Dear Mayor Wharton,

If you’re really serious about building Memphis into a City of Choice for young talent, and you’re really serious about creating the nation’s first office of talent retention and development, then I humbly suggest you double-team it.  In essence, I think it will take a team of two to make this work: one white, one African American.  Now before anyone gets all up in arms about all the ills of our city that are so much more important than talent, y’all just hear me out.

Today’s Picture: A Bit Woeful

Let’s start by taking a look at the current state of affairs.  What exactly does a young professional in Memphis look like?  Well, for starters, I’m white.  And I have at least a four year degree.   And I’m between the ages of 25 and 34.  It doesn’t matter what my actual job is, or how much I make.  I’m a young professional.  Does that sound like what you thought I would look like?  It’s exactly what more than 70% of us look like.

Now, what does a general Memphian look like?  There’s about a fifty-fifty chance I’m white or African American.  Seventy percent chance I don’t have a college degree.  Thirty percent chance I’m not even working.  Now, who can tell me what doesn’t add up about these two pictures?

US Census data shows that roughly 12% of Shelby Countians are between the ages of 25 and 34, or about 111,000 of us.  Of that 12%, only about 36% of us have a bachelor’s degree or better.  So now we’re down to about 40,000 people out of Shelby County’s entire population of more than 900,000 who qualify as “young professionals.”  What do we actually look like?  Well, only 17% of these college-educated citizens are African American.  That shakes out to about 6,700 African American young professionals in the area.  Hmmm . . . that doesn’t bode well for our future.

So what?

So why should we concentrate on building young talent just as much as we concentrate on crime, education, and other key issues?  For starters, the presence of a vibrant community of young professionals is one of the top three indicators of a city’s success.  What??  Yeah.  Education, safety, greenness, and all that other stuff are important, but without us young professionals in Memphis to work on these issues, we have at least a 30% chance of failing as a city.

If hard numbers are more convincing to you:  According to CEO’s for Cities, young professionals account for 58% of a city’s success as defined by per capita income.  Short version: we can account for as much as 58% of Memphis’ economy.  That’s an awful lot of tax dollars that can be used to educate our children, keep the Med open, and put more police on our streets.

Want more money?  Then let’s see what happens if we simply increase the talent we have here.  If we can increase our college attainment by 1 percentage point (only about 8,000 graduates), then Memphis will benefit from a $1 billion annual economic impact.  And that billion dollars will repeat itself year over year.  It’s not a one-time deal.  Again, that’s an awful lot of education, social services, police, and parks, which are a direct result of spending as much energy on talent development and retention as we do on other issues.

Side Bar: Serious props to Leadership Memphis and all the other wonderful groups who are working so hard to make the Talent Dividend a reality.  I truly believe we can achieve this ambitious goal, and I’m grateful you’re all on the case.

Now, back to the hard numbers.  I’m not terribly good at math, but if there are only 40,000 of us young professionals in all of Shelby County, then I’m pretty darn sure that’s not enough of us for Memphis to reach its full potential.  Oh, and did I tell you that we’ve been bleeding 3-4 young professionals EVERY DAY for the last 18 years?  Yowsers.  Sometimes I think it might be easier to find enough money for the Med under my couch cushions than it will be to turn the tide on our talent blood loss.

If more young talent means more money, and I hope you will at least agree that means it deserves more attention, then who really cares what that talent looks like, right?  Just so long as we build it and the tax dollars it creates.  Wrong.

One Shot

Memphis has one shot at building itself into a City of Choice for young professionals.  It’s not worth doing unless we can do it right.  And right means we build diverse talent.  Want to succeed in business, education, and just about anything else you can think of?  You have to build a diverse team.  Otis Sanford recently cited some interesting research that shows students who are educated in diverse schools perform better.  It’s what author Scott E. Price calls the “Diversity Conjecture.”  Simply put, diversity creates better groups, companies, schools, and societies.  In some cases, the power of diversity can even trump ability.

Let’s return to those 6,700 African American young professionals.  Does 17% minority young professionals sound like diversity to you?  I think not.

Memphis as a whole is already wonderfully diverse.  Trust me.  Statistical data aside, more than 1,500 folks, many of them young professionals, consider our diversity to be one of the city’s greatest assets.  So if we’re going to commit our time, money and passion to building a community of young talent, shouldn’t it be a diverse community, one that actually reflects our city?

It reminds me of a movie that I don’t particularly care for, “Field of Dreams.”  The only line I remember from the movie is, “If you build it, they will come.”  I’m quite sure that adage holds true for talent as well as baseball.  That still doesn’t explain why we need 2 people leading the charge, but keep that phrase in mind as we continue forward.

I was talking to a friend of mine about this issue recently.  (See my previous post.  I’m passionate about this one, and sometimes it’s all I can talk about.)  He relayed an interesting conversation he recently had with some very important people engaged in talent retention.  The group was about half white, half African American.  They weren’t really making any progress finding solutions, so they backed up and decided to look at the question of what kind of talent Memphis already has and what we should be working towards.

Turns out, therein lay the pickle.  The African American conversants thought my friend (who is white) was only talking about white young professionals.  My friend thought the group was only looking at African American young professionals.  Either way, the disconnect was a concrete impediment.

I’d bet good money they aren’t the only folks with differing visions of what our talent currently looks like and what it should look like.  If we’re going to be successful in recruiting and retaining talent, let’s first show Memphis what that talent looks like.  Most importantly, our talent is diverse.

Well, not yet.  But it can be.

It Might Be Shocking

Now, my next statement might seem a bit shocking.  That’s okay.  It stands to reason that if hold something up as your ultimate goal, I’ll think that’s what the goal should look like.

Let’s say the city’s first “Talent Czar” is white.  Well then, that must be who they’re trying to recruit, white talent.  What if the first “Czar” is African American?  Well then, the city must be focused on only recruiting and building African American talent.

But what if we put forth a team of both black and white young professionals?  That is what we want to create isn’t it?  A diverse community?  Back to “Field of Dreams.”  I posit that if you build it – a diverse team leading the charge, then they will come – a diverse community of young professionals.  There’s certainly more than enough work to be done than any two people can handle.  It’s going to take a lot of elbow grease to stem the tide of talent.

I’m a big fan of starting with the end in mind.  So let’s take a brief look at what can happen when we empower a diverse team to build Memphis into a diverse City of Choice for young professionals:

We might not need as much of the Gates Foundation money.  Memphis will be a very attractive city for the nation’s best and brightest teachers.  They will want to stay here and work to educate our next generation of young professionals.

We might not even care about where our police officers live because we’ll have a whole cadre of college-educated men and women who want to live in Memphis, serving and protecting.

Artists, musicians, and other creatives will know they can come to Memphis and be surrounded by other energetic, entrepreneurial people.  Move over Nashvegas, Memphis is the place to create.

Bioworks, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Memphis won’t be able to keep up with the influx of researchers, specialists, entrepreneurs, and general smarty-pants who all want to call Memphis home.

We might even get a little closer to finding the cure for childhood cancer.  St. Jude is one of the finest research institutions in the world, but it’s a really tough sell to get the best scientists to move to Memphis.

Did I mention the $1 billion economic impact or the increase in tax revenue we could devote to crime, education, and the myriad of social issues we face every day?

Stay Strong

So Mr. Mayor, to recap: Please stay committed to building Memphis into a City of Choice for young professionals, if for no other reason than the incredible financial impact.  We can’t just build any old talent, though.  It must be diverse talent.  There’s so much work to be done, and so much benefit to be reaped.  We have to get this right.

Please build a diverse team to tackle our impediments to growth.  If the team is diverse, then the product will be diverse.

One final thought:  I have no idea where you’ll find the money to do this.  It sounds like we’re a little short on cash right now.  I can’t seem to find a comprehensive, easy to read map of city government, so I can’t even begin to suggest where cuts might be made or duties shifted.  As a citizen though, I trust you to find a way.  We can’t afford not to succeed.