News Kamran on 25 Aug 2007 07:36 am
Importance of Priorities for Cities and Businesses
Priorities are important in business as well as anything else in life, including urban development.
When you prioritize things, you select certain items over the others and thus take risks.
What if your list of priorities generate results not totally in line with your original intentions?
I found myself thinking about such issues as I was reading a very interesting blog post about the way Cerritos, California grew into a viable community ( http://www.planetizen.com/node/26490) .
What made this piece especially interesting for me is the fact that I know quite a bit about one of the cities, Baltimore, that the author has mentioned to compare and contrast different growth priorities (the other being Cleveland).
“The key to Cerritos’s success may be the timing of its investments,” the author says. “Cities such as Cleveland and Baltimore poured money into museums and other grand projects in the vain hope that they would lure businesses and young, creative folk. Cerritos began by building pipelines and roads, then moved on to business parks, policing and schools (including California’s best high school). Only when it was rolling in money did it break out the titanium.”
It’s true that Baltimore for years tried to attract business and tourism dollars by pouring a lot of resources into its famous “Inner Harbor” project. And to a certain extent the project worked. But even today, if you just drive a few miles into the interior of the city, old pockets of poverty and neglect are still there, intact.
The lesson for businesses big and small is the same – are you going to opt for short-term projects to build up a cash-flow in a hurry and win the short-term marketing battle (like the city of Baltimore) but then exhaust your resources for the long haul?
Or, are you going to grow slowly, by making sure that your fundamentals, the “infrastructure” of your growth is in place before you scale up and expand your operations?
Question – what if your competition catches up with you and eats your market share while you are taking your time (like the city of Cerritos) to nail down the fundamentals in place? That’s when the local “business environment” also becomes a crucial component of the overall growth equation.
Growing cities and businesses into healthy self-sustaining organisms is a complex chess game played against time, with limited chances for making a mistake, and against multiple opponents. Perhaps all entrepreneurs can learn a thing or two by comparing the way Cerritos and Baltimore became what they are today.