Transforming Oklahoma City
As I arrived in Oklahoma City this week on my way to Ponca City, I had time to reflect on my experiences in OKC helping to transform the regional economy. We started working on the strategy in 1994. Back then, the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber was located in a dismal space on the ground floor of a parking garage. Next door, the vacant Skirvin hotel was a continuous reminder of the city's collapse.
Across the street sat the Medallion Hotel, the only downtown hotel property open in 1994. (In 2005 or so, I helped guide a group of 200 leaders form Lexington, KY to visit OKC. At the time I hooked up with former mayor Ron Norrick, a leader in the revitalization effort. I related to Ron that in 1994, there were times when I came down for breakfast in the Medallion and thought I was the only one in the hotel. Ron's comment, "Ed, you probably were.")
We started with a small team of five or six people. As I learned more about the regional economy, I began mapping networks. (Back then I used a simple software: Inspiration .) Eventually, I defined seven privately-led initiatives that connected closely with the publicly-led initiatives Ron Norrick devised.
In putting together the strategy, we faced a lot of difficult obstacles. We had naysayers in the leadership. We had difficult boundary issues to overcome, especially in the li fe sciences. We faced a challenging mythology of "poor Oakies". Most distressing, when we were getting ready to launch, the Oklahoma City bombing took place in April 1995.
Undeterred, our team of city leaders city leaders (including Burns Hargis, now President of Oklahoma State University and Clay Bennett, owner of the city's new NBA franchise) launched our strategy in 1996, about a year after the bombing.
You can see how coordinated economic development strategies can transform a region. I prepared this slide below back in 2004. You can see how income growth in the metro region of Oklahoma City began to accelerate three or four years that we launched our strategy.
One of the features of downtown OKC is Bricktown. In the past, Bricktown was the home of a single restaurant, a Spaghetti Warehouse. Now it is a hotspot, a center of activity in the downtown.
A lot of what I learned about OKC's economic development has found its way into Open Source Economic Development. One key lesson: it is not the leaders themselves who transform a region; transformation comes from linking and aligning the networks that these leaders can help mobilize.
