Dr. Bell: In all organizations, there are individual leaders, but there is also a leadership system, and that's a term that, again, comes out of my background, but I want to be sure you know what we are talking about there. I used to work for the US Chamber of Commerce, in Washington with the Malcolm Baldridge program, and was a Baldridge examiner, and one of the things we looked at for the National Quality Award had a criterion in it that talked about, not the individual leaders, but the system of leaders in that organization. That is what I would like us to think about, the combination of individual leaders, the things we do individually, the things we help other individual leaders do, but also to step back from our system every now and then, our community, our region, and look at the system of leadership that is in place, because certainly in the National Quality Award perspective, the system of leadership is much more important than the individual leaders are. They will change, but that system is what we need to focus on, and is what we need to have some conversation about.

There is another part to this that I think is very important for us to understand, and I have said I think leadership principles are pretty well transparent in most organizations, but I don't want to say that in this group we all look alike, and we are all the same size. Communities and regions aren't either. I used to work in Jacksonville Florida , and I can be at the airport in Nashville from my office here faster than I could be at the airport in Jacksonville from my office in Jacksonville , and I never left the city limits of Jacksonville while doing that. So, communities are different, and different organizations have different perspectives. If you are talking about economic development in Jacksonville Florida , you are talking about a very highly populated area, and it is the equivalent of at least 6 Upper Cumberland counties, so you can just look at this part of the State of Tennessee . So as we define our leadership system, we have to be pretty clear about what group, or organization, or community we are talking about. The community of Jacksonville is certainly different than the community of the Upper Cumberland , and Memphis is certainly different than Cookeville or Oneida . So, we've got a leadership system that we need to talk about, but we need to do it in the context of our system, of our particular community, and its needs.

Today I am going to use some buzzwords, and someone asked me to put this in the context of business leadership principles, so I wanted to pull a few from business, that is at least a few popular phrases in business today. They are not all used any more today than they were a few years ago, but some phrases that I think are really important for us to think about in our communities. So we are going to look at strategic alliances. That is a phrase probably everyone is familiar with. You may not be familiar with BHAGs, unless you are a fan of Jim Collins, if you have read “Built to Last”, or any of his other books, BHAGs are Big, Hairy, Tenacious Goals. We will have a slide on that a little later, it is spelled out there. But we want to look at that vocabulary, a little bit of what that might mean to us. I also want to introduce you to something that I have done quite a bit of work on since the 80s and that is the four faces of leadership, and we will try to apply it to community development, I have applied it primarily to individual leaders in their first real leadership job.

I also want to be very sensitive, looking at the difference between say, Memphis and Oneida , or Cookeville and Oneida . I want to be very sensitive to the fact that in a system, we have a sense of mission, and a sense of place, and we will talk a little bit about that. Then talk about how we lead change and how we influence change in our organizations, and about some kinds of changes, transformation versus adaptation, or stated a little differently, revolutionary change, versus evolutionary change. I said “versus” and I put that phrase up here, but I want to suggest that they don't compete, they are not antagonal or antithecal to each other, but we need to use both transformational and adaptational processes in our organizations.