Mike Breen's New Book

Mike Breen's new book, Multiplying Missional Leaders, makes the case that most churches don't have leaders at all, they have managers: people carrying out the vision of the top leadership. Under this pov, leaders are people that receive their own vision from the Lord, that they are uniquely tuned to receive, and they go about implementing it.

So under this scenario, to use a musical metaphor, leaders use original material and managers only do covers - other peoples' material. It's more nuanced than that: successful recording artists do occasionally cover other artists' songs, and your local cover band will sometimes do originals.

Maybe the work place example of the self-starter will be more helpful.

What's the big deal about a self-starter? Once she knows what the big picture goals of the group are, she naturally begins doing things that need doing, things that directly contribute to the fulfillment of those goals. You don't have to give her her every single task in order to get her to contribute to the success of the group.

This does not, and should not, mean that self-starters can't work effectively on assigned tasks. Our ideal person is versatile: he can work for others, with others, independently of others, and lead others.

This is what I believe Breen is talking about.