September 12: What's the point, again?

Last week we looked at where we're going. Today we'll take a moment to consider why we're going. So we asked John F. Smith, a mainstay on the Economy League's board of directors and a participant in the 2005 Chicago trip, to point to a success story from the first Leadership Exchange.

He found one easily: Michael Nutter.

"We thought Chicago had a lot to teach us," Smith said, "and it did. But the most important thing we came away with was a sense of ourselves." Smith said the group left Chicago feeling that with the right kind of teamwork, its collective values could be put to work to overcome its collective frustrations. The time felt right to start literally campaigning for a better Philadelphia.

"Of the people on that trip, Michael Nutter really took that literally," Smith said.

Then-Councilman Nutter had already established good government as one of his core issues. He'd been pushing ethics legislation since 2004. But upon returning from Chicago, he ratcheted up a campaign to win voter approval for a city ethics board, and he leaned on his Exchange cohort to help. The group quickly raised almost $40,000 dollars to help the initiative pass.

It wasn't long after that success that Nutter left Council to launch what few predicted would be a victorious run at City Hall. Ethics became more than just a plank in his platform; it came to virtually identify the Nutter brand. At a time when voters were openly tired of City Hall's culture of scandal and corruption, Nutter skillfully used his past work on the issue to distinguish himself from departing mayor John Street. And when the Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed him, it wrote: "If you want ethics reform, go with the guy who has already done it against the odds."

And while Michael Nutter's political success depended on countless factors, a clear line connects the Chicago trip, with its lessons in collaborative campaigns and regional reform, to the successful branding of Nutter as a street-smart champion of ethics.

"We felt our oats at that time," said Smith. "We regard Nutter's story as that of a person who succeeded in doing what he said he was going to do."

So as this year's Leadership Exchange group heads for Atlanta, Smith is looking forward to more than just learning new facts or seeing new strategies in action. He's looking forward to seeing his fellow Philadelphians get a jolt of new energy. "Everybody needs to be taken out of their comfort zone," he said. "We think we're pretty smart, and then you go somewhere and they shake you up."