The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has a long history of leadership as an important membership organization serving the research library community. A reading of its history highlights a substantial shift in its methods of community leadership in recent decades. Historically, like most membership organizations, ARL was largely focused on information gathering and dissemination, serving its constituency in a kind of "staff" role: assembling statistics, analyzing them, routing findings around the community and to important external entities, and engaging in lobbying and library advocacy in Washington. From its founding in the 1930s through the 1980s, ARL carried out this agenda quite successfully and with positive impact. Under the leadership of Duane Webster since 1988, ARL has continued this baseline of community support and advocacy but has added a substantially more active entrepreneurial layer to the organization. For the most part, we now take this entrepreneurial activity of ARL for granted, without reflecting on how it came to be or giving due credit to the leader whose vision and efforts made it possible. This brief article is intended to shed light on that part of Webster's legacy. (Contains 15 notes.)