A businessman once slid a folder across a breakfast table toward DeKalb County CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson. She slid it right back without opening it. “I don’t take folders,” she told him, and then she told him what kind of business her community actually needed. That one exchange tells you a great deal about the leader you will meet in this episode.

CEO Cochran-Johnson will tell you she is from L.A., meaning Lower Alabama. Her grandfather started as a sharecropper and became the first African American man to own a cotton gin in Butler County, and she still holds his land today. She grew up in a village of church, family, and high expectations, went on to earn three degrees, and now leads one of the most important counties in Georgia and one of the largest centers of Black wealth in America.

She runs government like an owner. Listen for how she found new revenue at the county’s airport simply by asking a question nobody had asked, and what happened when a routine lease renewal landed on her desk and she learned the county had been renting a building it could have owned for decades. As I like to say, nobody washes a rental car. Her ownership mindset belongs in your household as much as in any government office.

Most people misunderstand government, and what we do not understand we tend to resent. Your county shapes your property taxes, your roads, your permits, and your access to opportunity more than Washington does, and it is one of the largest buyers of goods and services anywhere. Come to leaders like CEO Cochran-Johnson with a business plan, not an envelope, and hold on to the card she gives young people. Put it in your sock drawer.

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Prefer to watch? The full episode is on YouTube.