Welcome to Curated Morning. A compendium of news, information, and stories that economic development professionals, community development leaders, and elected officials read every week to stay in touch with what is happening in our economy.

The Main Thing:

Main Thing

In the next installment of our series on being kind to future generations, we explore how preserving and honoring the past fosters kindness towards future generations. Economic development professionals who do this not only enhance the quality of the community, but they also generate jobs and capital investment.

What more do you need to justify this activity?

The one thing besides having infrastructure, land, and incentives to attract new industry is a high-quality place to live that honors those who have come before them. Preserving knowledge, wisdom, buildings, skills, and artisanship is essential to being kind to future generations.

In my community, the ‘machinist’ was revered and looked upon as the key to long-term growth and prosperity. Some of this has been lost with time; however, many still practice and love ‘working with their hands.’

Read about how you can be kind to the future by honoring your past and building prosperity in your community in my latest post.

Read the full post here.

Focus On Leadership

Coffee, Certificates, and Cyber: Why Culture Beats Compliance in Building Digital Defense

South Carolina's Chief Information Security Officer Josh Godfrey is revolutionizing how government agencies think about cybersecurity by focusing on culture over compliance. Rather than relying on annual training sessions and passive protocols, Godfrey's team creates an "active, not passive" cybersecurity environment where employees feel personally invested in digital defense. His approach includes celebrating top phishing email reporters with certificates and praise, having cybersecurity team members distribute coffee while building relationships with colleagues, and leaders sharing their own cybersecurity mistakes to make the topic more relatable and human.

Why This Matters: Economic development organizations handle incredibly sensitive data—from confidential business expansion plans to proprietary site selection criteria—making them prime targets for cyberattacks. More importantly, cybersecurity infrastructure and organizational readiness are increasingly becoming location factors for businesses evaluating communities for investment. Companies want to know that their local partners have robust digital defenses before sharing sensitive operational data or intellectual property. By building a strong cybersecurity culture rather than just checking compliance boxes, economic development agencies can better protect their critical operations while demonstrating to prospects that their community takes digital security seriously.

Take Action: Audit your organization's current cybersecurity training approach—if it feels like an annual chore rather than ongoing engagement, it's time for a culture shift. Implement recognition programs for staff who identify potential security threats, making cybersecurity awareness a celebrated skill rather than a burden. Develop talking points about your organization's cybersecurity culture that you can share with business prospects to demonstrate your community's commitment to protecting sensitive information and digital infrastructure.

Read the article: Cyber leaders say culture is hard to track but must constantly evolve by Chris Teale | RouteFifty

A+ Work from B+ People: The Secret Sauce of High-Performing Economic Development Teams

Forget the myth that great teams require superstar talent. New research from Vanessa Urch Druskat reveals that the highest-performing teams aren't built by hiring individual stars, but by developing "emotionally intelligent norms"—the unwritten rules that govern how team members interact, support each other, and work together. Her study of teams across industries found that successful collaboration depends more on creating a sense of belonging and psychological safety than on assembling the most skilled individuals. The best teams establish routines for understanding each other's roles, conducting honest assessments of strengths and challenges, and actively engaging with external stakeholders to gather information and resources.

Why This Matters: Economic development is inherently a team sport that requires seamless collaboration across departments, agencies, and organizations—yet most economic development professionals have never received formal training in team dynamics. Your success depends on your ability to coordinate complex projects involving planning departments, utilities, workforce boards, chambers of commerce, and countless other stakeholders. Whether you're working to land a major manufacturer or revitalize a downtown district, the quality of your team's collaboration often determines whether opportunities succeed or stall. Moreover, businesses evaluating your community are also evaluating your team's ability to work together effectively during the often lengthy and complex site selection process.

Take Action: Conduct an honest assessment of your current team's unwritten rules—do they encourage psychological safety and mutual support, or do they inadvertently create silos and competition? Institute monthly structured team meetings that specifically address what's working well and what needs improvement, moving beyond project updates to focus on collaboration itself. Establish norms that celebrate collaborative wins rather than individual achievements, reinforcing that your community's economic success depends on collective effort rather than lone-wolf heroics.

Read How to Build Emotionally Intelligent Teams by Vanessa Urch Druskat | The Next Big Idea Club

The Team Reboot: Why Economic Development Leaders Need a Playbook for Starting Over

Every economic development professional knows the feeling: a key team member leaves mid-project, a new mayor brings different priorities, or a major prospect decision creates tension among partners. Yet most leaders push forward without addressing the underlying team dynamics that determine success or failure. New research reveals that today's highest-performing teams don't just weather change—they actively relaunch themselves through a six-step process: reassess the real issues (not just symptoms), reconnect by rebuilding trust and psychological safety, reenvision the team's purpose and goals, recontract on roles and decision-making processes, reenergize through quick wins, and readjust continuously to sustain momentum. The key insight is that team relaunching isn't a sign of failure—it's a leadership discipline that treats teams as living systems requiring regular renewal.

Why This Matters: Economic development work is uniquely vulnerable to team disruption because success depends on sustained collaboration across multiple organizations, agencies, and political cycles that rarely align. Whether you're managing a downtown revitalization initiative spanning multiple terms of office or coordinating a complex infrastructure project involving city planning, utilities, and private developers, your team composition and dynamics will inevitably shift. More importantly, businesses evaluating your community are often assessing your team's ability to work together effectively throughout lengthy site selection and development processes. A team that can't manage its own transitions certainly can't be trusted to manage complex economic development projects that may span years.

Take Action: Create a formal team assessment protocol that you implement whenever significant changes occur—new members, role shifts, or project pivots—rather than hoping teams will naturally adjust. Establish regular "team health check" meetings focused specifically on collaboration dynamics rather than project updates, using anonymous feedback tools when necessary to surface unspoken tensions. Develop a standard team relaunch process that includes revisiting your community's economic development vision, clarifying decision-making authority among partner organizations, and resetting communication norms and meeting practices. Institute celebration rituals for collaborative wins that reinforce positive team behaviors, particularly important when your "team" includes elected officials, private sector partners, and various agency staff who may not naturally see themselves as teammates. Schedule quarterly team retrospectives to proactively identify and address emerging collaboration challenges before they derail important economic development initiatives.

Read 6 Steps to Reset a Demotivated Team by Alyson Meister and Ina Toegel | Harvard Business Review

Something You Should Read:

Remember when your biggest energy worry was whether your phone would die before you found a charger? Well, while you were stress-scrolling TikTok, the entire global energy system has been quietly plotting the most dramatic makeover since the Industrial Revolution.

In her Substack newsletter, Hannah Ritchie writes about research recently conducted by Ember Energy and has a fun, nerdy way of explaining why we're all living through what she calls the "Electrotech Revolution" – and spoiler alert: it's way more exciting than just "let's save the polar bears" (though I’m totally into doing that too).

Here's an idea she delivers: we've been burning "old sunshine" (fossil fuels that took millions of years to form) when we could just use the fresh stuff that hits Earth every single day. It's like insisting on eating week-old pizza when there's a hot pie right in front of you.

However, Ritchie points out something really interesting – energy is transforming from something we dig out of the ground (and pray doesn't get more expensive) into actual technology that follows the same "gets cheaper over time" rules as your smartphone. Plus, plot twist: AI might actually help the energy transition instead of just hogging all the electricity for ChatGPT's existential crisis about whether it has feelings.

I have often said (at least to myself) that we're actually witnessing a technological shift as big as the invention of electricity itself, and this post will either make you incredibly optimistic about the future or deeply concerned about how much you still don't understand about how your lights turn on.

Read the post here.

Overheard:

Some traditions say that the real nature of awareness is that its all-pervading, everywhere, empty or pure or clear, and capable of holding absolutely anything and everything that arises.

Henry Shukman

The Rabbit Hole:

The Flying Car is Finally Here!

Ever since I watched The Jetsons as a kid, which was a very advanced look at the future for a cartoon conceived in the early 1960s, I have been pining for flying cars. Looking at old issues of Popular Mechanics, we were promised flying cars and 'video phones' by futurists and tech wizards.

We've got the video phones, and some of us are already tired of Zoom (thanks, COVID), and now someone has finally created and sold the first flying car. Finally!

In this video, you get to see the delivery of the first flying car by a company called Jetson (I kid you not) to tech bro, Palmer Luckey, CEO of Anduril, a new-age defense contractor (watch the 60 Minutes feature of him here).

Back to the flying car. It's all electric, and I'll be honest, I'm already planning where I'd park it. You can order one here. They are only $ 128,000, and just think, you could avoid rush hour traffic every time.

Watch the video here.

Smashing Pumpkins (the festival, not the band)

There is nothing like a good food-eating contest. While Brooklyn and Coney Island are known for their Fourth of July hot dog-eating contests every year, the town of Morton, Illinois, is known for its Pumpkin pie-eating contests every Fall.

While most Rust Belt towns were busy watching their manufacturing jobs pack up and move to Mexico, Morton, an Illinois village of 18,000 people, looked around, spotted some orange gourds

Morton, Illinois, is the undisputed world champion of canned pumpkin (sorry, California and Texas, but as local farmer John Ackerman puts it, you're "horribly, horribly wrong"). This is the town that processes 85% of the world's canned pumpkin, hosts a festival that draws 118,000 visitors annually, and where grown adults wear garbage bags to compete in no-hands pumpkin pie eating contests. Yes, that's a real thing that happens (see reference above).

Starbucks and its annual release of Pumpkin Spiced Lattes have nothing on Morton.

While the rest of the Midwest watched manufacturing jobs disappear faster than pumpkin spice lattes in October, Morton figured out something brilliant about "place-based economics." Instead of chasing the latest economic development fad, they have doubled down on what they had: perfect soil, ideal climate, and apparently an unshakeable commitment to orange vegetables.

When I lived in Central Illinois, one could see the pumpkin fields just outside Morton on I-74 when driving by. If you want to learn more about this gourd-based economy, you can read the article here.

If you want to go, sorry you missed the 2025 festival. To learn more about the festival and plan for next year, go to this link.

Peace for a Change

Growing up, we had a cool music teacher in the 6th grade who let us bring albums to class and play them on occasional Fridays. The rebellious friends of mine brought Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne albums. However, one day, someone (I can't remember who) brought in a totally different album.

I have confessed in this newsletter my love for music and how it makes me feel, more so the sound versus the words.

However, in the case of this album and the song we played from, it was different.

I first heard Cat Stevens' (aka Yusef/Cat Stevens) song "Peace Train" in sixth grade during one of those Album Day sessions. His music has always resonated with me, and more than ever, the words of this song hold a special place in my heart today.

There was a period when he stopped playing music due to his religious beliefs, but he has since changed his stance.

We need Yusef/Cat Stevens and his music more than ever right now. You can watch Yusef Stevens and multiple other artists sing Peace Train in this feature from Playing For Change, a global music project that connects musicians from around the world through the power of music.

You can watch and listen to the words here.

My hope is that this song will bring you the same sense of peace and solace that it brings me every time I hear it.

P.S. Pass it on and share your thoughts or experiences with the song. I'd love to hear how it resonates with you.

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With over three decades of experience in economic development, public administration, and small business, I can now bring my expertise to benefit you. What are the issues facing your community? What obstacles are you facing in growing your business? Let's work on this together.

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If you have any thoughts or comments regarding any articles in this newsletter please feel free to contact me through email at martin@martinkarlconsulting.com.

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