KFC Headquarters
We had a powerful day again leadership-wise. We toured the headquarters of the Yum! – the company that runs KFC, Long John Silver’s, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and A&W Root Beer. We spent about an hour with Greg Dedrick who is president of KFC. There were lots of lessons there, but I was struck by one of his challenges being much the same as ours (or probably any church).
Walking through their headquarters, their culture and interaction just bled with the core values their company embraces…customer service (they call it “customer mania”), positive recognition, excellence…everything. You could almost taste it! I asked Greg about the challenges of getting those values all the way through the organization. He said as good of a job as they do with it, there is always the challenge of getting those values to be lived out by the 16 year old kid taking your order behind the counter. Hard…but outrageously important…because that kid is the face of KFC to the average person…not the corporate office.
True in church too, isn’t it? Our mission and our approach to ministry (the 4C’s at Suncrest) are things I believe our elders and our staff would put their ministries and maybe their lives on the line for. But how do we get this to continually move from the core of the church to the edges? The face of Suncrest in our community isn’t me or Doug or one of our elders…it is all 1000+ of us who call Suncrest home and that is multiplied by the dozens of interactions we have with people each week.
Gotta keep thinking and working to make this happen.
.Real.Greg.Lee. 