Mini-summit with maxi blinders

Change is hard. And it’s hard because people – especially people in public positions – have so much trouble getting at, and acknowledging, the truth.

The difficulties were vividly demonstrated last week at the Restoring Prosperity to Cleveland Mini-Summit sponsored by the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization Greater Ohio and held June 8 at Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center. I attended, not as a member of the media, but as the small-business owner that I also am.

The five-hour meeting was part of a series of discussions about economically reviving Ohio that are being held in cities around the state as part of a research and policy-development collaboration between Greater Ohio and the Brookings Institution. Elected officials, including City of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, Ohio House Speaker Armond Budish and Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, were joined by members of the Greater Cleveland business, philanthropic, NGO and community-development sectors to hear the Brookings Institution’s findings about the state economy and take part in panels and workshops.

What the sponsors apparently hoped to accomplish was not just to reveal that Ohio is ineffectively using its federal stimulus money by giving equal amounts to all counties instead of concentrating it on the state’s job-and-industry powerhouses, its major cities. Greater Ohio Director Lavea Brachman and Brookings Institution Vice President Bruce Katz indicated that they also wanted participants to cast aside old patterns of rhetoric and thinking and evaluate Ohio’s problems with truly fresh eyes.

Tough assignment. And, judging from what was said and what was offered as solutions, none of the speakers and panelists even came close to accomplishing it.

Here’s why:

Ohio’s leaders in general and Cleveland’s leaders in specific have what seems like an unbreakable habit of looking around to see what other communities are doing and whatever the trend is nationwide, adopting that policy. Sometimes these policies are necessary and good, but many times, they don’t address this community’s specific needs and problems. It’s the trickle-down theory of  change: We copy other cities and states instead of inventing our own fresh solutions to our own unique problems. And by the time Ohio and Cleveland get around to embracing ideas from elsewhere, often they’ve become copies of copies – diluted, out of date and no longer effective.

Maybe even worse, hand-me-down solutions reinforce  popular wisdom, and popular wisdom - because it takes a long time and a lot of simplification to become widely accepted – often amounts to deeply entrenched bias. It’s a shallow, knee-jerk, easy response to complex and ever-changing situations whose effective resolutions actually require new  insight and creative approaches.

Ohio and Cleveland have copied many, many ideas from other places to try to solve the deeply rooted and horribly tangled messes that are our economy, educational system and other vital processes. All any of us here have to do is look around to see clearly that this doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work.  And we all know it doesn’t work. But at the Mini-Summit, as is typical of big gatherings of established community leaders, participants maintained a smooth, smiling, we’re-on-it attitude as they urged worn-out policy trends and a bland civic optimism on listeners as cures for the community’s cancerous ailments.

The copied policy that got to me the most was the one about technology – specifically IT and biomedical technology – being the answer for the state and Cleveland economies. It’s an idea that’s been talked about all around the nation, as if this were 1958 again and the World of Tomorrow gadgetry that hard sciences can provide were all our society needs to be prosperous and fulfilled again. Ohio and Greater Cleveland have joined this parade of venture capitalists and government grantors by creating a slew of business resources and programs – the Third Frontier, JumpStart, MAGNET, the Cuyahoga County New Product Development & Entrepreneurship Loans, etc. - for technology manufacturers and, essentially nothing for any other kind of entrepreneur.    

To hear this technology bias offered as a truism at the same time that panelists were paying lip service to economic diversity and full use of our human capital made my blood boil. The world has uncountable needs that cannot be met purely by inventing and manufacturing new technologies – needs from nourishment and clothing to news, knowledge and, yes, government - that have given rise to enormous numbers of successful businesses, both for-profit and nonprofit.  Cleveland and Ohio have many talented, creative, hard-working people whose skills do not lie in developing scientific or technological products, people who can and must be included in our economic future if we’re to have an economic future.

That means that Ohio and Cleveland can’t create opportunities and funding only for technology-making companies. That’s putting all the eggs in one basket – a  failed policy of the past.  Has Ohio learned nothing from the collapse of the steel industry? There must be moral and material encouragment for entrepreneurs of all kinds, support for creative and productive people of all kinds.  

It’s time to grow a spine, throw out all the borrowed junk we’re hoarding, and think for ourselves. We must do things differently and better. And right now.

It’s already almost too late.