PITTSBURGH (TNS) — It’s not a coincidence that the person who delivered the biggest economic development coup in recent Pittsburgh history, and finally offered a vision for what southwestern Pennsylvania can accomplish in the coming decades, was derided as “Connecticut Dave” during his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Only an outsider to the region’s sclerotic, navel-gazing political culture could pull off something as splashy and innovative as Tuesday’s inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit.

Sen. Dave McCormick wasn’t constrained by the pressure to please hundreds of people from decades of accumulated relationships, by the pieties of the respectable establishment, by the neuroses — risk-aversion, self-doubt, lukewarmness — of a region whose leaders have forgotten what it feels like to win.

DOING BIG THINGS

What comes from the summit, in the long run, is impossible to say. There’s good reason to believe that its vision of catalyzing not just $90 billion in deals and commitments in one day, but much more in the weeks and months and years to come, will come to pass.

But even if it doesn’t — even if the AI revolution somehow stalls out, or investors turn their attentions elsewhere — there is still an essential lesson to learn from the spectacle.

McCormick went out and did something in and for Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. He did something big. We don’t have to constantly wring our hands about stakeholders and optics and what if it doesn’t work and we look foolish which inevitably leads to maybe it’s safer to do something small or nothing at all.

Individuals with talent and leverage can just do things. And Pennsylvania needs more people like that.

Now, powerful people don’t typically do big things with purely charitable intent.  McCormick stands to gain from the summit by the enhancement of his prestige, which will help him to retain and to increase his political power.

And his friends and associates who populated the panels are looking to make a buck (or several billion) by using, and one might say exploiting, the resources and people of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Yet it is an enduring strength of the otherwise wobbly American system of liberal democracy that there is generally some relationship between the gains sought by powerful people and the well-being, on at least some metrics, of regular people.

If the investments catalyzed by the summit do not materialize, or do materialize but only benefit a select few, the politician who organized it stands to lose. The senator is incentivized to ensure that whatever growth comes from his efforts is at least somewhat widely shared.

To be sure, not every big thing done by big people is worth celebrating. But I think this one is. And especially so in Pittsburgh, because we’ve seen such little ambition to do big things, in a place once famous for big things, for so long.

PEOPLE ODVER INSTITUTIONS

Our region is blessed with a remarkable breadth of robust institutions, from foundations to corporations to nonprofits. But the idea seems to have permeated the city that these institutions, as if moved by some unseen force, will generate solutions to stagnation on their own.

That’s not how change happens. The motive force behind real change is rarely institutions moving under their own power: They are by nature conservative — careful, cautious, self-protective, resistant to change — and typically perform their work out of habit. They do not spontaneously innovate.

Changemakers are individuals of talent and ambition who coordinate, deploy and redirect those institutions, or even take over or supersede them. They see opportunities that others don’t, and arrange a single institution, or organize a variety of them, or create new ones, to bring their vision to fruition.

Pittsburgh certainly has such individuals. But it also has a culture of risk-aversion and defeatism, informed by the trauma of the collapse of heavy industry, that discourages them from taking action or, at its worst, ostracizes those with the ambition to do big things.

Many such people leave the region to deploy their skills where they’ll be more appreciated. Only the most stubborn, or the most rooted in a place they love, stick it out. And they are forced to decide: conform to the culture, or try to change it?

On rare occasions, an entirely new personal force emerges, one who is detached from the city’s culture and its systems, and who can do things that force the institutions to react.

That’s what McCormick did this past Tuesday: He created something so big, so irresistible, that nearly every institution was forced to reckon with it, and in many cases to participate in it, even if their leaders resented having to do so.

It’s an entirely new way, at least here, to deploy the leverage that comes with being a U.S. senator: to catalyze economic development, to overshadow a region’s institutional leadership, and to build a massive personal brand, to boot.

AWAKENING AMBITION

Whether or not it works in terms of enhancing regional prosperity, it may be that the most important effect of McCormick’s summit is to awaken latent ambition in frustrated, talented leaders and would-be leaders who want the region to thrive, and want to thrive here.

That is: the kind of people who must decide whether to go along to get along, or to do something risky, something splashy, something big. The kind of people Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania needs.

(Brandon McGinley is commentary page editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)