As some of you might know by now, business and community development is/are areas that Aunt Toby is very very interested in and passionate about. I grew up in a little industrial town in Upstate New York – a place that ended up in the 1970s with an advertising campaign whose tag line was “Will the last person leaving xxx, please turn out the lights.” I ‘did time’ in economic and workforce development for a gas and electric utility, but that is not what I’m all about tonight.

I want to talk about the movies. My two favorite movies that deal with economic development and what I think they say to us today about the economy. And I’m hoping someone else out there has other movies that they think say something about the economy and why we are in the state we are in (and NO, you can’t use Wall Street, mention Gordon Gecco, or “Greed is Good.”).

Movie Number One: “Gung Ho”, where unemployed auto worker Hunt Stevenson (played by Michael Keaton) goes to Japan to try to convince a Japanese car company to come back to their little town and re-open the plant. Hilarity and heartburn ensue when the Japanese arrive and try to establish their operating methods with the American workers. Everyone lives happily ever after when the Japanese supervisors and American workers team up to try to fool the Japanese president who comes for a visit. “I like you; you make me laugh.”

The core of the issue in this movie is that the American workers are portrayed as not wanting to change. They want all the benefits of the operation; they also don’t want to have to do anything differently from what they have done in the past. There is no discussion about the former management of the factory. From this standpoint, the movie is a rather simplistic view of America’s industrial situation in the 1980s; however, as all generalizations, it does have a core of truth to it, which is that in order for American workers to stay employed and for American business to survive, we all have to be willing to look ahead, be flexible, be partners and change.

Movie Number Two: “Other People’s Money”, where Larry ‘the Liquidator” Garfield puts an antiquated wire and cable company in play. The speech he makes at the annual stockholder’s meeting has been voted one of the top 100 movie speeches of all time. The factory is old, environmentally polluting, and not making money. Although the owner (played by Gregory Peck), appeals to the stockholders (many of whom are workers in the plant) to vote for the community and the jobs, they vote for the money.

The core lesson of this film is – once you get past the little romantic interludes between Garfield and the lawyer for the wire and cable company – that the owners of the company basically did not do their job in terms of protecting the company and the employees by looking at what was happening in the wire and cable industry and coming up with new technologies to meet new demands. Again, the writers boiled down some issues but have found a kernel of truth of what happened in the 1970s and 80s to America’s industrial heart: you had companies which made the decision to invest…companies which made the decision to keep doing what they’d been doing for the past 50-100 years..and companies which made the decision that it was a better ‘deal’ for them to just allow the governments of other companies such as China or Mexico to make the investment in industrial training and development and move the operation overseas.

When I was doing economic development, although there was a lot of drum-beating from the ED consulting companies about workforce quality and ‘clustering’ and issues such as this, in the end, no matter what companies would say, it all boiled down to one thing: The Wanna Factor.

The Wanna Factor is what makes a company president move his company to Annapolis, Maryland so that he can be on his boat at 4:30 in the afternoon on Fridays. The Wanna Factor is what makes a company president NOT move his business out of the New York City Metro Area because his wife doesn’t want to move their kids out of their private schools and doesn’t want to give up the quality of the retail. The Wanna Factor is what makes a company president move the company because some state has made them an offer that they can’t refuse in terms of PILOT programs or free worker training or other incentives. The Wanna Factor is also the whole issue of Right to Work states. “I Wanna be THERE and I don’t Wanna be here.” It’s not rocket science or productivity or wanting to make jobs, or the workforce average educational attainment or the availability of an interstate exit in both directions.

All it is, is Wanna.

Any other movies?
(photo courtesy of OldSkool)