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Ed Morrison · Thanking a teacher
January 3rd, 2012
Rich Homberg from Detroit Public Television passed this along.
Some years ago, I was speaking to the Rotary in Cleveland. One of my high school teachers was in the audience. Before I began, I pointed him out and thanked him. A small gesture, to be sure. Boy oh, boy. He really appreciated the gesture. You would have though I had handed him a check for $1 million.
Ed Morrison · Cleveland’s Growing Problem with Abandoned Homes
December 24th, 2011
Scott Pelley and 60 Minutes, in case you missed it:
Ed Morrison · Bull City Forward: A model to resuscitate the Civic Innovation Lab
December 24th, 2011
Checkout Bull City Forward, based in Durham, NC…A good model for relaunching the moribund Civic Innovation Lab.
Some thoughts on next steps for the Cleveland Foundation:
1. Run a challenge inviting teams to manage Civic Innovation Lab 2.0 anchored to one or more colleges or universities
2. Send the finalists to Durham, so they can connect and figure out what’s happening there
3. Invite the finalists to modify their proposals based on what they learn; schedule presentations
4. Guarantee the winner core operating funds (with Gund) up to a ceiling of about $200K of five years
5. Establish an Opportunity Fund (a seed fund along the lines of the SBIR program) to be managed by the Lab
6. Create networks (angel capital, mentors) to support the new Lab
7. Avoid the temptation to micromanage
Here’s more background…
Still stuck? Read what can happen when you tap into the ingenuity of university students. An example from Madison, WI:
Ed Morrison · How open courseware changes higher education
December 24th, 2011
Created by: Online College Classes
Ed Morrison · Buffalo schools get a big boost
December 21st, 2011
Buffalo civic leaders announced a landmark collaboration to improve its city schools.
In what could be a pivotal moment in the history of the Buffalo Public Schools, Say Yes to Education is announcing today that it will offer a college tuition guarantee for graduates of traditional public and charter schools in the city, starting in June 2013.
Some interesting quotes:
“This idea is so simple: an entire community committing to every child being successful. We do this collaboratively.”
“When a city is a hurting and the realization comes that we have to do something to help the kids and revitalize the city, then it works.”
“People are ready to be part of the solution. Everyone realizes this is a crisis, and everyone’s committed to doing what’s right by the kids.”
Ed Morrison · Hoosier innovation: A brilliant, simple idea to support young entrepreneurs
December 20th, 2011
Here is a simple idea for accelerating the development of networks needed to support young entrepreneurs. With legislation recently passed by the Indiana legislature, Indiana communities can elect to offer incentive packages to attract young entrepreneurs.
It’s both a competition and a matchmaking. The young entrepreneurs will evaluate different bid packages before deciding where to locate their business
The initiative is targeted at entrepreneurs who are in an Indiana college or university pursuing a major, minor or certificate in an entrepreneurial program. The initiative also includes Indiana graduates with a major, minor or certificate on the turnaround program who completed their studies within the past 3 years.
The process starts with a business plan. So far, this isn’t much different than most business plan competitions.
But here’s the twist. Communities compete with incentive packages to attract the best entrepreneurs. The communities come up with the reward.
Instead of chasing the next company moving from Michigan the Mexico with incentive deals, participating communities design incentive packages to attract these promising young entrepreneurs.
My Purdue colleague, Scott Hutchison, is in the middle of the team implementing this initiative statewide. He’s promoting the program to communities by encouraging them to think broadly about the different incentive packages that they can put together.
So, for example, a local health system to provide low-cost or no-cost health insurance to employees of the new company. Real estate developers could offer real estate packages that include both live and work spaces. Local restaurants could provide vouchers for free or reduced price meals. The downtown association could provide “shopping cards”.
Accounting and law firms could offer reduced rate or free services. Local governments could offer a concierge service to help the new company navigate government regulations and programs. Community banks could band together to provide attractive financing packages. Angel investors could come together to mentor the new company. The local YMCA could offer free memberships. The list goes on.
This initiative doesn’t cost the state government a dime. At the same time, it redirects local economic developers and civic leaders to the real source of future prosperity in their communities.
Brilliant.
Ed Morrison · Report on US Manufacturing
December 20th, 2011
A week ago, the Council on Competitiveness released a report that makes a dramatic, urgent call for a renewed focus on manufacturing as the “cornerstone of American independence, economic prosperity and national security”. The report concludes that manufacturing’s competitiveness demands igniting innovation.
The report goes on to set forth an array of actions that can improve the future trajectory of U.S. manufacturing firms.
The report goes on to set forth an array of actions that can improve the future trajectory of U.S. manufacturing firms.
Ed Morrison · Massachusetts looks at the growing divides in its economy
December 20th, 2011
Here’s an interesting report from The Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth. The report explores on the economy’s “lost decade” and the challenges for the Massachusetts presented by the growing divides among its citizens. One of the particularly troubling findings: the lost link between greater productivity and higher incomes per worker.
Ed Morrison · Why incivility destroys innovation and prosperity | Shreveport’s Choice Neighborhood as a case study
December 18th, 2011
Incivility destroys a community’s capacity to generate wealth.
Here’s why.
In a networked, knowledge-driven economy, collaboration drives wealth creation. And collaboration can only thrive in a stable environment of trust. The corrosion of our civil society –– the alarming growth of incivility and pervasive lying –– undercuts our economy’s productivity and our capacity to innovate.
Incivility — fraudulent concealment (“hiding the ball”), lying, manipulation, and associated behaviors — can work well to redistribute wealth. We see almost endless examples from MF Global to the subprime mess. Yet, these behaviors do not generate wealth. Indeed, they erode capitalism’s capacity to generate wealth. That’s why corruption slows economic growth and why trust is associated with higher rates of economic growth.
We have moved into a new economic era with new rules for prosperity. Increasingly, knowledge embedded in products and services creates the value leading to wealth. This knowledge is generated and managed through collaborative, loosely joined networks.
Our capacity to prosper depends on our capacity to collaborate and innovate in these open networks. To innovate, we must learn how to design and manage complex projects without relying on “command and control” dictates, which don’t work. Trust becomes a key element in the effectiveness of these networks. Ethical habits are crucial to innovation and the generation of wealth in open networks. (For those interested in diving deeper into this topic, you might read Francis Fukuyama’s Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.)
This all sounds abstract. Let’s get practical.
Bringing innovation to inner city Shreveport
How do you transform the economy at a neighborhood level? That’s the challenge that a colleague of mine, Kim Mitchell and his firm, took on with a HUD Choice Neighborhood grant in Shreveport, LA. Kim is a member of our Strategic Doing Design Team that meets twice a year to advance the disciplines of agile strategy with Strategic Doing.
In this Choice Neighborhood grant, Kim and his team proposed a new approach to rebuilding the economies of devastated inner-city neighborhoods. The Purdue Center for Regional Development has been assisting the team.
We know this much: billions of dollars of federal money over the past four decades have not changed the dynamics within these neighborhoods. Each of these well intended federal programs has been designed to fix a specific problem. They do not change the underlying dynamics within the neighborhood. As a result, they fail. In the case of HUD, the agency’s categorical programs have done little to change the dynamics of neighborhoods like Ledbetter and Allendale in Shreveport.
A promising strategy developed in Shreveport offers hope of a new approach. Community Renewal International views neighborhoods as a series of interconnected, complex networks. As a shorthand, they refer to the “village structure” of the neighborhood. For a number of years Kim and I have been working with Mac McCarter and his team at CRI to explore how we might integrate the CRI strategy framework with the new discipline of Strategic Doing, incubated at the Purdue Center for Regional Development.
This video introduces CRI:
Strategic Doing represents a fast way to design and manage complex collaborations by following simple rules. (For more background, see the article in the most recent issue of Michigan State’s Engaged Scholar magazine, p. 33) This video introduces Strategic Doing with work we have been doing on the Space Coast in the wake of the NASA Shuttle shutdown:
The CRI approach promises dramatic improvements in the productivity of federal investments in these devastated neighborhoods. So, for example, in Allendale, CRI has shown dramatic improvements by focusing on what matters: the core, intentional relationships that build the neighborhood.
Strategic Doing focuses on building these strategic relationships quickly.
Our partners at Michigan State are now using this discipline to address opportunities and challenges in neighborhoods in mid-Michigan through the “Power of We”. With Michigan State, Purdue is launching a national network of colleges and universities to teach this new discipline in order to accelerate our nation’s civic innovation. Arizona State, Indiana University, the University of Akron, the University of Alaska, and Northern Illinois University are just some of the campuses joining this effort.
Accelerating civic innovation is vital to our economy’s economic transformation. We have shown that with Strategic Doing, we can dramatically boost the productivity of federal investments by “linking and leveraging” these investments across organizational and political boundaries.
With the Choice Neighborhood grant, Kim and his team proposed to use the Ledbetter/Allendale neighborhoods as a testbed for new approaches to revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods by combining the insights of Community Renewal International and Strategic Doing.
This work is difficult, complex and exciting. Open innovation pushes us in new directions. At its base, however, it requires a commitment to civility among the members of the team. By “civility” I mean the capacity to treat each other with mutual respect and honesty. Civility means not withholding relevant information from one another, not lying to one another, and not personally attacking one another.
The Shreveport Choice Neighborhood innovation implodes
Unfortunately, the City of Shreveport and the local council of governments could not uphold their end of the bargain. A week ago, they issued a letter demanding that Kim and our team cease working on this project.
This letter came from an attorney after local government officials undercut the project with a pattern of unacceptable civic behavior. Rather than confront any disagreements with our team openly, the City and the council of governments elected to first attack our work behind the scenes and then run to a lawyer.
I’m disappointed, but not surprised.
Civic innovations like the ones we were designing in Shreveport disrupt bureaucratic organizations. These innovations propose a new way of doing business that can be threatening to the established order.
The incivility we encountered fits a pattern long established in Shreveport, where I have been working since 1984. When I first arrived in the city to work on an economic development strategy, I encountered a public debate touched off by a Methodist minister. He accused the city’s leadership of being unable to collaborate to lift the city’s sights. Rev. Hull called this civic pathology “Shreveportitis”. Amplifying Rev. Hull’s comments the same year, I wrote about the political challenges facing Shreveport in a strategy report that the American Economic Council awarded the first Arthur D. Little Award for Excellence in Economic Development.
I pointed out in that report that Shreveport’s evolution politically would ultimately define its economic horizon.
Almost a decade later, on November 3, 1993, I gave a speech to the Shreveport Rotary, “The Politics of Personality: The Biggest Economic Challenge Facing Shreveport and What To Do About It.” In the speech, I diagnosed Shreveport’s problem bluntly: “The political dynamics of Shreveport…are mired in a ditch.” I pointed out that as economies slow down, the focus of politics inevitably narrows. The game turns into zero sum, and local “leaders” focus too much on personalities and not enough on issues of common concern. They lose a sense of direction. Politics becomes a soap opera, an endless loop of shallow intrigue and innuendo.
In my 1993 remarks, I set out some simple rules to guide Shreveport toward a more healthy and productive civic process: Shreveport’s leaders “must be willing to to exclude from the process those people who insist on promoting their own hidden agendas to the detriment of others. Those who insist on manipulating and withholding information to their own advantage. Those who refuse to respect others and the spirit of collaborative discussion.”
Twenty-seven years after Rev. Hull and I pointed out the challenge of civic leadership in Shreveport, and 18 years after my speech to the Rotary, Shreveport’s leadership has been unable to develop more healthy civic habits. Shreveportitis still infects the body politic.
The challenge for HUD: Move beyond project management
Sadly, the agency staff at HUD has proven itself not much help to get the Choice Neighborhood project underway. One of the challenges in moving HUD toward new models of sustainable development involves training staff new ways of thinking and behaving, new approaches that foster collaboration. The HUD staff is well-versed in project-based management. Yet, these approaches are too rigid, too linear, too bureaucratic to support the agile, integrated and open strategies that provide the foundation for sustainable development. Sustainable development invites us to cross boundaries, not defend them.
I am finding with my conversations with other development professionals across the country that the HUD staff has a very difficult time understanding how to manage promising new pathways to sustainable development. These approaches are inherently more agile and flexible. As HUD moves forward, they will need to examine how to retrain their field staff to promote more collaborative approaches to sustainable development. (The same is true for the staffs of the Employment and Training Administration, as well as the Economic Development Administration.)
Where we go from here? We will continue to develop and deploy new approaches to agile strategy and sustainable neighborhood development. We will also explore how these models can be embedded, replicated and scaled across regions through our emerging university network.
In our last Strategic Doing Design Team meeting, we discussed the fact that not all communities or regions have the civic maturity to undertake these more sophisticated approaches to building wealth in a networked world. We will be writing up the case of Shreveport to gain some insight into the civic behaviors that must be in place to transform an economy through open innovation in loosely joined networks.
Shreveport’s Choice Neighborhood initiative has provided us a valuable lesson in what to avoid.
Where does Shrevport go from here? My guidance to my friends and colleagues in Shreveport was passed on to me by one of my mentors, Dick Pogue, former managing director of the Jones Day law firm.
In guiding me, Dick told me he was passing on advice he received years earlier from his mentor, the legendary Erwin Griswold, former Solicitor General of the United States.
When I confronted opposition to deploying these new approaches in Cleveland, Dick told me, “Press on, regardless.”
Sage advice.
Brian Cummins · OCC communication to Banks regarding Foreclosed Residential Properties
December 15th, 2011
The following information was received from Kermit J. Lind and draws attention to an important communication released yesterday from the Federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
___________________________
Dear Public Officials and Code Enforcement Advocates,
The attached statement just released by the OCC to Chief Executive Officers of All National Banks and Federal Savings Associations, Department and Division Heads, and All Examining Personnel should be of special interest to those agencies who are spending millions in public funds to deal with the harmful condition of residential properties in foreclosure… See full post: OCC communication to Banks
___________________________
Link to the full OCC communications released on 12/14/2011: OCC 2011-49
One of the more interesting points of the Comptroller’s guidance is the mention of releasing liens in lieu of foreclosure actions where properties are deep underwater –
Releasing a Lien Rather Than Foreclosing
At times, lenders may release a lien securing a defaulted loan rather than foreclose on the residential property. This decision is often based on financial considerations when the bank or servicer/investor determines that the costs to foreclose, rehabilitate, and sell a property exceed its current fair-market value. When this decision is made after a bank or servicer has initiated foreclosure, the borrower may have already abandoned the property or discontinued the care and maintenance of the property, increasing the chance of a blighted property in the community. Because the decision to release a lien is typically a financial decision, banks and servicers should ensure that their valuation of the property provides the best information practicable, while complying with investor requirements, before initiating foreclosure and subsequently deciding to release the lien. While the financial risk must be considered, banks and servicers should also consider the potential for reputation and litigation risk arising from their position as a prior mortgagee or servicer of a now-abandoned property. [emphasis added]
[Read more here.]
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