At our recent leadership retreat (and the follow-up Webinar on Jan. 5) presenter Monique Brumbach mentioned a book with the intriguing title Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). Bobos are bourgeous bohemians, who comprise "the new upper class" according to Brooks, and have shaped our contemporary culture in multiple ways. In his chapter on business life, Brooks describes how bobos have created new companies "that have stood the Organization Man on his head." Ironically, these companies seem to reflect the networking model I present in my earlier blog (5. Moving ahead through Networking), which in turn reflects the biblical model of Ephesians 4. 

"Companies today, the mantra goes, have to think biologically. They have to create lean, decentralized, informal participatory systems. They have to tear down rigid structures and let a thousand flowers bloom. The machine is no longer held up as the standard that healthy organizations should emulate. Now it's the ecosystem. [I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase . . . for we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field.] It's the ever-changing organic network that serves as the model to define a healthy organization, filled with spontaneous growth and infinitely complex and dynamic interconnections."

This paragraph jumped out at me as an expansion on the networking I speak of in blog 5. Brooks is thinking of the internal system of an organization, but we can apply it to the way an organization interacts with other organizations too, especially within the at-least-theoretically non-competitive environment of religious organizations. I doubt that the author has the Bible in mind at all, but his last phrase--"filled with spontaneous growth and infinitely complex and dynamic interconnections"--is almost a paraphrase of Ephesians 4:16, "from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love." So as we build on the networking model we not only feel up-to-date but, far more important, we reflect timeless biblical truths as well.