1. I keep hearing Amazon's choice of NY & DC/Crystal City was about "talent." Yes of course. But it about selecting locations with different kinds if talent, specialized talent pools that meet specific needs.
2. What we are talking about is a very sophisticated kind of corporate locational strategy. This should be a field in business schools & urban programs. But it is not. At least not yet.
3. .@PlaceWonk & I & our @UofTCities team are working on this. We have a Working Paper in the hopper & a piece coming @CityLab tomorrow which previews some of what we have been doing.
4. Part of it has been tracking the location of Fortune 500 HQs over the past half century. Part of it has been thinking about AmazonHQ2 & similar which has been eye-opening.
5. A corporate locational strategy is not an individual optimizing decision. It is searching across a broad economic landscape to look for matches between talent (specialized kinds of talent) & location.
6. HQ2 was NEVER about selecting a single site for a stand-alone headquarters. It was about crowdsourcing information on sites, talent, specialized types of talent, universities, training programs, airport & transport to create the data to site many different things.
7. And to extract maximum concessions and incentives from state and local governments ... leverage ...
9. That is why just looking at the finalist list one could see, "This isn't an HQ2 list." Sure NY, & DC & Boston & Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Toronto make sense as possible HQs. But Pittsburgh or Austin are tech hubs. Columbus, Indy, Nashville are logistics, Miami is LATAM HQ.
10. Amazon is getting VERY DIFFERENT kinds of talent in NY & DC. This is critical. This is not just about tech talent. It is about specialized kinds of talent available in particular places ... plus access to government ...
11. NYC is the world's greatest global city. It is a center for global finance, global HQs, global media + a budding tech hub. Amazon had to locate in NYC to fulfill its dream of being the world's largest company. It is where the global management talent is.
12. Let me emphasize this: the NYC location is about MUCH MUCH more than tech talent. It is about getting access to the global management, financial, marketting talent, they could not attract to Seattle. Proximity to that very specialized talent pool that is in NY & London.
13. DC/ Crystal City is different. Yes, it is more about tech talent. But it also about getting access & proximity to government, cloud customers & DoD. Plus the Washington Post.
14. And it doesn't hurt that the CEO has homes in both places.
15. I fully expect follow-on announcements ... and more sitings ...and the Nashville announcement is in line with this. Amazon is going to be siting lots and lots more facilities. That is the very purpose of this locational strategy. Do it carefully all at once.
16. Amazon has done this part of corporate locational strategy very well. But there is one additional aspect of corporate locational strategy that is doing terribly poorly.
17. That other side of corporate locational strategy is to manage the jurisdictions you are in and are moving to. This they are failing at.
18. My hunch is that they are drinking their own cool aid, believing all the booster rhetoric they are hearing from governors, mayors and local & state officials.
19. But now the honeymoon is over. The gloves are coming off.
20. Amazon has chosen two big cities, with two incredible media cultures and communities, and large activist communities. Eyes will be all over these deals.
21. To do corporate locational strategy right, especially these days of big tech backlash, companies must be seen as - and BE - partners in community development.
22. Big, rich tech companies cannot be seen as extractors. It is brand damaging. Amazon is a consumer company. It depends on the allegiance of its customers. Its brand is everything.
23. As the press increasingly turns negative, its brand suffers. and that brand is worth a WHOLE LOT MORE than $3 billion in tax payer incentives.
24. Amazon's top leadership needs to wake up and see the damage this is doing, and simply say no to incentives. And be an actual, responsible partner in community development in NY, DC/ Crystal City, back home in Seattle & its locations across the country.
25. I sketch out how it can do this, and why it should issue an Amazon Pledge to its many communities here:
ft.com/content/59a6cf…
ft.com/content/59a6cf…
26. Importantly, places are not disembodied "locations", they are actual communities with lots of different kinds of people with real and deep attachments.
