Vistage leader gives update 2 months after Bowen’s death

Chuck Hyde, executive coach and group chair for the Northwest Arkansas chapter of Vistage International, said the peer advisory organization continues to move forward following the sudden death two months ago of Terrell “Terry” Bowen.

Bowen died in late August in a motorcycle accident while on vacation in Colorado. He was 61. He was recruited to be the founding chair of the Northwest Arkansas chapter of Vistage in 2016. Hyde joined the organization as Northwest Arkansas’ second chair in mid-2017.

“Our groups continue to do great work together in the weeks following Terry’s death,” Hyde said. “Clearly, there is a void without Terry. I said at his memorial service that the member-to-member and member-to-chair relationships are very difficult to describe unless you’re in one. It’s those relationships that have helped each of us process and grieve Terry’s loss in a healthy way and move ahead knowing that’s what he’d want and even expect us to do.”

Hyde said Vistage NWA still has three groups with 43 members representing 38 companies. The breakdown is one Chief Executive group with 14 members and two Key Executive groups with 17 and 12 members respectively.

“I expect that we’ll see net growth to round out those groups in the next three to six months,” Hyde said.

Hyde said there is also a possibility of adding additional Vistage offerings in the future — Vistage for Emerging Leaders, which is a two-year curriculum-based model for high performing individual contributors and new managers. A Vistage Inside model would allow companies of scale to customize their own internal Vistage group.

Hyde said Vistage NWA is ranked No. 69 out of 564 Vistage chapters in the U.S. and is No. 3 out of 22 in the Dallas region, to which it belongs.  That’s based on several metrics including engagement, membership and retention.

“To me, that’s significant in terms of the caliber of members and what we have been able to do in a very short period,” he said.