New Mexico Business Weekly by Megan Kamerick, Senior Reporter

Date: Monday, May 7, 2012, 3:58pm MDT – Last Modified: Monday, May 7, 2012, 4:06pm MDT

The New Mexico Governor’s Conference on Tourism takes place May 14-16 in Taos with the theme “New Mexico’s Centennial: Just the Beginning.”

The annual event is organized by theTourism Association of New Mexico   and the New Mexico Tourism Department. Keynote speaker David Houle has worked for 20 years in media and entertainment, including with the launch team for MTV. He will talk about leading in the “transformation decade” and explore new technologies and their implications on the way we live and work.

Economic development expert Mark Lautman will hold a session on new opportunities and roles for the tourism industry. Tom Garrity, president of The Garrity Group Public Relations    , will discuss the in-state tourism survey done by his firm.

Katalin Cseke and Wendy Forbes will look at social media trends in travel, and Don Graywith the New Mexico Film Office    will discuss making communities friendly to film productions. There will also be a report on the state tourism marketing campaign by the Tourism Department and its ad agency, Vendor Inc.

A full agenda and registration information is online.

Premium content from New Mexico Business Weekly by Mark Lautman, Guest Columnist

Date: Friday, April 27, 2012, 4:00am MDT

While coming up with an actionable plan for creating jobs is harder than it has ever been, it’s an equally bad time to be trying to fake one.

Last year, a business leader from a community that won’t be named sent me a draft of an economic development plan they had commissioned. Along with redlining it like a plagiarized freshman English paper, she had scrawled a new title: “Obfuscating on Thin Ice.” She was furious.

Instead of laying out a course of action that outlined the tough choices and lines of accountability required to make things happen, they got a mushy, unquantifiable, unenforceable list of vague, passive suggestions. Later she told me, “No one writes this way unless they’re obfuscating the fact they have no idea what to do or they are trying to avoid going on the hook for results.” She was sure it was both, and she was out for blood.

“This crap may have passed for strategic planning in the past, but we have to make something happen now or a lot of people are going to lose everything they have … Anyone not taking this strategic planning process seriously will be on thin ice with me,” she said.

I suspect there is a lot more thin ice out there by now. The best way to ensure that a plan is both strategic and actionable is to heed what I call The Rick Weddle Rule, named after an economic developer colleague who once headed the program at the famed Research Triangle in North Carolina: “If you really need something to get done, and you don’t know who is going to get fired if it doesn’t get done, it’s not going to get done.”

Weddle’s point is that if your planning fails to identify the person on the hook for every critical element of the plan, it is not really a plan, it’s a suggestion.

Before you can assign responsibility, you’ll have to know what you really need: how many and what kinds of jobs, how you’ll create them and what resources will be required. Then and only then should you tackle deciding how to organize, fund and staff the plan.

This part won’t be easy.

To begin with, you’ll be going into the organizational process saddled with a legacy patchwork of organizations and interest groups: retention and expansion programming; industry recruiting; import-export promotion; incubators; economic and demographic research; business climate advocacy; tourism, convention and visitors bureaus; agricultural extension services; small business development centers; arts and culture programs; and incentive and funding programs.

Purging, merging and coordinating these organizations will take time and political willpower.

Complicating matters is the growing importance of integrating a new set of institutional players and convincing them to cooperate. The biggest obstacle to growing most community economies is an imminent shortage of qualified workers caused by retiring boomers, a falling birthrate and a growing skills mismatch.

No qualified workers means no new jobs. No new jobs means no new revenue. Communities that can convince their workforce development, higher education, health and social services, and housing and philanthropic institutions to buy into a long-term strategic jobs creation effort will be in an enviable position.

Another nasty factor complicating the organization and execution stage of the process: trying to sell financially strapped public and private program sponsors on higher levels of investment for falling returns. Today, your marketing people might have to kiss 10 times more frogs to find a prince. Workforce development and human services institutions will need to muster the political will to divert shrinking program resources to educate and train the new workers.

After using the same organizational model for economic development and workforce development for 75 years, some communities are starting to experiment with new program approaches and business models.

In Colorado Springs, they’ve acknowledged that their biggest economic development challenge is attracting enough talent to manage the transition from a booming boomer workforce to a community filled with retirees. They are merging the chamber of commerce and economic development efforts, since many of the things they must do to attract qualified 24 to 44-year-old workers fall under a chamber agenda.

Gallup converted from a publicly managed program to one run by the private sector. Cibola County just spun its economic development efforts out of the chamber and is switching to a new workforce-driven model.

San Juan County is conducting a massive overhaul of its economic development program and moving to one modeled on the Tupelo Overarching Development Foundation’s structure. Innovate-Educate New Mexico has teamed with the state Department of Workforce Solutions to pioneer a new labor market platform designed to give employers, aspiring workers and training institutions more efficient ways of finding each other.

The boldest new economic development business model innovation has to go to my friendJohn Mulcahy, the rookie economic developer for the city of Truth or Consequences, home of Spaceport America. After struggling to get a program funded under the traditional model, he went out and got himself elected mayor.

The bottom line is that communities with the best chance to win in this new economic and demographic era will be those that can get their workforce development and human services interests to the table with their economic development champions and get them through a real strategic planning process.

The converse is also true. Obfuscating your economic development and workforce development predicament doesn’t just put you on thin ice, it’s a prescription for decline.

by Monica Mendoza

Published: April 23,2012

Time posted: 9:49 am

 

New Mexico Business Weekly by Kathi Schroeder, Editor

Date: Friday, March 30, 2012, 5:18pm MDT – Last Modified: Friday, March 30, 2012, 6:10pm MDT

New Mexico has lots going for it, not the least of which is the recent spate of beautiful weather we’ve been enjoying.

When the skies are so clear, we can see the icy contrails of the virtually constant air traffic over this part of the Southwest reflecting in the sunlight. Looking up, it’s fun to wonder who might be on board one of those flying people carriers and where they’re headed.

This week, I learned a heck of a lot more about what goes into keeping those big birds airborne. An under-most-people’s-radar-screens Albuquerque business called Ultramain Systems Inc. has played a huge role in easing the paperwork burden of maintenance tracking for an impressive collection of clients, from the globe’s largest airlines (Emirates) to soon, The Boeing Co   .’s fleets of aircraft coming off its production lines.

Ultramain’s CEO Mark McCausland, a Carlsbad, New Mexico native, helped his Albuquerque Economic Development audience understand why it’s important to shut off one’s electronic devices upon takeoff and landing, although he didn’t admonish his audience to do that. After listening to his Thursday luncheon presentation, I surmised that. His company has created software that has replaced reams of paper reports pilots and ground maintenance folks have to fill out for each flight.

Thanks to Ultramain’s software wizardry, all of that data, such as reports of strange noises or fuel leaks, gets transmitted electronically. So that means there’s a lot of wireless traffic clogging the radio frequencies around airports. There are strict Federal Aviation Administration    rules that pilots and maintenance workers must comply with in order for your flight to take off or land in a timely fashion. I’m over-simplifying the process as it’s much more complex than that. Suffice it to say that they are required by law, emphasis McCausland’s, to have identical copies in the air and on the ground simultaneously of all maintenance issues. And you thought your pilots were just flying the plane.

There was another great keynoter at AED’s Thursday lunch, Vice President and General Manager Marshall Suarez of CTS Corp., also a significant Albuquerque business, with in excess of $16 million in revenue in 2011, $6 million of it from exports. We’re talking economic-base jobs because it’s money coming into New Mexico from products or services produced by in-state companies. McCausland caused a ripple in the audience when he told attendees that 100 percent of his company’s revenue comes from out of state.

These are the types of businesses our monthly Reinventing Economic Development columnist Mark Lautman has been spouting about for months because they’re great boons to our economy. They bring fresh money – income, taxes, etc. – into the state because the producer companies are based here and, therefore, get paid here, not in Los Angeles or New York.

Suarez is another New Mexico native, a graduate of New Mexico State University    . His very successful company, originally called Chicago Telephone Supply, transitioned from Chicago to Albuquerque in the 1970s. It manufactures high-tech ceramic-based components for everything from television sets and nuclear submarines to cell towers and jet printers. Right here in River City. CTS is an important player in the global marketplace and it, too, has flown under the radar screen of most of us in this region. I’ve driven past the CTS building on Alameda at Jefferson for years, not sure what its blue letters stood for.

Our newspaper has profiled McCausland and reporter Kevin Robinson-Avila has written numerous stories about Ultramain, but we’re going to turn our attention on Mr. Suarez and his quiet company very soon because you, our business readers, will most likely find his North I-25 corridor business just as impressive as McCausland’s. Either man could have been AED’s sole keynoter. Their stories and their companies are that interesting. Together they employ nearly 250 people in our region and their companies are helping keep our economy alive.

New Mexico Business Weekly by Mark Lautman, Guest Columnist

Date: Friday, March 23, 2012, 4:00am MDT

That’s a big idea and according to Lautman the secret sauce in an effective economic development program. Your economy has to grow faster than your population. Sounds simple right? In this thought provoking book, he explores the powerful demographic changes facing our communities, our country and our world that make the business of growing jobs look like the least of our problems.

I think we all understand the linkage between and a healthy growing economy and productive and growing workforce development. Today’s unemployment rate makes it easy to focus on job creation as the fix, at least in the short term, to our problems. What I think we don’t understand intimately enough is the affect the boomers exiting from the workforce (and the unpreparedness of our younger generation) will have on our communities. Maybe even worse, we aren’t even looking at the problem through the right lens.

In this 200 page book, Lautman introduces a number of different lens (maybe too many?) to evaluate the magnitude of the problem. Part One covers the forces in play changing dramatically the workforce “pie” and the distribution of the Too Old, Too Young, Qualified and Unqualified. To be honest, this chapter scared me. A lot. He uses some great charts to illustrate the demographic changes that will alter the future availability of the capital so vital to supporting economic growth – human capital.

Part Two explores communities, why they’re important and how the “weak side” of the economic development equation will become a dominant determinant in the effectiveness of your economic development programs. I loved this section’s emphasis on base economic jobs and just how economies grow. These are important foundational concepts that often get left out of the discussion. He uses some great examples of “what if” scenarios to demonstrate what ignoring your community and its appeal to the Qualified cohort will have on your future economic well- being.

I also really liked the emphasis on community leadership being a critical factor for future success. It’s easy to think in this business if we build it, they will come. Not so easy, says Lautman, who presents a hierarchy of economic development environments ranging from Hostile to Strategic Elite.

“Catastrophic full employment” is the phrase the author uses to describe the coming demographic tsunami. The zero-sum game we so often here attributed to traditional business attraction in economic development, now comes home in the form of a global war for talent. My copy is marked up quite a bit and that’s because Part Three was full of insightful snippets. The central theme being – if you don’t have the people, you’re out of the game.
Fortunately, Lautman finishes with a practical chapter on how we might be able to better protect against becoming the “Loserville” he describes with doomsday detail.

Lautman, at times, is perhaps too harsh on our educational institutions and his wild caricatures of economic development programs and communities are at times laughable. He never misses a chance to call a spade a spade, but his candor is refreshing and you never lose touch with his sense of the enormity of the challenges facing us.

There is plenty to learn here and I recommend this book for economic development practitioners and workforce development professionals (or anyone who wants to make their community better in the future). A guided group read would a powerful way to take some of these ideas and make them actionable. Book club anyone?

Sara J. Dunnigan

Business of Aging Summit to address workforce shifts

February 14, 2012
12:31 PM

Read more: http://www.gazette.com/articles/jobs-133461-shifts-summit.html#ixzz1mOcDzejB

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jobs and more jobs — that’s the essence of economic development efforts.

Mark Lautman, author of “When the Boomers Bail: A Community Economic Survival Guide,” sees a growing need to focus not just on new jobs, but on having workers for those jobs.

“It used to be all we needed to do was create some jobs and things would get better,” he said. But as the economic recovery gains steam and baby boomers retire in greater numbers, Lautman sees a shortage of qualified workers that will create an increasingly intense competition among communities vying for workers.

“It’s counterintuitive right now when there are 13 million people out of work, but the problem really isn’t the unemployment rate. It’s do you have enough people available with the skills that the economy needs now? And that’s where we’re getting out of whack.”

Lautman will bring that message to Colorado Springs as a keynote speaker at this month’s Business of Aging Summit, presented by the Senior Resource Council and the Greater Colorado Springs Chamber and EDC.

Lautman is a founding director of the Community Economics Lab, a private, not-for-profit think tank in Albuquerque, N.M.;  he also has a consulting business, Lautman Economic Architecture. In addition to  his speech, Lautman will be part of a breakout session at the Business of Aging Summit looking at what Colorado Springs can do to attract and keep entrepreneurs and young professionals — an issue that has been a concern of economic development leaders and Springs Mayor Steve Bach.

A mountain view might help attract some workers to the area, Lautman said, but that’s not likely to be enough to keep them amid the competition caused by a labor-starved market.

“What things about Colorado Springs is driving people off that you want to keep?” Lautman asks. You find that out, he said, by doing exit interviews. Then figure out what things can be fixed and what can’t.

“We may be in the situation in a lot of places,” he said, “where if you can make a place that generates out of its school systems and universities its own talent that doesn’t want to move, that wants to live there, then the employers come to you.”

It’s not all about the younger workers, though; communities need to harness the aging population as well, Lautman said. There are going to be a lot of people “on the edge of the workforce,” he said — people in their 60s or 70s or even older who have needed skills and still want to work at least part time.

“Colorado Springs is getting more baby boomers moving in than anywhere else in the U.S.,” said Jenifer Furda, senior vice president of member services for the Greater Colorado Springs Chamber and EDC. That should be viewed as a positive, she said, both in terms of boomers as consumers and as a flexible workforce.

“Here’s this amazing wealth of talent, knowledge, energy,” Furda said.

Communities that adapt to the changing demographics, and that provide a quality of life that attracts and keeps workers, will be the ones that prosper, Lautman said.

“A lot of people are thinking this is going to go back to some sort of past normal. I think things have changed structurally.”