Becoming Your Best Corporation kicks off their international leadership conference
Tiffany Frandsen | Managing Editor | @tiffany_mf
On May 6, community and business leaders gathered at the Zermatt Resort in Midway for a world-wide conference on leadership hosted by a Utah company, Becoming Your Best Corporation. Gov. Gary Herbert gave the keynote address about the necessity of being apathetic as a leader and the significance one person can have on entire communities and countries.
The press conference also kicked off Herbert’s Becoming Your Best Leadership Tour. The tour covered 17 countries, including The Philippines, Nicaragua and Guatemala and is intended to train political, community and business leaders with different leadership skills.
“Doesn’t matter whether it’s a large pond or a small pond, we need leaders at every level of society. Sometimes we tend to be apathetic … opposed to what we should be—good citizens of this country,” said Herbert.
Herbert encouraged people to lead by their own rules, regardless of their own perceived influence.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has,” said Herbert.
Steve Shallenberger, president of Becoming Your Best Corporation, introduced the governor, and spoke about the state of Venezuela’s economy, where it is not uncommon to wait three and a half hours to get into grocery stores (Venezuela is not on the list of countries the international tour will stop at).
One of the stops Shallenberger and his team will make is in Rwanda, for the second time. When the group was in the country previously, they spoke to President Paul Kagame, who led the army that rebelled against the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
“Whether it is a world leader trying to unite a war-ravaged country, a CEO trying to take his company to the next level or a parent trying to cultivate a strong, connected family, what we see in our trainings over and over again, and what we see in our own lives, is that leadership matters and that people can learn skills and develop practices that can truly empower their lives and transform the lives around them,” said Shallenberger.
Herbert told the story of then-seven-year-old Ryan Hreljac, who heard of people dying because no access to water. Hreljac raised funds to drill wells in Uganda, and now, a college graduate, runs a nonprofit that has drilled more than 800 wells.
The governor didn’t speak about Utah’s own water conservation efforts at the press conference, but the message is one that has been pressed often recently, after having had a relatively low snowpack—the stream flow forecast is 30 percent of the average snowpack. Herbert signed an executive order on May 3 ordering the conservation of water by prohibiting daytime outdoor watering (from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.), upgrading irrigation systems for efficiency and implementing leak-detection devices.
