Book Review: Mastering the Management Buckets by John Pearson

This is a review of Mastering the Management Buckets by John Pearson. Building on the work of leadership and organizational culture gurus like Bob Buford and Peter Drucker, John Pearson looks at twenty critical competencies he believes are essential for leading a business or nonprofit. Released by Regal in 2008, Mastering the Management Buckets from John Pearson offers some important fodder for those who do not have much leadership experience in shaping teams, meetings, and organizational structure or organizational behavior. 

I read Mastering the Management Buckets by John Pearson for a class that was part of the Master in Business Administration (MBA) program at City Vision University. The author and book are greatly influenced by the work and thoughts of Peter Drucker, Bob Buford, and other organizational leadership gurus in a similar vein. Transparently, at times, this book can feel more like a commentary on the work of others than fresh innovative work. This book, without a doubt, was written to be a comprehensive resource of practical business advice to leaders (Executive and Managerial) serving both large and small organizations, including church communities and ministries, that may not have the experience or education needed to effectively run their context. 

Pearson's Mastering the Management Buckets is broken up into 20 management buckets. The 20 buckets are categorized into three arenas: Cause, Community, and Corporation. Through his 20-Buckets, Pearson offers what he sees as the essential areas of focus and growth for organizations. Some of his buckets are more prescriptive than others. The prescriptive chapters can feel contradictory since the book starts with a warning to not overly formulate. In fact, Pearson, quoting Drucker, notes that “Religious organizations have a tendency to eternalize the tool” (Pearson 2008, 10). This note prefaces a warning to never confuse culture and tools with eternal matters. I think Pearson's buckets are good fodder for conversation, but I also think they are heavily contextualized for larger churches and ministry organizations. Pearson was notably involved with Willow Creek and Bill Hybels before the failures thrust them into the limelight in negative ways, but many of these ideas would work in a context like that more so than the average church in America. 

I think Additionally, I would say that the book started with some strong chapters, but it felt like the level of resource and input incrementally went down after the halfway point of the book. I would warn readers to be careful to chew on the meat and spit out the bones. For me, the strength of this book is not the exact information, though some of it is very helpful and good information, but rather the strength is in the way it inspires you to develop your own focuses (or buckets) in which you will focus on in your church community, business, ministry, or organization.

The first six chapters, or core competencies, all come from the Cause arena. The Cause arena “is all about our mission, our customers, our strategy, our programs, our products, and our services – and it’s about the results we are targeting" (Pearson 2008, 24). The seven chapters make up the Community arena of your organization or the core competencies that speak to people skills, intentional culture creating, healthy teams, crisis preparation, and a God-honoring culture with honoring people, donors, and volunteers. The last seven chapters look at the Corporation as a whole. The Corporation arena looks at your board, budget, delegation practices, operation methods, ways of systems, printing (or communication), and running healthy meetings. Each chapter might have some ideas that do not apply to your context, or feel superfluous, but each competency will end with some helpful to-do items to bring through reflection a realization of what your context does need to focus on in this area.

In summary, this book brings good fodder for conversation in your organization. As one reviewer on Amazon said, "But there really isn't very much content in this book to guide either a new or experienced leader of a religious non-profit and even less a business," and I would agree with that. The first half of the book helps you to accurately define your customer, but I would say that it relates it to the church in ways that could be detrimental and so singularly focused (good for a business) that leads to broken and hurting church communities that try to change from who they are to what they think a guru tells them to be. Perhaps the greatest advice in defining your character comes in the words of this challenge, “Stay on your knees until you hear from God" (Pearson 2008, 45).

There are many thoughts and ideas loosely collected in Mastering the Management Buckets by John Pearson. It reads like a more thorough, lighthearted John Maxwell leadership book, with plenty of references outside of itself for further growth. Though I was presented with some fresh ways of looking at things, I didn't find anything new for my leadership. At least, it challenged me to realign to greater intentionality in the way I lead within the church community and non-profit I work with. I plan to consider what competencies I feel are necessary for leading in the contexts I lead and begin to focus on them with greater intentionality, growth plans, and resourcing. 

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