Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. A conversation designed to help

leaders go further faster. On today's podcast we'll begin a two-month

conversation about some of the lessons we've learned in our first 20 years.

Andy, I don't know about you but it's hard for me to believe it's been 20 years.

Yeah, October 1995 we became an organization and off we went and just celebrated

our 20th with some friends and family yesterday and it's like a blink.

It is and you know I'm really looking forward to these podcasts because we're

going to dig in to just a few of the things that I think we've learned. The

thing that'll make these two podcasts unique is that we're not saying here's

some things we think everybody should do. What we're going to talk about are the

things that we actually did that actually made a difference. And one of the

challenges in leadership literature is you read the book, you read the

article, you underline them, you hand them out to your team, you discuss them for

months and you wonder is this important? I mean it all seems important.

Anybody that can theory this should work. Yeah, compelling writer can make

anything sound important and you think oh my gosh if we don't embrace this

principle or maybe this really is the solution. And so we talk about those

kinds of things and there's value and all that. So for these next two podcasts

Lane and I are going to take the things that actually made a difference and

talk about those. In other words knowing what we know now if we were to go back

20 years and start over of all the things we read of all the things that we

thought were important of all the things that we taught our staff. You know what

...