With a cover made to look like an organizational chart (indeed, the author believes in hierarchy), and the catchy, contemporary title, a potential reader might assume the content is similar to the business leadership manuals that have been popular over the past thirty years. In fact, the reader wouldn’t be far off. The focus of the book is primarily focused on non-profit organizations and how to lead them. Institutions, Smith iterates repeatedly, matter and they are “essential to human flourishing.” For an organisation to be effective, members must have institutional intelligence: “the wisdom of working effectively within an organization with others … by understanding how institutions work, how they can be effective, and how all people in the organization can contribute to the whole system.” This book is relevant not only for church planters—just starting new institutions—but also for seasoned pastors and other non-profit leaders who want more synergy between the institution’s mission and its operations.

The book contains ten chapters, a conclusion, and three appendices. Chapter one introduces seven “distinctive” features of an effective organization. These features include mission clarity, appropriate governance, quality of personnel, a vibrant culture, financial resilience, appropriate ‘built space’, and strategic alliances. Indeed, these seven characteristics comprise the remaining chapters of the book.

Good governance is another distinctive feature of an effective organization. In chapters three and four, Smith posits that institutions must ask themselves questions about decision-making and implementation. Effective organizations not only make good decisions, but they have the capacity to implement those decisions. Leaders should have a clear understanding of how to use power responsibly and to whom they are accountable. Smith specifies three “entities” of an effective organization: executive, board, and practitioners. Each entity needs to know what it is responsible to achieve. As a learning organization, effective institutions get the wisdom and knowledge they need to make good decisions and ensure they can carry them out.

David A. Livermore, Cultural Intelligence: Improving your CQ to Engage our Multicultural World (Baker Academic, 2009), 288 pages, ISBN 9780801035890.

What is ‘cultural intelligence’ and why is it important? In today’s multicultural and multilingual world, it is more necessary than ever for church leaders and lay believers to learn how to express “love and respect for people who look, think, believe, act and see differently than we do” (11). This becomes all the more pressing when we realise that several different generations or even nationalities may be present in the churches and communities in which we live and worship. This is the driving force behind David A. Livermore’s excellent introduction to cross-cultural work and ministry. This guide is suitable for all leaders who have a heart to “reach across the chasm of cultural difference” (11) and, in this reviewer’s opinion, is destined to become a classic in its field and the benchmark against which future works will be based.

The book is split into four parts, covering the four areas of cultural intelligence (shortened to CQ), a new model for cross-cultural work and reflection. In the first part, “Love CQ,” Dr Livermore argues that the basis of all successful cross-cultural work must be genuine love for others and not simply “politically correct tolerance” (20). Only once we are sure that this is our foundation can we move on to actually learning about other cultures.

The second part, “Knowledge CQ,” maps out the contours of culture as a concept and gives examples of its different representations in everyday life. In chapter 4, for example, the author summarises the typical values of the prevailing socioethnic culture of the USA, while in chapter 5 he wrestles with the complicated task of defining culture. The last three chapters of this part cover the nature of different cultural domains, from socioethnic to organisational culture (chapter 6), the relationship between language and culture (chapter 7) and a general overview of a variety of cultural values, overlaid on a series of sliding scales (chapter 8).

The second deficiency is that in chapter 5, where he sets out to define culture, no settled definition is actually presented. Instead, we are offered a handful of “useful” definitions and a tour around common metaphors used in discussions of cultures (80-81). While it may indeed be true that the very nature of culture makes it difficult to define, and while previous definitions may not have been too helpful (80), the lack of a settled working definition here is disappointing.