As leaders in American regions awaken to the tougher challenges of the global age, a serious, sometimes frantic quest for the right structure follows, almost invariably. Delegations go off to other regions to see how they're organized.
Faxes fly, phone calls follow.
Every region does it differently. Just as different flowers flourish in different regions, quite distinct, even contrasting organizational patterns show up as civic successes. Atlanta learns how In Atlanta, the scene nearly always shows business driving much of the agenda. Usually, government takes on the role of managing partner. Together, these organizations became a prism to see how one region got the widely divergent interests to coalesce around a single mission and its myriad secondary opportunities.