Staff Writer
Before getting into the heart of an address Thursday to 80 local business and legal leaders, Haskell CEO Steve Halverson wanted attendees of Gray Robinson’s Community Leader Forum to think for a moment. He wanted them to think of the greatest invention in history.
Halverson then gave his own opinion on the subject.
While he mentioned harnessing and sustaining fire along with the creation of the wheel and semiconductor, he believes it’s something else.
“My nomination is the American corporation,” he said. “The idea, and it’s brilliant, that you can create a fictional legal person and endow it with certain defined rights and limit it with certain responsibilities and liabilities, let it form its own mission as a legal person and then give it the freedom to go pursue that is an extraordinary concept.”
Such a structure, he said, has spawned innovations, inventions and ideas that have the capacity to do “extraordinary things” for communities.
The question was the framework around his discussion with the community leaders on several issues, with many spawning from his drive to address the importance of education and “delivering America’s promise” of setting up youth for success.
“It’s so obvious that it’s almost trite,” he said.
The need for more rigorous work ethics, higher standards and discipline for children in school is needed to succeed economically in the future, he said, while keeping up with the rest of the world.
In addition to his drive to engage the community in education, Halverson told community leaders of the importance of the link between employer and employee (calling any wedge between the two “corrosive and damaging”); the importance and duty for people to engage publicly; and his advice on his own desire to avoid cynics and pessimists.
The Community Leader Forum is sponsored by law firm Gray Robinson, held quarterly to engage the community with leaders to educate and interact on different topics in Jacksonville, said Kenneth Jacobs, managing partner of GrayRobinson’s Jacksonville office.
“I think for a business leader like Steve to come out and say education is the most important thing is vital,” said Jacobs. “Often times you hear it from people involved in education on the school board or elected officials, but for a business person to do it really sends a message to all of the business community that it has to be a focus.”
Halverson also took several questions from the audience. Some of the questions and the responses are below.
Are KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools the answer to local and national changes in getting education back to where it could be?
The short answer is that it’s part of a larger answer. They’ve had remarkable success other places and they’re in Jacksonville now. I think it’s really important on a few grounds. One is, it’s part of a larger social experiment on what works. You don’t have to have theory, you can have real facts and they will prove their facts. Second, it creates choice. A really, really effective monopoly doesn’t exist. Competition makes us all better.
Where do you think Jacksonville is currently in terms of race relations?
I’m probably the wrong person to ask. My sense is, it’s pretty negative. Moving here, I was struck by what I thought was a thin veneer of civility and calm. If you poke below that, there’s a lot of tension, a lot of inequity and significant structural racism in this community, but we’re not alone in that by any means. I keep coming back to education, but it’s a significant part of the solution.
Where do you see Jacksonville and the state of Florida economically going forward?
I tend to focus on the good, but you’ve got to see the ugly. The biggest thing for me, and I’ll talk from a statewide basis but it applies here, is letting go of old paradigms. We rely on the built-in premise that it’s always going to grow, there’s always going to be tourists and there’s always going to be a rise in property values. None of those three propositions are true forever, so we have to have a completely different notion of what the economy is going to look like in Florida. We simply have to be a smarter state, which is why we have to invest in education.
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