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6 Responses to “The Heartland Conference”

1. John Polk Says:
   April 2nd, 2009 at 10:36 pm

   In addition to Your Esteemed Self, were any other Ohio/Cleveland+ representatives at the conference?…if so, it’d be good to hear from them. if not…Why not?…

2. Ed Morrison Says:
   April 3rd, 2009 at 7:28 pm

   Well, John, it was rather disappointing. Ohio did not have much of a delegation, and Cleveland — well, I did not run into anyone. I’ll check the list of attendees.

   That’s too bad, because leading states are weeing the influx of cash into the public workforce system as a great opportunity to transform the system. As a result, there is a lot of interest in the disciplines of Strategic Doing, as a way to identify, define, and manage collaborations.

   So, it’s not surprising to me that I-Open and Purdue will be doing workshops at other multi-state regional forums to be held in Atlanta, Dallas, Boston and San Francisco.

   Idaho, Indiana and Colorado are moving to reorient their workforce systems using this approach, and the Milwaukee 7 region is well on its way to becoming a national leader of open innovation using this model.

   In Cleveland, I suspect, we should be concerned about another problem…waste and corruption. The Cuyahoga County Workforce Board has a strong tendency to be a political cookie jar for the mayor and the Commissioners, especially DiMora.

   I will be exploring how we might be using expanded reporting — particularly of the upcoming summer jobs program — to keep track of where the money is going.

   The Feds will be requiring monthly reporting, and the Chicago regional office made clear that they will have no patience for business as usual: paying kids to paint fire hydrants (which is what a typical Cleveland program looks like).

3. Ed Morrison Says:
   April 3rd, 2009 at 7:36 pm

   Erratum from some lazy typing: Should read” …because leading states are seeing the influx of cash into the public workforce system…”

4. John Polk Says:
   April 4th, 2009 at 5:21 pm

   I did some time on the City Of Cleveland’s Private Industry Council, the City’s workforce board, during part of the White Administration.

   I noticed that the Board never saw contracts with agencies, never received any reports on results achieved by contracting agencies, nor even spoke to anyone who received Federal funds through the City’s program.

   When I began asking questions regarding process and results, even suggesting that we might occasionally visit agencies receiving funds to see how they were doing, I got serious, White-style pushback: I got fired from the Board and the word went forth that I was anti-Mayor (oh, yeah, and a racist).

   At the time, the City dished out about $20 million in federal job training funds. I’d be interested in knowing how, if at all, the situation has changed. At the time, the County’s workforce program dispensed about $4 million.

5. Ed Morrison Says:
   April 5th, 2009 at 8:29 am

   I have a funnier story.

   Soon after leaving Case Western Reserve, the Cleveland Cuyahoga County WIB contracted with I-Open to do a strategy. It was quite an experience.

   At one board meeting, I posted a summary chart of the federal funds that flowed through the WIB. A board member blurted out: “$20 million! I don’t know we had that much money!”

   I’m going to see if the DOL’s Chicago Office will collaborate with a group of us to make the payments under this summer’s youth program more visible.

   Under the upcoming reporting standards, Byron Zuidema (former head of DOL’s Chicago Regional Office, now a key aide to Secretary Solis) made clear that WIBs will be required to report monthly on their summer program. Byron is very supportive of the open networks strategy we have been developing at I-Open and Purdue.

   The workforce system is the largest economic development system in the region, but it operates in deep secrecy. (For example, the WIB, before the Recovery Act, operated at about $20 million a year, over twice the size of the foundation’s Fund for the Future.)

   I’ll be using Map the Mess as a platform to share what I learn. http://www.mapthemess.net

6. John Polk Says:
   April 5th, 2009 at 12:55 pm

   Unfortunately, mediocrity, mendacity, self-dealing and adherence to the path of least resistance have become the hallmarks of too much of Cleveland’s private-sector governance, whether over private-sector organizations or “public/private partnerships,” like the Workforce Boards.

   With The Imperial Bureaucracies firmly entrenched and calling the shots, private-sector leadership are generally either asleep at the switch, blissfully uninformed, or in on the scam.

   Over four or five years, Board leaders who ask questions or demand accountability are routinely marginalized and replaced either by good-hearted people who are so happy to be “at the table” that they’d vote to support pederasty if directed to do so by staff, or else unapologetically using their positions to feather their own nests.

   This is, of course, not endemic to Cleveland, nor just to local institutions. The current economic crisis can be traced back to more than a decade of lax and permissive corporate governance over greedy and self-dealing CEOs’ and corporate staff. And ironically, having ruined their companies, these CEO’s and their co-conspirators usually receive big severance packages instead of jail time.

   Perhaps this is a factor at the root of Cleveland’s lackluster governance. Corporate CEO’s are used to selecting Board members for their willingness to play along, and on one anothers’ Boards, tend to return the favor. How can we expect they’d fulfill their civic and institutional responsibilities any differently?…

   Literally tens of millions of dollars per year flow through public and private institutions with very little accountability. THIS is one of the critical factors in our curent leadership crisis.