Community Builder

by Jennifer Reese

Now that Silicon Valley is overflowing with jobs, wages are high, and exports are booming, it's sometimes hard to remember that just a few years back, times were tough. In the early 1990s, job growth had stopped dead in its tracks. Federal cutbacks had ravaged the region's defense industry, and high-tech companies were looking elsewhere, largely because the Valley--- home of Intel, Apple, and Oracle---was turning out to be a surprisingly inhospitable place to do business. It was the kind of place where it could take a couple of years to get a building permit. And it wasn't a particularly wonderful place to live: Housing was outrageously expensive, traffic terrible, and the schools below par. "Silicon Valley was like Jerusalem for high tech," says Judith Hamilton, who arrived from New York City in 1992 to run Dataquest, the technology research firm, "but when I got here what struck me was: 'This place doesn't cooperate.'"
It was in this dismal climate that a group of business, civic, and labor leaders decided to try cooperating. In 1992, they put together an organization aimed at making Silicon Valley more competitive and called it Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network. The name emphasized the fact that this was a partnership between the companies and municipalities in what had been, traditionally, a fiercely entrepreneurial region.
"Business had been pointing its finger at government saying: 'There's too much regulation, taxes are too high, and your attitude is bad,'" says Joint Venture's CEO Becky Morgan, MBA '78. "Government looked at business and said: 'You're bringing all this pollution and traffic to the Valley.' Joint Venture was set up to get people to say: 'Hey, we're all in this together.'"
In its first year, the founders of Joint Venture came up with a grand design for solving all of Silicon Valley's problems, from the crumbling schools to the super-slow permitting processes. But public­private partnerships with grand designs are a dime a dozen. Rarely does anything come of them. As the San Jose Mercury News put it, there was a strong feeling that Joint Venture would "produce high-flown talk and high-priced consultant reports but little else."

Enter Becky Morgan. A three-term state senator tired of political wrangles, a former bank lending officer and schoolteacher, this 58-year-old mother and grandmother has been given a lot of the credit for making Joint Venture actually work. "We needed someone who had an understanding of both the public and the private sectors and could bridge whatever gaps there were between the two," says San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer, who is Joint Venture's cochair. "Becky Morgan has really done that."
Seated in her corner office overlooking the busy freeways of San Jose, Morgan talked recently about how her circuitous career path has led her to this unique position: trying to get Sili-con Valley to think---and act---like a community. She is a quiet but warm woman, eager to talk about the various issues facing the Valley, where she has lived for 29 years.
"I come from that generation 'whither thou goest I will go,'" says Morgan, who is a native of Vermont. "We moved here in 1968 when my husband had his ninth job move in eight years, and we decided this was where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives. When he was asked to move once more with the company, we said: 'No thank you.' You could see and feel the entrepreneurial spirit that was beginning to take hold as exciting new companies were born. We saw this as the land of opportunity, which, fortunately, it has been for us."
Like many women of her generation, Morgan's career got off to a slow start. She graduated from Cornell in 1960 with a degree in home economics and got married the same year. Her early work experience consisted of teaching junior high school and doing some custom dressmaking, which, she says, provided "a little extra pin money, as we called it in those days." After moving to Palo Alto, she took up various volunteer activities, raised two children, and served on the board of education. But in the mid-1970s she started thinking about getting a job. She was considering working toward a California teaching credential when it struck her that what she really enjoyed was dealing with the school district's administration and budgets. She de-cided she wanted an MBA more than a teaching certificate.
In 1976, Morgan enrolled at the GSB. "I put on my Levi's and rode my bike, and it was a year before anyone realized I had teenagers," says Morgan. "It was an ego trip to be part of the group!" She also found it extremely challenging: It was a big leap from home economics to microeconomics over a 16-year gap. But, says Morgan, "The GSB opened up opportunities I never would have had otherwise." Like a job in corporate finance at Bank of America in Sunnyvale, lending to young Silicon Valley companies, which is where Morgan got her education in the needs of the region's hard-driving businesses.
In 1980, she ran for the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors---and won. In 1984, she moved on to the California State Senate. "One of the joys I have in life is to bring divergent ideas, interests, and philosophies together and move toward action," says Morgan, a moderate Republican who built a reputation in the Senate as a strong advocate for education.
But politics---Morgan prefers the term "public service"---was ultimately discouraging. "I really am a problem solver and a collaborator by nature," she says. "The increasingly contentious and highly partisan environment in politics wasn't comfortable for me, and in the spring of 1993, I was feeling some frustration. I had wanted to be appointed to the position of superintendent of public instruction for the State of California. That was obviously not going to happen. Then one day, I got a call in Sacramento from Joint Venture and they said, 'We have this group and we've decided to hire a president and CEO. Would you be interested?'"
Morgan was very interested.She saw more possibilities for making good things happen through Joint Venture than she did politicking endlessly in Sacramento. Joint Venture cut through all kinds of traditional boundaries and, if it could be made to work, would harness the energies of business, government, labor, and the schools. Everyone was brought under the umbrella. And what an enormous umbrella: The region Joint Venture calls Silicon Valley encompasses 30 cities, parts of four counties, and a population of more than 2 million, making it bigger than some states, including Vermont. "To impact the business climate and education system here would allow us to have a significant impact on California," says Morgan.
But the sheer geographic scope of Joint Venture also presented a huge challenge: It's hard enough to build a sense of community in one city, let alone 30. Moreover, when Morgan took over in 1993, Joint Venture was getting bad press. After a year and a half, it hadn't accomplished anything concrete, and already it was in debt.
"There were people who said: 'Why do we need another organization?' And others who said: 'They haven't done anything---can they?'" says Morgan. "Well, what they had done was their homework! They'd researched the situation and put in place a plan. Joint Venture was doing its R&D in public, and R&D is messy. A company can do its R&D in private and nobody knows how many mistakes it makes. This was a group of people who'd come together with great dreams and put together a plan for what ought to happen but who didn't have the leadership to implement it."

Morgan was that leadership. "I'm old enough to know my strengths and weaknesses," she says. "And I'm much better at the implementation and community outreach piece of a process than in the creative design." She hired a communications specialist to help clear up public misapprehensions and a fundraiser to put the organization into the black. She also took a hard look at what Joint Venture could and couldn't accomplish. The founders had come up with 13 initiatives, and Morgan dropped three of them because they didn't have enough support. Then she started putting together teams and trying to make things happen.
The people who have joined those teams are one of Joint Venture's greatest strengths. The top executives at the region's most influential companies have signed on, including John Morgridge, MBA '57; Regis McKenna; and Lew Platt. And keeping them on board has been one of Morgan's greatest accomplishments. "In this kind of job you get your work done through convincing people they want to do things," says Silicon Valley executive Hamilton. "You don't have any direct authority: You're dealing with a bunch of volunteers and strong-willed CEOs. Morgan handles those issues with grace and panache."
This high-powered buy-in has helped Joint Venture achieve some impressive results. Silicon Valley is already an easier place to do business. "We recognize there are strategic reasons for companies to be located all over the globe, but we want those decisions to be made for strategic reasons," says Morgan. "We don't want people leaving because they don't like the way they get treated at City Hall."
Companies are getting treated a lot better. Through Joint Venture, big Silicon Valley firms, including Hewlett-Packard and National Semiconductor, have loaned out experts to help towns streamline their permitting processes. Sunnyvale, for one, has taken its permitting process from 110 steps down to 36. Even more dramatically, 27 cities and 2 counties signed off on a uniform local building code. Contractors who build in San Carlos, Sunnyvale, and San Jose will now be working with one simplified set of regulations.
There's more. Joint Venture developed a program to assign teams to mentor start-up companies and help them hone their business plans and drum up capital. The organization was also instrumental in recruiting the Flat Panel Display Consortium to San Jose. "Just to have a mega-chamber of commerce for Silicon Valley is useful," says Hamilton, who now runs FirstFloor Software. Mayor Hammer agrees: "I hear it from businesses all the time, that San Jose is so much more business-friendly. People say: 'We don't get hassled like we did a few years ago.'"
But Joint Venture isn't just a business booster. It is also addressing the region's social issues, like traffic, health, and education. Silicon Valley is, after all, more than just a cluster of computer companies. It's a place where people live and raise children, and---if just making life better for people isn't enough ---ignoring the region's social ills will, almost certainly, lead to economic troubles in the future. Morgan has been insistent that Joint Venture pay attention to social issues, especially education and health. "It probably comes out of my training as a home economist and also as a parent," says Morgan.
Under the auspices of Joint Venture, volunteers from forward-thinking companies with wellness programs---which educate employees on issues like smoking cessation, diet, and exercise---go into other companies and show them how to do it. These programs are undramatic, but effective: The City of San Jose credits its wellness program with saving $1 million in workers' compensation in its first 18 months.

As for education, Joint Venture has raised $25 million in cash, technology, and human resources to work with the region's schools and improve student achievement. Volunteers from the business community are partnering with teams of schools and trying to do some simple things that make a big difference. Like ensuring that year after year students learn new material. One team of schools found that between kindergarten and 8th grade, less than 30 percent of the material kids learned each year in science class was new. Why? Because teachers from different grades hadn't been talking to each other.
There is very little having to do with the public life of the Valley that Joint Venture is not currently trying to address. The organization is working to stimulate development of an environmental industry; it has spun off a program that helps smaller companies trade globally; and through an independent affiliate, it is trying to increase telecommuting in order to reduce traffic. At a juncture like this, it would be easy to see Joint Venture becoming part of the problem---another vested interest in a region filled with vested interests.
But part of Morgan's success in running Joint Venture is that she seems to do so with a striking lack of ego. She doesn't appear to use Joint Venture as a way to further her own personal ambitions---and given the attention the organization has been receiving lately, it would be easy to do so. When initiatives no longer require the protection and nurturing of Joint Venture, Morgan spins them off.
"There's absolutely no attempt to build a kingdom," says Hamilton. "She puts the emphasis on the good of the Valley rather than Joint Venture as an organization."
And this, in a nutshell, is what Joint Venture is all about: getting beyond the day-to-day needs of your organization, of your town, company, industry, or union, and focusing on the good of the larger community. And for all its Fortune 500 corporations, for all its wealth, talent, technology, and for all its natural beauty, until recently a community is something Silicon Valley has never really been.

"One of the joys I have in life is to bring divergent ideas, interests, and philosophies together and move toward action. I really am a problem solver and a collaborator by nature."