House leadership: Louisiana Speaker of the House Clay Schexnayder has named conservative strategist Lionel Rainey III to his transition team. Rainey will serve as an adviser to Schexnayder during the transition process as they prepare for the upcoming legislative session. Rainey was named one of Business Report’s Forty Under 40 in 2017, and is the founder of political consulting and public relations firm LR3 Consulting.
Applications open: The Baton Rouge Area Chamber today opened applications for its Business Growth Award, designed to recognize job growth in a company within the nine-parish Capital Region. The application is available online through Friday, Feb. 7. For the 2020 award, the qualifying years are 2017-2019. Businesses interested in applying must be within the nine-parish Capital Region, but do not have to be current BRAC investors.
Quantifying: In his recent book, The Gift of Global Talent, Harvard economist William R. Kerr argues that talent is the world’s most precious resource. The collective knowledge and capabilities of the U.S. workforce is worth an estimated $240 trillion—four times more valuable than the country’s physical capital stock and 10 times more valuable than all the urban land in the United States, Brookings reports. Read a new breakdown of how talent is valued.
