Driving Michigan’s Economy Forward

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Driving Michigan’s Economy Forward

Dow President and CFO Howard Ungerleider leads Business Leaders for Michigan.

DORON LEVIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

Howard Ungerleider pursued a circuitous career path across the country and overseas on behalf of a single company, moving with his family nine times before becoming the president and chief financial officer of Midland-based Dow Inc.

The journey resulted in an impressive resume and the qualifications for top-executive management. It also underscored for him the responsibility to expand opportunities for jobs and promotions to aspirants from diverse backgrounds — such as his own.

Growing up in a Houston suburb after moving with his family from New York, he recalls a classmate who had never met a Jewish person and knew the religion only in terms of inappropriate ethnic stereotypes. In sixth grade, he received an F on a math test when a teacher refused to reschedule a makeup due to his absence on the High Holidays.

“Being the only Jewish student in the school was certainly one of the defining moments toward understanding what it’s like to be different from the others,” he said.

“That’s why I’m very passionate about driving inclusion and diversity inside Dow,” he said. “As a human being it’s the right thing to do. Everyone should be able to live up to their full personal and professional potential. And when I put on my CFO hat, I can see it creates more long-term value — the evidence is overwhelmingly clear.”

Serving Dow in several locations in the U.S. and overseas before taking over his current leadership role in Midland has heightened his perceptions of comparative business climates in Texas, for example, overseas and that of Michigan, his family’s home for the past 14 years.

Among Ungerleider’s civic

COURTESY OF DOW

Howard Ungerleider

commitments is his chairmanship of Business Leaders for Michigan, an economic leadership council consisting of CEOs and other top executives of the state’s largest and most influential corporations. Business Leaders advocates for improving the state’s economic climate and prosperity by way of more effective tax policy, enhanced educational initiatives, infrastructure investments and employment opportunities.

“We look at Michigan’s business and economic climate in comparison to the other states, measuring important characteristics such as the growth of our population, income and per capita gross domestic product (GDP),” he explained. “Coming out of the Great Financial Crisis, we were a bottom 10 state. And the good news is Business Leaders working together with state government and our communities, we were able to get us from a bottom 10 to where we are now. Depending on the metric that you look at, in the middle of the pack.”

“Top 10” states in terms of jobs, productivity, personal income and population indicators, according to Business Leaders, include California, Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and New York. Ungerleider and other CEOs aren’t satisfied with Michigan’s rise from the bottom. He is optimistic that “working together we have a legitimate shot at becoming a top 10 state.”

To get there, Business Leaders is pursuing what he calls four key “pillars” or priorities: growth via state-sponsored economic development efforts; talent development, meaning secondary education and technical training to boost qualifications for good-paying jobs; more dollars to classrooms for K-12 education; and improved “business climate” so more companies find it easier and more efficient to locate or expand operations here rather than in competing states.

Senior members of Michigan’s Jewish community can remember the glory days of the 1950s and 1960s, when Detroit and its environs were among the most prosperous economies on earth. The state’s relative economic decline from those days — pockmarked by the bankruptcies of General Motors and the city of Detroit — has hit the Jewish community as well, as families have left Michigan in search of better opportunities and an exodus of college graduates has relocated to New York, Chicago and the West Coast to pursue their careers.

To cite just one dismaying statistic that bears on Michigan’s economic status today, less than half — 49% to be exact — of the state’s working age population has a degree or credential needed to qualify for a particular job or skill.

“Michigan is addressing this educational attainment

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