2013 Arizona Leadership Forum

2013 ARIZONA LEADRSHIP FORUM

GREAT BY CHOICE

Business

Nonprofit

GOVERNMENT

NATIONAL BANK OF ARIZONA IS

ELEVATING ARIZONA What do great leaders do? They practice disciplined thought. They have the discipline to face the “brutal facts” and the faith that they can prevail.

Jim Collins Leadership Expert, Author and Keynote Speaker

The 2013 Arizona Leadership Forum could not have come at a better time. Following the difficult years of the economic slump and the often confusing portrayal of Arizona in the media, there are promising signs that growing numbers of Arizonans have a clear and positive view of the Arizona they want for the future.

Lattie Coor Chairman and CEO, The Center for the Future of Arizona

Arizona today is experiencing the outcomes of the choices made by state leaders over many decades to systematically reduce support and investment that has marginalized residents, social service agencies that support them, and education at every level. Decisions by present and new leadership ultimately will shape Arizona’s future, as well as impact any change in status or direction today.

Steve Seleznow President and CEO, Arizona Community Foundation

Continuing the Conversation This past February, NB|AZ presented the Arizona Leadership Forum, a gathering of top executives from around the state representing the corporate, philanthropic, nonprofit, tribal and government sectors. This was a continuation of the conversation begun at the Nonprofit Leadership Forum in September 2011. However, it expanded the scope of participants and advanced the agenda to explore how leaders from all sectors can work together to improve our state. NB|AZ is proud to be leading this effort and working with such notable organizations as Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Foundation, The Phoenix Philanthropy Group and the Center for the Future of Arizona. We share a common vision for the economic development of Arizona and we believe that having serious discussions and tackling the complex issues that we as a community face are the first steps in realizing that vision.

I invite you to join us as we continue to elevate the leadership conversation by visiting nbarizona.com and downloading a copy of the 2013 Arizona Leadership Forum White Paper.

Learn what more than 700 leaders believe are the opportunities for Arizona to realize its potential as a great place to live and do business. By paving the way for a strong and thriving economic future for Arizona, we will provide opportunity for prosperity and growth.

Sincerely,

Keith Maio President and Chief Executive Officer National Bank of Arizona | Member FDIC

Founding Presenting Sponsors

Energy and Ideas for a Better World.

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Looking Back

Poor by Choice

No blaming recession for outcome of Arizona leaders’ decisions

by Don Rodriguez The Great Recession often is cited as the reason that Arizonans aren’t farther along financially than others across the country. But Steve Seleznow, president and CEO of the Arizona Community Foundation, challenges everyone to not look back just to 2008. High poverty rate, undereducated work force, income inequality — all can trace their roots back more than 30 years.

“These are outcomes, I would argue, that our leadership has led us to produce,” he concluded in his presentation “Poor by Choice: The Power of Leadership” at the 2013 Arizona Leadership Forum. Using sources ranging from federal and state government data to Arizona Indicators issued by the Morrison Institute, Seleznow told leaders attending the Forum that because Arizona voters select their leaders, “it’s an outcome … I would say that we chose.”

To demonstrate, he shared a chart indicating that for every $1,000 of Arizonans’ 1980 personal income, $137 was spent on students in the state’s higher education system while $100 was spent on K-12 students. In a trend show-

ing a drop nearly every year since then, those numbers plunged to $76 for higher education and $83 for K-12 by 2010. “The state had put a much higher value [on higher education] back then than they do now,” he expounded in a private interview later.

A separate slide showed the outcome of such support: By 2010, the percentage of Arizonans ages 50 and older with at least an associate degree beat the national average for the same age groups. By comparison, Arizonans ages 21 through 49 trail even the national average when it comes to earning degrees. “We have to say, ‘What is the work force we want to create?’” he said in the later interview. “We don’t seem to be growing our own.”

Further, he shared with the Forum audience two charts that compared appropriations from the state’s general fund. In 1979, for every $10 spent on education, $1 was spent on protection and safety. But by 2012, $3 was allocated for education for every $1 on corrections. “That’s a choice,” Seleznow told the audience. “That’s a value choice.”

Forum participants learned the most apparent result of an undereducated work force is the richest 5 percent of the state’s households have an average annual income of $274,700 — which is 17 times the income in the 20 percent of households considered the poorest.

Seleznow contended this is more than dollars and cents. “It’s about what happens when we spread this inequality on income so far when we know that the social outcome and social indicators will drastically affect our future and the quality of life here,” he said.

“We have to lead beyond our boundaries,” Seleznow challenged the audience. To do that, “we have to build new coalitions” that include philanthropy, government and private companies. “But we need more working coalitions to put in place the leaders we want and make the choices we want.”

Arizona Community Foundation azfoundation.org Morrison Institute for Public Policy morrisoninstitute.asu.edu

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Are you ready for take-off?

Phone: 1.877.524.8774 . Web: www.PhoenixPhilanthropy.com

Our Future

Jim Collins Speaks to Arizona His research provides a framework for action for Arizona leadership

by RaeAnne Marsh It starts with people. That is a basic tenet of Jim Collins’ teachings on how to effect greatness in an organization, and central to one of the challenges he gave to the assembled leaders at the Arizona Leadership Forum earlier this year.

A foremost authority on leadership and author of New York Times bestseller Great by Choice, he urged everyone there to reach out to like-minded people to join their passions to the efforts to create stronger leadership and social cohesion.

And looking ahead to next year, Collins also issued a challenge to identify the 20 most respected and influential political leaders in the state and make sure they attend the next forum.

He stressed this should be as participants, not as speakers. He indicated that he wanted to be informed of the outcome of those efforts.

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What Arizona is doing, he said, is something he has never seen another state do. In his closing speech, he said, “You have something very interesting that can be happening here. This could become one of the wonderful inflection points stories in our country and one where other people would study you to sort of figure out how this happened.”

His keynote speech, in many ways, crystalized the strategies that had already been set in motion — that the Forum was, in fact, part of — and inspired further action, as described in other articles in this Arizona Leadership Forum special section.

Collins teaches the importance of disciplined people practicing disciplined thought driving disciplined action. The impetus for the Forum lay in the recognition that nonprofits

— the organizations often closest to the social issues confronting our communities — have not been involved in the leadership addressing those issues. When a Gallup Poll was released that showed only 10 percent of the population throughout the state felt we had the leadership we needed, National Bank of Arizona spearheaded a joint effort with Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold and The Phoenix Philanthropy Group to convene a gathering of nonprofit leaders and board chairs — which evolved several months later to the Arizona Leadership Forum, adding leaders of for-profit organizations to the movement. Bringing political leaders to the next Forum follows Collins’ belief in building momentum. It was the challenge he called our “Big Hairy Audacious Goal.”

The Forum is part of a broader effort involving co-founding sponsors National Bank of Arizona and Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold working with The Phoenix Philanthropy Group: Arizona Nonprofit Leadership Initiative. The Initiative includes an online portal that allows nonprofits to share best practices; a communication plan to inform people about what’s going on in the nonprofit sector; and an economic vitality study to measure the economic impact of the activities and services the nonprofit sector provides, such as after-school care that enables the parents to hold a job.

As Forum panelist Rufus Glasper, chancellor of Maricopa Community Colleges, noted, although there is a lot of individual activity around the state, “until we raise all boats, we won’t get the results we want.”

These, then, are what comprise the “Flywheel” of Collins’ key concepts — small initiatives that build to a cumulative effect. He pointed to the importance of considering not only what would be “clicks on the flywheel,” but how to know if we are getting better.

Another challenge Collins issued was to find the root cause, a necessary step to being able to bring about systemic change. This requires embracing another of Collins’ basic tenets: It is critical to confront the brutal facts.

Greatness is not a function of good or bad circumstance, according to Collins. It is a function of choice and discipline. Facing the brutal facts and acknowledging the truth of the situation is a first step in dealing with that situation.

Arizona must embody what Collins has named the Stockdale Paradox — retain the faith that we can prevail to greatness in the end, while retaining the discipline to confront the brutal facts of our current reality. He named this belief structure after Admiral James B. Stockdale, who had described to Collins how he had survived being a prisoner of war for several years — he kept an underlying faith that he would one day be free, but avoided setting himself up for repeated disappointment in tying that belief to a hoped-for calendar date. However long it took, he kept his mind on the image that it would ultimately happen.

Collins iterated a triangle whose three points, taken together, define a complete per-

son: success, growth (he noted that growth, not failure, is the opposite of success) and service.

He directed a third challenge to Arizona: to have an objective for each of those points on the triangle.

The best leaders, Collins said, are those who combine humility with a strong will. They push toward a greatness for the cause — whether a business organization or a social issue — rather than for themselves. It is leadership in the service of a mission rather than personal aggrandizement that defines greatness and what he classifies Level 5 leaders.

Underscoring Collins’ studies on leadership is the idea of determining what is empirically working, and then utilizing strategies to make that work on a bigger scale. His final challenge to the Arizona Leadership Forum participants was to build on the work done in the Center for the Future of Arizona’s report “The Arizona We Want 2.0.” He challenged each person to pick one of the eight identified areas — educa-

tion, job creation, environment, infrastructure, healthcare, young talent, civic engagement and community involvement — and assess how he or she spends time and what kinds of clicks he or she creates on the “flywheel.” But his message circled back to, whatever our personal “hedgehog” to which we devote passionate energy and at which we feel we can be best in the world, the first task is “who” — who are the best people to get on board with us or for us to get on board with to further the effort.

Each person should find three people who are capable and respected but who are not yet engaged and recruit them for the brutal fact he or she wants to address, and charge each of them with recruiting three more. That, he said, is how to create change.

The Arizona We Want Initiative thearizonawewant.org Jim Collins jimcollins.com The Phoenix Philanthropy Group phoenixphilanthropy.com

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Representation

A Failure to Communicate Voters play a role in lawmakers’ weak leadership

by Don Rodriguez Primary races in recent years often decide winners without the need for runoffs, providing simple solutions in the search for leaders. But for Lattie Coor, quick decisions when electing leaders is symptomatic of a larger problem: the disconnect between candidates and the people they intend to represent. “When the primary determines the outcome, we do not have the level of interaction we need to have,” says Coor, chairman and CEO of the Center for the Future of Arizona. “If you have a large turnout in the primary, that causes candidates to be more active in seeking supporters and discussing issues.”

Besides leading to needed runoffs, those discussions can reveal common ground between officials and their constituents. Says Coor, “Citizens and elected officials don’t have a strong bond,” especially at the Legislature. One of the Center’s findings in its “The Arizona We Want 2.0” report was, despite the high consensus found among citizens on key issues, only 10 percent of Arizonans believe their elected officials represent their interests.

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Coor touched on this issue as moderator of the panel “Leading Change for a Greater Arizona” at the 2013 Arizona Leadership Forum. He and others on the panel emphasized that direct contact is critical for both sides when it comes to working with the Legislature. “I think we have to engage, not running down there because of our individual special-interest groups but trying to get them to engage in a long-term planning dialogue,” said panelist Doug Pruitt, board chair of Greater Phoenix Leadership.

But that doesn’t mean ultimately letting legislators do what they want. In this regard, panelist Rufus Glasper, chancellor of the Maricopa Community Colleges, shared with the Forum audience his recent experience appearing before the Workforce and Higher Education Committee to discuss three bills, “The posture that we chose to take was to first tell them about the community colleges, tell them about what our role is and what the expectation is.”

Center for the Future of Arizona arizonafuture.org Greater Phoenix Leadership gplinc.org

An update

A Shared Vision of Arizona

Leaders of not-for-profit and for-profit organizations build momentum toward a collective movement

by Don Rodriguez

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Lattie Coor (left), chairman and CEO of the Center for the Future of Arizona, moderates the “Leading Change for a Greater Arizona” panel discussion with panelists Gonzalo de la Melena, president and CEO of the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; Juanita Francis, president of The F2 Family Foundation; Rufus Glasper, chancellor of Maricopa Community Colleges; Courtney Klein Johnson, co-founder of the SEED SPOT; Tony Penn, president and CEO of United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona; and Doug Pruitt, board chair of Greater Phoenix Leadership

the Forum was one of the most impactful days I’ve spent in terms of quality of information presented, inspiration provided, tools people walked away with, and general feeling of trying to improve what’s happening in Arizona.”

For Maio, one of the key takeaways from the forum was a noteworthy finding in a pre-event survey of registrants: Arizona doesn’t seem to have a lack of leaders, just a lack of leaders working together. “We can’t fix this with our Leadership Forum but what we can do is start the conversations, start trying to move the ball,” he says. “It’s that leadership group working together toward a common vision.”

His bank’s work with Arizona leaders actually began before this year. In September 2011, National Bank of Arizona was joined by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Foundation and The Phoenix Philanthropy Group to sponsor the Arizona Nonprofit Leadership Forum, an invitation-only event for more than 250 key decision makers from nonprofit organizations statewide. Maio says the decision was made to eliminate the divide between nonprofit and for-profit businesses by expanding the forum this year to include top executives from both sectors. “We just wanted to take a leadership position in convening those groups

together, and not define that by tax status but just by leadership,” he says of the focus shift.

What Comes Next?

Leveraging insights collected at the forum, a white paper was distributed at a follow-up town hall meeting in May and feedback from those attendees was added to an earlier survey to produce a final version published in September; a website has been created to encourage organizations to share information on their commitments and actions; a Web portal will be created; and an economic vitality study will be conducted, says Maio.

In addition, town halls will continue the dialogue about promoting learning and communication across a variety of sectors and geographies. “By working together as unified leaders, non- and forprofit companies can make the biggest impact on the future of our state,” he says.

Pruitt would like to see what he calls the forum’s “missing link” — political leaders — become part of the action. “They need to be at the table and they need to become part of the solution,” he says, and the leaders must hold accountable those who let ideology get in the way of finding and creating real, positive solutions as well as find and support others who will. We need to “keep the pressure on to address the

Photo courtesy of Ben Arnold Photography

An innovative initiative to identify and support Arizona’s leaders and, more importantly, help get them on the same page when it comes to guiding the state’s future, was launched this year with the Arizona Leadership Forum, a gathering of more than 700 top executives from around the state. They represented Arizona’s corporate, philanthropic, nonprofit and tribal sectors. The Feb. 8 event “allowed us to start a higher level of conversation about how we can work together to improve our environment,” says Keith Maio, president and CEO of National Bank of Arizona and a key organizer of the event.

The keynote speaker was author Jim Collins, whose books such as Good to Great reflect his research into successful companies and organizations. “He was actually very intrigued that we were convening this for-profit/notfor-profit group across the state,” says Maio, “and to his knowledge this is the first time he has seen that from any state — in other words, putting that kind of attention and action toward a collective movement.”

The day ended with the panel “Leading Change for a Greater Arizona,” led by Lattie Coor, Ph.D., president emeritus of Arizona State University, that also featured J. Doug Pruitt, board chair of Greater Phoenix Leadership and retired chairman of The Sundt Companies, and community volunteer Juanita Francis.

Attendee Sarah Suggs, CEO of O’Connor House, feels part of the event’s value was in bringing together divergent views for a respectful dialog toward finding consensus. And Collins “made it uncomfortable for someone to be in the room and not look the problem in the eye.” Danny Opendem, president of Southwest Austism Research and Resource Center, credits Collins’ message about being clear as to purpose and making sure to have the right people in place with already having an impact on his organization, and he shares, “I thought

An Initiative

Arizona Indicators arizonaindicators.org Arizona Leadership Forum phoenixphilanthropy.com/forum Greater Phoenix Leadership gplinc.org National Bank of Arizona nbarizona.com The Phoenix Philanthropy Group phoenixphilanthropy.com

Building a Dream Freeport-McMoRan launches effort to teach women entrepreneurs

by Don Rodriguez Women around the world imagine owning their own businesses one day and leading their families to better lives. With the endorsement of the Clinton Global Initiative, multinational mining company Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold is working to make those wishes come true with DreamBuilder, a Web-based business skills training and certification program that offers teaching, tools and resources to women.

Developed with Thunderbird School of Global Management, the program caught the attention of the initiative launched by former President Clinton that uses a model known as “Commitments to Action” to inspire new, specific and measurable activities and partnerships, explains Tracy Bame, president of the Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Foundation and director of social responsibility and community development for the company. DreamBuilder fit the bill.

After the initiative became a partner in the conceptual phase, beta testing began in August 2012 with 78 women at varying stages in their businesses’ lifecycles. They lived in and around Arequipa, Peru; Copiapó, Chile; and Calama, Chile — all locations of Freeport-McMoRan mines. Now it’s time to come home. At the Clinton Global Initiative–America meeting this past June, American DreamBuilder was announced with the initial goal of reaching 4,500 women in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas before opening to others across the nation. The English version is under development, with a public launch expected in August 2014.

Bame says American DreamBuilder can help address some of Arizona’s challenges, such as job creation. It even can support the Arizona Leadership Forum and its mission by linking to nonprofits serving women or entrepreneurs interested in partnerships. “American DreamBuilder will give women the skills they need to take their dreams to a new level,” she says. “It will be designed to not only build business knowledge but the confidence to put that knowledge into action.”

Clinton Global Initiative clintonglobalinitiative.org DreamBuilder dreambuilder.org Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Foundation freeportinmycommunity.com Thunderbird School of Global Management thunderbird.edu

Photo courtesy of Todd Rosenberg / Clinton Global Initiative

real issues in front of us and work to get the collaborative spirit that was in that room [at the forum] alive.”

To keep the momentum, Francis says the state’s best leaders should be identified and supported. “Coalesce around one or two specific initiatives and support our best leaders to make those things happen successfully,” she says.

Even those who didn’t attend the forum can play a part. Laurel Kimball, founding principal of The Phoenix Philanthropy Group, urges individuals to select an actionable item they are passionate about, such as retaining young talent in Arizona or protecting the state’s natural environment, then share metrics about the results of their involvement on the forum’s and Arizona Nonprofit Leadership Initiative’s shared website.

She also encourages residents to become well-informed on facts about our state at such websites as the Morrison Institute for Public Policy’s Arizona Indicators. “We hope that individuals and organizations will seek to be part of the dialogue about Arizona’s pressing issues as we reach out to leaders from the nonprofit, business and governmental sectors in all parts of Arizona, of all ages and backgrounds,” says Kimball.

Pruitt is encouraged about what lies ahead, saying the time is right for Arizona to begin to address the issues that are in front of us and become a very different state in the next few years.

Most people he knows are willing to work to make Arizona better if they know goals have meaning and can be fruitful. “I think first, you have to ask, and secondly, you have to show that what you are doing is about adding value, making Arizona better for future generations and that what you are doing is sustainable.”

Tracy Bame with Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Kellie Kreiser of Thunderbird School of Global Management and Emad Rizkalla of Bluedrop Performance Learning at the 2013 CGI America meeting announcing a new Commitment to Action, American DreamBuilder: The Women’s Business Creator

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