Dr. Bell: I want to end with talking just very briefly about innovation and change, and suggest to you that as leaders, that is your responsibility, that's our responsibility, to create innovation, and change. If they simply want the leader to open the Chamber of Commerce, or the county offices everyday, and shake hands with whoever comes by, and do nothing else, we probably don't need to be paying that leader very much, and we don't need to be expecting much excitement in our community. Effective leaders are a catalyst for change. They find a way to make change happen, and we could have spent the hour . . . this would have been a good one too. Recognize also that that doesn't always make you the most popular person. Change by definition creates discomfort. But did you watch the Lady Vols the other night, or the Syracuse team when they won? Those people weren't particularly comfortable out there on the floor, they weren't casually walking around saying “how are you doing”, they were sweating, and they had stress on their face. Athletes perform well under stress. They don't perform well under distress, and as leaders, we have to be very careful in that balance, we want to put stress on our community, and pressure to change, but we don't want to move it to a level of distress, or we will simply be rebuilding what we have broken, or what we have torn down for many many years. So, the delicate balance in introducing change, is to bring in enough stress to move forward. When does the human body not have stress? One time, and it is at death. Until then, every part of the human body is in stress for its entire existence. Now that stress is something we're comfortable with, we live with that, and that is true in our organizations too: if effective, powerful organizations are lead by people who produce stress, and if the organization is comfortable with that stress, when there is no stress, that's a dead organization.

So, part of our challenge is to innovate, and to introduce change, and to put some stress and some discomfort in the organization, but not to move it to the level of distress. Most changes that we work with involve some degree of revolution, and some degree of evolution. I wrote a book about 10 years ago, and we said “some degree of madness, and some degree of method”. There are processes, even when we are dramatically changing, that we have to make sure are fundamentally sound. Again, managing meetings, an example of that, communication. But then we've got to throw the book away on some others and get creative. So some combination of revolution and evolution. Now, we've got a revolution going on in Iraq right now, the Russian Revolution had one. What happens in a revolution?

Audience member: Some chaos.

Dr. Bell: Some chaos, right. Quite a bit of it, there may even be some heads roll; they may pull down some statues. Again, the idea is statues are the past, in the rear view mirror; we need to be looking forward. So, revolution and evolution go hand in hand. And in leading that change effort, you are the leaders in that change effort: there are a lot of things that you need to bring to the table: new ideas, a sense of speed, a sense of change, even if you have to change the front door of the building, make it some place else, change the conference table. Do things that say things are not the same as they were last week or last month, and then drive that change from many directions. I said earlier that there's a lot of paths out there, we can't walk them all simultaneously, but once we choose a path, we can approach it as Memphis is doing with biotechnology, approach it many different ways. The biggest factor to failure in change is the lack of leadership.