In our ever-changing world “a tried and true method” may no longer necessarily apply to accomplishing the goals we have for our future. What may have worked for decades may simply no longer be effective or even relative to today. What made us successful personally, professionally and even as a community yesterday may need to be rethought, retooled or replaced today. Being creatures of habit and sometimes reluctant to change, we fail to acknowledge that often what we are doing, no matter how good our intent, how passionate our desire or how diligently we work, it just is not working.
Sometimes personally we need to rethink our own habits, relationships and desires, realigning our life with our current personal priorities and goals.
It is equally important to take stock in our business or profession. We must be able to adapt and overcome, exploit opportunities or trends, capitalize on strengths and minimize the impact of a void or weakness. We may have to do it in a completely different way than we have ever done it before. We have seen businesses doing a lot of this lately with the increases in healthcare cost and administration, minimum wage increases, impact fees, and an ever-increasing regulatory environment. If we fail here we are likely to be out of business or out of a job.
The same should be true for our community. There should be a willingness to do something different when what we are doing is not working. For example, if we are exporting the majority of our talent in the form of our graduates because they cannot find a job here, we need to be willing to change across multiple fronts to keep that from happening. To accomplish a goal like that may mean the business community, our state, our county our educators all may need to think and respond differently than we have in the past since what we have been doing to date has not resolved that problem in our community for decades.
As an organization the Chamber recognized that if we wanted to achieve our mission and be effective in our role of supporting and advocating for a fertile business environment where future generations have the opportunity to thrive, we needed to be willing to do things differently and we are. Something we will be doing differently is presenting non-partisan initiatives to our elected officials at the city, county and state level with the goal of improving our community in ways that grow the opportunities for everyone. We are hopeful that they will be willing to do something different to address some of the things that need to change.
Troy Tudor and the Entrepreneurial Spirit 