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Editorial: What the Speakers Didn't Say
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Business New Haven
11/10/2003
By: BNH
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When the guest speakers at your major business function can speak for almost an hour without saying much of anything, both you and they have a problem.
We give credit where it's due to the organizers of the November 4 Southern Connecticut Business Expo at the Citywide Field House, the fourth annual event since it was rescued from the scrapheap of apathy and inertia in 2000.
Some 200 exhibitors plied their wares to attendees and one another. The buzz about the event was cautiously positive. The buzz about the local business climate was fraught with uncertainty.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going, and all that. These are times that cry out for new ideas, energy and leadership in a corporate community decimated by buyouts and sellouts. What attendees at the pre-event breakfast meeting got instead was pretty thin gruel.
We can understand why the chamber offered up Chandler Howard, chairman and CEO of Fleet/Connecticut, as "guest speaker" - after all, his bank was presenting sponsor of the event.
But Howard offered up little more than well wishes and glad-to-be-here platitudes - just one week after the momentous announcement that Fleet was to be swallowed up by Bank of America, creating the second-largest banking company in the nation.
With the banking industry in New England at an historic crossroads, the business leaders attending the Expo would have doubtless benefited from Howard's analysis of merger-mania's continued death-grip on the banking industry, or explaining the forces that compelled Fleet to do a deal now.
Instead, we got, "Bank of America is a company that's committed to the communities it does business in." Yeah, if it can even find them on a U.S. map.
The Future's-So-Bright-We-Gotta-Wear-Shades award for the event went to keynote speaker Gov. John G. Rowland, who arrived accompanied by a security detail whose size suggested that His Excellency might be expecting trouble from, say, North Korea.
In his state, unemployment is up. Health-insurance costs are nearing (if not passing) the threshold of unbearable. Investment in new bioscience and high-technology firms has slowed to a trickle.
But that's not what Rowland talked about. "Our Connecticut economy is stronger and smarter," he said. "I am a lot more optimistic than I was" in July, when the steepest job cuts in recent memory were recorded. The bad economic news of mid-summer was, he said, "an aberration."
"The best is yet to come," he concluded. Business people scratched their heads.
We think the governor missed an important opportunity here. He noted that consumer confidence is up, but business confidence is at best shaky. A September survey conducted by the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) noted, "The soft economy continues to wreak havoc with job growth. [Survey] respondents say that only 11 percent will increase employment compared to 18 percent a year ago. Over 37 percent may trim their workforces.
Beyond job erosion, business people worry about the state's deficit-ridden budget. The worry about prohibitive health-insurance premiums. Hanging heavily in the air are the continuing ethics investigations that have tainted the governor's administration and emboldened critics such as the Hartford Courant's Michele Jacklin on November 5 to label Rowland's "the most corrupt administration in modern state history."
We think Rowland would have done better to acknowledge the travails - and the fact that leaders in both the private and public sectors need to do more. Instead, he treated the opportunity as a smoke-blowing exercise. In front of an audience of business people most of whom are eager to be friends with their state's third-term Republican governor, John Rowland probably didn't win many new ones at the business expo
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