Dr. Bell: Well hello again, it's good to be with you in this interactive way of communicating. We've been talking about leadership and you have been reading about leadership and studying about it in several different modes. You remember that we have talked about leadership as being a balancing act; the leader is constantly balancing relationships, relationships between people, and relationships between people and tasks that the organization or the leader hope to achieve, and achieve well. I want to share a little something with you about relationships and tasks, and do it a little bit in the perspective of the Malcolm Baldridge National Performance Excellence framework, what was called the National Quality Award. I have worked a lot with that program, and I really do like the framework that is used to build a model for what successful business practice is all about.

In the Baldridge framework, leadership is the first element looked at in any business or organization. Leadership drives the rest of the process, and it's the first category that is looked at. Another contextual thing within that framework is that the system focuses first on the approach that is taken to a problem, then the deployment, how the organization works toward achieving success, and then, the results that the organization actually achieves. So, approach, deployment, and results: some things that a leadership class, and a leader, have to think about very very frequently. When you look inside the Malcolm Baldridge framework, after you look at category 1, leadership, the next thing that comes up is strategic planning. A leader has to be involved on a very significant level with planning beyond the day and the week and the month: planning beyond operations, and thinking about the strategy of the organization. So strategic planning is a very important part of the leader's function. You may remember that we quoted Warren Dennis, and your textbook talks about Warren Dennis, about the leader's function, or the leader's job to turn vision into reality. You also may remember Napoleon's quote, that a leader is a dealer in hope. I think both of those are important when we think about the leader's role in strategic planning. Turning vision into reality is a significant part of the leadership challenge. That means the leader has to understand the environment in which the organization operates, and has to be sure that all the players in the system are comfortable in that environment, and understand it. It is important that that leader operate inside the environment, and actually get out and understand deeply what the systems, and pressures and forces are in a given environment.

It is also important that the leader understand not just what is in the environment, but how the organization can influence that environment. Understanding the environment, and then understanding how to influence the environment are vital parts of strategic planning. In addition to that, a leader has got to be concerned with defining a new reality. Again, Dennis talks about turning visions into reality. A big part of that is defining the new reality. That is what the strategic plan tries to do: move out beyond the horizon, and beyond existing realities, and link existing reality to future reality. A leader, a dealer in hope, and a dealer in vision, is the person that's got to be vitally involved in that process. A leader also has to be a catalyst in helping people embrace change, helping them think about that new reality, that new future out there, and helping them be excited about moving the organization toward that.