THE NEW EVANGELIZATION AND EXECUTION-ORIENTED STRATEGIC PLANNING

Most Rev. John Barres, Bishop of Allentown, Pennsylvania

Jim Friend, Chief Development Officer, Faith in the Future table conference, he was an inspiration. The whole idea of an execution-oriented approach really resonated with me.

Larry Bossidy’s whole approach to execution-oriented strategic planning can be summarized by the words of the great inventor Thomas Edison: “Vision without execution is hallucination.”

Strategic planning fundamentals consist of solid human virtue, human formation and human wisdom as exemplified by the life and management practice of people like Larry Bossidy. The Holy Spirit ignites those human skills and opens us up to the progress and lead of the Spirit. Our pastoral efforts to promote the New Evangelization, at the same time, requires us to be sound, prudent and innovative financial stewards.

I would like to start by talking about Larry Bossidy [retired CEO of Honeywell International, Inc., and author], who has become a great friend and mentor to so many of us in the Diocese of Allentown. I have read and carefully studied Larry’s books, particularly Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. And when I heard Larry speak at the 2006 Leadership Round-

In December 2010, I took a trip up to Ridgefield, Connecticut to see Larry. We spent 90 minutes together and really hit it off. I was 49 at the time, and I told him, “I love what you’re writing. I’m a young bishop, I need some guidance, and I’d like you to work with me and the Diocese of Allentown.”

He agreed and really committed through weekly conference calls and periodic visits to the Diocese. He mentored our diocesan staff and influenced significantly my own management style. He also took one of the young stars of Catholic philanthropy in the United States today, Jim Friend, and helped him to develop into a topflight ecclesial planner.

While I was working with Larry, I had dinner in Manhattan with Bishop William Murphy from the Diocese of Rockville Center [New York] who said something I still remember. I was reflecting on some of the tensions and difficulties of change. We work with innovative entrepreneurs, and finance and marketing people. We work with inspirational pastoral people and dedicated Catholic educators. As the bishop, you are right in the center, and inevitably there are different approaches and tensions. The bishop is called to discern unity in the efforts. The two perspectives both serve the mission of the Church and need to be well-integrated and related. You need to help them understand each other and find a common language, a common vision and approach.

I can tell you I have made a lot of mistakes along the way. But like Jim Friend and our entire diocesan staff, I have learned so much that will help us to move into the future. We do not have all the answers. We still have a lot of issues we are trying to address, but we have come to realize that both data-driven and Spirit-driven processes are key.

Strategic planning in a Catholic setting needs to be Biblically-driven. Both Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI have been emphasizing and challenging every Catholic in every walk of life to be involved daily in Lectio Divina: reading, meditating, praying, contemplating and living the Sacred Scriptures. If that is happening, then our strategic planning senses are finely tuned to the Spirit, and all those human skills are ignited by the Spirit.

Our strategic planning approach needs to be Eucharistically-driven. My biggest takeaway from the past two days has been what Fr. Bryan Hehir said quoting Pope Francis that “those who live by the hope of the Kingdom of God generate and make history.” St. John Paul II said that every Mass has cosmic significance and every Mass is celebrated on the altar of the world. We have to harness the power of the Mass.

JRR Tolkien, in a letter to his son at the end of his life, writes: “I put before you the one great thing to love on this earth: the body and blood of Jesus Christ. There you will find true romance, true honor, true glory, and the true ways of all your loves upon Earth.” That’s the power of the Eucharist, and our strategic planning has to be nourished and inflamed with the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and the power of the cross. The cross of Jesus Christ is paradoxically our hope and our security. It’s the center of our world and of every conversion that we have in the course of our lives. It’s the center of our eternal destiny. So the power of the cross needs to be at the center of these beautifully orchestrated strategic planning efforts.

Finally, our strategic planning needs to be radically contemplative. It needs to be nourished by silence. There is one lesson in the holiness and mission of the lives of the saints. Openness to the will of God is nourished in silence. Dynamic and effective action finds its true direction in silence. As St. John Paul II said, in the lives of the saints, you can separate their holiness from their missionary spirit. Strategic planning finds its true direction in silence, in opening to the Spirit.

Grace builds on nature. The human virtue and developed skills of strategic planning are ignited and taken to a contemplative level by the fire of the Holy Spirit leading us. It makes all the difference in terms of how we approach strategic planning.

And so we honor and appreciate the insights of our dedicated Catholic business people, the apostolate of the laity, Vatican Council II, the baptismal call to holiness of the laity and the fact that the laity can never be patronized. When we really open up to the expertise, charisms and insights of our holy laity, the Church is deeply enriched and contemplatively energized.

My prayer is that this is what is happening in the Diocese of Allentown.

As I said earlier, we have not solved everything. We need to continually call on the

Spirit for the courage to make decisions that are timely, effective and pastorally charitable and sensitive.

We all wondered, of course, how a business icon like Larry Bossidy was going to adapt his style to the world of a diocese, an average-sized diocese at that. And the answer is he did a beautiful job – we adapted to his style, and he adapted to our’s. Since this [Roundtable] conference is about partnerships, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention what an incredible leader Bishop Barres is for opening himself up to the kind of experience Larry embraced, including mentoring and feedback. As many of you in this room know, the danger of being in a leadership position is becoming insulated from the truth, and so you have to sometimes be active in seeking the truth. And that’s the wonderful gift that Bishop Barres brought to the diocese, coupled with the boundless energy of Larry Bossidy who, as the bishop pointed out, was able to look at an avalanche of information and cut to the heart of the matter. It’s such an incredible gift, and I think he helped instill that in us, as well.

All of us have worked with and are familiar with a various types of volunteers. There’s the type that offers you his or her recommendation and everybody in the room walks out feeling good. (We now have a plan, thanks for your recommendation). Then there are the volunteers who make us look in the mirror and see the painful reality of our situation. In the Diocese of Allentown, we were dealing with a number of painful and potentially painful issues at the time the bishop brought Larry Bossidy to us.

The initial phase of our strategic planning initiative was very issues-driven. We had different subcommittees and my job as secretary for stewardship and development was to recruit some talented laypeople to staff these committees. We weren’t looking, however, for the same old volunteers, the ones who volunteer for everything. We reached deep inside the heart of the community and did a lot of interviews and networking to find people who are experts in their fields and could bring those talents to our subcommittees in areas like real estate and healthcare. We had one volunteer -- the chairman of our Purchasing Committee -- who became physically ill whenever we overspent on anything! In sum, we had wonderful people who were tigers in their own industries and who were extremely excited to work with Larry Bossidy. For two years, Larry would fly in quarterly. On those days, I would plan his schedule and every hour we would march in a new subcommittee to meet around the Chancery table and discuss the progress and challenges of each subcommittee. And I can tell you these very talented men and women loved being challenged and schooled by Larry.

How about results? From a philanthropic point of view, it’s not so surprising that our giving went through the roof. Our Bishop’s Annual Appeal and our donations to several charities that are supported by the diocese continued to grow because we really engaged some topflight folks. We asked for their opinions – as well as their expertise --and got them involved philanthropically with our endeavors.

As part of the overall strategic planning process, we put together individual tasking documents for each of the subcommittees. These were essentially a half-page of questions, and very specific benchmarks and timeframes for each subcommittee. We expected these subcommittees to not only answer these questions, but present their recommendations at quarterly meetings with Larry. Beyond the strategic planning initiative, we were actually able to get many of those men and women involved with the new boards of directors we had set up for our schools, and with our revitalized Catholic Charities board of directors. It’s been such a great opportunity to get our laity more engaged.

Larry never took little things for granted. If, for example, we decided to put a piece of property up for sale, he would challenge us with probing questions and observations, like “What’s your marketing plan for selling this property?” and “When you hire a firm to sell it make sure they have the right tools so you get the best possible price.” At the time of our strategic planning initiative, our director of Catholic Charities was retiring and so we launched a search. Larry made it clear he was a strong advocate of having top management involved in all hiring decisions, that it shouldn’t be delegated to a search firm or other party. He always thought you should hire good people because they have a huge impact on your entire organization.

Larry commented once that management by committee never works, and so having too many people involved in the process can be counterproductive. You need clear leadership. You need a group to distill the information, but then you need a clear leader in the end to make the decisions. At times, some of our committees found themselves getting bogged down with too much data. For example, our Special Learning Centers were trying to find a way to save costs and yet provide the same stellar service they always had. So instead of having these centers stall once again, Larry suggested they make decisions now for the coming year. In other words, don’t wait for the year to come and go before making your plan. Make your strategic planning happen now so that you can move forward.

Larry saw our Purchasing Committee as low-hanging fruit – as well as a winning proposition. We had some wonderful business leaders on this committee, including the chairperson, who knew from experience how to save $40,000 a year on cleaning, for example, or $50,000 on food, just by renegotiating their contracts. There are certain things that men and women who run businesses know instinctively. They know how to save a buck. And Larry’s appeal to us was simply to spread that com- mittee model as quickly as we could, to go for the low-hanging fruit.

Larry also encouraged us to be rigorous in our budgeting process. Sometimes budgets tend to get passed on from year to year without much analytical review. He advised us that it’s not simply a matter of defending the budget, but explaining it. And just through those conversations we found that maybe we don’t need this service, or maybe we need to invest more in a particular area. Larry was always looking for ways to stimulate that rigorous dialogue about every aspect of the budget on an annual basis.

Another piece of the pie that Larry helped us oversee (though it wasn’t directly involved with the turnaround) was Catholic education. We had spent three years with a group called the Bishop’s Commission for Catholic Schools, conceived and partially recruited by the bishop himself to help us turn around a 15-year decline in Catholic school enrollment in our diocese. We were bleeding about 500 kids a year from the whole system, and the hemorrhaging showed no signs of stopping.

We made an all-American wrestling champion from Lehigh University, Mark Lieberman, part of the solution. Mark was used to taking every problem to the mat and, in agreeing to spearhead our turnaround, applied the same approach to some of the challenges we faced in Catholic education. Probably the biggest and most painful part of his job was making sure everybody knew that enrollment was part of their job. If you had asked a principal back then whose job enrollment was, he or she might have said, it’s the administrator’s, or the pastor’s, or somebody else’s. We had to explain to them that enrollment was everyone’s responsibility, then make sure they got it and embraced it.

There was also the fact that over the years we had developed in the diocese a very strong top-down approach to marketing aimed at boosting our presence and visibility in the area of Catholic education. It was coupled with a bottom-up approach to getting strong leaders, strong boards of directors, and a strong advancement program in each of our schools. But I think the bottom line with any turnaround of Catholic education is that it can’t be all top-down driven by a diocese or archdiocese. There has to be strong local leadership and accountability for finance, for marketing, for development, and for all other business aspects. And principals have the toughest job of everyone; they’re the busiest people in the school. The truth is, most of them didn’t go to school to run a business, yet we’re asking them to basically be the CEO of a business. So bringing in the board of directors with their business sense and business savvy to be a resource to the principals and help them to make difficult financial decisions, help them with forecasting and projections and strategic planning, was such a tremendous blessing. And guess what? The principals love it. It’s another great example I’m proud to cite of the progress we’ve made in the strategic planning arena in our diocese over the last couple of years.

Please find a paper co-written by Bishop Barres and Larry Bossidy in Appendix 4 (pg. 71)