Getting too comfortable, complacent or downright smug is rarely a good thing — for individuals, organizations or even metro areas like Atlanta. The world moves too quickly for laurel-resting, we believe.
That realization makes all the more intriguing efforts like “(co)lab — A Collaborative Leadership Summit,” which recently concluded its inaugural session. This local gathering of thinkers and doers from the public and private sectors, as well as academia, is exciting in its promise because it shows that an impressive core of metro Atlanta’s leaders remain focused on the future’s opportunities and challenges.
Which is good, because create-a-new-box thinking is a big part of what enabled Atlanta to bolt past competing cities to become the complex, teeming — and at times maddeningly inefficient — colossus that we are today.
But what about tomorrow? The big questions for this metro are where do we go next? And how do we get there? Think tank-type efforts like (co)lab can help the region figure out the answers and begin moving to implement them at both a grassroots and 30,000-foot levels.
That’s important in a time when our political leaders are too-often lost in the politics of paralysis or fighting to maintain status quo ways of doing things. Yes, we need a stabilizing focus on today — that’s a valuable base for all else that follows.
Yet, Atlanta didn’t gain 4 million people in 40 years and become a go-to destination by just being stable, if not staid.
Atlanta set the pace by being unafraid to make the long, risky leaps that would either launch us to the front of the pack or collapse us into a heap as other cities zipped past us. Almost always, we landed on our feet when it counted.
That’s not a given going forward. Complacency or bad moves can stall progress.
So, getting smart, ambitious people together in public forums to talk about our strengths, and weaknesses too, can be a powerful tool to maximize our chances for future success.
In coming to understand the value of efforts like (co)lab, it helps to understand that Atlanta succeeded in large part because a course of action outlined by an oft-quoted economist became part of our metro’s DNA. In introducing the concept of “Creative Destruction,” Joseph Schumpeter wrote that, “Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.” The baseball great Satchel Paige put it more simply: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”
So it’s to the good that about 1,400 people signed up for (co)lab’s sessions at The Woodruff Arts Center and elsewhere. The summit’s handbook set up Atlanta’s situation this way: “The greater Atlanta region faces tremendous opportunities for growth in talent, innovation and education. Yet to set the stage for what’s possible, we first must confront reality.”
That set the stage for broad panels featuring political, business and education leaders from across the area and U.S.
From that beginning, more-targeted panels focused on questions of “Transforming Education,” “Cultivating Innovation” and “Attracting and Retaining Talent.” We’d agree that those are key questions facing this metro.
And it was worthwhile to see entrepreneurs and C-level businesspeople sharing the spotlight with college professors, policymakers and others. The impressive speaker list points toward Atlanta’s tall stature in drawing thinkers here to get ideas going. We should take advantage of the thoughts all participants helped generate.
Lastly, we’d be remiss in pointing out that programs like (co)lab are perhaps most promising in that they point a way forward toward improved collaboration across our town. That’s an important consideration in a place where “regionalism” has come to be viewed as a dirty word among many.
Like minds don’t always think alike, but surely they can find targeted, common purposes shared across this vast region. Who can be against fueling job-creating entrepreneurship or revamping schools to produce graduates who can compete for those jobs? If Atlanta can’t create an environment to foster such progress, other cities will. Commonsense and Joseph Schumpeter assure us of that.
To think otherwise is foolhardy precisely because economies never stand still — at least not successful ones. That means Atlanta has an insatiable need for smart, new thinking and action focused on our prosperity and fixing our biggest problems. We mastered that game in the past. We can’t dull our edge now.
