After JP

The 20th century finally wheezed to a close in Greensboro earlier this month with the sale of Jefferson-Pilot Corp. to a Philadelphia-based insurance giant. The end of an economic era does not portend disaster for this city, but it does show that we've got to redouble our efforts to define what comes next.

The last century actually lasted 110 years around here, at least in terms of the business culture. It began when Moses and Ceasar Cone built their first cotton mill in 1895, kick-starting Greensboro's growth from a sleepy Piedmont town into a wealthy and progressive city that would spawn several large, publicly traded companies. The acquisition of JP by Lincoln Financial means that the last of these old-line firms has lost its independence.

Two powerful forces helped undo Greensboro as a headquarters town: globalization and consolidation. The textile industry, weakened by the financial-engineering schemes of the '80s, succumbed to competition from overseas manufacturers; the insurance companies were absorbed by hypertrophied rivals in a business that has come to worship scale as a fundamental value. It's been the same story across the Triad. In High Point, the furniture jobs have gone to China, and in Winston-Salem the big bank was bought by a bigger bank from Charlotte.

That's the way the game is played. In hindsight, it seems clear that Greensboro's corporate leaders might have played it better, but the trends were not in our favor. Once a company sells shares to the public, it serves a pitiless master. Capitalism has no heart, no loyalty. It is a machine for creating wealth, and it will roll over anything in its path to get an extra quarter-percent return on investment. On a macroeconomic level, the machine is efficient and over time it spreads the wealth, if unevenly, across society; it can be seen as a corollary or even a prerequisite of political liberty. But in terms of individual lives and companies and cities, it is as remorseless as a shark at suppertime.

So Greensboro finds itself lacking the kind of large-company leadership that helped make it the nice place it is today. In truth that leadership has been slipping away for decades; the sale of JP just makes it official. It hurts to lose the talent and money that big corporations can bring to bear. But we are not a city without resources, and there are reasons to believe that we can continue to prosper in the future. To do so, we need to recognize the assets we've got, and understand that creativity, diversity and an acceptance of change are the keys to our next economy.

Nothing terribly new in that preceding sentence, I know. We've started down the path already, with the noises about a "creative class" and a serious downtown renaissance well under way. (If JP had sold out five years ago, the damage might have been much greater.) But I don't sense that the new rules have been internalized. This area should be fertile ground for information-age companies, yet we seem trapped in our 20th-century mind-set. It seems like we are waiting for someone to save us, but the fact is that assembling commodity-grade personal computers for Michael Dell, or moving boxes for FedEx, is no substitute for homegrown jobs and leadership.

This city prides itself on its openness, but it needs to be more open, to new people and new ideas. We need to attract talent, and hang onto it, and make ourselves a Mecca for innovators and builders. We need an entrepreneurial culture, and we should set a serious goal of creating the best public schools in the nation. There is much to build upon here, including the two branches of the state university system, the Cone Health System and the storehouse of wealth amassed in generations past. The city itself can do more, by being green and business-friendly and tech-forward in its policies.

Greensboro can learn a lot from its remaining Fortune 500 company, VF Corp. While VF is a successor to a mainstay of the old textile economy, Blue Bell Inc., it is post-modern in structure and strategy. The company was built by mergers and acquisitions, and has changed the nature of its business to compete in the global market. VF owns and markets brands such as Wrangler, Lee and Nautica while managing its outsourced manufacturing operations in Asia via sophisticated software and globetrotting executives.

It's a creative business built on top of an old-economy business. As such, it's a model for our future.

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.