When Love of LSU and Football Causes Business To Leave

Ugh what a depressing article from the Baton Rouge Business Report at The cost of losing IEM

Besides losing IEM we learn this depressing fact:

Cut through the rhetoric and IEM is leaving because 1] our present workforce doesn’t meet the company’s needs, 2] our universities, and especially LSU, are pathetic at partnering with the private sector, 3] our education system, from K-college, does a crappy job, and 4] our quality of life isn’t good enough to attract and retain the highly educated people IEM is desperate to employ.
It’s a story we’ve been hearing since a canvass trip to Austin six-plus years ago when George Friedman, CEO of the now internationally renowned StratFor, stunned those in attendance with his tale of how LSU officials essentially forced him to take his brilliant idea of providing information about world affairs to business and government clients and move to the Lone Star State. Why? Because Freidman wanted to partner with equally smart people at Tulane, a notion LSU shot down because 1] it wanted to control the money from commercialization, and 2] the Tigers played the Green Wave in football, and it was wrong to partner with the enemy.
Now, you will hear administrators at LSU and officials from the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, Louisiana Economic Development and Gov. Bobby Jindal’s office proclaim that the times they are a-changing. But, to be blunt, they’re not changing fast enough, and many of the people that stand in the way of progress and new ideas remain in power—can you say Ray Lamonica?