Ranking of Rankings Award

Expansion Management Magazine released a second ranking this month called the "Mayor's Cup Challenge." It is for all intent and purpose a "ranking of metro rankings." It includes rankings for education, health, quality of life, logistics, legislative environment, and knowledge work.

Here are the top ten metros from this listing:

1. Des Moines, Iowa
2. Kansas City, Mo.-Kan.
3. Omaha, Neb.-Iowa
4. Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn.-Wis.
5. Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash.
6. Cedar Rapids, Iowa
7. Lexington, Ky.
8. Fargo-Moorhead, N.D.-Minn.
9. Columbia, S.C.
10. Lincoln, Neb.

This ranking is totally different than Expansion's high-value labor market ranking.

The secret to understanding rankings and ratings is that they reflect exactly what you measure. A more important question that any company or economic devleopment organization must ask is: "What are the driving factors to the business investment and facility location decision?"

In that sense, a company locating a major facility must know which factors are key to its success if it intends to use rankings and ratings as a guide to facility location decision-making.

A time-honored wisdom in economic development is: "Avoid reasons for early elimination in the competition for a project." A time-honored wisdom of business facility location is: "Rule out as many places as quickly as possible to get to the intermeidate list of options that are worthy of consideration." Guess what? The two clash, which is central to most economic development marketing campaigns. This is a major issue in "branding" places for economic development purposes.

Download the Excel spreadsheet with the rankings here.