"Alex Bogusky built the country's slickest ad shop using Apple products. His next challenge: Persuade people like him to buy Microsoft's stuff."

That leading sentence to a recent article in Fast Company magazine sucked me in to the article. The story is about an unlikely firm (albeit "hot" and "hip") hired to overhaul the image problem that has plagued Microsoft for...what, about 600 years?

I don't know if Alex can do it, but I did enjoy the article, and found three great quotes in the article:

• "To try to be cool is to not be cool. To chase cool, you're chasing something that already exists, which means you're always going to be on the wrong side of it, you'll always be following."

Uh, wake-up call, how many times do we do this as church leaders?

• When asked if Alex was going to force his staff to stop using Macs in favor of Windows machines since Microsoft was now their largest client, he replied, "It's not a matter of forcing people. It's getting them to want to use it. If you can't, you're not going to do great advertising."

Rather than tell your staff or leaders that they must attend a service or have to be in a small group, how about make it so compelling that they won't stay away?

• "As the company draws bigger, more traditional clients, the risks grow proportionately. Edginess and risk taking mean nothing without results."

You can be traditional and effective. You can be edgy and ineffective. Edgy might get you on a top 100 church list somewhere, but it doesn't mean you are making disciples. Let's focus on disciple-making, and if edgy gets it done, then go for it.

According to the article, the new Microsoft ad campaign (being developed by Alex's company) is slated to break this month. Should be interesting!