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The state of Illinois was a big loser. Here's one to grab onto: losers spend more money selling and they pay less attention to the
competitiveness of their product. Winners spend almost all their money planning, how to make their product more competitive than it already is and much less on selling.
They don't have to spend a ton on selling. They've got it going for them. The Wall Street Journal one day in headlines stated, "Illinois big
loser," left-hand column, front page. Illinois was doubling the size of their sales force to improve their economic development situation. It didn't matter, they had a bad product, and they still do. They
haven't changed it.
South Dakota, now how did they get in the winner column? We talked face to face with maybe 175 people. Ben Cardin was Speaker of the House and
Mickey Steinberg was President of the Senate They were really helpful. We had good dialogues back and forth, and I can remember when we showed them the charts. As you decrease relative to your competition, you don't
have to have a price decrease, you could hold your price as all others increased, you're still relatively better off. But, we said, Florida keeps winning, and Ben said, "But they've got all the sunshine and all
that stuff, how can we compete with that?" I said, "How would you like South Dakota, Ben? What do you think they've got going for them?"
South Dakota needed jobs, and they got a governor that says, "Let's just pick on the state of Minnesota. Let's get more
competitive than Minnesota. Then let's go over and see if we can interest some of these firms to expand here." Citibank needed to put in a major Visa credit card location. Where did they put it? South Dakota,
and it's still there. I don't know how many jobs that meant but I'll tell you, it made South Dakota a winning state.
Now, let me just quickly get to the how to. We discovered the what that Maryland has to do. We listed probably about 10 things that
you could look at in 1983 and say these are areas that need some attention that will improve our competitive position. But our big discovery really was how.
As a group, if it doesn't happen, you force it. Make the governor, whoever he or she is, and the head of economic development
spend almost all of the economic development budget on measuring for competitiveness. All the junkets I used to hear about to Europe and Japan, I always felt that if they brought someone back who took a look at us
then looked at Virginia, they'd stand in Prince George's County and say no, I think I want to be over there. The press from the junkets was selling that we were doing something. Save all that money. Force it. Make
economic development do what it takes to be competitive. Hire who you need to hire, don't look at all the studies, be specific and get the information, boil it down, to no more than 10 things that you have to do.
Let's say next summer you set a date, and you plan a conference inviting the business community, the government community,
academic community, labor, and media. That conference is called a Strategy Conference for the state of Maryland. What you want to go away with is a complete understanding of the first 10-point strategy that it's
going to take to play tough.
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