Day 2: September 25

More than one Leadership Exchange attendee has noted that so far, the Atlanta panelists aren't quite as "on message" as their counterparts in Chicago were. Those observers noted something else: that that's a good thing. A lack of forthrightness certainly wasn't a problem at Thursday morning's first session, which explored the nature of civic leadership in Atlanta.

We heard a detailed history of some of the most recent civic success stories: landing the Olympics, reforming the public housing authority, and rescuing financially troubled Grady Hospital. Two of those three were almost wholly driven by the city's business community. The third, housing, involved significant private sector collaboration.

That makes all three prime examples of the Atlanta Way, in which business leads and government follows. Securing the Olympics, for example, was entirely the product of what P. Russell Hardin of the Woodruff Foundation called "brash, audacious private leadership" that depended on "exactly zero dollars" in public money.

Likewise, according to Hardin, the reclamation of Grady Hospital began when the Chamber of Commerce decided it needed to address the fact that a critical public institution had been "gushing red ink for a decade." The Woodruff Foundation followed the Chamber's lead and financed the work that led to the creation of a new board to run the place. "It has been a monstrous struggle," Hardin said of the politically sensitive takeover. "But we have a new operating board who are going to pull Grady out of the ditch. We made a huge investment."

And while neither of the morning's other two panelists contested the value of these particular achievements, they weren't afraid to suggest that Atlanta's style of civic leadership may not have evolved far past the traditional five-guys-in-a-room style. Alicia Phillipp runs the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta, and she has spent 31 years in the city. "Things have changed," she said, "But perhaps not as much as they should."

Her main critique is that the city's minority and community voices aren't called to the proverbial table until there's a crisis - and even then, those that are called are too politically compromised to effectively check the power wielded by the city's big players. The city has failed, she said, to develop a diverse civic leadership. "It's not enough to say, ‘People aren't ready to be there,'" she said. "We have to get them ready to be there ... and it's important that they're not so compromised by the fundraising they have to do for the organizations they work for, that they can't make an honest contribution to the conversation."

Journalist Maria Saporta was more blunt: "The five guys are still meeting. They meet at the board of the Woodruff Foundation. I don't know the age of the youngest - maybe seventy?" Hardin had no comment on that one. But the rest of Saporta's analysis suggested that the "five guys' model may not be that long for this world anyway. In an echo of what we heard on Wednesday, she said that more and more of the region's executives have less and less time for Atlanta. Many of the big companies headquartered in the region ultimately rely on business outside the region, leading her to question their commitment to a healthy Atlanta.

In Saporta's view, that shift makes the role of state government all the more important. "But one of the reasons we can't implement things is we constantly seem to be at odds with our state leaders," she said. "It could be jealousy, it could be distrust, but it's opposition from the state that makes it so hard to implement things."

The only political figure with the clout to drive the region, she said, is the governor. Roy Barnes was able to play that role, but only until he lost to Sonny Purdue in 2003. Barnes chose to be "the mayor of the Atlanta region," Saporta said, while Purdue has chosen to be "the mayor of the rest of the state." That makes for a tough job for civic leadership in Atlanta, whether it comes from big foundations like Woodruff, or community-based groups like those supported by the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta.

And all that from just our first session of the day! Later we delved into the tangles of the region's transportation problems, and still later we split up for journeys around the city to visit with experts on housing, education, and international economic development. We'll share more about all of this in the days to come, but for now, we'll be getting some rest as we prepare for our final day. Friday we'll look ahead and consider our next steps, and then it's homeward bound - hopefully without too many traffic jams on the way to the airport.