Watching the Cavs pull out a one-game victory over Orlando last night after a quick inbound and very long three-point bucket from Lebron James with exactly one second left on the clock, I couldn’t help but be inspired by the king’s heroism. Six years out of high school, James is easily the most decorated (and deserving) power player in the NBA. These last-second miracles aren’t uncommon with James, but, as any coach will tell you, there is no I in team, and one guy can’t do everything.
This is certainly analogous to the state of our region’s economic development. While we Clevelanders are gung-ho about our sports teams (I live and breathe the Tribe, for example), our love affair with our region and its business production has languished of late, and cynicism about jobs and upward mobility has set in, becoming the first resort in our thought process about the local economy.
This mindset is so bad that, when some bad business news occurs locally, many people will just say, “it’s this damn economy” before they even think about the factors that led to the bad news, be they lack of innovation, wasteful hiring, over-regulation, high taxes, or, more generally, a lack of collective focus on the industries at which we in northeast Ohio truly excel–biotech, materials engineering, energy, and, yes, transportation.
Yet it’s not all doom and gloom. My firm, Best Technology Strategy LLC, has been in business for three years now, and each consecutive year has been one of growth over the preceding year. We help our clients to execute an I.T. strategy that saves them money, makes them more efficient, and helps them to grow, even in these “lean times”. Part of why we’re successful is this: we consider the underpinning tactics when managing an I.T. organization. We don’t respond with the usual solutions to an I.T. problem (it’s too expensive to spend money so maybe the problem will just go away; let’s just hire a new full-timer to deal with it; etc.). Instead, we apply a business rationality that seems to have disappeared from the decision-making process of our larger industries.
In other words, while the big companies visit bankruptcy court, looking for a last-second three-point ball to bail them out, our firm is on the streets, being the hero.
It’s with this in mind that I survey the great accomplishments of Cleveland firms over the years. Bridgestone and Goodyear, the magnate firms of Rubber City, where Lebron James was born and raised. PolyOne, in Avon on the west side of Cleveland, a poly-materials manufacturer. Moen, the famous faucet company. Sherwin Williams, the paint company with a unique in-house retail distribution model. Progressive Insurance, one of the largest vehicle insurers in the world. Eaton Corporation, a large supplier of industrial manufactured goods for a host of industries. The Cleveland Clinic, the most sought-after research hospital system on the planet. MTD in Valley City outside of Cleveland, maker of domestically-manufactured lawn mowers and tree equipment. UTU, the largest rail transportation union in North America. The football-helmet maker Riddell, headquartered along with Best Technology right here in Elyria, west of town. NASA Glenn Research Center, which is providing the core technologies for our next trips to the moon and ultimately Mars. I could go on and on about the great industries of northeast Ohio that contribute to the 160 billion dollar local economic pie.
There’s not a company mentioned in the preceding paragraph that hasn’t face some level of advertisity in the last two years or so. What has saddened me isn’t the downturn, though. It’s the way Clevelanders think and talk about it. When out of towners move to Cleveland, locals meeting them for the first time often ask, “why in the world would you move HERE?” Talk about prideless self-effacement. I just want to grab these nay-sayers, many of whom were born and raised in Northeast Ohio, and say, “dude, have you seen Detroit lately?”
Trust me, I was born in Detroit and can truthully confess that I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and Cleveland is no Detroit.
Cleveland is a fantastic place to live and work, for a multitude of reasons. Despite the fact that we don’t have an NHL hockey team, we do have three incredible pro franchises with great home facilities. Despite the fact that we don’t have Mt. Rushmore, we do have a lovely national forest and more parklands than any other large metro area (there are three large metroparks suitable for jogging and picnics within five minutes of my house, even). And while we don’t have Harvard or Cornell or Stanford, we do have that old-fashioned rustbelt grit that can turn a high school dropout into a successful high-tech business owner and published author.
This is a great city, and we exist at a pivotal time in our history. Sure that’s easy to say. It’s always a pivotal time, right? Well, no. The decisions we make today will shape virgin industries like fuel-cell power for the next century. And we don’t need to be Mo Williams or Z waiting for the hero to sink the last-second threeball, to be the hero.
No, we can be the heros ourselves, every day, right now. Great ideas come out of adversity, and no one ever became a hero when times were fantastic.
