I’ll let Team NEO discuss how it’s work is being received elsewhere in the region. But I think the close working relationship between Team Lorain County and Team NEO speaks volumes. And that’s just one example. It’s certainly not being ignored. Recently, Team NEO supported Summit County mayors and other officials on a trade mission to India.

I’m not arguing things are perfect, but I don’t think it’s fair to say the “Cleveland Plus” brand has failed. Site selectors (a key audience) certainly don’t think so. And for the first time ever the region is marketing itself, and while it will take years to overcome our decades of neglect there are signs of progress in terms of payroll attracted and new deals that are in the works.

The Fund’s work with the region’s chambers (not just GCP) and elected officials to develop an effective regional economic strategy have persuaded the State of Ohio to treat northeast ohio as a single region, rather than a series of feifdoms. But that victory is not complete as the state bureaucracy itself is remarkably complex.

The region’s chambers and business groups in Stark County, Mahoning Valley and elsewhere are working with the Fund and others to encourage regional approaches to talent development and government reform. And I share Ed’s hope that in the area of talent development our region will be able to learn from others. I expect some parts of the region will learn better than others, but for the first time the entire region is at the talent development table together. Talent development is incredibly complex, and state leadership is vital to success and I hope readers of this blog will encourage state officials to commit to pushing for changes that help employers and residents prosper.

The work of bringing the region together still requires more shuttle diplomacy than I’d like. There are still, as Ed notes, “insular mindsets and attitudes” — and they are not limited to Cuyahoga County. But I see those attitudes changing every day as people see Cleveland-based BioEnterprise helping Akron create the Bioinnovation Institute and the Lorain Innovation Fund investing in companies from across the region who’ve been helped by JumpStart’s TechLift program. Results make attitudes change. Some of this progress can be found on our web site, http://www.futurefundneo.org, and some can be found at http://www.advancenortheastohio.org. And it’s my hope that we’ll do a better job of sharing these successes in the future.

Unquestionably the global economy and the global recession/depression requires us all to act differently than we did 20 years ago or even five years ago… five months ago. Some in the region are more willing than others to embrace change. I know the members of the Fund are eager to help the region learn from others and to learn from each other. They are willing to take risks and make mistakes. But they are not willing to sit on the sidelines.

The elementary mistakes being made — and the millions of dollars wasted — are avoidable.

The irony, of course, is that Cleveland actually has assets and resources from which to lead a successful regional economic development strategy. Yet, the leading work in the region takes place in Lorain, Akron and Youngstown.

Over the next decade, we will see a nexus evolve between Youngstown and Pittsburgh. We will see another set of connections among Lorain, Akron and Youngstown. (Indeed, these connections are already forming with the Innovation Alliance between the Lorain County Community College and The University of Akron; and the connection taking place between LCCC end Youngstown State, as LCCC helps Youngstown State with its community college plans.)

In sum, it’s not hard to see a future for the Northeast Ohio region which has Cleveland on the edge and increasingly irrelevant. The civic process in Cleveland has completely broken down, as the pie fight over the convention center continues. Civic leaders outside Cleveland have no appetite for a food fight. They will be polite, but in the end they will simply walk away.

I have not followed the funding of the foundation’s efforts, but I suspect that it is still heavily concentrated on Cleveland-based philanthropies. The effort to promote Cleveland+ as a regional brand has largely failed. The effort to engage a regional conversation through Voices and Choices has failed. My guess is that Team NEO is largely ignored by local economic developers. The effort to create some sort of buying group among Northeast Ohio communities did not work.

There is promise in the collaboration that the Fund is trying to stimulate among local governments. It’s a small beginning. The investment commitment represents only about 3% to 4% of the Fund’s assets. And even if wildly successful, it will not have much of an impact on the long-term trajectory of the region’s economy.

The reason is simple. Government accounts for a fraction of a regional economy. Improving the cost structure of government will help lower the increasing upward pressure on taxes. But this can happen only over long-term and it a far larger scale than the current experiments allow.

More recently, the Fund has ventured into the complexities of workforce development. This is a highly complex area of regional economic development. (Up until about 10 years ago I avoided at all costs.) The workforce development system in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County is dysfunctional.

The chances of success here are not all that high, unless the leaders of this effort open themselves up to the learning that is taking place in regions across the country.

In other words, if civic leaders in Cleveland want to be successful in regional workforce development their insular mindsets and attitudes will need to change.

The interesting comparison over the next decade will be Cleveland and Milwaukee. My money is on Milwaukee.

The reason: like Cleveland, most of the people in Milwaukee devising and executing a regional economic development strategy have never taken on this task before. Yet, unlike Cleveland, civic leaders in Milwaukee look for guidance from people who have some experience in regional economic development.

It is possible to envision an organization which devotes brainpower to addressing genuine issues of common need and interest facing companies and institutions seeking to grow and add jobs in the region…defined however you will. People growing companies in Pittsburgh, or Youngstown, or Akron face common problems in workforce development. labor costs, marketing and managing in an increasingly connected global marketplace.

Problem is, the work you’d do to address those issues is radically different from the work being done by the organizations positioned as “representing the interests of the business community.”

Because for them, it’s all about Having The Power. Any benefit to the overall economy is largely…serendipitous…

We used to have the occasional corporate leader ask us, “What exactly does helping small businesses have to do with economic development?”…

Thirty years ago, and today, that’s what you’re up against…

When reflecting on the old hierarchical mindsets, the behaviors they spawn, and the people in Cleveland who continue to practice them, I’m reminded of a story a friend of mine once told me.

My friend grew up in Texas, and as a young boy, he would visit his grandfather’s farm. One weekend his grandfather took him to the barn to show them how to slaughter a pig. Without explaining, the grandfather took out a knife and slit a pig’s throat.

My friend, startled, expected to see the pig drop over. Instead, the pig began running around the barnyard. I friend, frightened, asked his grandfather why the pig was not dead.

The grandfather replied, “Oh, the pig is dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Exactly so. The Greater Cleveland Partnership and the Fund are organized around principles of steep hierarchy. These principles involved in Cleveland in the early decades of last century, as companies began organize large-scale production and marketing operations.

The ideas of Frederick Taylor guided these new organizations as they evolved. Taylor, a father of “scientific management” saw the importance of separating planning and doing. Traditional approaches to strategic planning evolved from this split.

Strategic planning assumes that there is a relatively small core of strategic thinkers who guide a large army of doers.

As firms evolved,they developed middle and top level salaried managers to monitor and control the work of operating units. You achieve scale by building ticker and bigger organizations.

This vertical organization had some important advantages. It was capable of reducing costs and coordinating high volume production with national and international distribution.

Not surprisingly in Cleveland structure and operation of civic organizations mirrored the underlying “real” economy. The president of Republic steel stood at the top of the hierarchy. The civic and social structure of Cleveland was very rigid and clear. Club memberships, board memberships, voluntary organizations, private schools, even dancing schools all fit within this hierarchy.

By the early 1970s, the collapse of the steel industry undercut Cleveland’s civic hierarchy. It no longer exists in its traditional form. Nevertheless, the GCP and others continue to embrace a top-down mindset.

Beginning in the 1980s, corporate strategy consultants like myself began applying strategic planning models to the challenges of building regional and state economies.

Our underlying assumptions included the idea that local political leaders and others were not “smart enough” to figure out the complexities of investing public resources across multiple economic sectors.

Fast forward 10 years. By the early 1990s I was beginning to understand that old-style strategic planning models would not work in regional economic development.

The reason is relatively simple: regional economic development takes place in an “civic space” outside the four walls of any one organization. Within the civic space, no hierarchy works. I started work on new models of strategy that are more appropriate to regional economic development. I continue that work today.

Yet in Cleveland, there is a real reluctance to embrace these new approaches. I found that out in my brief tenure at Case Western Reserve University.

The results of this reluctance by leadership to embrace innovation speak for themselves.

We used to say of a certain kind of guy that if you could buy class, he’d own more of it than anybody.
GCP controls the largest discretionary checkbook for economic development in Ohio, outside of the State itself. If success were dependent on the sheer volume of public and private investment in economic development process, Northeast Ohio’s economy should be thriving.

It ain’t the money; it’s how it’s being spent and who “the deciders” are.

And it’s the tendency of “the Cleveland Process” to devolve attempts at innovative activity to the lowest common denominator of consensus among the funding institutions and the Imperial Bureaucracy operating them. The Fund has great ideas, but its funders expect a certain degree of…harmony…with “the process”…so it can innovate only very carefully, at the margins, lest it find itself crossways with its regional “partners.”

“The Process” is the problem. There is virtually no objective standard by which one might conclude that the region’s economy is any stronger for all the resources being spent on, and by, the local Economic Development Institutional Matrix.

But the status quo must be okay with SOMEBODY, if the expenditure of so much money, for such meager returns, with such little accountability, by such a relatively closed group of people, can be seen not just as okay, but as progress…

BTW, your post inspired me to write a long bottled-up rant on the Cleveland+ brand, and its total inappropriateness as a symbol for regionalism. http://tinyurl.com/dbmuju

As I note in another post, the Fund has made a promising beginning to stimulate regional collaboration among governments.

The experiment is small though, The $300,000 devoted to this initiative represents only about 3-4% of the total commitments that the Fund makes of $8 million to $9 million per year.

With most of its money, the Fund has become the financing arm of a series of largely Cleveland centric initiatives effectively controlled by the GCP.

I’m not sure that’s what the foundations had in mind when they made commitments, but that’s where they have ended up.

The results is not so good for those looking to the the Fund to be a force for authentic regional collaboration.

With the exception of Bio-E, the managers of these large organizations appear to spend most of their thinking time and investments (if you believe folks in Lorain, Akron and Youngstown) in a relatively tight ring around Tower City.

And GCP’s approach to regional initiatives brings to mind George Burn’s old joke: “If you can fake authenticity in Hollywood, you’ve got it made.”

Cleveland+ has become a regional symbol of GCP’s inept approach to regional collaboration.

To get a measure of its irrelevance as a regional brand, ask a simple question: Where is the Cleveland+ logo displayed on home pages?

Greater Cleveland Partnership (YES)
Greater Akron Chamber (NO)
Youngstown Warren Chamber (NO)
Lorain County Chamber (NO)
Canton Regional Chamber (NO)
Cleveland Airport (NO)
Greater Medina Chamber (NO)
Lake County Chamber (NO)

The Fund For Our Economic Future is at least trying to put a spotlight on the potential for regional collaboration with it’s latest intiative. But, having committed serious resources to other surrogate organizations, it can provide only so much to non-institutionalized activity.

I know the Cleveland Foundation has given much thought in the past to creating a linkage with its Pittsburgh counterpart. Perhaps The Fund will be “handling” that for the future.

Ed’s slide speaks to me because it did seem that in 1993-94, Cleveland’s business, political and institutional leaders chose to close in on themselves, just as other smart communities were actively embracing The Outside World. This was done largely to accommodate the White Administration and its enablers. The Mayor couldn’t have given two hoots about regional collaboration, not with such juicy opportunities for public larceny as Hopkins and Browns Stadium.

The drivers of today’s shenanigans are largely the same people who were on hand then.

I worry about the tendency of GCP to substitute money for brainpower in so many of what should be its key activities. Having put up a few hundred thousand each for TeamNEO, JumpStart, Cleveland+, and other initiatives, the organization can stop thinking about all that stuff and really concentrate on…what?…