Brewed Fresh Daily

16 Responses to “Just Talk? Not really”

1. JS Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 8:39 am

   It can be argued what you have here is a very pragmatic, results producing plan.

   That argument is best put forth with actual plans, real world metrics, and the strategic results of a case history — not more talk about abstract strategic outcomes.

   Just from the point of effective communication with the skeptical, this would seem very basic.

   It’s very difficult to argue from the abstraction without getting eye rolls and “this guy really does not get it,” from the very people you’re trying to persuade. Action isn’t a lecture from academe. Results aren’t talk about the vagaries of the diagram.

   People who act and produce tangible results are leaders. And result producing leaders overthrow entrenched time-wasters who only produce talk.

2. Betsey Merkel Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 10:05 am

   Thanks JS. In connection to your comment, I’d like to suggest readers learn about the pragmatic results in North Central Indiana’s WIRED region (Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development).

   Civic, business, academic and government leaders there have adopted the new practices and tools of Open Source Economic Development for just the last couple of years. Granted it takes time for people to make these tectonic cognitive shifts to understand where new value resides, but I think you’ll agree the results are goal driven with strict measurements and hard benchmarks.

   Here’s the Success Report: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13347086/NCI-WIRED-Success-Story-Power-Point-123108

   Consider this a template for Everyone. All the activities are replicable and scalable for any region serious about making efficient, sustainable change. Many other regions across the U.S. have adopted Strategic Doing. The U.S. Department of Labor has adopted Strategic Doing. Colleges, Universities and their communities have adopted Strategic Doing. Why? It works.

   Bottom line: there is nothing complicated about this, it’s not rocket science. There’s a way to do this, it’s called Strategic Doing.

   We have all the tools and information we need and we have us. This is simply a matter of people learning about the value Strategic Doing offers them to respond to changing needs as they happen informed by critical thinking and ultimately, guided by our moral compass.

   Let’s not be stubborn but intelligent. The alternatives are not pretty. And, this is fun! So???

3. Ed Morrison Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 11:27 am

   JS:

   You’ve got it. We have been using this approach with remarkable results in Indiana. Milwaukee 7 is following in our footsteps. Other regions and states are following. The Department of Labor is integrating Strategic Doing into its professional development. The list goes on.

   In North Central Indiana, we have 50+ initiatives underway within 4 focus areas. Each initiative has passed through a transparent evaluation process to insure that the initiative is replicable, scalable, and sustainable.

   Each initiative has clear metrics.

   All of this work is managed by 1 full time professional.

   That’s the power of “linking and leveraging” networks and following a discipline of simple rules.

4. John Polk Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 2:27 pm

   Personally, it’s been quite awhile since a breakthrough idea has sprung fully-formed from my brain. I don’t know any other way to develop strategy, and implement it, than to engage in collaborative conversation with an interdisciplinary group of really smart people.

   There’s an adage in the association business: if the members help write the plan, they’ll help to underwrite it. Inclusive collaborative process doesn’t just leverage brainpower and resources, it creates a shared sense of urgency to DO something, and the desire to measure outcomes, so the group knows both what they’re doing and how they’re doing.

   Be it with Voices and Choices, several failed gambling ballot initiatives, and, I suspect, the recent Sustainability Summit, our corporate political and institutional leaders consistently show an unwillingness to listen appreciatively, choosing instead to ignore both the Voices and their Choices because they contradict their established agendas.

   Before V&C was an actual process, I once asked an insider, “What if 10,000 people got together and in one day could reach consensus not just on what needed to be done to fix the local economy, but also how to do it? Do you think anybody would listen.

   He just smiled ruefully and said, “If the big guys don’t like it, they’ll just ignore it.”

   And so they did. And so they do…

5. Ed Morrison Says:
   August 21st, 2009 at 6:10 am

   John:

   Your explanation provides an insight into why Cleveland is crumbling under its own inability to adapt.

   In the words today’s Plain Dealer editorial on the Port, Cleveland has become an “economic dead zone”.

   The boys behind the curtain — and their mandarins out front — may think that they are actually doing something (other than, of course, plastering their names on buildings).

   But markets don’t lie. For the past decade, the ineptitude of Cleveland’s leadership reveals itself in the stark statistics of decline.

   At some point, enough people will figure out that this generation of Cleveland’s leaders really doesn’t know what they’re doing when it comes to economic development.

   This week marks another milestone. Cleveland has launched the next episode in its ongoing food fight over casinos. While the Cavalier’s owner Dan Gilbert is investing in an entrepreneurial academy, Bizdom U, in his hometown of Detroit, he is making plans for a casino in Cleveland that will — given the saturation of the market — vacuum personal income out of the region.

   Sidebar.– With casinos, you need over 60% of the customer base to come from outside a region in order to have a positive economic development impact. Take the case of Louisiana, where I have studied the issue in depth. The casinos which target the Texas market, like Shreveport, have a positive economic impact for the region. Casinos that rely on an internal market, like Baton Rouge, create a net drain of income from the region.

   Given the saturation of casinos in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan and West Virginia, there is little likelihood of meeting this threshold in Cleveland. Furthermore, the relatively low tax rates proposed for Ohio’s casinos increase the threshold beyond 60%.

   Connecting the casino to a medical mart might help, but since we have no business plan for the medical mart, an untested real estate concept, it’s impossible to tell. (The leading cities for medical meetings are Orlando, Chicago, Washington and San Diego. None, except Orlando, averages more that 50 meetings per year. Cleveland’s leaders are projecting at least 50 for their medical mart, without any factual analysis to back up their projection.)

   There’s a strong argument to be made that a casino and a medical mart don’t really go together.

   Meanwhile, it appears that no one is focusing on recruiting Gilbert’s innovative entrepreneurship initiatives to Cleveland. I have no idea why not.

   http://bizdom.com

   Take a moment and read this entry from Dan Gilbert’s blog:

   In the News: Bizdom U Populates Detroit with Budding Entrepreneurs

6. JS Says:
   August 21st, 2009 at 7:02 am

   If Cleveland and Indiana show such different results, what you need is a a different plan.

   As for the Indiana report, it leaves out a lot of the very details I suggested. 37 students in 2007 and 48 trained in 2008 tells me nothing about results.

   Entrepreneurship is about business, not training for the possibility of business. This is a weak metric — about inputs, not outputs. If this is typical of the “metrics” portion of your diagram above, no wonder you face resistance.

   It has yet to be explained that the diagram plays an important part of these entrepreneurs in planning their business or running their business.

   The presentation doesn’t even show how the scheme shown here was used in Indiana.

   Finally, the way you get change is to have the newly trained entrepreneurs become an economic threat to the established order. These new businesses — using what’s in the diagram — must show remarkably superior earnings, profits and competitive advantage.

   Sorry, I don’t see strategic doings/outcomes either. Krannert’s making “resources” available doesn’t inform anyone about how (or whether) those resources were used. Nor does it explain the results.

   You have to show a skeptical audience why this particular way of doing things is markedly superior to a hundred other ways.

   A skeptic wants to see a superior profits, superior bottom line growth, and to top it off some remarkable products and services with definite competitive advantage.

   The reader of this “presentation” can’t tell if this launched 85 companies with the design vision of an Apple computer — or 50 hot dog stands with another 35 giving up on the idea of entrepreneurship altogether.

7. Ed Morrison Says:
   August 21st, 2009 at 8:09 am

   JS:

   Thanks for your critique, but you seem to miss the point.

   WIRED is a training program — a workforce development initiative. The outcomes are measured in people who complete training. (As for whether or not improving educational attainment increases economic incomes, the data are pretty clear: Higher education levels and higher incomes are closely connected. See the classic work by Paul Gottleib and Mike Fogarty, completed while they were at the Center for Regional Economic Issues at Case Western Reserve University: Educational Attainment and Metropolitan Growth)

   Your comments reveal a stong private sector orientation: “A skeptic wants to see a superior profits, superior bottom line growth, and to top it off some remarkable products and services with definite competitive advantage.”

   Economic and workforce development investments are fundamentally different from the private sector investments that power individual businesses.

   They are blended investments with financing from public, private and nonprofit sources. It is simply naïve to think that you can measure these investments with the same precision that a business would apply with its investment disciplines. I wish it were that easy, but it’s not.

   Sidebar: Why profit is not an adequate measure of economic development investment

   Businesses have a limited set of defined objectives to deliver measurable value. They have strongly imposed structures and rules that must be closely connected to the market. Investments by public and nonprofit organizations seek to generate public returns that fall outside the four walls of the firm. Economists use the term “spillovers”.

   Economic development investments are publicly valuable but not privately profitable. (If they are publicly valuable and privately profitable, the market should be left to work. If they are privately profitable, but not publicly valuable — pornography or the drug trade, for example — we need regulation to step in.)

   Even so, we are seeing private-sector businesses move beyond the notion of profit as their single metric of success.

   In the Industrial Age, markets were stable, and management thinking was driven by a linear cause-and-effect model. Within the industrial model, the role of profit was an adequate gauge of business progress.

   This way of thinking, standing alone, is not pragmatically useful anymore. In dynamic, fast moving markets, linear thinking does not work very well. The balance, order and simplicity of Industrial Age thinking is lost today, because markets are continuously shifting.

   We are now seeing businesses grapple with new ways of capturing performance along different dimensions. The balanced scorecard represents one example. But there are many others. Some companies are designing new “dashboards”. Others are moving toward sustainability, the notion of a triple bottom line, to adjust their strategies and imagine other possibilities. Others are moving toward open innovation and measuring the density of their innovation networks.

   Increasingly, businesses are succeeding if they are the first within an industry to see an adjacent possibility and act on it. That’s what innovation is all about. A single-minded focus on profit does not, sadly, measure the ability of the business to adapt and change rapidly.

   Regional economies that focus on nurturing innovative firms will prosper if you believe that innovation can generate productivity improvements, which in turn boost incomes.

   We are working to develop new diagnostic tools — such as a new regional innovation metric that we will be launching this fall. These new tools are more suitable to open systems thinking that move beyond simplistic cause-and-effect mindsets.

   The core problem in your critique is that you do not seem to understand the difference in these types of investment.

   Regional economies are complex adaptive systems not subject to the linear, causal relationships that you suggest in your comments. As complex systems, they have leverage points: places where relatively small inputs can make major differences.

   A final point: the document I’ve posted is a progress report to an audience of federal officials who have invested in our region. It is not intended to be an explanation of our strategy. Given my lack of explanation, it is not surprising that you did not completely understand this point.

   As for hotdog stands or Apple computers, we are seeing both. As a research university, we are obviously focused on technology-based economic development. But if a laid-off autoworker in Kokomo can make a happy living selling hotdogs, we should all applaud.

   Sidebar: Of hotdogs and floating soap

   In the 1850’s my great grandfather came to this country from Belfast and opened a meat packing business in Cincinnati. I’m sure he would have loved the idea of hot dogs, made popular about 20 years later by another entrepreneur, Charles Feltman, at Coney Island. As it was, he was smart enough to marry the daughter of another entrepreneur, William Proctor, who with his business partner discovered something really simple: how to make a soap that floats. So, I’m not so cynical about selling hot dogs (or soap, for that matter).

   By the way, you might be interested in reading James Burke’s, The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible – and Other Journeys to gain appreciation for how something a simple as a hot dog can lead to surprising connections. Our economy is a set of networks nested in other networks, and Burke’s perspective underscores the point. Innovation, as my colleague Valdis Krebs notes, takes place on the edges of these networks.

8. JS Says:
   August 21st, 2009 at 9:24 am

   “The outcomes are measured in people who complete training. (As for whether or not improving educational attainment increases economic incomes, the data are pretty clear: Higher education levels and higher incomes are closely connected.”

   There are a couple of issues I am attempting to address. One of which is why it is the skeptical aren’t being convinced by what is shown.

   You’re generalizing does not convince me of the merits of this particular course over others.

   Next, to the business person the compelling results Are Not people who went through the course. This plays right into the (possibly questionable, but highly effective) argument of academic distance from reality.

   You seem to miss the point of convincing the as yet unconvinced. If you are training entrepreneurs, common business metrics apply. If not, call them something else.

   There is nothing wrong with the point profits are not the be all and end all. However, if what you’re showing produces lower profits or no profits and then you put forth a weak case for any other benefit, your audience is likely to remain unconvinced.

   You wrote, “But if a laid-off autoworker in Kokomo can make a happy living selling hotdogs, we should all applaud.”

   Show me an autoworker trained through this program — running his stand as prescribed in the diagram kicking off this discussion — then I shall applaud. And not until. Pretty close to what I would think your “just talk” skeptic would be looking for.

   As for Pinball Effect, I already read Connections by James Burke. In turn, my suggestion is for you to read the Medici Effect — perhaps more in line with what the skeptical might be looking for.

9. Ed Morrison Says:
   August 21st, 2009 at 10:21 am

   Our approach to regional economic development, designed around open networks is working. It is focused and driven by metrics.

   I’m sorry that you remain unconvinced. But I am not surprised.

   Your skepticism, perhaps, is one reason why the private sector in Cleveland does not move. You seem sadly uninformed about the dynamics of regional economic development.

   We agree on one point: the Medici Effect is a good book.

10. JS Says:
    August 21st, 2009 at 11:12 am

    “uninformed”

    Yeah. Sounds like Cleveland.

11. Ed Morrison Says:
    August 22nd, 2009 at 9:38 am

    JS:

    Maybe you can help me understand Cleveland’s culture of insularity. In regional economic development, there are no books. People are inventing new approaches on the fly. The best way to learn is to visit other cities and regions to see “What works”. For some odd reason, Cleveland’s leadership does not routinely make visits to other regions.

    This is a common practice among leading cities. Delegations of between 30 and 200 civic leaders will annually make too in three-day visits to learn what others are doing.

    I’ve never understood why Cleveland’s leaders do not organize around this simple idea.

12. JS Says:
    August 22nd, 2009 at 4:53 pm

    You won’t provide the information I ask for, then call me uniformed — on information you won’t provide on the training and trainees.

    Who’s in a bubble?

    Frank Jackson, who traveled to Cleveland’s sister city within the last year? (You know the cities name, I’m sure …you’re informed, I am not).

    Recent PD article: Cleveland officials to visit China and Japan for research on new alternative energy possibility August llth 2009. I’m sure you know, as you’re the font of all information, and I am simply to be dismissed, what that trip was about bringing to the Ridge Road transfer station.

    Or the trip to the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia July 14th.

    I could go on, but really — what could I possibly put forth that won’t be dismissed by your insular little clique? The self-congratulatory self important feedback loop you lock yourself into is quite tiresome.

    It’s not you so it doesn’t count. Is that it?

13. Ed Morrison Says:
    August 22nd, 2009 at 10:13 pm

    JS:

    You’re getting a bit testy here.

    What precisely do you want to know? I’m happy to give you data, if that what’s you want. You were asking for economic development outcomes from a workforce development initiative, so I guess I’m confused.

    Here’s a suggestion. Just send along you data request, your name and e-mail to me at edmorrison@purdue.edu

    I’ll see if I can answer your questions.

    You seem to misunderstand my point on outside travel. Leading edge cities annually arrange large delegations of civic leaders to travel to other cities to learn what works. These groups range from 30-40 on the low end to 200 on the high end.

    As for the mayor, I have no idea where he went, since I do not know anything about which sister city you are talking about. (Cleveland has 20 of them.)

    As you may know, most of these sister city relationships are geared toward cultural and student exchanges. They normally have little to do with business. (For a few years in he 1980’s, I headed the sister city relationship between Boston and Hangzhou.)

    As for going to Japan or China for alternative energy research, perhaps that’s a good idea, but it’s hard to judge from one paragraph in the newspaper. The language problems in doing business with Japan or China are severe, so to me, it doesn’t make much sense, given that there are other resources closer to home.

    If I were investigating the issue, my first stop would the the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado. Then, I’d probably head to Canada. There’s a good article in the Globe and Mail: Garbage in, energy out. I’d also look here:

    Zero Waste Ottawa

    Zero Waste Vancouver

    I’m not convinced the Cleveland Public Power’s efforts at thermal gasification will amount to much. It seems more a gesture than a strategy (like the addition of 6 or 8 hybrid vehicles to the CPP fleet a couple of years ago).

    As you may know, the biggest challenge with waste to energy gasification of municipal wastes comes in waste sorting and pretreatment of solid waste. It can be a very costly process, so gasification offers only a partial solution to reducing municipal solid waste. It will likely work best as part of a broader strategy of waste reduction, including recycling.

    Now for Nova Scotia, I’m not sure what the purpose of that trip was.

    http://www.wcpn.org/WCPN/news/27029

    (Canada’s Maritime provinces are doing some interesting research with civic leaders in Maine on creating a new transportation corridor to the US Midwest. Maybe that’s what you meant. About a year ago, I sat through a presentation in Maine about their work. As part of that, it’s clear Halifax wants to be the “Atlantic gateway” to North America.)

    If you are talking about the Port’s activities more generally, what I know, I read in the newspaper. (The Port is not known for its transparency.)

    I refer you to the PD editorial calling into question the Port’s plans for the future: Plan to remake Cleveland’s port isn’t yet solid enough to go forward. Tom Breckenridge has also done a recent article raising questions what the Port is doing”: Cleveland port’s various projects are raising questions about oversight, cost.

    Finally, I’m proud to know that I lead an “insular little clique”. Please send along the names of people in my cabal. I’d like to invite them to dinner and get them some t-shirts. Sounds like fun.

14. JS Says:
    August 23rd, 2009 at 7:32 am

    “some t-shirts.”

    Don’t have any spare “I Got Linked” shirts around?

    Just a small aside, but I am no apologist for city bureaucrats — calling them “leaders” is also not a word I would choose. Again, if Cleveland is different perhaps different tactics should be applied. Something the well traveled appreciative inquirer should already be informed about.

    If anything can be said of Cleveland, the monkey-see monkey-do approach (ten years late and millions in investment short) has been tried. Old Slogan Revisited: Cleveland’s a Plumb …Only Because New York’s an Apple and We’re Just That Uncomfortable With Innovation.

    A little long for a slogan, but still apropos for that shirt.

    As for the rest, you’ve already stated quite clearly you don’t do more than release trainees in the wild to do who knows what. This doesn’t have that new economy smell one looks for in their genuinely innovative new direction.

    What would you send me that shouldn’t be (more appropriately) placed alongside the diagram above — probably in the initial post?

    Your OP seems to take issue with why a group like Fund for our Economic Future sees an initiative (yours or others) would be dismissive of something as “Just Talk.”

    Okay, I asked for details. And got similarly dismissed as uninformed about stuff that should have gone into the original post.

    Doesn’t this sound like more of the same we’ve come to expect from Cleveland? If I am testy it’s in response to the same ODOT, Port Authority, etc etc open meeting closed decision making “bubble.”

    The original post sounded like a genuinely honest appreciative inquiry for new information. I now have the details about the one-way “I have the answer — you better get on board” memo.

    Sorry, but I’ve been getting that memo for thirty years. I did miss the day they taught that in Appreciative Inquiry class though.

    If I am wrong and you are looking for new information to try a different approach with the goal of getting your ideas more traction here — try not to look like the same old Cleveland wine in a new bottle.

    If those guys lack transparency, your diagram also leaves a lot to be desired. As does the refusal to simply explain who is using the diagram posted above and how that diagram is producing a desirable result.

    The Port Authority criticism is exactly what I’ve been applying to this diagram — for similar reasons. Good example. Thanks for bringing up yet another similarity between you and the Cleveland bubble leadership.

    What I see of the Cleveland bubble is withholding details, dismiss skeptics as uniformed about those details not provided, then hold open meetings to let those people blow off steam rather than engage two way communication which might change the plan already decided upon.

    Then let the lack of getting into the practical get things done details come back to bite the project in the untested, unproven assumptions.

    Been there. Seen that. Have the shirt.

15. John McGovern Says:
    August 23rd, 2009 at 11:09 am

    @ Ed Morrison:
    You said “Innovation, as my colleague Valdis Krebs notes, takes place on the edges of these networks.”

    Agreed!

    Has the metaphor yet been extended to incorporate living systems? The edge of an ecosystem is known as an ecotone and this is where the greatest diversity of life exists.

16. Ed Morrison Says:
    August 23rd, 2009 at 3:21 pm

    JS:

    I must admit, I have some difficulty following your logic.

    First things, first. You mistake my motives. I’m not trying to get more traction here. I’m already quite busy, thanks. I am, however, trying to help out those in northeast Ohio who see another path to accelerating collaboration.

    New thinking is taking hold in Lorain, Akron and Youngstown. CLE is slower to try out new ideas.

    Who is using the diagram?

    Well, economic and workforce development professionals are following this approach to Strategic Doing in a number of places. In the past year, I have conducted workshops in Idaho, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Indiana, Texas, Louisiana, California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Oklahoma, Illinois.

    Like any new habit, this discipline takes time to master. But people are seeing a new approach to strategy, and they are using this approach to align networks quickly with “link and leverage” strategies.

    You seem still hung up on the fact that education and training is some how disconnected to economic development. I, obviously, don’t agree.

    If you want to see how this approach is delivering results among businesses, you might look to the fresh water cluster in SE Wisconsin (Milwaukee 7 region): The Milwaukee Water Council. They conducted a strategic doing workshop last summer.

    Or, you might want to look at the clean tech initiative in Indiana: the Indiana Energy Systems Network. Our WIRED initiative made a seed investment in that network, which involves companies like Cummins, Delphi and Allison Transmissions

    I think this conversation with you, JS, is at an end, since you will not reveal who you are to BFD readers or even to me privately.

    That’s “withholding details” if you catch my drift.