(Williamstown, WV, September 29, 2008) Congratulations to the City of Williamstown, the Wood County Economic Development Authority, and the entire state of West Virginia the September 29, 2008 celebration of Hino Motors’ first year of production.

 

But most of all, congratulations to Hino Motors for locating your truck assembly plant here in the Mid-Ohio Valley. As you are now learning, the quality of our local workforce is prime capital in an uncertain world. Your investment will remain mutually beneficial.

 

In business, we Americans share much with our Japanese business associates. What binds us together reflects the best that’s in each of us; the desire for economic security, professional growth, family time, and baseball.

 

In his critically acclaimed book “Men At Work”, columnist George Will writes of the rich texture of baseball, an American export, a contest played without a clock, measured by numbers, a game Yogi Berra said is “not over until it’s over”.  The appeal of baseball, Will observes, is not so much in the score but in the count, where the game changes on every pitch, and the pitch changes according to outs, men on base, inning, score.

 

The top ad was developed by OffWhite, Marietta, OH ,for the Southeastern Ohio Port Authority to congratulate Wood County, WV on acquiring the Hino Motors assembly plant. The bottom ad was developed by Salter & Associates, Vienna, WV, to congratulate Hino Motors on the roll-out of their first truck. Ads appeared in area newspapers.

This ballet of pitch and catch is the ballet of buy and sell, a statistical measure of a hitter’s worth. Baseball is the free market of risk and reward. Freedom to succeed; freedom to fail. One cannot exist without the other.

Baseball is my favorite metaphor for economic life in the Mid-Ohio Valley. Every transaction, local or otherwise, changes the count. An inventory is debited, a job is won or lost, a value shifts, money changes hands, a run scores and the loser waits until next time. Products leave the warehouse, a day of effort turns into billable hours. As time goes by the strong emerge, the weak exit the field, and balance sheet metrics reveal the hard truth: Everyone cannot win; paper doesn’t forget, numbers don’t lie, and there’s always next year.

Baseball is free enterprise. Baseball requires patience. Interest grows in value as each game and each season progresses. Beyond balls and strikes, there is little ambiguity in its measure. The 2003 All-Star game notwithstanding, there’s always a winner in baseball, and there is always a loser.

Previous economic development performance revealed a hard truth about both sides of the Ohio River. We could play, but we were not yet a team. As the textbook suggests, if you squeeze the numbers hard enough, they’ll confess. The 2000 U.S. Census for our SMSA, for example, despite our best efforts to count cows and copperheads, told us what we already knew: We’re bleeding intellectual capital. Our youngest talent has gotten away from us. Worse yet, it seems some have accepted an outrageous allegation - if we want to win, we need to go somewhere else. Some appear resigned to the idea of our children hitting the road, diploma in hand, never to return. To some, we’re a farm team.

But no more. We're learning how to work together. Wall Street meltdowns, taxpayer bailout plans, credit crunches, wars, terrorism and economic uncertainty have reached us, of course. But if we’re going to deal with it, we can do it here, linking arms and supporting one another.

 

Enabling technologies not even imagined when we started our company in 1985 have shifted the game and leveled the playing field. So, for those of us willing to believe and willing to invest, we’re on our Field of Dreams.

Washington County, Ohio and Wood County, West Virginia, are within reach of the nation’s major markets. While some action may lie on the Capital Beltway, the outer belt of Charlotte, somewhere on the way to San Jose or Shanghai, the transaction itself might as well occur here. In short, welcome to the Internet. We can rightfully claim that we’re no longer in the middle of nowhere - we’re in the middle of everything.

And as we learn to recognize Web sites as marketing investments instead of computer projects, as we overcome content shock imposed by this electronic piranha with a voracious appetite for thoughts, words, offers and value, and as we learn to integrate new technologies into the most fundamental of our free enterprise initiatives, we’re proving we can play in the big leagues. Plus, we can go home for lunch.

Our future is what the future always was - opportunity laced with uncertainty. When Rufus Putnam and his band of capitalists arrived at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers in 1788, they set-up shop with effort and industry, faith in the future and confidence that hard work and persistence would yield reward despite the risk. Falure was not an option but it happened. Many struck out. Before their game was over, however, they changed the landscape and moved the fences.

 

Today, more than two hundred years later, the equation remains the same. If we want to grow, we have to change. If we want to compete, we have to work together. And if we want to progress we must elect, appoint, hire or otherwise develop from within leaders who, like Rufus Putnam, accept risk while getting the most out of their bench.

Here at OffWhite Salter, we’re blessed with clients from across town, across America and around the world. We’ve never had an out-of-town visitor who didn’t wish out loud they could spend more time here, where they could take a break, gaze over the Muskingum River, watch crew practice, walk the brick streets, study the architecture, chill out. My office windows are corporate assets.

The Mid-Ohio Valley was a special place before the Internet. Today, our lifestyle is more marketable than ever and it’s a game plan we can work. Tools and technology have removed conventional geographic restraints from our businesses, putting us in touch with the world while commanding us to think globally.

Economists, much like baseball managers, rightfully refer to their craft as a mathematical approach to a social science. They understand that some things cannot be measured. Our unique combination of rivers, architecture and history are strengths we can engage on both sides of the Ohio river. Marietta College is a crown jewel that radiates around the world. The McDonough Leadership Center reminds us how far one man’s legacy can reach. West Virginia University, Parkersburg, and Washington State Community College have turbocharged our capacity for infrastructure support. We are hard workers who want to work. We have great bench strength without a single Starbucks.

A viable economic future demands that local and regional leaders step to the plate and develop an integrated economic plan that will embrace and empower all who want to participate, one that will give us critical mass and opportunities for alliances among ourselves.

The folks at Hino know we don’t need to manufacture our values; we are revealing them for what they are, which is why Hino's original investment in Williamstown is well on its way to doubling faster than anyone imagined.  We don’t need to be Williamsburg or Silicon Valley. The Mid-Ohio Valley works for me, and this is where I live.

I see an economic future void of apology or whining about what Columbus or Charleston or Washington did or didn’t do for us. We are who we are, where we are and we’re not for everyone. But for those who want their capitalist intensity and free-market aspirations superimposed over a lifestyle that puts family and community at the top of the lineup, a work day that turns rush hour into rush minute, we’re open for business.

Along the way, we can remain true to our values and focus on keeping open minds and supporting one another. If we start to cheer for each other, we’ll have more to cheer about. And in our ballpark you’ll see the world from any seat in the house.