The Great Change

Laurence Sotsky, CEO

I think we all need to think about C&I in a fundamentally different way. 

For business, the general view of C&I must shift from one which unfairly defines C&I as a largely perfunctory series of menial activities in sum representing limited cost mitigation to a view which defines C&I as a major revenue center. Because that is what C&I is - a revenue center. Enterprise portfolios regularly represent $500MM+which require expert work and strategy to monetize - that’s the recipe for revenue center by most any corporate cookbook.

But beyond the boardroom, we must shift the public view from corporate welfare (that most loathsome of mistruths) to fellowship. Forget the notion that welfare recipients must. By definition, maintain a certain level of need while C&I awardees must maintain a certain level of achievement, it’s a more basic argument than the nuances of language. It’s about why C&I works and the nature of the world in which we now live.

We live in an age defined by technological advancement unfathomable to even the most aggressive futurists of 1975. The truth is that we are all doing our best to live our lives as the very fabric of civilization undergoes its most dramatic shift since the establishment of agriculture. This is a radical radical time in which we live - C&I is not a bleak representation of the dark symptoms of that great change but rather, the absolute purest expression of banding together to brave this storm. Government, business, communities, and regular old people are all in the same position as we collectively endure the radical changes brought on by the ascent of technology - C&I is a means to manage those changes. 

C&I is not a short term fix nor is it particularly sexy, and really, that’s what the naysayers are trying to do by decrying it as corporate welfare, to define C&I as some easily understood blunt grotesquery, to villainize one of the only macro economic tools which has proved useful during the tumult of globalization. Our job now is to speak truth to lies, to speak without hesitance to the ranting and the misinformed, to re-contextualize C&I not through empty sexy phrases but through incontrovertible tangible outcomes…

…you know…

…facts.