It’s Time for Some Courage (Commentary by Jeff Wood)

It’s a difficult thing to tell one of the most innovative business communities in the nation that it’s lost its mojo. That’s not to say that Northwest Arkansas is kaput. Far from it.

There is definitely something missing though. Maybe a better way to say it is the area seems to have lost its entrepreneurial compass.

It’s not the overall economy. The national news programs keep prognosticating the end of civilization. Yet I look out my office window every day and see a bustling U.S. Highway 71-B. It’s filled with trucks and cars and commercial vans rushing to conduct some kind of commerce somewhere.

True, some of it is “discounted” business, but the world hasn’t stopped. We’re just doing the speed limit again.

Think way back before last November, when Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers threw up their hands over decades of dumb decisions and ridiculous labor costs. Go back before Congress mortgaged our children’s futures by nationalizing whole industries — whether “they had to do it” or not. Think before September 2008, when Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG realized the time to shape up had already shipped out.

Historically we’ve been an island of ingenuity even in down times, but our local entrepreneurial chutzpah has been a little stagnant of late.

Two deaths in 2007 did more to dampen Northwest Arkansas’ resilient spirit than all the dawdling dimwitted do-nothings D.C. can muster.

J.B. Hunt, founder of the Lowell trucking and logistics giant that bears his name, died that January. John Lewis, founder and retired chairman of The Bank of Fayetteville, followed in June.

Helen Walton, the first lady of retail and generosity, died that April as well. Certainly losing such a dynamic champion of Arkansas was an incredible blow, but her philanthropic legacy is only just beginning. Miss Helen was a thunderhead of grace and giving who will be forever missed.

The missing ingredient I’m talking about today though is a couple of rainmakers. Locally focused, business opportunity creators with guts and guile and the financial wherewithal to make things happen.

Hindsight and sentiment can too easily make heroes out of the common man. But in the last decade when you talked about the area’s ability to keep creating particularly startup opportunities, the conversation had to include these two gentlemen.

John knew how to make it rain. Mr. J.B. was a walking monsoon.

It would be futile to try to inventory their good work. Those of you who know anything about business in Arkansas are surely already familiar.

Once at a Bank of America Private Client Group gathering in Rogers, several of us huddled around Mr. J.B. as he scribbled figures on a napkin. He was doing cost analysis on shipping affordable farm tractors from China to America and thinking out loud about all the spinoff opportunities.

He looked up and laughed at one point and said, “Oh, we’ll all go broke and get rich again before it’s over. It’s the trying that’s fun.”

Access to capital obviously makes things easier. But regardless of wealth, if either of those men were alive today smart deals would be getting done, and it wouldn’t matter if they had a nickel. Confidence would be carrying over to others and pollinating into new ventures and ideas.

They stubbed their toes plenty of times, but instead of trying to “manage” their image, they were already on to the next thing.

That’s what we’re missing, and what it comes down to is courage.

What we need today are business leaders who aren’t just looking out for themselves. Territorial squabbling between cities is as cowardly as it is counterproductive.

We need leaders with the courage to dream bigger; to deliver even when it doesn’t necessarily benefit them on the front end.

Both of those men had that. They listened intently, counseled wisely and when a smart idea came along, they hopped up and helped make it happen.

Who will be our regional rainmakers for the next decade? There are big boots to fill, but it’s the trying that’s rewarding, isn’t it?

I don’t know if there’s venture capital in heaven, but I do know this:

There’s at least a couple of angel investors up there now, scratching out deals on slips of paper and watching closely to see what we’re going to do next.