The Five Contradictions of Economic Development

Next week, I’ll be in Detroit opening Michigan’s Premier Economic Summit and Annual Meeting.

My keynote is called The Work Behind the Win: What 500+ Economic Developers Have Taught Me.

Preparing for it has meant going back through years of podcast conversations, notes, stories, wins, losses, and things people told me when the microphones were off.

I expected to find a tidy list of best practices. Instead, I found contradictions.

Economic developers are constantly being pulled in opposite directions:

Move faster, and take the long view.

The RFI is due Friday. The board wants results this quarter. The elected official wants an announcement.

But sites, infrastructure, workforce pipelines, housing, and relationships take years to build.

The work requires urgency without impatience.

Compete harder, and partner more deeply.

Communities compete for projects, investment, talent, funding, and attention.

But almost no meaningful win belongs to one organization.

You have to compete like the outcome matters, and collaborate like you cannot win alone.

Use more technology, and become more human.

Economic developers are buried in data, documents, spreadsheets, systems, and deadlines.

Technology should take more of that work off their plates.

Not because relationships matter less, but because they matter more.

The point of better technology is to create more time for judgment, trust, persuasion, leadership, and conversation.

Tell a simpler story, and do more complicated work.

Every community needs a clear answer to a simple question:

Why should a company choose us?

Behind that answer is an enormously complicated mix of infrastructure, workforce, utilities, zoning, housing, transportation, politics, and risk.

The job is not to make the work simple.

It is to make the complexity understandable.

Chase wins, and study losses.

Wins get announcements, ribbon cuttings, and headlines.

Losses usually disappear into an inbox.

But losses reveal where your information was weak, your process was slow, your assumptions were wrong, or your community was not ready.

The best economic developers celebrate wins—and study what did not work.

The best people in this profession do not eliminate these tensions or choose one side over the other. They learn to hold both.

I’ll share more after the keynote, including the stories behind each contradiction and what I think they reveal about where the profession is headed.

But for now, I need to finish the speech.

I’ll be in Detroit for a couple of days. If you’ll be there too and want to say hello, talk contradictions, or see what we’re building at Sitehunt, send me a message.