The Fort Worth Chamberletter

Jeff King, the new chairman of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce board of directors, sees a compelling need for innovative grooming of new leadership for a city that’s encountering new challenges as an international business and cultural force.

King, managing director with J.P. Morgan, takes the helm in partnership with 70 business leaders who serve with him on the board. His views are sharpened by extensive community involvement that spans the public-private sectors. He shared some thoughts about his priorities as Chamber board chairman in the following Q&A:

1. How do you describe your vision for Fort Worth?

We need to recognize that Fort Worth is at an inflection point. Our traditional sources of corporate and community leadership are evolving. This is nothing new, as over the years Fort Worth has seen major employers sell or leave town, it has endured defense budget cutbacks, crises in banking and energy, and it has responded.

However, I believe that our city has seen over the past decade a significant change in the very nature of our community leadership, in the degree of involvement of our business leaders with regard to philanthropic support, strategic planning, and city and county budget issues. I also believe that there has been a change in the makeup, the demographics, the priorities and values of the generation of community leaders and benefactors who are growing up behind them.

If you were to pose this as a question to the community at large, would the answers differ between generations, or lifestyles, or races? As I have said, we are at an inflection point, if not a major crossroads. Fort Worth has grown up, we’re one of the largest cities in the country, we’re playing on the world stage, and we have to work harder than ever in order to maintain our unique character. We also must ensure that our community is an open, inviting, fertile field for those young, creative, entrepreneurial, and multicultural leaders that we must retain and attract if we are to truly live into our future.

2. What’s one way the Chamber can help Fort Worth tap more of its potential?

To my earlier point around the evolution of our city and its leadership, Vision Fort Worth is the young professionals group at the Chamber. The value of this type of organization often comes from networking or educational opportunities. However, it’s time we take a bolder step.

We don’t need to figure out how to plug our young leaders into today’s Fort Worth; we need to provide them a forum that allows them to create the blueprint for what tomorrow’s Fort Worth will be. We all owe an incredible debt of gratitude to the generations of leaders that provided us with this amazing city, our world-class educational institutions, arts community and zoo – this one-of-a-kind personality that combines our sophistication with our western heritage.

But the times are changing, and our future leaders will be even more traveled, more educated, more connected, and more diverse than ever before. They will inherit a Fort Worth where the concern is not whether it will grow, but how it will continue to reinvent its relevance within one of the largest and fastest-growing metropolitan regions on Earth.

Vision Fort Worth can provide the platform that brings our future leaders together in order to brainstorm, envision, define, and implement the map to our future. How will Fort Worth be viewed 25 years from now? Will it be a magnet for college graduates as they start their careers, no matter if they matriculated here or elsewhere in the world? Will it still be famous for its arts community? Will it be accessible to all people? Will it have a vibrant public education system? Will the river be fully utilized? Will it remain an important medical and transportation center? When my grandchildren’s peers overseas hear about Fort Worth, what will their impression be? When I speak to Vision Fort Worth members about the future state of our city, and their role in creating a vision for it now, they become quite passionate.

3. How can the Chamber build more membership?

We were talking about this the other day, and somebody said that when a Chamber member drops their membership, they usually say, “We just don’t have the time or money.” It’s much more difficult to say “we don’t see the value of our membership” because then they might have to explain what that means.

The Chamber is the most effective vehicle through which a local business can leverage its voice at City Hall or in Austin or in Washington, DC. This is important all the time, but it’s particularly so today, with public budget deficits, a volatile economic environment, and an unfriendly tax outlook. How can any company, large or small, go it alone in today’s unsure world? We must make sure that this message gets out there, and it is incumbent on Chamber leadership to make it so.

4. What’s a key area of focus for economic and workforce development?

As we face a multi-billion dollar budget shortfall in the 82nd legislative session it will be imperative that we advocate on behalf of public education to ensure appropriate funding for our greatest assets, our children. With those same budget pressures in mind, we must also monitor the status of the state’s economic development incentive tool kit to make sure this set of valuable programs is not jeopardized.

5. What government issues may dominate the coming year?

Hands-down, it’s the city budget. I’m not sure how we can have a $70+ million deficit and keep parts of our city services off-limits when it comes to making hard decisions. The citizens of Fort Worth are already carrying one of the heaviest tax burdens in the land. I am confident that our public officials will make the right choices, but they need the support and partnership of our business leaders, and that means the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce.

On the federal level, we will continue to assess the impact of healthcare reform on business and the healthcare industry and monitor the status of “Cap and Trade” (ACES) legislation. On the state level, we must continue our efforts to improve our air quality, ensure the availability of long term water resources and tackle the transportation challenges of mass transit and highway funding.

If you’re reading this, and you’re not a member of the Chamber, we need you, we need your input, we need your voice!

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J.P. Morgan

Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors

At first glance, Jeffrey Garten’s serene poise may belie his former service as a captain in the U.S. Army’s Special Forces.

His easy smile may hint of patrician breeding suitable for his Ivy League career as Juan Trippe professor of international trade and finance at the Yale School of Management. And he’s a gracious complement to his celebrity wife, Ina, the Television Food Network’s elegant “Barefoot Contessa.”

But, as Business Week noted in 1995 when Garten was heading to Yale to serve as dean of the Yale School of Management and William S. Beinecke Professor in the Practice of International Trade and Finance, “he’s no tweedy academic.”

Garten, who served in economic and foreign policy roles for the Nixon, Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations, is recognized globally as an authority on international business affairs, finance and trade.

Jeffrey Garten

He will keynote the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce’s 128th annual meeting June 8 at the Worthington Renaissance Fort Worth Hotel with a look at how decisions made in Washington impact U.S. and global markets.

Garten regularly shares his expertise in commentaries for leading news outlets. He tempers his candor with eloquence but speaks straight to an issue. Consider, for example, his May 7 column in Newsweek headlined “Moneymen are still calling the shots.”

“We are entering the Era of Regulation, and yet it will still be the financial markets that decisively push our leaders in one direction or another,” he wrote.

“Not only in the U.S., but around the world, markets still play the role of disciplinarian when our elected leaders cannot make hard decisions, and the financial markets still cast the deciding votes about how things work—in the form of currency movements, bond prices, equity values, and the cost of credit default swaps—even more so than the votes of millions of citizens at the ballot box.”

And, he notes, “Governments are usually fighting the last war. Markets, on the other hand, are forward looking.”

His insight has long proved its value. A 1999 essay he penned for Foreign Affairs, headlined “Lessons for the Next Financial Crisis,” carries a familiar ring as he argues that “no one ever really had a clear picture of the global financial system, even before today’s crisis-ridden uncertainties.

“It is not just that over $1.5 trillion in currency changes hands every day, nor that understanding some of the newer financial instruments requires a background in quantum physics, nor that the range of market players — from banks to hedge funds — keeps expanding, nor that the variety of countries participating in the global economy keeps growing.

“Besides all this, there is also a broad range of regulatory, supervisory, and political systems, and there are disputes about what political, economic, and social mechanisms are required to underpin modern capitalism.

“Not only do these mind-boggling complexities make it difficult to examine what happened and why, but the sense that the worst aspects of the crisis are over could erode the determination of weary crisis managers to take the painful measures necessary to prevent another calamity.”

Garten assesses horizons with neverending vigilance. When he considers developments regarding China and U.S. policy, he sees disquieting trends. He addressed his concerns in a recent online column for The Daily Beast, a noted Web-based aggregator and originator of news and opinion.

“We’re Handling China All Wrong,” the headline stated as Garten wrote that “the U.S. no longer has the leverage to go it alone with China.

“China is in its third decade of economic growth averaging some 10 percent each year. Over that period it has transformed itself from being a poor backwater, lifting some 200 million people out of poverty, and becoming the world’s second largest economy, the world’s largest exporter, and the world’s most important creditor.

“It is establishing world leadership in green-energy industries, clearly a critical sector for the future, and may well emerge as a major competitor with the U.S. in manufacturing automobiles and some aspects of aerospace. In other words, the trajectories of the U.S. and China are moving in dramatically different directions.”

Garten welcomes one trajectory, however – the route home to Ina, his chic wife of more than 40 years. There’s special food for thought there. Like the dinner menu.

A look at Jeffrey Garten:

“A Trade Warrior Goes to Yale.”
http://www.businessweek.com/1995/42/b344660.htm

“Moneymen are still calling the shots”
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Moneymen+are+still+calling+the+shots%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

“Lessons for the Next Financial Crisis”
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/54800/jeffrey-e-garten/lessons-for-the-next-financial-crisis

“We’re Handling China All Wrong”
http://www.cfr.org/publication/21470/daily_beast.html

TV Guide’s look at Ina Garten
http://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/ina-garten/214855

Randall C. Gideon & James Toal

As a premier architectural-engineering and planning firm, Gideon Toal has created many Fort Worth landmarks during the past 50 years, but much of their work in shaping this city is invisible.

They aim “to be problem solvers and help make major opportunities for the Fort Worth region happen,” according to a joint statement by co-chairmen Randall C. “Randy” Gideon and James Toal.

And they strive to “develop comprehensive creative solutions for problems presented by our clients and the community” in areas of economic development, finance, planning, design and public/private partnerships, they said.

Those are among the bedrock reasons that Gideon Toal will be honored at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce’s June 9 annual meeting with the Spirit of Enterprise Award that recognizes local companies for their contributions to the advancement and prosperity of the city and commitment to preserving the private enterprise system.

“Gideon Toal was chosen because there is not a local company that has been more involved, contributed as much or dedicated more time to the important initiatives and issues that have impacted our City over the last several years,” said past Chamber Chairman Brian D. Barnard of Haynes & Boone who, with three other past chairmen, selected the 2009 honoree.

“Randy Gideon and James Toal have dedicated untold amounts of time and intellectual capital to solving problem after problem, and served our city in so many different but exceedingly positive ways,” Barnard said.

A key player in the revitalization of downtown Fort Worth, the firm’s list of recent and current accomplishments alone ranges from projects such as the Trinity River Master Plan to Trinity Uptown, the new downtown Tarrant County College complex, Acme Brick’s headquarters, Intermodal Transportation Center and Tandy Center redevelopment.

“Any tour of Fort Worth architecture would surely include numerous projects designed by Gideon Toal,” Conde Nast Portfolio.com reported.

“We want every project we undertake to result in a better Fort Worth – physically and financially,” Gideon and Toal said.

“There is a true commitment to the ideal that Fort Worth has provided Gideon Toal with immense opportunity and support, and we in turn should return that support to Fort Worth. Cooperation in our community has catapulted us past numerous other developing and redeveloping cities.

“In many cases,” they said, “partnerships of its citizens and local government have been led by the private sector. From downtown redevelopment to relocating major employers to the area, the private sector has been at the front in major initiatives to improve Fort Worth.

“For example, we have worked on the Downtown Plans since 1983, and we have worked on the last four base closure issues at what is now Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base, which now employs more people and units from the military than before 1991, when the Base Realignment and Closure process began.”

Gideon Toal has been involved in Downtown Fort Worth, Inc. since its inception and participated as both consultants and citizen leaders in directing the revitalization of one of the best downtowns in the U.S.

Toal and Gideon also have served as volunteers and consultants for Streams and Valleys, Inc., since its launch in 1969. They have provided leadership in the planning and rebirth of the Trinity River Corridor and emergence of Trinity Uptown.

The firm has worked with the Chamber on numerous assignments to retain major corporate neighbors. Gideon Toal has been directly responsible for 5 major corporate relocation and retention efforts.

“Our pride in our community is exhibited through our private initiatives, often in cooperation with public partners,” Gideon and Toal said.

The firm’s success, they added, is “always only if the leaders of the community support the ideas, which includes the Chambers of Commerce, various neighborhood districts, the City, Tarrant County, federal leaders and many others.”

Richard Florida: “The Creative Class is the core force of economic growth in our future economy.”

Urban theorist Richard Florida sees one form of wealth worth banking on now and throughout the future — human capital.

“For the first time in human history, the basic logic of our economy dictates that further economic development requires the further development and use of human creative capabilities,” Florida said in an e-mail interview with the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce.

“The great challenge of our time is to find ways to tap into every human’s creativity.”

Florida is author of the national and international best-selling book Who’s Your City? Lauded globally as one of the world’s leading public intellectuals, he is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and founder of the Creative Class Group, an advisory services firm that charts business and community trends.

Florida will address the Chamber’s 127th annual meeting June 9 at the Renaissance Worthington Hotel. He shared some of his views in advance in the following Q&A.

What’s one measure that can show Fort Worth whether it’s growing as a center for innovation?

Human capital. The driving force behind any effective economic development or business strategy is talented people. We live in a more mobile age than ever before. People, especially top creative talent, move around a lot. A community’s ability to attract and retain top talent is the defining issue of the creative age. For businesses considering a potential relocation or expansion decision, talent plays a critical role; it is one of most important criteria. Firms that are relocating are evaluating the talent pools of target communities to determine if there is a match between their needs and the area’s strengths.

How compatible with a creative class is the Texas ethic of hard work and responsible living?

Very compatible. One of the greatest challenges we face is tapping into the creativity and work ethic potential of our entire workforce. As I have written before, I believe, every single human being is creative. Economic growth is driven by creativity, so if we want to increase it, we have to tap into the creativity of everyone. That’s what makes me optimistic.

What type of leadership is most likely to dispute your view of the value of a creative class?

The great urbanist Jane Jacobs has a word for this kind of person. What distinguishes thriving cities from those that stagnate and decline is a group of people she calls the “squelchers.” Squelchers, she explains, are those political, business, and civic leaders that divert human creative energy by posing roadblocks and saying “no” to new ideas.

What makes the creative class so powerful as an economic engine?

The Creative Class describes 40 million workers — 30 percent of the U.S. workforce — and includes two segments of workers:

Creative Professionals – These professionals are the classic knowledge-based workers and include those working in healthcare, business and finance, the legal sector, and education.

Super-Creative Core – These workers include scientists, engineers, techies, innovators, and researchers, as well as artists, designers, writers and musicians.

The Creative Class is the core force of economic growth in our future economy. In fact, the Creative Class is expected to add more than 10 million jobs in the next decade. Even though the Creative Class represents only a third of the workforce, they earn more than $2.1 trillion dollars — 50 percent of all wages and salaries in the United States. This total represents as much as the manufacturing and service sectors combined. In addition, the Creative Class controls nearly 70 percent — almost $500 billion — of the discretionary income (buying power) in the U.S. This is more than double that of the manufacturing and service sectors combined.

What’s one of the greatest challenges for a city in nurturing a creative class?

Creating an authentic community that appeals to the Creative Class. Today’s knowledge workers, not only expect a diverse innovative working environment but a community that is aesthetically pleasing with rich opportunities. It’s important to remember: the place creative workers choose to live is the most important decision we will make, largely because it influences and shapes all the others: from job opportunities and career options to our investments, the friends we make, the people we date, the mates we ultimately choose and the way we raise our families.

Regions and communities who successfully compete for creative talent – and the companies who employ them — will be those that provide creative works with a complete authentic community – a good job market/ economy, thick amenities (restaurants, arts, parks, etc.), appealing aesthetics, safe neighborhoods, viable public transportation or connectivity, etc.

What type of civic and business leadership does it take to develop a city with a strong creative class?

Engaged civic and business leadership is critically important to a thriving community. As I described in Who’s Your City, it has a profound impact on the success of a community and the happiness and satisfaction residents have with their community.

In our research, we found that citizens who are satisfied with their community’s leadership are more likely to recommend their community to another person as a place to live or do business.