Ralph Doty’s critique from both last year and this year rested in large part on his admiration for the JCI outfit he worked with when he lived in Ohio. I guess you’d call that innocence by association.
JCI has twice as many employees worldwide as Duluth has residents. I presume that most Fortune 100 Companies grow to that size because they have lots of good people doing work that people want to pay them to do. That does not mean that everyone working for the company is virtuous. Ask New Orleans or Chrysler what they think of JCI. I suspect Duluth may be yet one more instance of some rotten JCI apples.
A lot of Let Duluth Vote folks have recently been combing the Internet to learn more about JCI. One sent me this link about the St. Louis County School System. Its a spiffy presentation put together by JCI in preparation for a Duluth-like long term plan for the ailing rural schools of St. Louis County.
The person who sent me the link said she wanted to warn the St. Louis County schools to “run away” from JCI. I don’t blame her but as I paged through the data all I could think was that if ever there was an important service JCI could provide it would be this. To provide a good honest analysis to a hard luck school system about how to help it improve. Its too bad that the rotten apples in Duluth taint the whole JCI apple barrel.