How organized are you? Perhaps you don't realize it, but it is absolutely essential for you to belong to an organization before you can succeed in business.

You see no loner has ever made it to the top. Unfortunately if you are a loner you cannot succeed by yourself. You need other people. I have mentioned this before and I will mention it again and again.

Now just my mentioning the word organization probably triggers off some pictures in your mind. And no doubt each person will have a different picture that will come into their mind.

Picture of an Organization

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word organization? Do you get a picture at all?

Most people will probably get a negative picture. You get a picture of this great big machine where you are just a small little cog that fits in there somewhere and doesn't really count. Is that the way you often feel?

You say, “I work for this big organization, and the higher management doesn't even know that I exist.”

Very often the picture that we have of an organization is very negative. Some people don't even know what the word means. I went to dictionary.com to look up what organization means. Go and give it a try.

Do you know that probably more than two thirds of the definitions were obscure statements like, 'Pertaining to be organized', or 'The act of being organized' - something like that.

Using the word 'organized' with 'organization' is stupidity. Most of the definitions didn't explain to me what an organization was.

Then right in the middle of it I found this one simple definition which was kind of thrown in by somebody. And actually I thought it was the best one of the lot. Here it is:

An organization is a group of people who work together.

Isn't that profound? I thought it was awesome. A group of people working together make up an organization.

Now how does this come about? I would like to give you just a few ideas of how a group of people working together become an organization.

Know Your Place

The first and most important thing is that each person in the group must know their place. They must know where they fit. They must know what their function is, what they are supposed to do and what they are not allowed to do.

So you are working with this group of people and you know that this is your job. This is your responsibility and your duty to carry out.

Does that make you part of an organization? Not necessarily. It might make you a loner sitting in an office with a whole lot of other loners each doing their own thing.

And so you have this group of people working together, but that is not an organization is it? It takes more than knowing your place in a group to make it an organization.

You must not only know your place, but you must also know the place of those that are round about you. You must know the place of each person in the group.

And then thirdly, every single person in the group must be working towards the same goal. It shouldn't be just a bunch of people each doing their own thing.

Rather each one should be interacting with each other, knowing what the other one is doing; each contributing and complementing one another and together reaching out for the same goal.

When you combine all of these people together, what you have joined together is far more powerful than what each person has individually. Actually it is far more even than just multiplying by the number of people.

Five people each doing their own job does not give you five times the power. If they blend together as an organization, complement one another and interact with one another, they form a whole that can be many times more powerful than five times the power of one person.

That is the power of organization.

Chaos and Confusion

It doesn't come about that easily though does it? Have you ever tried to throw a half a dozen people together in an office, give each of them a job and just leave them to it?

What is going to happen? Well most of the time chaos and confusion, blame shifting, arguments and all sorts of strife and conflict will take place.

Have you ever worked in an open office that wasn't very organized; where nobody really knew what they were doing or what the other person was doing? It is chaos.

So just because you have a bunch of people working together, and even though each person has a job and even knows what everybody is doing, don't think that organization comes naturally.

It requires something a bit more than that. It requires leadership.

You Need an Organizer

To form an organization out of a group of people takes a very special kind of person - a person who is known as an organizer.

You see someone must decide what each person's place is. One person as the leader must take each person, and delegate to them a responsibility, a task and a place in the group.

Then somebody has to make sure that each person does what they were given to do. Someone has to enforce the tasks and the activities of each person in the group.

You see an organization is not simply a group of people working together. It is a group of people who have been formed together into a whole unit.

They are being held together and disciplined, motivated and organized by somebody who has the skill to be an organizer. That person will be the leader of the group.

If you want to succeed in business you only have two options open to you.

1. You must be part of an organized group or an organized team

2. If you are the owner of a business, one would think that this is the role that you would be carrying out. You must be a leader who is able to organize others

If you are not able to organize others and you are not that kind of leader, then you should not be owning, running or managing the business. You shouldn't be the one in top leadership.

You should just go out and become an employee. You should become part of somebody else's group and organization, and let someone else who has the skill of being an organizer take care of that job.

So the question is: Which one are you? Are you the person who needs to be organized, or are you the person who is capable of organizing others?

Now is it possible to learn how to become an organizer? Is it possible to develop this skill of organizing others, because like everything else in life it doesn't come naturally?

It seems that to some people though it does come naturally. Some people seem to be born with a natural skill of being an organizer.

All Four Needed in Business

I have looked at these different qualities:

1. A person who has the ability to influence others and to cause sales

2. A person who has the ability to cultivate relationships with people; to connect them together and increase the number of people you know and who know you.

These are all different kinds of people that are absolutely necessary to the efficient functioning of a business.

These four together very often do not exist in one person. And so for a business to succeed you need all four kinds of people.

But perhaps you are a very special breed. You are of a class that I would like to call the Apostolic Entrepreneur.

In the realm of ministry, an apostle is capable of carrying out all of the ministries of the fivefold ministry. And amongst the other four remaining ministries, the apostle usually is experienced in all four and is able to carry all four of them out.

In the same way, what I have covered this week are actually four different types of entrepreneurs.

Perhaps you are called to be an Apostolic Entrepreneur and have developed this skill, and by God's grace and power you are able to exercise the functions of an Apostolic Entrepreneur.

If this is the case then you would have had experience in each of these four types, and you would be qualified and able to step into the shoes of each of those.

If you are able to do that, you will be in the business realm what the apostle is in the ministry realm. You will be a master builder who will lay new foundations and establish new businesses. You will build up business organizations and will cause the wealth of the world to come into your hands.

And as an Apostolic Entrepreneur called by God, you will be able to funnel that income back into the Kingdom of God and cause the extension of God's Kingdom in the earth. That after all is what we should be doing as Christians isn't it?