So, is the glass half empty or half full? Depends on who you ask.
So, is the glass half empty or half full? Depends on who you ask.
In “A Tale of Two Cities,” Charles Dickens famously described the time period of his story (France during the revolution) as both “the best of times” and “the worst of times.” Depending on which national survey you read the same could be said of Hawaii today.
CNBC gave Hawaii an overall 50th place rating in its 2015 Survey of the Best Places to Do Business in the US. Making up that overall rating are 10 individual dismal ratings for the cost of doing business (50th), infrastructure (49th), business friendliness (44th), access to capital (37th), workforce (46th) … you get the idea. Just can’t wait to see the 2016 ratings, can you? All in all a pretty distressing picture of what’s it’s like to be in business in this state. The one bright spot, and an extremely bright spot it is: Hawaii’s No. 1 rating for quality of life.
Supporting that last rating is an altogether different portrayal of life in Hawaii also in a 2015 survey done by Gallup-Healthways. That survey gives Hawaii the top rating in the U.S. for overall well=being for the fifth time in the 8 years this survey project has been around, and for two of the three years Hawaii didn’t make No. 1 it was No. 2.
The Gallup-Healthways survey looked at how respondents evaluated their sense of purpose, social relationships, financial security, and relationship to community, and suggested that higher well-being goes hand in hand with higher worker productivity. Gallup-Healthways then went further and saw increased productivity as in turn enhancing the effectiveness of organizations.
While these two surveys do indeed measure different things, those things aren’t really that different at all when you stop to think about it. Happy people make happy circumstances for living. But I have trouble directly connecting the purposeful, financially secure, socially connected and community involved Hawaii of Gallup-Healthways with the dismal sweatshop of CNBC. Sort of like Neverland meets Newark. (Apologies to Newark).
But if we look at how the surveys were done, here is where we find the key. The CNBC survey used published data along with the input of “an elite group of CFOs’” from CNBC’s Global CFO Council. The Gallup-Healthways survey was done via a statistically solid phone interview sample (land line and cell). On the one hand, you could say the CNBC survey is more factual, but on the other you could say that it was done by people who don’t live here (arguably).
So what does this have to do with small business I hear you ask, and a good question that is. As noted elsewhere by business consultant luminaries, small business is Hawaii’s business, with the overwhelming majority of us in this state contributing to our local society through our small business workplaces. So the Hawaii CNBC portrays is the situation we portray to the world, the Gallup-Healthways survey is the life we live here.
The moral of this story, if indeed we place some belief in these two somewhat diametrically opposed surveys, is that maybe we should take some of that community connectedness we experience and apply it to helping the small business community, and by that I mean us all, in workforce development so we have the educated workforce we need that is recognized by the rest of the country. Maybe we should take that sense of financial security we feel and magnify it by trying to bring down the cost of doing business insofar as we can (we can’t change being in the middle of the ocean, but regulatory speed up? — it’s a thought). And maybe we should take the sum of our well-being and invest it in both portraying Hawaii as a friendlier place to do business and having that reflected on the ground in the data.
How specifically? I don’t know. I do know that here in Hawaii, we unfortunately bear the burden of a national perception, and some of the facts, that we are the last place in the U.S. one would want to be in business. This certainly doesn’t help much with our efforts towards becoming self-sustainable. But we also share a common experience of this being where we want to be and being content in being here. Think about that. How can we translate that sense of fortunate place into business efficiency? Let’s work on that.
(If you haven’t been totally put off about business in Hawaii, our next class, “How to Start a Business in Hawaii,” is 9-11:30 a.m. Friday. Register by calling 327-3680)
Hawaii SBDC Network is funded in part through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration and the University of Hawaii at Hilo. All opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.
Boyd is the director of the West Hawaii Small Business Development Center.