spending any more money on the creation of new ideas!

With his own money, Walt formed a team of engineers who secretly met a night in a warehouse on the Disney lot.  The crew developed the concept of EPCOT Center.  Walt was a man who kept on thinking "foolishly."

Grover also relates how Michael Eisner, credited as half of the genius team that guided Disney to incredible profits, was almost not hired!  One of the major stockholders described him as a young man who "mostly liked to take the blocks he had and just rearrange them."  To this, a higher-ranking member of the board replied, "This is exactly the kind of leader we need.  Hire him and find ten more like him."

Walt Disney went bankrupt in his first business endeavor.  Thomas Edison has thousands of failures before he got the light bulb right.  Benjamin Franklin, the fool on the roof flying a kite in a rainstorm, retired as on of the country's first millionaires.

Jesus was willing to look foolish.  And this was the key to his success.  Coming into town on a donkey, having to fish to pay your taxes, and forgetting to bring wine did not seem like the ingredients for success.  Crying like a rejected lover, passing out invitations to a feast that largely go unanswered, having to stand on front porches and knock hardly sounds like a job description for a king.

Omega leaders cannot be afraid to look foolish.  We must keep to the plan that we vaguely sense but that only God can see.

He was willing to look foolish.

Are you willing to look foolish as a leader?
List ten leaders who at one time of another looked foolish to the world.

Jesus, CEO