“The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.”
-Peter Diamandis
The world certainly has problems – social, economic, health, and environmental. This global pandemic has both created new problems and surfaced festering issues across the world and inside our communities.
In the United States our innovators and entrepreneurs are already hard at work solving these problems. In some cases these creative individuals and companies are drawing up long-term business plans and new public-private partnerships to address them at scale.
While thousands of companies have been damaged because, thousands more will be created as a result of this crisis. New approaches to social inequities will be generated with new urgency. Jobs will be created and invented, old approaches will be destroyed (sometimes painfully), and leaders will emerge sector by sector and community by community.
We should not look past the crisis – there is hard work to do and we will have to be patient and methodical to be successful in addressing our health and economic problems. We should, however, also reserve parts of each day on planning for a better future.
Enormous effort and care must be provided to individuals, families, neighborhoods, cities and entire states as we approach each day. Similar effort and care must be set aside to think about building back up, perhaps in a very different way.
Can we rebuild in a way that destroys inequities not just diminishes them? Can we build a more resilient economy, healthier communities, and fundamentally better institutions?
The Columbus Region entered this year and this decade with a vision – to become the most prosperous region in the United States. That vision has been tested within months as this crisis has unfolded, but it still holds.
The urgency of addressing that vision and the tactics and activities that will be required to not only grow and thrive economically, but socially across the entire community, is more pressing that ever.
Take care and take heart as we move forward!
-Kenny McDonald