09.19.2007 4:18 pm
Recapping 10 leadership trips
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Scott Schnuck, the chairman of this year’s RCGA Leadership Trip to Minneapolis-St. Paul, must have been anticipating the reaction of some of my cynical colleagues. When I returned to the office, they asked how I had enjoyed the “junket” and expressed doubt that anything could come out of a three-day gabfest in a faraway city.
At the final session in Minneapolis, though, Schnuck led the 87 RCGA delegates through a recap of all 10 leadership trips, beginning with the 1996 visit to Cleveland. First and foremost, he and others said, the trips have built better relationships among business and political leaders from throughout the St. Louis area. But they’ve also led to some specific actions. For example:
- The trip to Cleveland, which had seen a great deal of downtown redevelopment, led to creation of the Downtown Now plan in St. Louis.
- A speech by Bill Gates Sr. in Seattle in 1997 inspired the formation of the Technology Gateway Alliance, a predecessor of today’s Innovate St. Louis.
- The trip to Boston in 2002 gave a boost to the Cortex technology development in midtown St. Louis, and moved the region’s venture capital efforts forward. Schnuck didn’t mention the Vectis venture capital fund, but it began with discussions during the Boston trip.
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
I think that there is a lot to be gained by a community when and IF its leaders travel to other places with a sincere interest in learning different ways of doing things.
Unfortunately, my experience with many conventions is that they are about as substantive as singles bars, where various self-interested “salesmen” attempt to ingratiate themselves with politicians and corporate pooh-bahs by wining and dining them, while deliberately saying practically nothing of substance that might offend any of their “marks.”
Furthermore, a lot of the schmoozing over drinks or golf involves a certain degree of collusion to limit competition — either by price fixing or by coordinated lobbying for government subsidies or other preferential treatment.