-by Mayor Harold Rainwater

Peter Drucker wrote in a recent edition of Forbes magazine that, "Management and entrpreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task." If an entrepreneur doesn't learn to manage, or management doesn't learn to innovate, it can't last long. Every institution, Drucker wrote, "must build into its day-today management four entrepreneurial activities."

The first entrepreneurial discipline is abandonment, the process of systematically eliminating programs, products, and functions that don't optimize your resources. The second is improvement, always striving for qualitative change. The third discipline is exploitation, taking your successes and using them to produce an even better tomorrow. The last entrepreneurial discipline is innovation, which means replacing, or even making obsolete, current practices or programs.

Drucker said that, "entrepreneurial" activities start with the outside and are focused on the outside. However, the tools we originally fashioned to bring the outside to the inside have all been penetrated by the inside focus on management.

Now you might ask, what does all this have to do with Wilmore! It does because the more things change the more they stay the same. As so much has happened in my quarter century at City Hall, perhaps I have been so busy with management that entrepreneurial disciplines have been neglected. Many times, the demands of living today prevent us from planning for tomorrow. By contrast, only living for tomorrow prevents us from taking care of business today.

Is planning new parks more important than repairing older parks? Is planning new transportation routes more important than fixing potholes today?

I have asked the council to join me this year in undertaking a strategic planning initiative. This year we have dedicated two meetings a month to planning. During the first phase, we are receiving reports from individual departments, organization, and planning bodies in Jessamine County.

To get through this and end up with a viable end product we have established several strategies for planning.

1. Use "outside" resources--Sylvia Lovely, CEO of the Kentucky League of cities will help us begin this process on February 8 at 7:00 p.m.

2. Establish the planning group and stick with it until we are done. The process may take a considerable amount of time.

3. Keep discussion open-- many "off-the-cuff" comments lead to rich concepts.

4. Agree upon the component parts of the plan and a description of each before constructing the plan.

What we hope to do with this planning effort is to create an envisioned future. Bob Kobielush, president of CCI/USA, describes this as a vibrant, engaging and specific description of the future as it relates to the community. It paints a picture that can motivate and drive everyone forward in the organization or community with a sense of passion. Another end result of this planning effort is to develop an annual business plan. It has been said that you can't manage what you can't measure. We need to develop a plan that has measurable and focused strategic goals, tactics, and tasks to be set forth and implemented on an annual basis so the overall goals of the community can be satisfied.

It is important to do things right, but it is of far greater importance to be doing the right things. Learning how words like abandonment, improvement, exploitation, and innovation fit into Wilmore future may be worth our task. If this plan is done well, we should have a template for welcoming a century and new millennium in Wilmore.