Training better leaders doesn’t mean squat

A couple of times lately people have said something about rural towns needing good leaders that really set me off.  One person (I’ve forgotten who) posted this slide from a presentation they were watching:  It says: “Core belief: The single most important factor in the future of rural communities is the presence of highly-skilled, highly-motivated…

The 1860s called; they want your old school committee structure back 

Our current way of working together is what’s killing our efforts. The way we work together in formal committee structures assumes we’re all together on a train. All the influence is up front with the engineers, and everyone else is more or less along for the ride. That’s the way organizations have worked for a…

Clouds of chaos ☁ and arrows of alignment ⬆

Back in my workforce development days circa 2003, I used this pair of diagrams with all the partnering organizations to illustrate the value of alignment: The cloud and the big arrow were our workforce system. All the little arrows were organizations, officials, programs and pieces of the workforce system. We were definitely a cloud, not…

Janet picked six big ideas for small towns 

Janet Soto Rodriguez picked out 6 themes from what I’ve written about lately that she felt were exactly what Oregon small towns most needed to hear as they work on entrepreneurship.  There are positive trends for small towns. It doesn’t matter what the numbers say about us, what negative story others are telling, what narrative…

It’s not about bringing your town back. It’s about bringing your town forward.  

“It’s not about bringing your town back. It’s about bringing your town forward.”  Last week I promised we would talk about what that looks like.   Imagine you had to start a town from scratch on the same piece of land where your town sits now. The catch is, you don’t get to keep anything. You…

How can we get more people to the table? ???

It’s one of our shared challenges: How can we get more people to the table?  Don’t have a table. Don’t have a meeting. Go do something. More people will turn out to do something small but meaningful than will turn out for something relatively difficult and not apparently meaningful. Most meetings, including those “participatory” community…

Stop reading the RFP list  ??

Dear Small Towns,  Stop reading the economic development RFP list of businesses asking you to compete with incentives to lure them in.  Love, Your entire town HowdyYou have more than enough to do to build local opportunity. You have plenty of potential business right here.  You could be focusing on supporting what Mark Riffey calls “Two…

Why duplication of effort is actually good for your town ???

How many variations of this have you heard:  We’re a small town; we can’t afford to let people duplicate efforts  It would be so much more efficient if we didn’t have so many overlapping projects  If we just knew what everyone was doing, we could streamline and eliminate all the conflicting events We already do something like…

Why I’d like to feed business plan competitions to the sharks 

I’m not a big fan of business plan or startup competitions. I especially don’t like shark-style pitch competitions. I do love that you’re taking action to support more startups and entrepreneurs. I like that you’re including training and support for everyone who participates. I can even live with the package of services you’re awarding as…