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Don Cunningham: Air Products and Lehigh Valley Have Prospered Together

By Colin McEvoy on July 25, 2018

This column, written by LVEDC President and CEO Don Cunningham, originally appeared in The Morning Call and on the newspaper’s website on July 24, 2018. (Click here to read Cunningham’s previous columns.)

Don Cunningham

Talk about not leaving the old neighborhood.

Air Products announced this month that not only will its new headquarters remain in the Lehigh Valley, but it will just bounce down the road a mile or so in Upper Macungie Township.

It’s a combination of a downsize and an upgrade. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to sell to my wife.

The Lehigh Valley’s largest company will go from a 235-acre location to a smaller 50-acre site, but into a new building with the most modern of research and development facilities and all that’s current in office and building features.

In essence, Air Products has become a sort of empty nester with more space than it needs. Following its divestiture of non-core businesses during the last two years, the company has focused on its central business — industrial gases — precisely where it all started. It’s a bit like what remains after the kids have moved on.

And, as I keep telling my wife, the more unneeded space you have around the house, somehow it’s going to get filled, most likely with relatives on the holidays or kids returning home.

Turns out, she likes it that way. Therefore, we’re at an impasse. And just as the tie goes to the runner, an impasse equals a win for her.

Therefore, I’ve drafted an invite to Air Products CEO Seifi Ghasemi to dinner. This guy knows how to get things done. I’m thinking he can help me explain the business sense of us moving to a smaller and better living unit a mile or two down Linden Street in Bethlehem.

He found a great solution for Air Products — a new, more focused headquarters. And, he kept it right here in the good ‘ole Lehigh Valley, right down the street, so the “relatives” – in this case, all us Lehigh Valley residents – are quite happy. This is a guy who understands the natural law that all empty space is filled by something – or someone – so it’s best to tighten it down.

Not sure if Ghasemi can help me win my battle. Corporate board dynamics are easier than marital ones.

Whether he shows for dinner or not, I have tremendous respect and gratitude for the decision he made to keep Air Products headquartered in the Lehigh Valley. In a global economy, all companies, especially ones like Ghasemi’s that operate in 50 countries, can locate wherever they want in the world.

But, unlike Jeff Bezos’s Amazon and its multinational, multi-year sweepstakes for a new headquarters, Ghasemi went old school from the start.

He didn’t seek the shiny lure of a bigger city or the seduction of states shaking pom-poms of money and incentives. He realized location wasn’t the issue. The grass isn’t always greener in other pastures.

Air Products and the Lehigh Valley have grown and prospered together. It was the region’s location, its people and its assets that brought Leonard Poole and his growing industrial gas business to a 25,000-square-foot former machine shop in Emmaus in 1946. The search was done then. Poole looked far and wide to find a home for the fledgling company he started in Detroit a few years earlier.

Today, Air Products is an $8-billion global company, headquartered in Trexlertown. It’s the Lehigh Valley’s largest corporation.

We are fortunate Mr. Poole selected us. We’re also fortunate for the leaders who followed him like Ed Donley, Dexter Baker, Hap Wagner and others, along with the tens of thousands of engineers, chemists and employees of every vocation and skill set who were from the Lehigh Valley or made a home here. A symbiotic relationship between company and place became an integral part of Air Products’ success and the region’s identity.

Ghasemi’s tenure appears to be focused on fixing what can be improved and leaving alone what isn’t broken. We should be grateful for his wisdom and exercise our own, understanding that just because a company is here now, it doesn’t need to remain.

Businesses aren’t charities. They don’t create jobs to be helpful. They don’t choose sites for offices and plants as rewards. Decisions are made first in the interest of their customers and shareholders by improving competitiveness and controlling costs. They stay if it makes sense.

That’s why the decision to stay says as much about the Lehigh Valley as it does Air Products. They’re staying in the neighborhood because it’s a good one, just like it was back in ’46.

A region’s workforce, talent supply, educational opportunities, cost-competiveness, infrastructure, quality of life, cost of living and access to a broader market for supplies, customers and employees make the difference. We win when these factors remain strong. It’s critical for all of us – and those that employ us – that collectively we work to keep those assets strong and better than the lure of the competition, which, today, is global.

When you travel when you’re young, you tend to think every place you visit would be a better home. Then you age and realize that’s largely because you’re there on vacation. In the end, it’s just as well to notice the greener grass afar, and not move to it, but bring it back to the neighborhood.

I may not be the best judge on this. Except for some years at college, I’ve lived all my life in about a five-mile radius. I like regularly walking past the house where my grandparents, now long gone, played cards with the family on Friday nights, the street where my kids first peddled a bike or the Little League field where I first hit a ball. It keeps me grounded, connected to where I came from, how I got to be where I am and why it matters what I leave behind.

There were times the Lehigh Valley may have been easier to leave. We’ve weathered those storms, and today for many new people and new companies, we are the greener grass. That feels good.

At the start of Amazon’s search for a second headquarters, I wrote Mr. Bezos an open letter and invited him to visit the Lehigh Valley. I told him the Yocco’s dogs were on me. He didn’t respond. Some rightfully ripped me for merely putting a hot dog on the table.

So, Mr. Ghasemi, my wife is terrific cook and I promise you an extraordinary meal if you can help me pull off what you’ve done with Air Products: staying in the neighborhood but just downsizing into smaller and better digs!

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