Thoughts From the Top

For all the attention paid to titles, corporate scale and professional achievements in assembling the Ingram’s 250, there is another benefit to the exercise that doesn’t necessarily reveal itself in an individual profile: Ask enough accomplished people the same questions and you begin to see Kansas City through a different lens.

These are leaders from construction and banking, health care and higher education, real estate and philanthropy, manufacturing, professional services and communications. Their organizations have different constituencies, business models and definitions of success. But their responses to our questions this year produced striking areas of agreement—not just about what Kansas City should do next, but about the ways successful organizations grow and the leadership disciplines that make that growth possible.

That conversation arrives at an important time.

After years of preparing for the 2026 World Cup, Kansas City has cleared another major civic hurdle, following a run that included a new airport terminal, hosting the NFL Draft and other high-profile undertakings. The natural question is: What does a region that has learned to execute big projects do with that capacity now?

For Dana Jermain, Kansas City managing partner for Deloitte, the World Cup should be “a starting point, not an endpoint.” Its real value will be determined by whether relationships and international exposure become business investment, expansion, talent attraction and tourism over the next five to 10 years.

But that’s only one answer.

Bob Page, CEO of The University of Kansas Health System, sees an opportunity to make health care and medical research a larger part of Kansas City’s national identity. The health system, KU Medical Center, Children’s Mercy and BAMF Health are already partnering on the region’s first theranostics center, combining diagnostics and therapy in cancer treatment. Page sees that collaboration as a model for attracting outside investment and building a larger research economy. “The world knows who Kansas City is now,” he says. “Our next opportunity is to show what we can do.”

That’s one definition of the next big thing. Terry Dunn offers another—and it has little to do with pouring concrete.

The retired chief executive of JE Dunn Construction has spent his second act working through KC Common Good on problems that undermine economic opportunity at their roots, particularly crime, violence, poverty and employability. In that context, public safety becomes economic infrastructure every bit as surely as roads, airports and utilities do. Kansas City can build world-class amenities, but the long-term value of those investments is diminished if workers, residents and prospective employers don’t believe the community itself is safe, he argues.

It’s a useful counterweight to the traditional civic wish list. In addition to promoting start-up companies, Dunn’s work since leaving JE Dunn has centered on producing solutions to poverty, crime and unemployability through KC Common Good, extending a civic commitment that long predated his retirement.

What Comes After the Mega-Project?

The responses suggest there may not be a single successor to KCI or the World Cup. Instead, the next phase could be a portfolio of investments addressing the less glamorous impediments to growth.

Kimberly Rock, EY’s Kansas City office managing partner, points to regional transit and better connections among employment centers, educational institutions and emerging development corridors. The objective isn’t simply moving cars more efficiently; it’s connecting people to jobs and employers to workers.

Roger Best, president of the University of Central Missouri, reaches essentially the same conclusion from the higher-education side, advocating regional light rail and other transportation initiatives that improve the movement of people. He pairs that with deeper partnerships between business and higher education—including customized degrees and certification programs capable of creating more direct workforce pipelines.

Brad Bergman, chairman and CEO of Midwest Trust, looks farther below the surface: water, power, broadband and stormwater capacity. Those aren’t projects likely to produce ribbon-cuttings with the drawing power of a new airport terminal. They are, however, precisely the systems that increasingly determine whether a region can accommodate major employers, advanced manufacturing, data centers and population growth.

Anne St. Peter, founder of Global Prairie, similarly sees opportunity at the intersection of technology and infrastructure, particularly as data and artificial intelligence increase demands on power and other resources. But she also sees health-care innovation as a potential differentiator for Kansas City.

And Debbie Wilkerson, president and CEO of the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, expands the definition of infrastructure even further. She points to the Housing Gateway initiative and its effort to build a coordinated regional response to homelessness. That requires government, business and philanthropy to work across institutional lines—and, she says, to approach people in need of stable housing with dignity.

There’s an unmistakable theme there. The next era of regional progress may be less about finding the right project than about addressing the systems that allow everything else to work: safety, housing, mobility, utilities, talent and health.

Commercial real estate veteran Greg Swetnam would address another impediment in Kansas City with considerably more dramatic surgery. The Kessinger/Hunter principal says that if he were “King for a Day,” he’d move the Missouri-Kansas state line about 25 miles west. The border, he says, remains an obstacle to thinking regionally.

He’s joking about the solution—not about the problem.

The People Problem

If infrastructure produced a broad menu of responses, workforce produced something much closer to consensus, and talent remains the binding constraint.

Jermain sees an experience gap: Employers want workers who already possess skills and experience, while workers struggle to find opportunities to acquire them. Stronger links among employers, educators and workforce organizations could help break that cycle.

Roger Best’s answer is more direct because producing talent is UCM’s business. He wants employers involved in designing customized degree and certification programs that lead directly to jobs.

Rex Newcomer, CEO of D.H. Pace, would put greater emphasis on science education while strengthening support systems for start-ups. Coming from the leader of a family enterprise celebrating its 100th anniversary, that answer connects two ends of the economic-development spectrum: preparing the next generation of workers while creating more places for entrepreneurial talent to go.

The common denominator is that workforce development can no longer be treated as something schools do and employers consume. The leaders answering our questions increasingly describe it as a shared production system.

Lessons From the Corner Office

The same idea—shared responsibility—runs through their observations about leadership.

Page offers one of the cleanest formulations: “Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress,” he says. Leaders, he says, have to recognize when they possess enough of the right information to decide, drawing on data, culture and experience rather than waiting indefinitely for certainty.

Newcomer is even more succinct: Be decisive about problems before they fester.

For Tammy Peterman, president of The University of Kansas Health System, the enduring leadership lesson is recognizing the value of people inside the organization. That thought surfaces repeatedly in other sectors.

Jermain learned that trying to solve everything herself could actually impede development of the people around her: “I can’t fix every problem,” she says. Building systems that enable others to solve them is the higher leadership function.

Greg Maday, CEO of construction-materials manufacturer SpecChem, similarly has little use for bully-style leadership. Bergman’s objective is to create an organization capable of generating answers without requiring the chief executive to supply every one.

Stephen Penn, office managing partner for KPMG in Kansas City, brings the principle down to communication: “Always face-to-face for the tough conversations, and written for the day-to-day.”

And Wilkerson makes much the same case from the perspective of philanthropy. Face-to-face conversation is her preference for complex issues because people can ask questions, exchange perspectives and build trust in ways electronic communication often doesn’t allow.

Different organizations. Remarkably similar conclusions.

Death to the Bad Meeting

There was even more agreement about what gets in the way. Meetings. More precisely: bad meetings.

Jermain’s productivity killer is “discussion without decision”—people becoming buried in tactical updates instead of using their time together for strategic debate and decisions.

Rock makes essentially the same complaint. Effective leadership meetings, she says, should “resolve issues, establish accountability, and create clear next steps.”

Rachel Dwiggins, managing partner for Forvis Mazars in Kansas City, similarly has little patience for meetings consumed by reporting that participants could have absorbed beforehand. Come informed. Use the meeting to solve problems, make decisions and create alignment.

Penn’s objection is simpler: “Open laptops,” while Best nominates cellphones, with their “incessant interruptions” pulling attention away from the people actually in the room.

And Swetnam may be the unapologetic champion of face-to-face business. He’d happily restore the full five-day workweek because personal contact remains so important to the way he operates. His broader leadership rule is even less complicated: “Show up regardless and do what you say you are going to do!!”

For all the discussion about AI, analytics and digital transformation, perhaps the scarcest executive resource of 2026 isn’t information. It’s undivided attention.

How the Day Starts

That makes the answers to one of our most personal questions particularly revealing: What happens before the workday takes control?

Rock starts by identifying the few outcomes capable of producing the greatest impact before diving into e-mail and meetings. Swetnam works from the to-do list he prepared the night before, keeping his eye on what needs to get done most.

Jermain uses her commute as a psychological transition from mom and wife to executive—and reverses the process going home. Penn starts his day with morning Mass.

And Best turns on the ’80s channel in his car. A few minutes with the music of his youth, he says, supplies “a bit of energy for the day ahead.”

Small things, perhaps, set against billion-dollar companies, sprawling health systems and regional civic ambitions. But maybe not.

The leadership voices assembled here repeatedly reduce complicated challenges to basic disciplines: Decide what matters. Pay attention. Communicate clearly. Develop people rather than merely directing them. Build partnerships across institutional lines. Address problems before they become crises.

And don’t mistake a milestone for a destination.

KC proved during the World Cup that it could assemble people, institutions and resources around a clearly defined objective and execute on a global stage. The question coming out of 2026 isn’t whether the region can still do big things.

It’s whether that same capacity can be trained on the harder problems—the ones without opening ceremonies, television cameras or a final whistle. 

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 2026