David and Alex Bennett are hidden treasures for West Virginia in the hills of Pocahontas County. Alex is internationally recognized as a leader in knowledge management and an agent for organizational change, was the Deputy Chief Information Officer for Enterprise Integration with the role of Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) for the United States Department of the Navy. David was co-founder, CEO, and then Chairman of the Board and Chief Knowledge Officer of a professional services firm specializing in engineering management, information technology and organizational development.
The Bennetts moved to Pocahontas County a few years ago to start the Mountain Quest Institute, "a research and learning center dedicated to working with individuals, groups and organizations to achieve growth, understanding and high performance in this age of change, uncertainty and complexity."
Recently, David attended a Create WV workshop in Marlinton and commented, "There’s an old saying – if you think you can or you think you can’t – you’re right. That’s not just an old saying, it’s a scientific fact. If you believe you can do something, you have a much higher chance of doing it. If you believe you can’t, you can’t do it,” he said.
What does your community believe about itself? What does West Virginia believe? Whatever we believe about who we are and what our future is dramatically affects our future reality.
A relevant example is the West Virginia University football team. Regardless of what you think of Rich Rodriguez after his departure, you can't argue this: he set the bar high, cast a bold vision for competing for a national championship, and within just a few years the Mountaineers were in fact in that small, elite group of schools who had a chance to compete for it. For a state of our size and a school of WVU's status, it was an amazing achievement in just a few years (here's hoping it doesn't all unravel as quickly as it seems to be!).
RichRod didn't do it himself; it took boosters willing to invest and assistant coaches and players willing to buy in. But if we believed we could achieve such a bold agenda in football, couldn't we also believe that West Virginia could achieve bold things in quality of life and economic growth? Could we not move from the bottom of state rankings to near the top in areas such as physical and mental health, job growth and average household income?
Do we want it? Can we believe it?
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