Spencer W. Kimball

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What Jesus Taught About Leadership

May 6, 2010 in Jesus Christ by Greg | 2 comments

In answer to the question, what did Jesus teach about leadership, of course, the answer is a lot! Last year, Jimmy Smith at Mormon Mission Prep created a new blog “geared toward future missionaries and is designed to help them prepare physically and spiritually.” Recently, he started a series of posts on leadership starting with a post on Leadership: Jesus as the Perfect Leader.

In the article, he quoted Spencer W. Kimball who discussed seven skills and qualities for effective leadership as exemplified by the Savior during his mortal ministry. These include:

Fixed Principles – He operated from a base of fixed principles.
Understanding Others – He was a listening leader and loved others without being condescending.
Selflessness – He made his own needs secondary to the needs of others.
Shared Responsibility – He was not afraid to make demands of those He led.
Eternal Potential – He believed in His followers and what they could become.
Accountability – He was accountable to the Father and those who He leads.
Wise Use of Time – He taught us how to make effective use of our time.

While there are many books on leadership available, there are perhaps no better patterns to follow than those contained in the scriptures. In fact, a number of years ago Hugh W. Nibley pointed out the growing rise of management at the expense of leadership in his now classic article on the state of leadership in Leaders to Managers: The Fatal Shift:

Leaders are movers and shakers, original, inventive, unpredictable, imaginative, full of surprises that discomfit the enemy in war and the main office in peace. For the managers are safe, conservative, predictable, conforming organization men and team players, dedicated to the establishment.

The leader, for example, has a passion for equality. We think of great generals from David and Alexander on down, sharing their beans or maza with their men, calling them by their first names, marching along with them in the heat, sleeping on the ground, and being first over the wall. A famous ode by a long-suffering Greek soldier, Archilochus, reminds us that the men in the ranks are not fooled for an instant by the executive type who thinks he is a leader.¹

For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and even counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security?

“If you love me,” said the greatest of all leaders, “you will keep my commandments. “If you know what is good for you,” says the manager, “you will keep my commandments and not make waves.” That is why the rise of management always marks the decline, alas, of culture. If the management does not go for Bach, very well, there will be no Bach in the meeting. If the management favors vile sentimental doggerel verse extolling the qualities that make for success, young people everywhere will be spouting long trade-journal jingles from the stand. If the management’s taste in art is what will sell—trite, insipid, folksy kitsch—that is what we will get. If management finds maudlin, saccharine commercials appealing, that is what the public will get. If management must reflect the corporate image in tasteless, trendy new buildings, down come the fine old pioneer monuments.

While there should be some “manager in every leader . . . and some of the leader in every manager”,

The Lord insisted that both states of mind are necessary, and that is important: “These ought ye to have done [speaking of the bookkeeping], and not to leave the other undone.” But it is the blind leading the blind, he continues, who reverse priorities, who “strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” (Matthew 23:23—24). So vast is the discrepancy between management and leadership that only a blind man would get them backwards. Yet that is what we do. In that same chapter of Matthew, the Lord tells the same men that they do not really take the temple seriously, while the business contracts registered in the temple they do take very seriously indeed (Matthew 23:16—18). I am told of a meeting of very big businessmen in a distant place, who happened also to be the heads of stakes, where they addressed the problem of “How to stay awake in the temple.” For them what is done in the house of the Lord is a mere quota-filling until they can get back to the real work of the world.

As evidence of the point that leadership is definitely not management, after describing the supreme “managerial skill” of Amalickiah he said,

Jesus and Leadership »»

Archilocus, frag. 58.↩

Spiritual Knowledge

October 11, 2009 in Education by Greg | No comments

In 1993, Richard G. Scott spoke about acquiring spiritual knowledge at BYU’s Campus Education Week. In beginning his talk, Elder Scott asked, “Why center on spiritual knowledge?” to which he responded by quoting Spencer W. Kimball:

Spiritual learning takes precedence. The secular without the foundation of the spiritual is but like the foam upon the milk, the fleeting shadow.

Do not be deceived! One need not choose between the two . . . for there is opportunity to get both simultaneously; . . .

Secular knowledge, important as it may be, can never save a soul nor open the celestial kingdom nor create a world nor make a man a god, but it can be most helpful to that man who, placing first things first, has found the way to eternal life and who can now bring into play all knowledge to be his tool and servant. (Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, p. 390.)

He also quoted others:

President J. Reuben Clark observed:

There is spiritual learning just as there is material learning, and the one without the other is not complete; yet, speaking for myself, if I could have only one sort of learning, that which I would take would be the learning of the spirit, because in the hereafter I shall have opportunity in the eternities which are to come to get the other, and without spiritual learning here my handicaps in the hereafter would be all but overwhelming. (CR, April 1934, p. 94.)

President Gordon B. Hinckley stated:

This restored gospel brings not only spiritual strength, but also intellectual curiosity and growth. Truth is truth. There is no clearly defined line of demarcation between the spiritual and the intellectual when the intellectual is cultivated and pursued in balance with the pursuit of spiritual knowledge and strength.

The Lord Almighty, through revelation, has laid a mandate upon this people in these words:

“Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). (CR, April 1986, p. 63; also, “Come and Partake,” Ensign, May 1986, p. 48.) . . .

As knowledge unfolds it must be understood, valued, used, remembered, and expanded.

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Gift of the Holy Ghost a Higher Endowment

August 22, 2009 in Holy Ghost by Greg | 2 comments

Part 7 of 8 in the series Oquirrh Mountain Utah Temple Dedication

In 1902, the First Presidency responded to a question about the Holy Ghost, specifically, when did the apostles in the New Testament receive this sacred gift? The following is their reply:

The following inquiry has been received from an elder residing in Tooele County, with the request for a reply:

“There is a dispute here among the brethren as to when the Holy Ghost was received; was it at, or before the day of Pentecost?”

The answer to this question depends on what is meant by “receiving” the Holy Ghost. If reference is made to the promise of Jesus to His apostles about the endowment or gift of the Holy Ghost by the presence and ministration of the “personage of spirit,” called the Holy Ghost by revelation in Doctrine and Covenants, Sec. 130, verse 22, then the answer is, it was not until the day of Pentecost that the promise was fulfilled. But the Divine essence, called the Spirit of God, or Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost by which God created or organized all things, and by which the prophets wrote and spoke, was bestowed in former ages and inspired the apostles in their ministry long before the days of Pentecost. The words “Ghost and Spirit” are often used synonymously, and this causes some confusion, when the difference between the “personage of spirit” and the spirit “poured out from on high” is not taken into consideration. There is a universally diffused essence which is the light and life of the world, which proceedeth forth from the presence of God throughout the immensity of space, the light and power of which God bestows in different degrees to “them that ask him,” according to their faith and obedience, but the Holy Ghost, which Christ said He would send to His apostles from the Father (John 14:26) was and is a “personage of spirit,” and was not to come until Christ went away (John 16:7). Also the endowment from that divine being, the third person in the Holy Trinity, called “the gift of the Holy Ghost,” is a special blessing sealed upon baptized repentant believers in Jesus Christ, and is “an abiding witness.” The spirit of God may be enjoyed as a temporary influence by which divine light and power come to mankind for special purposes and occasions. But the gift of the Holy Ghost, which was received by the apostles on the day of Pentecost, and is bestowed in confirmation, is a permanent witness and higher endowment than the ordinary manifestation of the Holy Spirit.

Gift of the Holy Ghost a Higher Endowment »»

A Consecrated Place

July 12, 2009 in Second Coming by Greg | No comments

A few years ago a friend shared with me Henry B. Eyring’s talk entitled “A Consecrated Place”. In this talk he reiterated what past prophets taught about the Second Coming and what that means to BYU in particular. It reminded me of Joseph Smith’s vision of Nauvoo which encompassed both a temple and a university. Here is what President Eyring said:

Nothing so focuses the attention of those who work in a school as the knowledge that their students are about to arrive. On my first day of teaching in a university, I lost my appetite for breakfast. Heaven only knows what anxiety those who prepared the student housing and the bookstore and the classrooms felt. But this I know, from that first experience and the decades in education that have followed: You are all about to give laserlike attention to your tasks. Tunnel vision for you is not a weakness. At the start of school, it becomes a necessity.

Just before we put our heads down to get a closer view of the grindstone, it is useful to put a picture in our minds and hearts of where we are headed and why we are going there. That is easier to do here because living prophets of God have described our possibilities. To get ready for this year, I have studied two of those pictures of the future. One is from President George Albert Smith. The other is from President Spencer W. Kimball. The two views combine for me to make more clear what we should do and who we must become.

President George Albert Smith ended his remarks at the first dedication of the Eyring Science Center on October 17, 1950, with this prayer and blessing for us:

Oh, Father, bless the men and the women who are on the faculty of this great school that they may teach . . . under the influence of Thy Spirit, that they may be able to inspire the . . . men and women with the desire to be worthy to be called Thy children. Bless them that they may see the fruits of their labors, have joy when they have finished their work as instructors and leaders . . . that they may look back over a field, not of grain, not of vegetable, not of other things that people labor so hard for to keep us going here in mortality, but that they may look over a field of Thy sons and daughters who have been developed to be worthy to live with Thee. [BYU Archives, UA 579]

That picture of our students worthy to live with God might have seemed to be in some distant future, in the world to come, if I had not next read this from President Kimball’s second-century address (Spencer W. Kimball, “The Second Century of Brigham Young University,” Speeches of the Year, 1975 [Provo: BYU Press, 1976], 250–51):

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