I’ve been reading Tony’s Morgan’s Killing Cockroaches and other Scattered Musings on Leadership.  The book is about how we can lose focus in the job/ ministry and forgetting that we are the ones who build our schedule and determines our own tasks. “You get to decide where your time goes. You can spend it moving forward. Or, you can spend it putting out fires. You get to decide. If you don’t decide, others will decide for you. Then you, too, will be stuck reacting to the urgent.”

Tony tells the story of how the title came about:

I was a city manager–kind of like the CEO of a business. I was responsible for leading an organization with a $20 million budget and 150 employees. I was the man. I wore a suit. Everyday.

One day I was working at my desk, and I heard a woman scream from the other side of the office building. Just a few seconds later, the screaming woman ran into my office. She explained that she needed help. She had found a cockroach in her office. And, for whatever reason, she thought this was a problem for the “CEO.” Remember, I was the guy who wore a suit. Everyday.

I’m not sure why I did it, but I slowly pushed my chair away from the desk. Stood up. Walked down the hall. Entered the screaming woman’s office, and proceeded to kill the cockroach. I was wearing my suit, which, of course, I wore…everyday.

It’s been about eight years since that incident. I don’t wear suits anymore, but there are still days when I come home a little mopey. I guess the frustration is all over my face. (My wife) Emily will take one look at me and ask, “Did you have to kill cockroaches today?”

Even great leaders get sucked into Killing Cockroaches. Four days before Lincoln wrote and delivered the Gettysburg Address, he has to deal with such “issues.” The Washington Post tells the whole story here of a presidential memo which “seems a startling distraction to a president embroiled in a cataclysmic and bloody war. Thus it neatly illustrates one of the immutable laws of presidential politics then and now: Individual imbroglios fester at will, anytime, without regard for the deeper national crisis.”.