VisionWorks' Breakthrough Solutions
Harnessing the Forces of Change
Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things – An Interview with Dr. Vaughn Grisham – June 2005
If you have never heard of Dr. Vaughn Grisham,
Director of the McLean Institute for Community Development at Ole
Miss, you have really missed out. He is the author of four books on
community development, an astute observer of the impact of global
trends on communities, and best of all, a terrific story teller.
Lately, his work has centered on identifying examples of ordinary
communities and leaders who are doing extraordinary things. These
are really breakthroughs – stories of community leaders who have
created breakthrough solutions that will move their communities
forward. Earlier this year, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr.
Grisham, asking him how communities can be successful in the global,
knowledge-based economy.
Question #1: Dr. Grisham, in your work in
identifying the key factors in successful community development in
Tupelo, Mississippi and other communities, what have you found to be
the keys to success in the development of communities?
Mark, it begins with something that is very
simple - it has to begin with someone who has fire in their belly,
who has the passion that this is going to get done. It starts right
there. But if it remains with an individual - the lone ranger
-
then it dies. It is these people who are not so much in love with
themselves, but are in love with the idea that we are going to get
these things done. And they move forward. So it always begins with
that individual who has that sense of passion. I normally know
after I have been to a community and meet these people whether they
are going to be successful.
It is interesting to me that often times it is
not necessarily the best idea that carries the day. It is that
person who has that passion and persistence to move forward. We
start there, but then they begin to work with other people. There
are individuals who link with others. And they will say to me
"You
know, I was thinking about the same thing."
One of the things I am intrigued with is this
concept of vision. It is a concept I have studied very carefully.
The leadership books talk about a leader as someone who has a sense
of vision. I find that often it is a very vague idea, but the idea
is that we are going to get things done; we are going to make some
improvements. That’s where it starts, and then they begin to link
together with other individuals.
Question #2: As you know, the word "strategy" in Greek means
"the art of the general," because generals
need to be able to understand the big picture as a basis for
action. How important is it for community leaders to be able to
think and act strategically – to see how their community fits into
the big picture of the global economy and how their community fits
into it?
What I find in most communities is that
various individuals bring different strengths. There has got to be
someone who understands the big picture. That is that individual’s
role. They have got to be able to understand it, and to articulate
it in a way that individuals see where their own interest lies, and
to make that connection. So someone has got to fill that role. And
invariably I find that is true. That someone has that role - of
seeing the big picture, understanding these things - and some of
these individuals have the good sense to know that they are good at
the big picture, but they really stink at details. If they get
their hands in the details, they will mess them up.
Question #3: Could you give an example of a
community or community leader that understood their community’s role
in the global economy?
The best that I have ever known is a man by
the name of George McLean in Tupelo, Mississippi. People who didn’t
know George McLean just marveled and thought he was some kind of
intellect who understood things that the rest of us didn’t. But
what George McLean would do is that he would read everything he
could get his hands on. He was reading for ideas - getting the big
picture. What was so amazing about Mr. McLean is that I don’t know
if he ever had an original idea. But by and large, he understood
that big picture, and then he surrounded himself with people who
could do the nitty gritty, who could fill in where he was weak. And
he didn’t have so much ego that it would get in the way. But no
Question, McLean was the best at this that I have ever seen. But
fairly consistently, someone in a group has to see that big picture.
Question #4: So when you talk about the big
picture, are you talking about understanding the currents and major
forces at work in the world and how they impact that local
community?
Yes. They have got to know that - that these
things come down to the community. In my research, I have studied
agriculture. And of course agriculture in the United States,
certainly in the South, has been linked to international trade
throughout its existence. In fact, at the beginning of World War I,
in 1914, something like 67 percent of the cotton raised in the South
was traded overseas. So it was pretty easy for some of those folks
to understand a more global and international picture.
Question #5: As one way to explain the
major forces and trends impacting our rural communities, we have
been talking about what we call "The Four Horsemen of the 21st
Century Economy":
• relentless innovation,
• pervasive globalization,
• global connectivity, and
• the triumph of knowledge and technology over human
toil
a)
Have you seen examples of where innovation has been a
tremendous asset to rural communities?
Rural communities were created by the steam
engine - by the trains. One of the things I often do with students
in the first semester is to say "Here’s a map of Arkansas,
Minnesota, or another state, what do you see in common with these
towns?" It is so obvious for a lot of them - they are on a
railroad. And so it was this innovation that really created small
towns all over the United States. That one kicks them off, but a
lot of innovations go the other way.
b) Can you give examples of innovations that have been
destructive to rural communities?
Yes. The coming of the tractor. And the
coming of chemicals and pesticides, which eliminated the need for
large numbers of workers. In terms of their impact, some of these,
there is no Question, began to erode the workforce. We can drive
through the Delta and see one abandoned place after another. The
innovation came, they couldn’t make the adjustment, and they went
out of existence.
c)
The second of the four horsemen is pervasive globalization,
which we can define as the movement of goods, services, jobs,
information, technology, capital, and culture across national
boundaries. Can you think of where globalization has been helpful
to rural communities?
Here again, you have got to have that
individual who sees those opportunities, who sees how this can
work. There is a fellow over in Greenwood, Mississippi by the name
of Fred Carl, who began to produce the Viking range. He took some
of the most innovative business techniques from Japan and Germany,
and blended them into the production of a range that by and large
needed a global market. It is a very expensive product, and would
need a global market. I am always intrigued by people who
understand that they can produce a product but there is a limit to
what they can sell in a certain area, because the product is so
good, it is going to last a lifetime. You are not going to have a
resale on these.
d)
What about examples of where globalization has had a negative
effect on rural communities?
Clearly I think one of the things that is
happening with globalization is losing jobs because they are going
to Taiwan or Mexico. Yes, that’s true, but I am convinced that
people would lose those jobs anyway. Those jobs are going to be
replaced with capital, equipment, or they are going to move them
overseas. I think, for example, that there have got to be people in
China with the vision to understand that they are getting their
crack at it now, but it won’t last long. At the point where it is
financially advantageous to move to capital goods and away from very
cheap labor, then by and large, you are going to have those
[industrial] jobs replaced by machinery. It is almost inevitable,
it seems to me, if in fact with agriculture you can go from 95
percent of the workforce being agricultural workers to 2 percent
using machinery and technology, the same thing is going to happen in
industries.
e)
This is a real shock to communities that depend on industrial
development, wouldn’t you say?
Yes, it is. Right now, for many of them, they
can’t see another way out. They can’t see it, because we had
agriculture, then we had our manufacturing, and it is going away. I
try to track a large number of manufacturing companies. Many of
them had a lifetime of about 20 years. The 1970s were the peak
years for small towns all over the United States, but particularly
in the South, when all these factories came in. But if you look, in
about 20 years, they ran their course. And then they began to move
somewhere else.
I talked this evening about this town of
Houston, Minnesota. Houston, Minnesota is a little town with a
population of 1020, which understands it is part of an electronic
world, and understands that you are not going to go back to an older
way. So let’s figure out - how do you deal with this
globalization? How do you deal with this electronic age? We don’t
have any computer geniuses, but we don’t need them to solve some of
these problems.
One of my favorite examples is in western North
Carolina, in which those communities - here, Becky Anderson, who was
the creator of Handmade in America. She was the industrial
developer for Bunkham County. She went to New York, trying to find
some new industries. And finally, one person said to Becky "They’re
not here. You are not going to be able to recruit any more
industries. You are just going to have to find a new way of making
a living." And so she goes back and begins to work with people who
have craft arts. The problem with a lot of people who make craft
arts is that they were good at it, but they couldn’t make a living.
She found a way of binding them together and creating a crafts arts
trail, so they are working together, rather than working in
competition with each other. Even small places can do well.
I know of a little town called Chimney Rock,
population 97, and they understand that they are not going to get
any factories, and that they are going to have to turn to other
things.
f)
The third horseman is global connectivity - connecting to the
world through the Internet, or broadband connectivity. Can you
think of examples of communities that have benefited from global
connectivity or have had negative experiences with it?
Yes, I mentioned this place Houston,
Minnesota, that is not necessarily a part of the broadband, but
understands that you can connect yourself. You can connect the
whole community. I told the story earlier this evening about this
little population of 1020 in which every household has a computer
and is online. And they are connected to the school and are
connected to one another. They are rebuilding the whole community
around this. It is very, very important. In my own area of
northeast Mississippi, we are working to bring broadband to the
area. This is a high priority. We are working through TVA and the
universities and a number of other resources. We will establish
broadband. It is too early to know how successful we will be. But
one thing I am absolutely sure of is that just the process of
working together on this will have outcomes, not just in electronic
terms. We are building networks that we can do other things with.
g) Which do you see as the greatest barrier - is it the lack of
broadband infrastructure, or is it that people don’t understand how
broadband can transform their businesses and organizations?
It’s both. We are trying to do some work in
some African-American churches now, in which some of the
African-American businessmen have a sense "Maybe I can get in on the
ground floor of this. But I need both the infrastructure and the
skills." And so in some of the churches we are teaching the adults
how to use the Internet in fairly innovative ways and looking for
different opportunities to market their goods and to work through
these things.
h) The last horseman is the triumph of knowledge and technology
over human toil. Have you seen where knowledge and technology have
been used to positive benefit in rural communities?
Oh absolutely. Absolutely. We talked
earlier about how large numbers of people lost their jobs when
tractors and cotton pickers came in. But the quality of their life
went up. The town itself began to shrink. But these people were
displaced from these jobs and in some cases, they got better jobs.
Now I don’t want to be Pollyanna about this, because the actual
truth is that the majority of these people went to the cities. This
was when welfare came in, and I interviewed many of these people,
and found that large numbers of them never held a job on a permanent
basis again.
So there is no Question that this displacement
was at a cost. One of the things I really fear is that these
innovative transitions are going to come at a cost to African
Americans and other minorities - Latinos and the like. One of the
things I am looking to do is to try to get our people involved in
the use of technology from the beginning. I work in an
African-American school in Dallas, Texas. We begin our kids at 3
years of age in school, and they are using computers at 4.
i) Does it take a different mindset to understand this era and
to take advantage of these opportunities?
Absolutely. It is a humbling and frightening
experience for an adult with better-than- average intelligence like
myself to come up against some of these electronic devices and find
myself woefully ignorant. It is a scary thought. So I know how
scary it must be to an individual who doesn’t have these kinds of
backgrounds.
Question #6: You have talked about working
together. Could you comment on the importance of collaboration and
examples you have seen of collaboration within a community and
across communities?
We began our conversation by asking about some
of the keys to successful community development. The number one key
- no Question about it - is that you must have that individual with
a passion. And then that individual has to have the kinds of skills
to link to other people to form partnerships in the community and
out. What I find in these communities is that these individuals
learn to work together. In a typical community, you have the county
government going in one direction, the city is going in another
direction, the school is going in another direction, and the chamber
is going in another direction. It happens on a regular basis.
What you want to go for is what Peter Senge
talks about with alignment, where you can begin to get people
moving, not in lockstep, but in a common direction, where they all
see their at-stakeness, and where they can move forward. Tomorrow,
I am going to show them from the corporate world examples of where
some corporations have been able to gain this sense of alignment,
and how the same principles will work in a community.
In the recent movie "The Aviator," there is a
scene in which Howard Hughes is going for the world speed record in
a plane. And he looks at the engineers, and they have all these
studs sticking out, and he says "We’ve got to eliminate the drag."
That’s a lot of what happens in these communities. To get rid of a
lot of that drag, you have to learn to work together so there’s a
meshing and there’s a moving forward. But that’s a real skill, and
there are individuals who are good at that, and who can do that.
Unless you can do that, you are lost.
What I see is these people in a community come together: they look
first at their own assets, what is it we have that we can use, and
how can we access these. Then they look to external assets - what
is it we don’t have. Maybe they need the university, or some
technical assistance. Rarely do I find the technical assistance
they need in these small towns. They are just not there. You have
to look outside yourself and find external resources, and bring them
in as part of the alignment. You are creating these partnerships
between yourself and these agencies, these technical kinds of
skills. And then you are able to move forward.
I find that they move forward on a specific
project. That is, "We are going to reduce the dropout of students
in this school. That’s our project." "We are going to clean up
downtown. That’s our project." Very specific, very focused, with a
timetable. "By June we will have done this, and who is going
to do this?"
Question #7: I remember you talking about
how ordinary people can do extraordinary things, which I find very
compelling. Could you elaborate on that?
What really gets my attention is where I have
situations in which individuals without any extraordinary resources
are able to achieve these things that are just a "wow factor." They
just knock your socks off. I sometimes tell the story of this
African-American school in Dallas - in the poorest neighborhood in
Dallas, Texas; the least educated, highest unemployment, lowest
economic level. The teachers themselves - when I looked at their
vitas, I thought it was a joke. It looked like they decided to
choose somebody with the worst grade point average from the worst
schools in the southwest and make them their faculty. And they
are. You couldn’t get good people to come into this area. Those
people began to look, to see what they could do. They began to look
at their assets, and the principal asked the teachers - what do you
need to get better? And the teachers said "We need better
training. We need better education."
Here’s where they set up a very interesting
partnership. The principal set up a network. He went to the very
best private schools in Dallas, Texas, and said "I have a group of
teachers who are low achievers, but want to get better. Here’s the
deal I am offering you. If they get better, our students will get
better. You need black students, but you don’t want to lower your
standards. We’ll give them to you. You come help train our
teachers. Then they began to train the parents on how to be
parents. We received the 91st percentile on achievement
scores, with no dropouts, no kid ever in trouble. This is the kind
of wow factor I am looking for. And I have found it in a lot of
places.
The Colquitt, Georgia story of Swamp Gravy is a
great story in and of itself, with extraordinary results. Here’s a
community in which they are trying to find their assets. And
somebody says facetiously "Well what we are good at is lying. We
are great liars." Then this one lady puts a twist on this, and
said, "We are, but we don’t call it lying. We call it
storytelling." And so what they did was put together some stories.
They hired a fine director-producer out of New York, a screenwriter
out of Tennessee, and put on these plays, sold out every time. They
started with a budget of $2,500, and they now have a budget of $2.5
million.
They used this money to buy every vacant
building in Colquitt, Georgia. One they turned into a theater,
another they turned into a bed and breakfast, another they turned
into a mini-mall, another they turned into affordable housing,
another into a community center. And so now they have created other
revenue streams. We have movie makers who want to come in there and
make movies - in a town of 1,869 people. Now that’s extraordinary
results. The largest employer is the Miller County Arts Council.
We haven’t added any new industry, nor will we ever. But we found
other assets.
Question #8: Do you relate this notion of
ordinary people doing extraordinary things to the notion of
breakthroughs and of breakthrough solutions?
I do. In many of the cases, they are
breakthroughs without necessarily technological breakthroughs. A
lot of places I study don’t have those kinds of technological
skills, but they are breakthroughs nevertheless. When I tell these
stories, there is no Question that they are breakthroughs, because
you can see the lights going on. Well, we can’t do stories, but we
can do this or we can do that.
In my own home community, we have told stories
through William Faulkner and others, but we have some assets that
will make us a good retirement community, and we are beginning to do
this. So there is no Question in my mind that these are
breakthroughs.
Question #9: Is there hope for every
community?
I wish I could say yes, but the answer is no.
I wish I could say there is hope for every community, but there
isn’t. When first I began my research, one of the articles I read
was about communities that had become extinct. There were many
communities in the 19th century that became extinct.
There were many communities that have become extinct in the 20th
century. Not all the communities will make it. It is in a very
real sense, an elementary adaptation; it is the rule of nature. If
you can’t adapt to the new environment, you will die. You are not
going to change the environment. The environment is a given. You
have to adapt to the global environment. You can’t go back. That’s
the only ball game in town. Those that adapt will survive and go
on. Those that don’t adapt will lose and die.
Question #10: But any one community
could do this, could they not?
Yes. The most encouraging for me are those
communities of 97 people - in Chimney Rock, North Carolina, where
this group of citizens decided that their most important asset was
this beautiful little stream, but they couldn’t get to it. So these
people, who worked all day, would come at night, and turn the
headlights on their cars, and lay stones along the creek bank, and
created this walkway. They attract thousands of people who come and
walk on it. This is exciting. If a community of 97 can do that,
then any community can do this.
What you are doing now, Mark, in gathering
this information, has to be done. I mentioned earlier George
McLean. Every Wednesday morning George McLean would have breakfast,
and he would have a stack of newspapers and magazines on his left
side, with his coffee and piece of toast. He would pick these up
and go through it, and looking for ideas, and put it down. And
everybody who worked for him would do the same. When you came to
work that day, he wanted to know if you found an idea that would
help this newspaper run a little better. And if you found an idea
that would help this community do a little better, he would ask them
to talk about it. In fact, there’s absolutely nothing original in
Tupelo, Mississippi, which is a model for community development.
They got their ideas from newspapers and other sources. If they
heard of an idea that was working well in Kyoto, Japan, they would
send a group there. They still have $4 million with which they will
send teachers anywhere in the United States and anywhere in the
world. If there is a new idea in Helsinki, they would send someone
to go there, get that idea, come back, and teach it to us. Those
kinds of exchanges are absolutely essential if you are going to the
high level things.
You have to continually learn. One of the
things will stop your innovation is if you don’t open up your
community to the resources in your place - your people. You just
have to listen to your people. One of the basic premises I say is
that any organization that doesn’t listen to its people, to its
constituency, will die. Listening to them is a way of building
trust.
Question #11: Finally, you know the
University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service and its
VisionWorks partners will soon be making its Breakthrough Solutions
program available to communities, with the purpose of equipping
community leaders to understand the global economy and to create
breakthrough solutions. Could you comment on it?
This is necessary. It is absolutely
necessary. The work - I draw a parallel to the work of Peter Senge
at MIT at the Sloan School of Management. What Peter Senge has done
in his creating learning organizations is to bring together the best
ideas from all kinds of corporations and share them and exchange
them. And that’s what you are doing. You are bringing these things
to these communities. Now ultimately they have to shape it in their
own image. And there is a lot of creativity there. It always has to
happen. In fact, Senge points out to these corporate leaders -
"You
can learn a lot from GE, you can learn a lot from Motorola, but
ultimately you have to take all of these parts and make it work with
your corporate culture. And the same is true with the kinds of
things you are doing. They have got to have these things. They
have to have these raw materials. They don’t have the time to read
and study on their own. It’s just not possible. So this is an
invaluable source - this is just terrific for these places.
Thank you for all the work you do here in
Arkansas. As you know, I call on you to help us in Mississippi on a
regular basis.
Dr. Grisham, thank you so very much for
taking time from your busy schedule to visit with us. It has been
most enlightening, and I know your insights will be of interest to
everyone who can see this interview.
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