Taking stock as a new year begins, our state shouldn’t take for granted its strong business community, ranging from the one-person shop to the Fortune 500, and what that vitality means for Minnesotans.

“So many of the advantages we have in this state stem from the nature of our business community,” Myles Shaver, a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, told us.

With 17 Fortune 500 companies in the Twin Cities region, we’re “headquarters-centered,” and that’s distinct, Shaver said.

Given the size of our population, we are one of the leading metros with that concentration, according to Mike Brown of Greater MSP, the regional economic development partnership.

What’s more, we’ve sustained such leadership while “many other places that look like us have not,” Shaver said. “In general, most northern industrialized states have seen a decrease in headquarters activity over time. Minnesota hasn’t.”

One of the reasons is that “we’re really good at reinventing and growing new, big companies,” he told us. “It’s not just the same companies that have been around forever.”

In 1955, there were nine Fortune 500 companies in the metro region. Only two firms appear both on the past list and among the present 17: General Mills and the east metro giant, 3M.

Another plus, the state’s business community is diversified, a factor often cited in Minnesota’s ability to weather the Great Recession and recover quicker.

Whether their work involves water supplies, medical devices, energy, retailing or banking, the Minnesotans employed in the headquarters operations tend to hold high-paying jobs, Shaver observes.

Those workers influence the region’s overall demographics: We’re well educated, and median household income, Shaver said, is very high compared with the biggest 25 metro areas in the country.

“That affects us and our quality of life in many ways,” he told us. That high-earning population is “both able and willing to make investments in quality of life. People are willing to invest in things like education and other quality-of-life factors like the theater or the outdoors, and we see that locally.”

Then, there’s civic engagement, and the region’s culture of corporate leadership, highlighted last week in a New York Times report on the Itasca Project, the groundbreaking alliance of business leaders addressing long-term regional issues.

The project’s work, involving education, infrastructure and more, is among the reasons the Twin Cities region has “emerged as an economic powerhouse,” the Times observes.

The partnership you see here between the private sector and public sector “is really pretty amazing. Everyone seems to want to work to make the region better,” Greater MSP’s Brown told us. “There’s really just a great network of leaders” willing to “dive in to fix a lot of the challenges. That’s a big asset for us.”

What’s behind that engagement? Look back to the founders of the region’s big firms, Brown suggests. The entrepreneurs whose vision created 3M and General Mills and families like the Daytons and Cargills “really had a strong sense of trying to build the community,” including “all the good they did to help build the two core cities especially.”

Then, he said, “they instilled that into their companies” and it remained part of the corporate culture, even as the enterprises changed over time.

What’s different here, said Doug Loon, a longtime U.S. Chamber of Commerce official this year named Minnesota Chamber president, is “homegrown, innovative, entrepreneurial spirit that’s historically been the backbone of our business community.”

Ours is a place “where businesses have started small and grown,” Loon said. “We have some of the largest, most capable, most respected companies in the country and around the globe. That speaks volumes.”

“We should celebrate that, honor it and seek to protect it,” Loon said.

Policy makers — and the Minnesotans who elect them — should stand ready to do so with smart public policies that recognize our business advantages and keep our companies competitive.

 

— St. Paul Pioneer Press, Jan. 2