I’d like to thank all of you who took the time to drop me an email during the past month regarding my new role at Corporate Report Wisconsin.

And at the same time, I’d also like to thank a reader named Bill. He was actually the very first person to email me after the issue went out in the mail.

Bill chided me for being a bit “too sanguine, given the cataclysmic nature our county is taking.”
Point taken.

I think what my column illustrated is what a lot of us have been feeling for quite awhile. Are we being cheerful fools in thinking that the economy, and our country, is going to recover completely on its own? Or are we just at the beginning of a long, slow walk where all of our decisions will eventually be made for us?

Like yours probably is, my retirement account is certainly voting for the first option.

We’ve had some internal talks here at the Corporate Report office about what we should be doing to break the paralysis that seems to be pervading America. We can no longer just sit and wait for things to happen. We need to be out there making things happen.

But there’s a caveat to this hope: I fear that we’re now moving into an era of reaction, of trying to right things that weren’t well thought out or right in the first place. Instead, we need to move on, to recognize that things are really quite awful, and use that as a starting point to make things better.

We’re a pro-business magazine, and it’s our role to do what we can to support our readers and their businesses. Part of that is being proactive in taking the lead.

We’re starting by taking a close look at our upcoming issues as well as our online presence, and figuring out how we can get critical information to you about how your business can navigate its way out of the Great Recession.

We’re planning on doing in-depth features about issues that can and will have a serious impact on how you do business, like cap and trade, and offering special opportunities to encourage economic development in all areas of the state.

Our new focus is called Project Bootstrap. In the magazine, you’ll be able to identify content that we’re creating to help business in Wisconsin by its new logo.

We want to help you tap into your business resiliency, that tenacious-yet-practical side that we all have when times get tough.

Will our efforts work? We can’t say that for sure, but we do know that they will help.

One thing that we are confident about is that they won’t cost us $152 billion in the process.

By Laurie Arendt

Laurie Arendt is editor of CRW. She can be reached at crweditor@crwmag.com