Learn by your mistakes.

I’ve been doing that for a little over 50 years of economic development marketing practice and have picked out five of the biggest I’ve either made or viewed for this blog series.   I’ve already covered the first in a previous blog Projecting Job Numbers: Recipe for Economic Development Suicide on the folly of projecting job numbers as a fund-raising economic development device, so let’s move on:

MISTAKE NO. 2: PICKING AN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR BY STARTING WITH A NATIONAL SEARCH

“We’re going to get the best economic development person in the country” one of our clients said to me a few years ago.

“How much are you going to pay?” I said, and he named a figure that seemed to me about double the appropriate prevailing wage.

That client went ahead and hired one of the best known US developers who started by bringing in an equivalently expensive Associate Director, thoroughly shook up the staff beyond recognition, initiated a sizable economic base study, picked out a new and much more lavish office location -- and then left in six months for an even more prestigious and highly paid development post. 

National searches for development leaders are often appealing to local leadership but they can also lead to sizeable and often unexpected consequences.  Here are just a few potential difficulties:

• Differences in community conditions and characteristic
• Demoralization of existing staff
• Tendency to seek out the single outsider hero instead of relying on logical and proved local/regional resources
• Possible dissatisfaction by the new hero’s family
• And of course hugely increased costs along the way

Just one of many possible illustrations: a Midwestern community started on a North America-wide search and did it right.  They got the right Executive Director who truly galvanized the development program. But his wife couldn’t locate the right local religious instruction for her four children and within less than a year the still new director had departed for a much larger city with broader educational alternatives.

Sure, national searches can work but only after you’ve looked hard for local nominees who tend to know the community and its business challenges and potentials and have already made a strong community commitment.

Final example: DCI was asked to help recruit a CEO for a newly minted development organization.  It came down to two candidates, one of them a smart, quiet, highly active local banker; the other, a widely known, much quoted economic developer from 2,500 miles away.  The outsider “guru” was selected who then promptly became involved in a public brouhaha with two members of the Board and resigned after a year of widely watched turmoil.  The youthful banker was now picked, and for the past ten years has done an outstanding job.

I’m not saying don’t institute a national search; DCI has had dozens of highly effective clients who were hired that way.  I’m saying first start at home.  You may be happily surprised at what you find.

Agree?  Disagree?  Click on comments below to convey your brickbats or benedictions.