'20 under 40' members fulfilling their promise

They are the kinds of people that Creative Class guru Richard Florida says a city needs if it is going to be successful.

With the Class of 2008, The State newspaper’s annual “20 Under 40,” a list of rising business stars in the Midlands, now has 100 alumni.

But rising stars might be something of a misnomer. The 20 Under 40 aren’t simply young business and professional people who are full of promise, rather they are actually fulfilling their promise.

These aren’t just people who can do, they are people who are doing.

Many have founded their own companies or are leading companies. In almost every instance, they are providing not only business leadership but also community leadership.

Here are just three examples:

• Tori Anderson, Class of 2004 and vice president of Spherion Recruiting and Staffing in Columbia, is leading a task force of 14 employment agencies that will help find jobs for family members when the Army’s 81st Regional Readiness Command moves to Fort Jackson this year.

• Keely Saye, also Class of 2004, decided to scratch her entrepreneurial itch when she joined Catalyst, a fledgling media firm, last year as a principal and director of business development. Saye also serves as chair of the board of directors of Columbia Opportunity Resource and leads its Stop the Brain Drain task force.

• Jason Williamson, who was vice president for community development for the S.C. Technology Alliance when he was named to the Class of 2005, is now senior vice president of sales and marketing for Ometric Corp. a high-tech company that he helped found.

Attracting and retaining talented people, like those who make up the annual 20 Under 40, must be a goal for the Riverbanks Region if it is to be successful economically.

For Florida, who spoke in Columbia in November, creativity rather than technology is the key to competitiveness and the knowledge-based economy.

Technology is merely one of the components: Talent, tolerance and territorial assets are the others.

Florida believes creativity is the engine of economic growth. Every human being is creative, he says, and economic growth depends on harnessing a wide spectrum of creativity.

“Access to talented and creative people is to modern businesses what access to coal and iron ore was to steel-making,” Florida wrote in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class. “It determines where companies will choose to locate and grown, and this in turn changes the way cities can compete.”