[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 20 (Tuesday, February 29, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S965-S966]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO STEVE HIGDON

 Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to 
fellow Kentuckian Steve Higdon on his recent success in becoming 
president and chief executive officer of Greater Louisville, Inc.
  Steve Higdon grew up in Hikes Point and graduated from Trinity High 
School. He received a bachelor's degree in business administration from 
the University of Kentucky and began work with Yellow Freight Systems 
in Louisville after college.
  Steve made his way to the top of the Louisville business world 
through hard work and determination. After his work at Yellow Freight 
Systems, he held several positions of leadership within the United 
Parcel Service (UPS), including economic development manager. Steve's 
work at UPS led to his involvement with Greater Louisville, Inc., and 
to his being hired as executive vice president for economic development 
and chief operating officer.
  Many of Steve's colleagues have noted his extraordinary leadership 
skills. Steve's co-workers at UPS and colleagues within Greater 
Louisville, Inc. have all spoken of his drive and ambition, his work 
ethic and intelligence. From everything I've observed, Steve deserves 
all of these compliments--and more. He has taken on a huge 
responsibility in the Louisville community, and his past experience and 
success is a sign of good things to come for the city, its residents 
and its workers.
  Steve also is involved in efforts to build a better Louisville 
community. He holds positions on the Workforce Investment Board, 
Housing Partnership Board, Kentucky Industrial Development Council, 
Industrial Development Research Council, and the Trinity High School 
Alumni association. This is further evidence that Steve's commitment to 
the community goes beyond mere business interests--he genuinely cares 
about Louisville's children and families.
  Steve, on behalf of my colleagues and myself, thank you for your 
dedicated service to Louisville and to the people of Kentucky. I have 
every confidence in your ability to lead Greater Louisville, Inc. and 
its efforts to build great accomplishments and successes in the years 
to come.
  Mr. President, I also ask that an article which ran in the Louisville 
Courier-Journal on Sunday, January 30, 2000, appear in the record 
following my remarks.
  The article follows:

          [From the Louisville Courier-Journal, Jan. 30, 2000]

Greater Louisville Grew New Leader From the Inside--Steve Higdon Loves 
                          To Deal With People

                            (By David Goetz)

       Steve Higdon, the new man in charge of Louisville's 
     economic future, speaks the language of development in a 
     broadcast-quality baritone. He moves seamlessly from 
     discussions of work-force issues to business retention to the 
     prospects of city-county merger.
       But if you watch him speak as well as listen, you can catch 
     glimpses in his gestures of the airport baggage handler he 
     was not too many years ago. He seems to grab his words as he 
     speaks them bracketing them between his hands or rolling them 
     up in front of him. Then he hands them to you, or takes them 
     to heart, or just places them here and there like a man 
     sorting bundles.
       Higdon, 37, is the new president and chief executive 
     officer of Greater Louisville, Inc., a hometown guy whose 
     love of long distances shaped a business career in shipping 
     and distribution that never took him very far from home.
       He's not too far removed in years or though from the 
     college graduate of 1987 who found himself bossing men twice 
     his age on the loading dock of Yellow Freight Systems at 35th 
     and Duvall streets in Louisville.
       ``It was the most stressful job I've ever had,'' Higdon 
     recalled last week in his modest new office, a passable view 
     of Sixth Street over his shoulder, business cards on his desk 
     still identifying him in his former job as the non-profit 
     corporation's head of economic development.
       ``I was very young and green, there were the hours, 
     managing Teamsters whose average on the job was 25 to 30 
     years,'' Higdon continued. ``The productivity goals were 
     extremely tough.''
       He was young and it would have been easy to quit, Higdon 
     said, but he had already developed a sense of having a career 
     rather than just a job.
       ``I didn't know what the career was, but I knew I would 
     have to be responsible,'' he said. ``I knew I would have to 
     work my way through it.''
       It was the beginning of a career that eventually placed 
     Higdon with air carrier UPS and brought him into contact with 
     the old Greater Louisville Economic Development Partnership.
       There he garnered the notice and respect of entrepreneur 
     Doug Cobb, who had signed on as president of Greater 
     Louisville Inc., in 1997 when the partnership merged with the 
     Chamber of Commerce to create a unified front for 
     Louisville's business-support and economic-development 
     efforts.
       Cobb said he wasn't intentionally grooming a successor when 
     he hired Higdon to run the development side of Greater 
     Louisville Inc., in 1997.
       ``I called Steve because he had a good idea of what was 
     going on'' in Louisville, Cobb said. ``But when you find out 
     what people can do and you ask them to do more, which they do 
     well, they just naturally grow into leadership.''
       Higdon is ``maybe the most impressive executive I've ever 
     worked with,'' Cobb said. ``He's a great organizer. He knows 
     how to figure out what needs to be done and get it done. He's 
     good judge of talent.''
       Higdon has ``a lot of the leadership characteristics that 
     make the difference,'' said LG&E Energy Corp. executive Steve 
     Wood, chairman of Greater Louisville, Inc.'s economic 
     development committee.
       ``To be a successful executive, you have to out-work and 
     out-think the competition, in this case, other jurisdictions 
     competing for new business,'' Wood said. ``I don't think you 
     can outwork him. His energy level's extremely high, and he's 
     as bright as they come.''
       Retired banker and civic leader Malcolm Chancey advocated a 
     broader, national search for Cobb's successor, but he praised 
     Higdon's energy and talent.
       ``If he has the right kind of support, he'll be 
     successful,'' Chancey said. ``I hope everybody will support 
     him. I certainly will.''

[[Page S966]]

       Higdon grew up one of four kids in a house off Klondike 
     Lane near Hikes Point. His father was a photoengraver at the 
     old Standard Gravure printing plant.
       The Rev. David Zettel, a counselor at Trinity High School, 
     remembers Hidgon as bright, gregarious and outgoing. ``He 
     smiled a lot,'' Zettle said.
       Higdon was ``more social than most smart guys.'' and he had 
     the ability to befriend any group, said friend Tom Scanlon, 
     now president of ScanSteel Service Center Inc. in 
     Louisville.
       Scanlon remembers exchanging words with students from a 
     rival school in the parking lot one night after a football 
     game. Then Higdon walked over to them.
       ``What looked like it was going to turn into a fight, 30 
     minutes later we were sitting on the hood of their car 
     drinking beer with them,'' Scanlon said. ``He has a look in 
     his eye and you trust him.''
       Higdon started out in accounting at the University of 
     Kentucky but found marketing more to his taste. ``It was 
     exciting. It was fun. It was creative,'' he said. ``You got 
     these marketing problems and there were 30, 40, 50 different 
     ways to come up with a solution.''
       He had never been on a plane before, but on a whim Higdon 
     left a summer job before his senior year to fly with a co-
     worker to Europe. He visited 13 countries on about $4 a day, 
     he said, and discovered a personal maturity and a love of 
     travel that have marked his career since.
       His first job out of college was as a part-time baggage 
     handler for Piedmont Airlines in Louisville--not for the $6 
     an hour, Higdon said, but for the free flights, employees got 
     if the planes weren't full.
       ``I flew 100,000 miles that year. We'd fly out to L.A. for 
     ladies night at the Red Onion, fly to Miami for the Super 
     Bowl, all we did was travel--it was so much fun,'' he said. 
     ``I've worked for an airline most of my life since. Travel is 
     the spice of life.''
       Even the full-time jobs at Yellow Freight and Emery 
     Worldwide that followed had a touch of the exotic for Higdon. 
     ``Every piece of freight had a destination or an origin in 
     cities all over the world,'' he said.
       He was a sales manager for the local office of Emery parent 
     CF Airfreight when UPS won landing rights in Japan and hired 
     him to run the Louisville office of its new UniStar cargo 
     company. His charge was finding enough freight customers to 
     fill the overnight package-delivery jets flying to and from 
     Japan.
       ``I was one of the first people hired to a significant 
     management position from outside UPS,'' Higdon said. ``In 
     less than two years this was the most profitable of their 40 
     offices in the U.S.''
       UPS later named Higdon the first marketing manager of its 
     own air-cargo division and had him create its first air-
     passenger charter service.
       ``In a real sense I've been like a corporate 
     entrepreneur,'' Higdon said. ``Every job I've had (with UPS) 
     was a new job. I never went into a position where I was 
     replacing somebody.''
       Doug Kuelpman, a former boss at UPS, said Higdon 
     ``understands the business world and what has to be done. He 
     has a knack.
       ``I never had to tell Steve more than once about doing 
     something, even in areas where he may not have felt well-
     equipped going into it. He's the kind of guy who likes to put 
     his head down and charge.''
       In 1995, UPS ``loaned'' Higdon to the development 
     partnership to help recruit transportation-intensive 
     businesses. Louisville Mayor Dave Armstrong was county judge-
     executive at the time and worked with Higdon in an 
     unsuccessful attempt to lure a new Harley-Davidson 
     manufacturing plant to the area.
       ``We were out of the picture altogether'' when he and 
     Higdon went to work on the project, but in the end, ``we were 
     barely edged out'' by Kansas City, Armstrong said. ``He did a 
     great job with that.''
       Higdon concentrated on a strategy for attracting high-tech 
     industries and recruited seven computer-repair firms with 700 
     jobs by the end of 1996.
       But while he loved his work, Higdon said, ``there was never 
     a time I felt this is where I want to be.'' The following 
     year he went to Cobb for advice on starting his own company.
       Instead, Cobb hired Higdon to head the business-attraction 
     efforts of what had become Greater Louisville Inc.
       His first day on the job, Oct. 8, 1997, Higdon told Cobb 
     that UPS was planning to expand its operations and was 
     seriously considering Columbus, Ohio, as the site.
       That conversation resulted in five months of intensive 
     negotiations that ended with the announcement that the $1 
     billion expansion and its 6,000 jobs were ticketed for 
     Louisville.
       As a former UPS insider, Higdon had ``a good sense of what 
     was going on'' inside the company, Cobb said, and he played 
     ``a huge role'' in the negotiations' success.
       Higdon is credited with helping develop the innovative 
     Metropolitan College concept that lets UPS package handlers 
     work their night shifts while attending college.
       When Cobb said last fall that he wanted to step down as 
     president and CEO, the board of directors decided to look 
     internally for a successor, said Ed Glasscock, chairman of 
     the board's search committee. The aim was to maintain 
     momentum and avoid a long adjustment period under a new 
     executive.
       They chose Higdon.
       ``It's not fair to characterize it as Doug naming his 
     successor. We asked Doug for his recommendations,'' Glasscock 
     said. ``You had a number of independent business people on 
     the search committee who reviewed the job description and 
     Steve's background. We felt he matched up, not because Doug 
     said he was the perfect candidate. We came to that conclusion 
     independently.''
       Choosing a successor internally is not unusual in 
     corporations, Higdon said, and, under Cobb, Greater 
     Louisville Inc. adopted the corporate model in its structure 
     and thinking.
       ``That's why we're successful,'' he said. ``The mentality 
     is we're all running a business here.''
       Running a business--his own--is still on Higdon's mind, 
     though it's been pushed into the indefinite future. He said 
     he is committed to his new job for at least three years and 
     that has its rewards.
       ``I love dealing with people more than anything,'' he said. 
     ``Since I was a kid I loved to be out among people.''

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