Northeast Ohio is Losing a Good One

Bob Farley has announced his resignation as the President and CEO or Team Northeast Ohio (NEO), an organization he was hired just two years ago to set in motion.

Bob is a national economic development talent. I hate to see my home region lose top professionals of his caliber. The search resulting in Bob's selection in 2003 took a long time to accomplish. NE Ohio is not an easy sell to top economic development talent, especially if you like the sound of new industrial and office buildings going up.

Unless Northest Ohio gets very lucky, it is my impression that we might have some difficulty replacing Bob with a known national talent.

What’s the problem? There are two major ones.

The first is that we have a regional economy that is in a “structural straitjacket,” which means the force field created by our current driving industries is preventing us from moving forward. This is a tough environment for economic development, where most of the deals are about holding onto what we have with relatively little new growth.

The solution is an accelerated economic diversification initiative that shifts our attention from trying to prop up dead and dying industries and companies to truly “jumpstarting” new industries and greater entrepreneurship.

The second problem is the “development culture” of the region, which still favors a command and control style of leadership and petty politics, rather than enlightened team-based leadership.

Training and better development of our economic development leaders is an imperative. This is not an easy job. I find that many “seasoned” leaders do not know how to work in high performance economic development teams, especially if these leaders come from “rugged individualism” organization cultures in business, government, and education.

I posted this article on ED Futures on Sunday. (No, it was not written with NEO in mind, but maybe NEO economic development leadership could learn by the message.) Maybe we have too much “suffering leadership” and not enough “joyful leadership.”

My comments are not intended as critical. We have too much of that already. Rather, they are constructive observations about why economic development is no easy matter in NE Ohio.

Bob indicated to me that he intends to return to the private sector to work in real estate development and investing. I wish him well as he takes his next career step.