Brewed Fresh Daily

As I've been dwelling on leadership this week, a couple of old CrainTech articles came to my attention that I thought I'd share. The first is from Reinventing Cleveland�s Power Structure:

For over a century Cleveland�s large industrial employers have been synonymous with the city�s institutional foundation... That model was first shaken by the industrial recession of the late 1970�s and continues to be rattled by economic forces that have been unkind to Cleveland�s headquarters companies... it does suggest that we have invested a lot of influence -- and responsibility -- with corporate leaders who have become minority shareholders in our community... This also means that the process can be co-opted by those relatively few players who truly are stakeholders in the region�s future, giving them unchecked opportunities to enact strategies which will serve their own self-interests, wrapped in a cloak of civic-minded concerns. All of which leads to some interesting questions: What if the decisions affecting the area�s economy were being made by people whose companies are actually growing here? Would the community�s priorities be different? And who might those decision-makers be? The answer to the final question is the most obvious: It�s the area�s entrepreneurs and small business owners who are heavily invested here and are providing virtually all the employment growth here.

The other one is from Leaders Make the Difference:

A couple weeks ago, I got the chance to shake hands with one of Greater Cleveland's innovative and committed young leaders in technology education...just before he got on a plane and flew home to Dallas. His name is Gregg Lowe. He grew up part of a big Catholic family on Cleveland's West Side. He's one of nine brothers to graduate from Saint Edward High School, where Gregg did well enough to attend Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, one of the nation's foremost engineering schools. He's now a senior vice president with Texas Instruments, and lives with his family in Dallas. Gregg must be doing pretty well, because a couple years ago the President of Saint Ed's flew to Dallas to hit him up for a big gift to support the school's capital campaign. Gregg wasn't too hot for bricks and mortar, but for the last several years he'd been wrestling with an idea: how to provide high school students with an introduction to basic engineering principles that might encourage them to pursue engineering as a college major and a career...There's a trendy title for this sort of activity: it's called venture philanthropy. But call it what you will, it's a tribute to what can happen when one person decides the time has come to make a difference, and links up with a partner organization which shares his vision and enthusiasm. This kind of personal commitment happens every day in our town, sometimes on a grander scale, but rarely on a more personal and visionary one. It should remind us that people, not institutions, are the engines of positive change in our community. And celebrating and encouraging this sort of philanthropic activism can be a refreshing alternative to making massive investments of resources to prop up aging institutions based on obsolete business models. In the scheme of things, I'd trade a million person-hours of institutional collaboration and consensus-building for ten Gregg Lowes anytime.

I apologize to Chris at CrainTech and John Polk, because I cut out large sections of poignant writing to fit it into this place. Please follow the links and read the whole thing. I'm sure John's been busy at the JCUEA, but I hope he has time for another column at CrainTech. I can't think of a better time then now for it.