PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

For Oregon business interests, last week began with a major development when the Board of Directors of the nascent Oregon Business & Industry (OBI) organization summarily fired its still-new CEO.

Whether business interests can recover from the controversy is a story yet to be told.

For OBI, the issues were several-fold. The new CEO, former legislator Mark Johnson, had apparently used incendiary language to describe a Latino member of the Oregon Legislature. He also had no real experience running a major, new organization feeling its way toward some kind of business consensus on major public policy issues facing the state.

In other words, his original hire was a mistake.

Then, to compound matters, Johnson tried to lead OBI while maintaining his residence in Hood River. Plus, he tried to install his former legislative assistant as the COO of the new organization, though she had moved to Pennsylvania and both she and Johnson presumed she could do the operating officer job from the East Coast.

If you would have added up these failures or stupidities, whichever is the case, you would have concluded that Johnson had to go. He did.

OBI emerged last year after an old-line business organization, Associated Oregon Industries, joined with a progressive upstart, Oregon Business Association.

Business and political leaders had been seeking a merger for years, hoping to forge a proactive, well-funded and, most importantly, unified political force in Salem. The combined organization has 1,700 members and an annual budget around $2.2 million.

OBI has the potential to be a powerful voice in Salem, a prospective counterweight to labor groups that often hold sway with the state’s Democrat majority. That was the prospect raised in 2016 when the business community crushed a union-backed initiative, Measure 97, that would have raised corporate taxes by $3 billion.

In practice, however, the merger proved difficult. The trade group lost several top staffers after Johnson took over, and member businesses split over such issues as the state’s response to climate change.

To recover lost ground, OBI tapped long-time Oregon operative Ginny Lang to serve as interim CEO while the organization searches for a permanent leader.

In an Oregonian newspaper interview, Lang, a retired telecommunications executive, said “Oregon’s largest business group needs to move quickly if it’s to recover from a difficult merger and the sudden firing of the first CEO.”

Good point.

“Everything they’re doing (the new Board) is new because they’ve created a different organization and a different way of doing things and they’re going to have to build a culture around it.”

Divisions remain, Lang concedes, between rural and urban businesses, and between liberal executives and conservative industrialists, a reality that is neither bad nor surprising.

“The idea that this the business community in Oregon that thinks and speaks and acts in the same way just makes me chuckle a little bit,” Lang said.

Part of the process of forming a new organization, she added, involves sorting through differences to find common ground and policies a broad group of members can support around education funding, taxes and the environment.

“It’s important for businesses to figure out ways to talk among themselves and disagree among themselves, then put forward options that everyone is willing to live with.”

With sage comments such as those, it will not be surprising if Lang succeeds in her interim role. Her long experience in negotiating the shoals of public policy in Oregon provides a solid foundation.

To be sure, Lang faces major internal issues. The business association needs a long-term CEO, a chief operating officer, a political director, a membership director and perhaps a communications chief.

Lang also says she will continue the push to make OBI a full partner with the Oregon Business Council and the Portland Business Alliance in developing the business community’s annual policy playbook, the Oregon Business Plan, which lays out a consensus vision on a variety of issues, from education and tax policy to pension reform and the environment.

OBI’s unique role in that partnership, she said, will be converting policy ideas into pieces of legislation and helping push them through the 2019 process, “so it’s not just an academic exercise.”

Kudos to Lang for her first days on the job.