The Economic Development Game Has Changed
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“First, the game changed twenty years ago — and almost no one noticed. Economic development used to be a short-term game driven by marketing, sales, and incentives. It required little planning. Today it is a long-term, planning-intensive, capacity-building game. You cannot win a planning-intensive game if you refuse to plan. Second, the profession has developed a bizarre, almost pathological aversion to planning. Had we been more serious about how we plan, we would have discovered — and fixed — many of the fatal flaws now plaguing the profession….
The core message of this book is simple: without a top-to-bottom overhaul of the profession — starting with how we plan — the chances that economic development will work in any version of the future are approaching zero.”
An excerpt from the new book, Saving the Greatest Profession: How Economic Development Lost Its Way and How to Fix It, by Mark Lautman, CEcD, FM, HLM,(2026).
