Home Field Advantage
On Economic Development
In his critically acclaimed book about baseball, “Men At Work”, columnist George Will writes of the rich texture of America’s pastime, a contest played without a clock, measured by numbers, a game Yogi Berra said is “not over until it’s over”.
The appeal of baseball, Will observes, is not so much in the score but in the count, where the game changes on every pitch, and the pitch changes according to outs, men on base, inning, score. This ballet of pitch and catch is the ballet of buy and sell, a statistical measure of a hitter’s worth. We identify with baseball because, like an auction, it is a pure connection between a willing buyer and a willing seller. Pitch, catch, hit, run. Baseball is the free market of risk and reward. Freedom to succeed; freedom to fail. One cannot exist without the other.
Obviously, baseball is my favorite metaphor for economic life. Every transaction, local or otherwise, changes the count. An inventory is debited, a job is won or lost, a value shifts, money changes hands, a run scores and the loser waits until next time. Products leave the warehouse, a day of effort turns into billable hours. Over time, the strong emerge, the weak exist or wait until next year, and balance sheet metrics reveal the hard truth: Everyone cannot win; paper doesn’t forget, numbers don’t lie.
Baseball requires patience. The experience grows in value as each game and each season progresses. Beyond balls and strikes, there is little ambiguity in its measure. The 2003 All-Star game notwithstanding, there’s always a winner.
Recent economic development performance reveals a hard truth about the Ohio side of the Ohio River. We can play, but we’re not yet a team. We’re on a losing streak. As the textbook suggests, if you squeeze the numbers hard enough, they’ll confess. The 2000 U.S. Census for Washington County, despite our best efforts to count cows and copperheads, told us what we already knew: We’re bleeding intellectual capital. Our youngest talent has gotten away from us. Worse yet, it seems we’ve fallen into benign acceptance of an outrageous allegation - if we want to win, we need to go somewhere else. We appear resigned to the idea of our children hitting the road, diploma in hand, never to return. We’re a farm team.
But no more. The combination of world events, terrorism angst imposed on metro areas, revaluation of big city capital burn rates, instant news and enabling technologies not even imagined when I started my company in 1985 have shifted the game and leveled the playing field. For those of us willing to believe, we’re on our field of dreams.
Washington County, Ohio is within reach of the nation’s major markets. That’s a start. While the action may lie on the outer belt of Charlotte, somewhere on the way to San Jose or Shanghai, the transaction itself might as well occur here. In short, welcome to the Internet. We can rightfully claim that we’re no longer in the middle of nowhere - we’re in the middle of everything. And so is everyone else.
And as we learn to recognize Web sites as marketing investments instead of computer projects, as we overcome content shock imposed by this electronic piranha with a voracious appetite for thoughts, words, offers and value, and as we learn to integrate new technologies into the most fundamental of our free enterprise initiatives, we’re proving we can play in the big leagues. Plus, we can go home for lunch.
Our future is what the future always was - opportunity laced with uncertainty. When Rufus Putnam and his band of capitalists arrived at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers in 1788, they set-up shop with effort and industry, faith in the future and confidence that hard work and persistence would yield reward despite the risk. Falure was not an option but it happened. Many struck out.
Before their game was over, however, they changed the landscape and moved the fences. Now, more than two hundred years later, the equation remains the same. If we want to grow, we have to change. If we want to compete, we have to work together. And if we want to progress we must elect, appoint, hire or otherwise develop from within leaders who, like Rufus Putnam, accept risk while getting the most out of their bench.
I once wrote an ad for a local tourist bureau that read “Come visit us in Marietta. We would send you a postcard, but we’re living in it.” It’s true. Here at OffWhite, we’re blessed with clients from across town and across America. I’ve never had an out-of-town visitor who didn’t wish out loud they could spend more time in Ohio, and more time on Marietta’s historic West Side where, for a little while, they could gaze over the Muskingum River, watch crew practice, walk the brick streets, study the architecture, chill out. My windows are corporate assets.
Marietta was a special place before the Internet. Today, our lifestyle is more marketable than ever and it’s a game plan we can work. Tools and technology have lifted conventional geographic restraints from our businesses, putting us in touch with the world while commanding us to abandon excuses for poor performance.
Economists, much like baseball managers, rightfully refer to their craft as a mathematical approach to a social science. They understand that some things cannot be measured. Our unique combination of rivers, architecture and history differentiates us from our friends on both sides of the river. Marietta College is a crown jewel that radiates around the world. The McDonough Leadership Center reminds us how far one man’s legacy can reach. Washington State Community College has turbocharged our capacity for infrastructure support. We are hard workers who want to work. We have great bench strength, but no Starbucks.
A viable economic future demands that local and regional leaders step to the plate and develop an integrated economic plan that will embrace and empower all who want to participate, one that will give us critical mass and opportunities for alliances among ourselves.
We don’t need to manufacture our values; we must reveal them for what they are. We don’t need to be Williamsburg or Silicon Valley. Ohio works for me, and Marietta is where I live.
I see an economic future void of apology or whining about what Washington, DC did or didn’t do for us. We are who we are, where we are. And we’re not for everyone. But for everyone else, those who want their capitalist intensity and free-market aspirations superimposed over a lifestyle that puts family and community at the top of the lineup, a work day that turns rush hour into rush minute, we’re open for business.
Along the way, we can remain true to our values and focus on keeping open minds and supporting one another. If we start to cheer, we’ll have more to cheer about. And in our ballpark you’ll see the world from any seat in the house.
In his critically acclaimed book about baseball, “Men At Work”, columnist George Will writes of the rich texture of America’s pastime, a contest played without a clock, measured by numbers, a game Yogi Berra said is “not over until it’s over”.
The appeal of baseball, Will observes, is not so much in the score but in the count, where the game changes on every pitch, and the pitch changes according to outs, men on base, inning, score. This ballet of pitch and catch is the ballet of buy and sell, a statistical measure of a hitter’s worth. We identify with baseball because, like an auction, it is a pure connection between a willing buyer and a willing seller. Pitch, catch, hit, run. Baseball is the free market of risk and reward. Freedom to succeed; freedom to fail. One cannot exist without the other.
Obviously, baseball is my favorite metaphor for economic life. Every transaction, local or otherwise, changes the count. An inventory is debited, a job is won or lost, a value shifts, money changes hands, a run scores and the loser waits until next time. Products leave the warehouse, a day of effort turns into billable hours. Over time, the strong emerge, the weak exist or wait until next year, and balance sheet metrics reveal the hard truth: Everyone cannot win; paper doesn’t forget, numbers don’t lie.
Baseball requires patience. The experience grows in value as each game and each season progresses. Beyond balls and strikes, there is little ambiguity in its measure. The 2003 All-Star game notwithstanding, there’s always a winner.
Recent economic development performance reveals a hard truth about the Ohio side of the Ohio River. We can play, but we’re not yet a team. We’re on a losing streak. As the textbook suggests, if you squeeze the numbers hard enough, they’ll confess. The 2000 U.S. Census for Washington County, despite our best efforts to count cows and copperheads, told us what we already knew: We’re bleeding intellectual capital. Our youngest talent has gotten away from us. Worse yet, it seems we’ve fallen into benign acceptance of an outrageous allegation - if we want to win, we need to go somewhere else. We appear resigned to the idea of our children hitting the road, diploma in hand, never to return. We’re a farm team.
But no more. The combination of world events, terrorism angst imposed on metro areas, revaluation of big city capital burn rates, instant news and enabling technologies not even imagined when I started my company in 1985 have shifted the game and leveled the playing field. For those of us willing to believe, we’re on our field of dreams.
Washington County, Ohio is within reach of the nation’s major markets. That’s a start. While the action may lie on the outer belt of Charlotte, somewhere on the way to San Jose or Shanghai, the transaction itself might as well occur here. In short, welcome to the Internet. We can rightfully claim that we’re no longer in the middle of nowhere - we’re in the middle of everything. And so is everyone else.
And as we learn to recognize Web sites as marketing investments instead of computer projects, as we overcome content shock imposed by this electronic piranha with a voracious appetite for thoughts, words, offers and value, and as we learn to integrate new technologies into the most fundamental of our free enterprise initiatives, we’re proving we can play in the big leagues. Plus, we can go home for lunch.
Our future is what the future always was - opportunity laced with uncertainty. When Rufus Putnam and his band of capitalists arrived at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers in 1788, they set-up shop with effort and industry, faith in the future and confidence that hard work and persistence would yield reward despite the risk. Falure was not an option but it happened. Many struck out.
Before their game was over, however, they changed the landscape and moved the fences. Now, more than two hundred years later, the equation remains the same. If we want to grow, we have to change. If we want to compete, we have to work together. And if we want to progress we must elect, appoint, hire or otherwise develop from within leaders who, like Rufus Putnam, accept risk while getting the most out of their bench.
I once wrote an ad for a local tourist bureau that read “Come visit us in Marietta. We would send you a postcard, but we’re living in it.” It’s true. Here at OffWhite, we’re blessed with clients from across town and across America. I’ve never had an out-of-town visitor who didn’t wish out loud they could spend more time in Ohio, and more time on Marietta’s historic West Side where, for a little while, they could gaze over the Muskingum River, watch crew practice, walk the brick streets, study the architecture, chill out. My windows are corporate assets.
Marietta was a special place before the Internet. Today, our lifestyle is more marketable than ever and it’s a game plan we can work. Tools and technology have lifted conventional geographic restraints from our businesses, putting us in touch with the world while commanding us to abandon excuses for poor performance.
Economists, much like baseball managers, rightfully refer to their craft as a mathematical approach to a social science. They understand that some things cannot be measured. Our unique combination of rivers, architecture and history differentiates us from our friends on both sides of the river. Marietta College is a crown jewel that radiates around the world. The McDonough Leadership Center reminds us how far one man’s legacy can reach. Washington State Community College has turbocharged our capacity for infrastructure support. We are hard workers who want to work. We have great bench strength, but no Starbucks.
A viable economic future demands that local and regional leaders step to the plate and develop an integrated economic plan that will embrace and empower all who want to participate, one that will give us critical mass and opportunities for alliances among ourselves.
We don’t need to manufacture our values; we must reveal them for what they are. We don’t need to be Williamsburg or Silicon Valley. Ohio works for me, and Marietta is where I live.
I see an economic future void of apology or whining about what Washington, DC did or didn’t do for us. We are who we are, where we are. And we’re not for everyone. But for everyone else, those who want their capitalist intensity and free-market aspirations superimposed over a lifestyle that puts family and community at the top of the lineup, a work day that turns rush hour into rush minute, we’re open for business.
Along the way, we can remain true to our values and focus on keeping open minds and supporting one another. If we start to cheer, we’ll have more to cheer about. And in our ballpark you’ll see the world from any seat in the house.
posted by OffWhite at 5:38 AM
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