Dr. Bell: I want to shift from the community to you personally for just a minute, and then broaden it out to the community. As we move into leadership, I think we need to understand that there are at least four faces as leaders that we have to put on out there today. There are many beyond four, but there’s four primary ones, and I want you to think about as a personal thing, but also what it means in terms of our community.

The first face of leadership is influencing upwards. We face upward a lot. I have a bunch of bosses, the State Legislature, the Chancellor, and the Board of Regents. We all have a bunch of bosses, but I would suggest to you that influencing upward is one of the most significant leadership roles we should play. We tend to think of leadership as influencing subordinates, but I am not at all convinced that that is…that is supervision, that is not real leadership in most organizations. So we need to think as individuals, and also our communities, we need to think about influencing upward. We also need to be certain that we influence the people that report to us, and, in many cases are part of our leadership team. We also need to influence laterally, that is, our peers. Those may be our volunteers in the community, it may be others that hold a similar position to us. If you are president of the Chamber of Commerce, there are other chambers around, and the question is: how do you influence them? And last, we need to influence outward, that’s what economic development is about, is influencing our customer base, and influencing others that might be defined as a customer.

Now I want to take you back to 1954. Peter Drucker said “one of the keys to leadership is understanding who is the customer”, and that is one question I would like for you to think about for just a minute too; for all of our organizations one of the vital questions that we have to ask is “who is our customer? Who are we really trying to get to, and get them to buy our economic development sales pitch?” So, as we get into that, we have to get into again, what are we selling, and who are we trying to sell it to? If we haven’t answered those questions as a leadership organization, or as an economic development organization, it is going to be very hard to focus the energy, and the leader needs to help focus the energy of the community. So, what are we selling, and who are we selling it to, and then, who or what is the competition? Is the competition the county next to us, is it Kentucky, here in Tennessee we talk a lot about Kentucky and the […], and other incentive based programs that we don’t offer in Tennessee. Who is the competition, and then how does the customer view us? Have you gone out and asked a recruiter, as Newsday tried to do this morning, regarding that survey, what they see, good and bad about our region, and what they see relative to the competition? Again, when we look, they tend to mention incentive packages or the lack thereof. But as Newsday says, we are still in the Top Ten in the United States. We need to leverage that, we need to see that there are ways to move forward on that. But how does the customer view us relative to the competition, and how do we learn from the customer and the competition? We can get our volunteers, and our staff employees, our leadership team, and move to a learning organization, to begin to try to understand how we fit in with our competition, then we have made some major, major steps forward.