Dr. Bell: Process management. One of the things that we really need to think about is the idea that everything that we do in a business, everything that we do in an organization, we do in processes. You brush your teeth in a process, I will bet you 90% of that has no variation in it: you take toothpaste with the same hand, you brush with the same hand, you do a lot of those things, and you could time yourself, about 80 or 90% of them very common. Everything we do in life, from waking up to going to bed is in a process. We need, as leaders, to go back to some very basic processes, and understand that if we don’t do them well, everything else starts falling apart. So, leaders manage those processes well. One of them is they manage meetings very well. They understand that if they mess up that meeting, they frustrate people just as much as the BHAGs will. Within that meeting, business practices say you manage time very well, you have specific agendas, you have the right people at the meeting. Have you ever been to one where you say “I’m not sure why I’m here, I don’t know who invited me really, it just showed up on my calendar”, and you know, you are just a bedpost at the meeting. Sometimes those are nice surprises, but most of the time, you’ve probably got twice as many people there as are really going to be productive. You need the right people in the right seat at those meetings, with a specific agenda, and a time management plan, that the leader, the chairperson of that meeting, is going to put in place.

And then, another process, and Andy talked a little bit about this in the first session, another process that’s really vital is that whatever media we put out, whatever communications we put out, whatever promotions that we do, we do them superbly. If we want to convince a customer that they want to come to our region, our town to do something, we need to do it superbly. Now, we all know, all of us that work in economic development, that whatever we send to them, that’s only part of their study process of our community. Have you ever benchmarked your newspaper, or the media that they put out, of the image of your community? I can’t tell you how many times . . . we have a student newspaper, and it’s supposed to be a learning experience for our students, but they have the worst headlines on the days that we have the largest number of parents on campus. And again, what the customer sees has a lot to do with that perception of our community. So, all of our media, the stuff we put out, as well as the other stuff our community does, have to be looked at as part of those basic communication processes that are part of the leadership game. So that’s process management.