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:

One of the jobs of an executive of a non-profit economic development leader is often called Board management. This entails developing meeting agendas, communicating, and what I like to call the “care and feeding of board members.”

Board members are your bread and butter. Some organizations have a pay-to-play policy. I don’t like that. You can end up with people who really don’t understand what you are trying to accomplish. Don’t get me wrong, you need the financial resources, but you need to place limits on this practice.

The care and feeding of board members goes beyond agendas. It’s about building relationships, grooming up-and-coming community players for leadership roles and careful recruitment.

I used to recruit people for local boards. Twenty years ago, the hard part was choosing among willing candidates. Today, the hard part is getting anyone to say yes. It's not the time commitment that scares them — it's the hostility, the Facebook posts, the public meetings that feel more like ambushes. We're losing our best local leaders, not because they lack courage, but because we've made the cost of service unbearable. This week's essay explores the empty chairs in our communities — and what it will take to fill them again.

​Read its ‘Lonely at the Top — And Everywhere Else, Part 3: The Empty Chair” here. ​

Focus On Technology

Washington Goes on Offense: The New Cyber Playbook Every Local Leader Needs to Understand

The White House just dropped its long-awaited cybersecurity strategy, and it's a notably lean seven pages with an unusually bold posture. Rather than leading with defense and deterrence as past administrations have done, the Trump strategy centers on offensive cyber operations, AI adoption, and deregulation. These strategies are a significant philosophical shift in how the U.S. intends to handle foreign hackers and criminal networks.

The plan is built around six pillars covering everything from disrupting adversaries abroad to modernizing federal networks with zero-trust architecture and post-quantum cryptography. One genuinely new wrinkle: it's the first national cybersecurity strategy to explicitly reference cryptocurrencies and blockchain, reflecting the administration's broader pro-crypto stance. Critics are already raising flags about whether rolling back cybersecurity regulations and hardening critical infrastructure can realistically coexist, but industry reaction has been broadly positive, particularly from AI and cybersecurity firms that stand to benefit from the strategy's direction.

Why This Matters: Local governments and the businesses they're trying to attract are directly in the crosshairs of the threats this strategy addresses, and the policy shifts it signals will ripple down to the community level. Pillar 4 explicitly calls for hardening essential services, including the energy grid, hospitals, banks, and water systems. This is the type of infrastructure that economic developers routinely tout to business prospects. The deregulatory push in Pillar 2 may reduce compliance burdens on private-sector businesses in your community, but it could also shift more responsibility for cyber resilience onto local institutions themselves. Meanwhile, Pillar 6's focus on building the cyber workforce pipeline across schools, industry, and the military represents a rare bipartisan opening that communities with technical education assets should be ready to capitalize on immediately.

Take Action -- Here are three things economic developers and other leaders can do to have a proactive stance based on this development by the Administration:

1. Audit your critical infrastructure's cyber readiness before Washington does it for you -- The strategy explicitly targets energy grids, hospitals, water systems, and banks for hardening. Don't wait for federal sector-by-sector guidance to arrive with tight compliance timelines. Convene a meeting with your local utilities, hospital administrators, and municipal water authority to assess where they stand on basic cybersecurity frameworks. This positions your community as proactive and resilient — a genuine competitive advantage when businesses evaluate locations and ask hard questions about infrastructure reliability.
2. Turn the cyber workforce gap into an economic development win. -- The strategy's workforce pillar is the least controversial piece in Washington, which means funding and momentum are likely to follow. If your region has a community college, university, or technical training center with any cybersecurity programming, now is the time to elevate it in your marketing and prospect conversations. Work with those institutions to explore apprenticeship pipelines, industry certifications, and connections to defense contractors or cybersecurity firms that may be looking to locate operations closer to talent pools.
3. Brief your elected officials and local business community on what deregulation actually means locally -- The strategy's push to roll back cybersecurity regulations sounds like good news for businesses, but the tradeoff is that more responsibility for cyber resilience shifts to the private sector and local institutions. Leaders who understand the landscape early will make smarter infrastructure and investment decisions and they'll remember who helped them get there.

Finally, contact your congressional delegation and see where they stand. See if they can help you navigate the changes and the stance being proposed. If you have created or determined a “position” on this topic, make it clear to your elected representative where you stand.

Read Trump’s cyber strategy emphasizes offensive operations, deregulation, AI by Cynthia Brumfield | CSO

Here are other articles on Technology that might interest you:​
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​Lucid cuts hundreds of workers in latest blow to EV industry by Kara Carlson (Bloomberg) | Los Angeles Times -- Lucid Group Inc. is slashing its workforce following a difficult 2025 for the electric vehicle maker, which struggled to boost production in a volatile auto market.

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​OpenAI Claims Safety 'Red Lines' in Pentagon Deal—But Users Aren't Buying It by Jose Antonio Lanz | Emerge News -- The Pentagon deal sparked a mass exodus from ChatGPT—and pushed Anthropic's Claude to the top of the App Store. But the bigger story is in the contract language.

I Need Your Help!

I am working on a project that involves bookstores and libraries. I love both. I could spend a lifetime in a bookstore or library.
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Libraries are a community's most important cultural resource. Increasingly, they are becoming the most important place for citizens to get real and honest information about their community and society. Most communities have already lost their daily newspaper, so keeping our libraries is very important. (I envy those of you who still have a legitimate daily newspaper.)
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Bookstores are a great place to hang out, browse through the latest titles and if you are lucky, have a coffee or something even stronger. My favorite big city bookstores are Kramers in Washington DC (where you cna order a full meal and that 'stronger' beverage) and The Strand in NYC.
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Here is how you can help me: Do you have a favorite bookstore or Library? Did a bookstore or library play an important role in your life? Is the place located in your community or elsewhere?
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Send me a message if you want a more detailed explanation of what I am working on. I look forward to hearing your submissions.
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P.S. If you have a picture, that would be even better!

Other Articles of Interest this week:

AI -- AI as a thought processor: Implications for learning and understanding -- Commentary by Alan R. Shark, associate professor at the Schar School for Policy and Government at George Mason University -- The tech is helping us form ideas and test arguments, and so could change how we think. We must be intentional about how we integrate it into our lives.

Data Centers -- Could a New Illinois Bill Be a Blueprint for Curbing Data Centers’ Climate Impacts? By Keerti Gopal | Inside Climate News -- As data centers drive up energy demand, water usage and utility bills, advocates seek to make companies mitigate their climate and economic impacts.

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​Green Economy -- EPA delays greenhouse gas reporting as it moves to shut down program by Jacob Wallace | SmartCitiesDive -- Covered entities for the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program will not be required to submit 2025 emissions data until October. By then, the agency may have already repealed the requirement.

What have I done..what have I learned?

I saw this prompt the other day and started thinking about it.

“Describe a significant learning from each decade of your life. How do these learnings over time integrate now that you have lived them?”

Wow. That’s a lot to think about. I feel as though I have seen much in my lifetime. The period of time I have lived and worked has seen a lot of change. I am turning 65 this year, and aside froma few health issues, I feel much younger than that, and act much younger than the age I feel (only sometimes).

When I think about the year I was born, 1961, and put into perspective from a timeline, some interesting things stand out:

-- I was born only 16 years after the end of WWII in 1945. Today, that war and its impact on our alliances and the world we know today are significant.

-- I was born less than 100 years after the end of the United States Civil War in 1865. It’s conceivable that some people born right after the Civil War are still alive. They would be 97 years old, but it’s possible.​

In my career, I have seen many changes. When I started my first job out of graduate school after completing my MPA, I went to work in a modern suburb, and are you ready for this… no one had a computer on their desk! That’s right, we had paper, pencils, and something called a Rolodex that contained important information about our contacts, and we either called people on the phone or wrote letters. There was no texting or emailing.

I share this not because it was better, but to illustrate the progress of technology over time.

Things have changed—many things. But the key question remains: what have I learned over the decades? First, what was I doing? Here’s a quick breakdown:

My Twenties (80s): Finished college, then grad school; first job; first marriage; first child; first disappointing boss; learned to navigate the world.

My Thirties (90s) : Second kid, first house, a quick stint in sales, back to the original career plan (city management), a gradual transition to economic development, then private development, growing understanding of power structures, weight gain.​

My Forties (2000s): Divorce, economic development, career advancement, new cities, new relationships, graduations, travel, and learning about my limits.

My Fifties (2010s): Big job, big city, new relationship, marriage, dog, office politics, and moves to Indiana and New York.

My Sixties (2020s): Pandemic, job loss, entrepreneurial urge, loss, divorce

While I am only halfway through my sixth decade, I still have new plans and ideas, even today. I am not the ‘retiring’ type. My father didn't retire until his late 70s, and I plan to keep going too.

Time will tell what the rest of my sixth decade brings. I have surprising plans—stay tuned, and you'll hear about them soon.

In the next newsletter, I’ll get back to the original question, review the first of those decades, and share what I've learned.

Overheard:

The Rabbit Hole:

Sleep Where You Drink: The Brilliant Plan to Keep You Longer

Maybe back in college, you slept where you drank. You know, in the back of the bar, or the actual bar itself. The bouncers quickly tossed you out on the curb or the back alley and hoped your less-drunk buddies took you home, where they threw you in bed and painted your face with Sharpie markers. After all, you always did want a fuller mustache.

Now, some enterprising distillers and brewers have figured it out and are encouraging you to sleep in their establishments… but not at the end of the bar. If you're going to drive two hours to buy whiskey, you might as well make it weird enough that people will pay to spend the night.

Hard Truth Distilling in Brown County, Indiana, sits on 325 acres and gets 400,000 visitors a year. They've got a cabin you can rent, ATV tours where employees drive while you drink, tiki boat cruises on a lake they dug themselves, an outdoor amphitheater, and a restaurant.

VinePair called it "Indiana's Drinking Disneyland." Which is either the best or worst description I've ever heard. Up in Minnesota, Cantilever Distillery has hotel rooms and a rooftop sauna. In Michigan, Journeyman Distillery will also let you stay overnight. BrewDog USA in Columbus, Ohio, has accommodations including "a loft that sleeps 18," which sounds like either a great idea or a disaster waiting to happen.T

his is what happens when craft beverage producers realize that nobody drives 90 minutes just to buy a bottle of gin. But they will absolutely drive 90 minutes to experience buying a bottle of gin while riding an ATV through the woods and sleeping in a cabin surrounded by bourbon barrels.
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We've turned drinking into adventure tourism, and honestly, I'm not mad about it.

You can't compete with Amazon on convenience. But you can absolutely compete on "come drink our whiskey while floating on a pontoon boat shaped like a tiki hut."

​Read about breweries and distilleries where you can spend the night​

More Rabbit Holes to go through: Thinkers and Heroes​
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This guy is a hero of mine, plus he was born in Rockford --- Tech legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his extraordinary life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate’ Brand was the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a precursor to the internet and ‘how-to’ video on YouTube. He is simply a very interesting guy worth getting to know.
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One of my favorite thinkers and people on this earth, Chip Conley, gave this TED Talk 15 years ago, and it still resonates. From the description: “When the dotcom bubble burst, hotelier Chip Conley went in search of a business model based on happiness. In an old friendship with an employee and in the wisdom of a Buddhist king, he learned that success comes from what you count.” Watch the video here. ​

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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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