The Full Cleveland

What's Next...

2008-07-03T21:01:00.001-05:00

The Plain Dealer's Joe Frolik recently addressed what we have been wondering and thought about posting, which is to suggest that the NEO economy has turned a corner and now has an infrastructure that supports innovation and accepts the risks of new ventures. (link)

We agree. The feeling is now taking hold in NEO's business community. Our concern at The Full Cleveland has now transferred from will the infrastructure take hold to will those non-profit organizations that gave it life -- such as JumpStart, Nortech, Greater Cleveland Partnership and others -- be able to step aside and allow at-risk organizations to step in and fill their role. If not, and these non-profits get lost in propping up their jobs at the expense of advancement, we're at greater risk than before any contribution from The Fund for Our Economic Future.

Fingers at The Full Cleveland are crossed.

Resolutions

2007-01-03T03:58:00.000-05:00

I’m awake in the middle of the night thinking about the world and how my world relates to it. I’m surfing news sites and reading about the mess in Iraq and how the U.S. is creating more problems in the Middle East than we’re solving. I read that U.S. missteps are only inviting more terrorism, as opposed to discouraging its spread.

Next, I read an evaluation by Homeland Security of U.S. cities: (link)

I was disappointed but not surprised to learn my homeland, Cleveland and its suburbs, is ranked near the bottom or lowest for preparedness for terrorism. Apparently our region is one where "formalized governance (leadership and planning) across regions has lagged."

That statement echoed many of our observations made on this blog. Think about it, how does another example of poor fundamental structure do anything to help attract new businesses to Northeast Ohio? It's symptomatic of greater problems, bigger issues.

Emergency preparedness is definitely an issue where the region’s political leaders can have impact, can exact improvements. However, they seem to spend too much investment in endeavors where they get great visibility but have little impact or accountability.

I prefer they invest their time and the other citizen resources on getting the infrastructure fundamentals right so the rest of our regional challenges have a better chance for resolution. ~Jim

More to Believe...

2006-05-15T21:40:00.000-05:00

We believe innovation is a critical driver in today’s knowledge economy. We’ve yet to hear anyone argue against the role it must play when reinventing the region’s economy. The Plain Dealer’s Quiet Crisis Series reminded us how our region has slowly suffered without it.

The Quiet Crisis Series also encouraged us to recognize that innovation is infrequently, if ever a product of group think. This is why immigration is critical to a creative economy. It brings ideas from across the globe and from a variety of cultures to help overcome challenges being addressed in a region. That’s the power of diversity.

This means that our region and our state need diversity to be present wherever influence is exerted on the region’s economy. A friend of ours assures us that a group has arrived to support this need as it relates to the State of Ohio’s policy making.

This group is We Believe Ohio. It has the support of NCCJ. These organizations are working to ensure that diverse ideas reign in our state government and that no one religious denomination blurs the line between church and state. They’re encouraging Ohio citizens to join Northeast Ohio spiritual leaders and lay people in the promotion of the values of inclusion, compassion and social justice, as opposed to the religious politics of division and exclusion.

The We Believe Ohio-Cleveland Chapter will be launched at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, May 17 with a public press conference at the Cleveland Play House at 8501 Carnegie Avenue in Cleveland. Reverend Otis Moss and Rabbi Richard Block are co-chairing the event. We’re anxious to hear what they have to offer.

A reason to "Believe..."

2006-03-28T11:03:00.000-05:00

Kent State University has announced its graduate architecture program is moving to downtown Cleveland. It’s our hope the annual influx of creative minds will spur a higher level of consciousness for design and how it can shape indvidual and collective experiences.

We believe this announcement holds the promise of giving our central city the distinct look that could be classified some day as “Cleveland Style,” attracting even more members to our region's creative class.

Furthermore, this would mark a major evolutionary step towards defining the Cleveland brand, allowing all of us to abandon empty slogans or, worse yet, relying on national media to define it.

Best of all, better city design is a proven path to defining a region's comparative advantage.

These possiblities are something we can believe.

Imagine Regionalism

2006-02-20T07:57:00.000-05:00

We’re discovering a variety of definitions on regionalism exist. We expect we’ll hear even more this week as WKSU explores the subject.

The alarm for NEO’s need to embrace regionalism was sounded again last week, prompting us to further consider how we define the concept. This AP news report, which tells how inner-ring suburbs often suffer from a lack of government support (i.e., tax dollars) at the expense of exurbs and core cities, helped crystallize our thinking.

Considering that the NEO region is expanding while its population remains relatively stable, this news report foretells trouble for more than just inner-ring cities; it's a warning shot for any suburb in Cuyahoga County as residential development proceeds into the greenfields of Geauga, Medina and Lorain counties. This might explain why Bay Village’s mayor was once lobbying for a seat on The Northeast Ohio First Suburbs Consortium.

Can you imagine if Cuyahoga County's suburbs had embraced regionalism in 1950? Their leaders would now be prepared to tackle the exacerbated issues they’re facing today. Had they embraced the challenges and troubles of neighboring cities like East Cleveland or, better yet, Akron and Youngstown, they would have answers to today’s problems.

Again, imagine how different our worries would be today if we had been operating as a region since the 1950s? We suspect our worries would involve choosing between the best opportunities and less on how to avoid disaster.

If our definition is true, the sooner NEO acts as a region the better.

Dream a Little Dream

2006-02-17T06:21:00.000-05:00

It’s not a habit of ours to rely on references involving Corey Feldman’s career to illustrate our thinking. However, the title of the 1989 teen comedy captures what we view is being asked by NorTech.

Growing up in the Cleveland area we’ve always been asked to understand the region through the rearview mirror. Our parents and grandparents would tell us what Euclid Avenue once was and what it once represented. Infrequently, if ever, did anyone ask us to consider what it could be?

We knew at young ages that the strip between Playhouse Square and Public Square wasn’t a retail center. The closing of Halle’s told us it wasn’t, only to be confirmed by the shuttering of May Co. and the postdated death of the Higbee’s building.

Despite these clear signs, we’ve also witnessed ill-fated investments of capital and goodwill into reviving downtown Cleveland as a retail center. Why? We suspect too few of us have been willing to look out the windshield; to look for what opportunities are ahead and sequester the energy to steer clear of potholes and pitfalls to pursue these.

Knowing what we know and what we don’t, we’re excited that NorTech is asking us to look out the windshield, to see what’s coming and to align our resources accordingly. Individually. Collectively. Regionally.

Mind you, NorTech isn’t telling us what’s coming next. It is sounding some signals and posting some signs, however. Yet the path any of us travel is ultimately a product of our making.

Like a good travel agent, NorTech does offer advice as to how to arrive at our desired destination:
1) Get personally involved
2) Start thinking
3) Contribute time, effort and/or resources to the cause
4) Help any organization that you’re part of to understand its role in shaping the future
5) Communicate to politicians at every level why and how they must support science/engineering education in our schools, colleges, universities and businesses

As frightening as this is to imagine, NorTech is helping us to adopt a newfound perspective comparable to that of Corey Feldman’s character in Dream a Little Dream. His character gains the wisdom of an elderly neighbor’s experiences after Corey collides with his dream girl. This event gives him the insight needed to realize what he could only previously dream about and the old man never thought to achieve.

NorTech is doing much the same by asking old white guys in suits to join forces with the rest of us to realize a mutual dream, making the Cleveland/Akron/Youngstown region one of the top ten places in the world for livability by 2020. Now that’s a distinction we can live with once we’re old white men looking in the rearview mirror at the full Cleveland.

Boundary-Breaking Collaboration

2006-01-25T20:07:00.000-05:00

NorTech apparently has a remedy that might help Clevelanders break from spending too much time talking to oursleves. The regional cheerleader for technology-driven economic development is helping area business clusters deliver potential disruptive technologies by recruiting strategic partners with complementary skill sets.

Nano-Network, a division of NorTech, has launched an affiliate chapter in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This collaboration between disparate regions will focus energies and investments on the growing science of nanotechnology and its consumer and manufacturing applications.

Chris Mather, Nano-Network's executive director, told The Plain Dealer that the New Mexico chapter will be managed by Technology Ventures Corp., a charitable foundation that "links the investor community and publicly funded technologies" with commercial prospects.

"New Mexico is extremely different from and quite complementary with Northeast Ohio," Mather informed the PD in response to a news release. "Federal funding and research labs are considered to be among New Mexico's strengths, yet the state is weak in manufacturing and commercial companies, nearly opposite from Northeast Ohio."

Might this be the start of NEO's comparative advantage?

The NEO Difference

2006-01-10T10:10:00.000-05:00

We’ve been asking here and elsewhere for help identifying our region’s comparative advantage. We think we might have the answer and, like anything we know too well, we’ve been taking it for granted.

It's integrity. Yes, integrity. Our region and much of the Midwest is steep in a culture of values where we place a premium on integrity. This might explain why we’re slow to trust outsiders, yet others elsewhere aren’t slow to trust us.

This revelation was made this past weekend when living the full Cleveland experience:

Friday Forum at the City Club – Baldwin-Wallace College Profs. Alan Kolp and Peter Rea relayed highlights from their co-authored book, Integrity is a Growth Market. They explained how integrity is vital in a global economy; it is the glue in any strategic partnership, which is now practically the only way a company can conduct business internationally. Their message is so strong that it has attracted global business leader Pierre Evereart , chairman of In Bev, the world’s largest beverage company. He’s retiring in April and, as he announced on B-W’s campus at a speaking event in October, will soon collaborate with the liberal arts school when contributing to the reinvention of the regional economy.

Saturday reading of Inside Business at Half-Price Books - In the current issue Lute Harmon Sr. explains how he discovered Midwestern values as a young entrepreneur and how he has come to recognize our value system as the “NEO Success Formula.”

Sunday visit at Cleveland Museum of Art for the last day of its Arts & Crafts exhibit - This exhibit focused on the influence of the Arts & Crafts movement throughout the industrialized world. A significant section was dedicated to Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie Movement, which was a crusade to highlight the values and strengths embedded in Midwestern values and culture. It reminded us why we love where live, as love requires accepting faults to appreciate virtues.

We realized this weekend that we’re taking our region's strengths, our blessings and our birthright for granted. If we’re going to reinvent ourselves regionally, economically and strategically, we must leverage our assets. Integrity, which is central to our Midwestern culture, is a critical component to any bundle of characteristics that defines our comparative advantage. In fact it’s the glue. Without it we can’t participate in global markets. Let’s not take it for granted. Let’s put it to work so all of us can realize the full Cleveland.

What have we learned...

2005-12-28T11:43:00.001-05:00

The end of the year invites introspection. One of those examinations is our blog and the feedback we’ve received and the related postings that have appeared on others. That said, one sentence summarizes our findings: We, Clevelanders, spend too much time talking to ourselves.

If this sentence is a brush, it paints us too. Our blog has taught us that we spend more time amongst ourselves asking for solutions to our region’s economic malaise and less time looking outward. The blog activity surrounding The Plain Dealer series on Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprise brought this issue to light.

We need to look no further than comments made by Rich Moore, a securities analyst who lives and works in Greater Cleveland, yet interacts with real estate developers and investors throughout the U.S.:

“I can't imagine that Cleveland would be a big draw for any real estate company," Moore said. "I hate to put it that way, but we're not doing the right things to make this a highly attractive real estate market. We just don't have the dynamics of supply and demand to warrant [Forest City] being a big player here."

Rich is in the business of selling these opinions to investors, people with capital who are looking for the best investments regardless of where in the world these might reside. As a public company involved in projects with long time horizons and high capital needs, Forest City must rely on these investors for the cash needed to complete the projects that deliver returns to shareholders (i.e., retirement funds, grandparents, working families and the like). Naturally, this responsibilty is what guides the company’s decisions.

If NEO citizens want Forest City to have an active presence in Cleveland’s reinvention, we need to create the economics that help the Cleveland-based company retain confidence with investors who have no allegiance to NEO. As Rich Moore has told and is telling others, our region is not making the compromises necessary to attract investment, such as tax abatements and other incentives.

The takeaway for us is we have to stop asking what Forest City or anyone else with desired resources can give us and start asking/listening to what it is we can do for them.

Thanks for reading. Happy New Year.

The Y-Town Advantage

2005-11-07T21:07:00.000-05:00

We’re still attempting to digest the Red Room Revolution and the resulting clamor that is still rippling through the blogosphere. We haven’t made sense of it yet and suspect it might be too early to do so.

In our quest to understand, we stumbled upon one posting on Brewed Fresh Daily in a discussion thread covering RRR that made us wonder less about Cathy Panzica and more about the multitude of organizations chasing the claim of NEO’s agent of change. It was from James Cossler, director of the Youngstown Business Incubator, who wrote:

"The mistake that Cleveland seems to make over and over again is that you need to have these all encompassing, grand and expensive programs to launch a “tech revolution”. And how many of these grand and expensive organizations have come and gone without any meaningful results?

"Youngstown is as far along as Cleveland in launching successful software companies. And in Youngstown, they have all come from a single organization with a $450,000 annual budget. Heck, in Cleveland, ED Execs have salaries that large.

"It really isn’t rocket science. As I have said before, if we can do it in Youngstown without a research university, without a research hospital, without an indigenous population of tech based companies (the three most common sources of startups), and without Cleveland’s corporate and foundation dollars…shame on Cleveland for not being further along."

JC left us wondering. Are Cleveland institutions a source of strength or barrier to economic reinvention? Peter Lewis has been convinced the latter is true and has limited his philanthropy to Cleveland institutions in hope of triggering change.

Ironically, local Investment Banker Michael Gibbons told Crain's Cleveland Business that he fears Cleveland could turn into another Youngstown. Maybe that ain’t such a bad thing.

Cooperation is the Path to Reinvention

2005-10-25T18:56:00.000-05:00

Recently, Tech Futures reminded NEO of its shared need for reinvestment in education. By investment, NorTech’s Chris Varley clearly means more than throwing money at the issue. Chris is calling for more cooperation among learning institutions, employers and NEO citizens, as he asserts:

"The solution? Well, if it were easy someone else would have already done it, but it means tackling and improving our educational and workforce training efforts at every level, from pre-school through graduate school. And that means lots of different organizations focused intently on the "pieces and parts" but in ways that are coordinated and mutually supportive."

The good news is that cooperation is happening. We’ve heard about it at Polaris Career Center. It is Cuyahoga County’s Joint Vocational School for 11th and 12th grade students, as well as a place where adults can receive new training and companies bring employees to learn the latest in best practices.

Polaris had been struggling to keep high school students interested in its manufacturing related coursework. However, the problem was turned on its head once the vocational school teamed with Tooling University, the Cleveland-based e-learning service for manufacturing skills.

The vocational school is now grappling with the enviable challenge of managing demand and requiring waiting lists for its manufacturing related classes. Polaris is witnessing phenomenal gains in student performance, combined with dramatic drops in disciplinary referrals. These students are on a path to lifelong learning. Case in point, Polaris’ Geoff Andrews reports that e-learning metrics allow school administrators to closely monitor student study habits. He has documented instances where kids were actively studying Polaris coursework while on spring break in Florida. That’s powerful.

Increasingly we’re realizing that NEO citizens have many of the resources needed to reinvent our economy. However, we’re also recognizing the need for NEO citizens to break from parochial behaviors and make investments in cooperation -- regionally, economically, academically. It is the surest path to producing the synergies that can transform our economy and deliver a comparative advantage.

A Solution for Strengthening NEO Leadership?

2005-10-12T15:21:00.000-05:00

Lev Gonick is on to something for the NEO region. It goes well beyond lighting the wire underneath us and his work with OneCleveland. We think it goes beyond anything he might imagine. And we think he would agree.

Lev spoke today at the City Club. He told how OneCleveland is allowing for OpenSource leadership, which breaks from past styles that have been everything from laissez faire to autocratic.

Considering that OpenSource leadership is unlike anything our region has ever experienced, we looked elsewhere for comparisons. We arrived at the leadership style of USSR’s Mikhail Gorbachev and his introduction of glasnost, which opened Soviet society to the free exchange of ideas and thoughts. His social program was the catalyst for parting from destructive behaviors and led to an embrace of a culture previously unknown to its citizens.

As we understood Lev today, he sees OneCleveland paving the way to true democracy for NEO. The regional area network enables our leaders to have greater connections to ideas, thoughts and concepts, some of which we identified previously.

It doesn’t stop there. Lev insists NEO citizens will have visibility into the actions of these leaders, as well as improved access to them. Furthermore, we’ll have a forum for delivering critical feedback, which when embraced has the power to transform – people, organizations, regions. It’s these dynamics, we suspect, that can embed accountability into the NEO environment and inoculate us against self-destructive behaviors.

In other words, we're hoping Lev is telling us that our region now has a window to discover its shared vision and translate it into a comparative advantage. These kind of discoveries inspire ideas, which are the true currency in today’s global economy. And these ideas can attract brains/talent and investment, addressing many of the “Quiet Crisis” symptoms and allowing for a more sustainable NEO region.

We’re beginning to believe that OneCleveland is lighting the way to the full Cleveland. But even we know not to get ahead of ourselves. We know the human animal resists change. And we know that rule of nature applies to those of us who reside in the region that’s home to the Dawg Pound. As much as the Russians embraced new freedoms, they also have inoculated themselves against these when electing their current leader Vladimir Puttin, whose leadership style resembles Stalin more than Gorbachev.

Thus, at the end of the day we still need strong leaders who can act with resolve. The powers of OneCleveland can strengthen solutions to our region’s fundamental challenges, but we understand it can’t eliminate these threats. That job remains the duty of NEO citizens.

Please No More Business as Usual

2005-10-11T10:03:00.000-05:00

We’re encouraged by findings from NorTech on the need for pre-seed and seed investments in NEO start-up companies that have been recently reported by news media. Our takeaway is that our region’s economy can’t be reinvented without a change in how we collectively do business in NEO. We realize that more investment is needed; however, we also regonize why it has been lacking.

Institutional investors are smart people. They know how to invest and where. They have fiduciary responsibility to do so. Yet they’re reluctant to invest in early stage funds that invest NEO start-ups. Why? We look to missing fundamentals for the answers, such as a lack of economic infrastructure and limited managerial talent. Money alone can’t remedy these.

Most early stage companies need talent more than money. These companies are typically started by people who were resisting convention and didn’t want to be part of an organization that demanded standards, protocols, policies and controls. Ironically, once these guys succeed at validating a new concept, their brainchild evolves into an early-stage company that needs exactly what they’ve always resisted: standards, protocols, policies and controls. Their success demands new talent. There’s a limited supply of this, especially in NEO. To get it here, requires a great deal of cash and substantial company equity, more than most entrepreneurs are willing to forfeit. Without the appropriate talent or support services, most start-ups risk squandering early stage investments.

How do we as a region overcome these fundamental challenges? Our client, Glengary LLC, is a great example of an early stage investment fund that’s breaking from business as usual in NEO. It was started with that objective in mind as its Founding Partners were determined to reinvent early-stage investment for the benefit of NEO.

Glengary invests almost exclusively in NEO start-up companies. It does so with a combination of human and financial capital. Glengary has a team of serial entrepreneurs or Operating Partners who have managed businesses from start-up to IPO. Glengary's people help NEO entrepreneurs grow businesses and realize visions, without sacrificing control. When this happens, our region becomes a nest for talented entrepreneurs, and infrastructure and investment naturally follow.

The Founding Partners of the “venture catalyst,” the guys who gave the seed money to start it, are also active. These are NEO business leaders, like Thomas Sullivan, Joseph Gorman and Albert Ratner; all of whom lend expertise and make contacts to introduce Glengary client companies to customers located in markets throughout the globe.

It is this kind of active investment that is necessary for overcoming fundamental challenges to early stage company success in NEO. Compareable solutions can be found elsewhere at GLIDE, JumpStart and ShoreBank. We hope our region’s leaders continue to support these and resist business as usual, which is likely to give us only more of the same and which the citizens of this region are increasingly unwilling to tolerate.

Is Godot Among Us?

2005-09-20T12:44:00.000-05:00

From what we’ve been able to decipher, we’re excited by the catalyst activity currently being done at NorTech. The tech-based economic development agency for NEO is taking leadership and stirring dialogue on fundamental questions, some of which we’ve asked in previous postings.

Our region’s conservative culture is a blessing and a curse. It offers stability and predictability, but unfortunately it also closes out many opportunities as a result of inherent risks. This region and its leaders have a horrible record and long history of risk aversion.

Methods exist for hedging these risks, however. Scenario planning, which NorTech is now advocating, is a proven method. It helped Royal/Dutch_Shell in the 1970s when OPEC was manipulating oil markets, and it continues to deliver growth for the mammoth energy company.

Beyond a hedge, the most powerful benefit of scenario planning is how it helps diverse and disparate groups to cull a shared vision. They each then have mutual ownership of this vision and are inspired to take actions to fulfill it. Better yet, it gives clarity to decision making and hence reduces risk.

These actions help groups to focus resources and act collectively, as well as discourage self-serving behaviors that threaten any vision. And these actions attract like actions, bringing opportunities to the region that our leaders couldn’t have predicted. That’s dynamic strategy. Last, like the invisible hand that directs any free market, the products of scenario planning can inspire group accountability and self-policing

Walt Disney said it best, "If you can dream it, you can do it." His words ring as true today as these did many years ago when first displayed above the Epcot Center. The importance of a vision cannot be denied. Neither can the importance of communicating that vision to the people responsible for supporting it. Communicating vision gives purpose and meaning to the work that people do, and pursuing and accomplishing that vision with a sense of integrity builds trust. The speed of transactions and investments in any regional economy are dictated by the level of trust that exists among its members.

We’re pleased that NorTech is building trust by asking the tough questions and making the results visible to others in the region; we believe it’s a window to a shared vision and greater trust among regional players. However, we remind NorTech to beware of its wishes. Now that it has put itself on the stage, NEO citizens will expect it to answer the tough questions, make difficult decisions and provide needed leadership.

Now we ask, is Godot among us?

NEO’s Comparative Advantage?

2005-09-01T16:58:00.000-05:00

What is it that NEO does better than most? We’re not just talking among regions in Ohio or the U.S., we mean globally. Cool Cleveland.com’s festival of the arts and technology is begging this question. Heck, we’ve pondered it before too.

First, we must agree on what comparative advantage means. An old joke, as often retold by B-W’s Peter_Rea, can help illustrate: In European heaven the Swiss are the diplomats, Germans are engineers, French are cooks, Italians are lovers and English are the police. Conversely, European hell is where the Swiss are the lovers, French are the diplomats, Germans are the police, Italians are engineers and the English are the cooks.

Peter will say that exceptions to these characterizations exist, yet there’s more than a grain of truth to the comparative advantages of Swiss chocolate, French wine, German beer, Italian pasta, and English deserts.

Knowing that virtually every business in every industry now competes in global markets, in some respect, what’s NEO’s comparative advantage? Akron once had rubber, Pittsburgh had steel and Detroit had automotive. No more. As the Ingenuity festival reminds us, NEO needs to embrace a more sustainable industry like the arts and marry it with technology to give life to innovation, to give life to a comparative advantage

Once our comparative advantage is identified and commitments made, our region’s economic development resources must be focused in the same way. We’re encouraged by the Ingenuity festival; we hope it serves as a springboard to future dialogue, which we also hope gives our region’s appointed leaders the backbone needed to commit resources with focus.

Realizing a Full Cleveland

2005-08-24T02:17:00.000-05:00

We’re back and we did some summer reading.

One thing we discovered during our break was the news surrounding developments with OneCleveland. Dan Hanson wrote a great report about it in the July issue of Inside Business. He shared the potential for collaboration and distance learning, such as better exchanges of research between area health systems or opportunities to bring the world to the doorsteps of our arts institutions. This fiber network clearly offers untold opportunities for these regional assets to deliver a comparative_advantage that NEO has struggled for too long to realize.

An immediate thought of ours was that this fiber network encourages once unheard of collaborations between governmental organizations at every level that are struggling to do more with less. This network complements current regionalism efforts, such as Ohio Senator and B-W Prof. Eric_Fingerhut's mission to encourage shared services among city governments. Why not? This network can allow for better, faster exchanges of information so that scarce resources for emergency medical systems can be less parochial and more regional. This would save taxpayer dollars and help make the region’s tax structure less a barrier to attracting relocating companies or start-up businesses. Pretty cool.

However, before capturing our thinking in this posting, we looked to the NEO Blogsphere to see how others were interpreting this event and were discouraged by the old-style Cleveland reaction. Too many of them are bellyaching that OneCleveland doesn’t offer the wireless services they crave, which is unfortunate as not enough energy is being spent posting ideas that unlock the potential of our currently unmatched fiber network.

It’s our hope that the dialogue of NEO Blogsphere shifts its view of OneCleveland to seeing it as half full rather than half empty, as they can help all of us realize the full Cleveland .

Who's your Daddy?

2005-07-17T21:42:00.000-05:00

We've been busy with work and families of late, but we thought the following feedback might also stir the thinking of others:

"You raise some really interesting points. Cleveland has its issues, but it also has a lot to offer. I particularly liked your entry on 'Waiting for Godot.' But do you think Clevelanders can overcome their inferiority complex enough to save their own city? Or are they so firmly entrenched in waiting for someone/something to provide the answer?

"I watch as people wait anxiously to see if Dan Gilbert (love him or hate him) will resurrect the CAVS and they'll be the savior that causes people to flock to Cleveland. I heard Gilbert speak recently and someone asked him about Cleveland and Detroit. His comment was how surprised he was at how much Clevelanders bash their own city because that doesn't happen in Detroit. Detroit is facing similar issues ― some much worse ― but the people there have a different attitude. He is so right. Detroiters expect if they work hard enough, they'll eventually get what they want. Clevelanders expect if they work hard enough, they'll get close to what they want before someone snatches it away.

"I love Cleveland. I just wish sometimes the natives would appreciate the region as much as the transplants do."

These comments were offered by a Michigan native in her '30s who is a NEO homeowner and is frequently resisting calls from family to return home.

The Immigrant Solution

2005-06-23T15:02:00.000-05:00

Attracting more immigrants to Northeast Ohio is a venerable goal. Today the PD’s Joe_Frolik introduces us to a Cleveland immigrant success story. This column was an addendum to previous “Quiet Crisis” reports that argued the importance of immigrant contributions to a region’s economy.

Joe will join others tonight at 8 p.m. on WVIZ to discuss the issue of attracting immigrants to Northeast Ohio. We hope Joe and his contemporaries spend more time focusing the conversation on economic fundamentals and less on suspicions about our region’s culture.

Fundamentally, immigrants are like any other human resource. In an era of global sourcing, they will typically be attracted to areas that reward their skills with the highest values. Cleveland needed masons and bricklayers at the turn of the century, resulting in an influx of Italians with such skills. These immigrants gave rise to Cleveland’s Little Italy neighborhood, as many of them were employed at Lakeview Cemetery. We venture that none of these transplants chose Cleveland as much as the region’s economic demands selected them. The same principles hold true today. Our regional labor supply is adequately serving its demand for labor, which unfortunately means no need for outside sourcing.

The only way we can make our region more appealing to immigrants is to affect both sides of the labor equation. This means we must apply our regional focus on creating demand for labor and spend less of our precious resources determining how to make the region more appealing to immigrants. They will tell us how to do that once they arrive.

It's our opinion that if we focus our collective resources on creating demand for specific skills and labor, problems like immigration and many of the other Quiet Crisis symptoms will remedy themselves.

Solutions Under the Collective Nose

2005-06-17T09:19:00.000-05:00

We need not look far for breakthrough thinking for our region's economic malaise. Richard Clark, founder and principal of Cleveland's St. Martin de Porres High School is an example of an unconventional entrepreneurial thinker who is addressing the fundamental challenges confronting our region.

Clark spoke at Baldwin-Wallace College in Febraury as part of a speaker series that was designed to encourage students and community members to identify passions, understand the need for entrepreneur competence, and to inform NEO residents about available entrepreneurial resources in the region.

Other than a stint selling appliances during the summer at his father-n-law's store, the former St. Ignatius principal had little exposure to conventional business. However, these limitations didn't discourage Richard Clark from adopting an entrepreneur's can-do mentality as he sought market-based solutions for children locked in impoverished neighborhoods and under-performing schools. The school's formula for success was told recently by PD's Sam_Fulwood.

Change is possible. In fact, its power is all around us.

A Case for Focused Public Investment

2005-06-14T11:20:00.000-05:00

If we want to see the benefits of focused public investment, we need not look further than neighboring Columbus,_Indiana.

In 1957 the leadership of the sleepy county seat of 39k made a fundamental commitment to being a “good town” when it accepted the offer and challenge of the Cummins Engine Foundation, which said it would pay an architect’s fee for any new school that was designed by someone from a select list of renowned and respected architects. The offer was later expanded to include a variety of public buildings.

As time passed the city’s focus on architecture and public art became infectious as other companies and church congregations decided to seek architects who would add to the community’s quality of design. Soon the city was attracting even more like minds as offers for free services poured in from aspiring architects who wanted to have their work displayed in the company of great artists. These actions perpetuated even more recognition and attention, as leading architects like Eero Saarinen, Harry Weese, Richard Meier, and I.M. Pei led the American Institute of Architects to rank Columbus sixth in a list that included Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington DC for architectural innovation and design. How often is Cleveland compared favorably to any of these destinations?

We Need a Litmus Test

2005-06-13T11:50:00.000-05:00

Our region's leaders need a litmus test for determining when and where they direct our collective focus. When deliberating over public investments, we need to ask ourselves will it serve the fundamental needs of our region's economy. If the evidence isn't clear, we drop the issue and move on to the next. We can't afford to waste resources examining issues/ideas/concepts that don't serve the fundamental challenges we face when reinventing the region's economy. Such a litmus test is a result of vision and strategy, which are products of leadership. If the current regional leaders aren't delivering, we need to rotate the stock.

Focus is our most precious resource

2005-06-12T19:16:00.000-05:00

I was reminded yesterday of how precious our collective focus is and why it must not be squandered. I attended Parade on the Circle with friends. The event is always refreshing, as it’s a great reminder of the creativity that abounds in our region. A friend and I were saying as much as we returned home. Our discussion quickly turned to Cleveland’s need for reinvention. My friend’s recommendation struck me as poignant. He suggests that rather than Cleveland trying to be all things to all people, he asks that it be a specialist so that it's meaningful to somebody. This would allow the region to focus resources in much the same way, rather than doing a little of everything and achieving nothing.

While Rome Burns...

2005-06-08T20:50:00.000-05:00

Today’s Plain_Dealer_reported that more money is being dedicated to researching taxpayer tolerance for a new or expanded convention center. What disturbs us is that Cleveland leaders have given incredible levels of consideration to potential convention center concepts and have done so at the expense of more pressing fundamental problems such as widespread poverty, under-performing schools and eroding infrastructure. Recently published research by a University of Texas at San Antonio professor makes a compelling case as to why our leadership might be misspending our most precious resource – our collective focus.

Prof. Heywood Sanders contends that the convention center market is oversaturated with offerings and that the diminishing demand promises it can’t catch up anytime soon. “Over the past decade alone, public capital spending on convention centers has doubled to $2.4 billion annually, increasing convention space by over 50% since 1990. Nationwide, 44 new or expanded convention centers are now in planning or construction,” according to Sanders' research, which was published in January by the Brookings Institute.

Simple economics say that most, if not all convention centers will suffer in this environment. Sanders points to Boston as an example, which opened a new $800 million convention center last summer and hosted about six events, which were attended by 65k in 2004, far short of projections. Consequently, surrounding hotel room night projections were merely a third of the estimates made in the feasibility study that sold the project to taxpayers. Worse yet, Washington, D.C. and St. Louis are operating at such substantial losses that they are unable to adequately pay down bonds secured by taxpayers. This means other government services or worse yet public schools will suffer at the expense of serving convention center debt.

There are only two cities experiencing favorable trends, Orlando and Las Vegas. However, Sanders points out that Las Vegas has seen attendance dips in recent years, due in part to the emergence of privately owned convention centers like Mandalay Bay and the Sands. Bookings in Orlando have returned following a steep decline in 2001, yet these are still below 2000 levels when measured by attendance.

Our aggravation would be diminished if Cleveland’s leaders had the wherewithal to actually put forward a business case as to why and how much investment in a convention center is needed to achieve a desired return on investment. This would entail a business plan that identifies which markets or trade shows they wish to attract, a description of the market and its size, as well as the investment size necessary to compete. A private convention center, such as Mandalay Bay or the Sands, had to do so to justify investment in Las Vegas, which probably explains why each was prepared to compete and contribute to the erosion of business at the nearby taxpayer-funded facility.

First and foremost, we would like to know how a new or expanded convention center serves the fundamental challenges in our region before anyone asks for investment.

Stop Waiting for Godot

2005-06-02T13:38:00.000-05:00

While walking through Cleveland's Playhouse Square during the lunch hour, I overheard a business man asking another, "so do you think there will ever be a day when a big company arrives in Cleveland to save it from despair?"

I've grown to despise such questions. These suggest that the solution to our region's economic woes resides outside of NEO. This mindset is part of our fundamental problem. Too many of us in the region are waiting for the solution to arrive. We're like the tragicomedy's lead characters, Estragon and Vladimir, in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot who believe an outsider will deliver them from despair. They pass the time waiting with inactivity and indecisiveness and continue to do so when all indicators point inevitably to the conclusion that Godot will never come.

I, too, was guilty of waiting for the next private-public solution to inspire some kind of renaissance in Cleveland. My view changed after meeting Peter_Rea, chair of the business division at Baldwin-Wallace College. He reminded me that the corporate players and market dynamics are no longer in place where Cleveland and NEO can place one big bet as it did in the early 1980s. He says re-invention will be a result of a lot of little fires from civic groups like Cleveland_Bridge Builders, 20/30 Club, and start-ups and other entrepreneurial efforts.

Rather than waiting for Godot, Peter recommends placing our collective bet on building a culture that fosters risk taking and creativity. He's asking us for fundamental change. Anyone committed to the region should be making the same request, as the waiting game is proving to be tragic.

Isn't it ironic

2005-06-01T15:10:00.000-05:00

The 6/1 New York Times has a feature about the redevelopment of the former Stapleton airport in Denver and its developer Forest City Enterprises.

Interestingly, Cleveland is home to Forest City, the nation's leader in gentrification development. The model for its business is a byproduct of rehabbing the Terminal Tower.

Is it me or does anyone else find it ironic that Forest City's expertise isn't being applied in its home city; a town desperate for re-invention. In fact, the company hasn't been active in development inside NEO since the Tower City project in the mid-1980s. What's keeping it out?

Forest City EVP Ron Rattner gave some explanations to the National Trust when it met in Cleveland in 2003. He cited archaic laws, inflexible legislators and a political mentality that's intolerant to the tax breaks that are necessary to inspire urban redevelopment and make the effort profitable for a publicly held company like Forest City, which is responsible to shareholders.

A quick visit to Forest City's website (http://www.fceinc.com/) gives easy testimony to inspired urban growth from redevelopment and re-use of historic buildings.

Again, isn't ironic that inspired solutions to our region's malaise are right under our collective noses.