CEO's express need for more speed in commerce recruitment
Published May 17, 2014
by Amanda Jones Hoyle, Triangle Business Journal, May 16, 2014.
Both Red Hat CEO and President Jim Whitehurst and Tom Looney, the general manager for Lenovo North America, express frustration when they talk about what it’s like working with corporate recruitment efforts through the N.C. Department of Commerce.
“I’m not in the economic development profession and I’ve spent a lot of time lately down at the Commerce Department, but there are two things you need in business,” Looney said, addressing the crowd at the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce’s Economic Development Forum Thursday morning.
One, he says, “you’ve got to be easy to do business with; and two, you’ve got to have speed if you are gonna win in this market. In state government, speed and easy to do business with are not two things that come easy.”
Whitehurst echoed Looney: “With any large agency like the State of North Carolina, you have lots of rules and regulations, and many of those you need, but at some time you’ve got to be nimble and be able to move quicker.”
Both business leaders, along with Kane Realty Corp. CEO John Kane, who also joined the forum panel, are hoping that will be able to change if and when the state legislature approved provisions to create a new public-private partnership that would privatize many of the sales and marketing function of the state Commerce Department.
State Rep. Tom Murry of Morrisville introduced House Bill 1031 earlier this week that lays out many of the provisions to create the proposed North Carolina Economic Development Partnership, which will be funded with a mix of public and private funds.
The partnership, though, will have no authority over the approval and issuance of economic development incentive grants, says interim Partnership CEO Dick Lindenmuth.
Lindenmuth, who was hired in January, says the partnership will instead focus most of its efforts on recruiting companies that fit within the state’s targeted growth clusters and making sure companies know about state amenities that might not have been as broadly publicized in the past.
Lindenmuth was referring to the $144 million Golden LEAF Rural Broadband Initiative, a project of RTP-based MCNC, that completed the installation in 2013 of more than 2,600 miles of broadband fiber across North Carolina.
“Business reasons are the reason people relocate, not the other things,” he says, like incentives.
