Since the inaugural production of our 50 Kansans You Should Know feature last year, the editors and researches at Ingram’s have had the opportunity to consider more than one thousand deserving residents of the Sunflower State.
Unlike other business-recognition honors that are often based on demonstrated, superior performance within a given business sector, we’re looking for something different:
accomplished individuals who weren’t necessarily the CEOs of the biggest companies, or the fastest-rising stars of C-level execs. Our goal was to capture not just a sense of what business leadership has to offer, but other figures, some iconic, some flying under the radar, whose achievements have added depth and texture to life in Kansas. We also have pursued the selection of characters with character.
Without being too boastful, we like to think we succeeded beyond our most fervent hopes. When you look past a resume and ask people to talk about the core values of the state—and how those values inform their professional lives and personal views—the steady recitation of certain traits begins to form something like a mantra, one you won’t hear repeated quite the same way in other locales.
Gen. Deborah Rose, who has since retired from her position in the Kansas Adjutant General’s office, touched on an oft-repeated theme last year: “I love Kansas; I wouldn’t live anywhere else. It’s the people of Kansas, the Midwestern hospitality,” she said.
But she also saw something more, something that goes to the heart of what makes Kansas a great place to do business or raise a family: “The collaborative thinking that we have in Kansas,” Rose said, was a defining characteristic of the state. We heard that over and over not just last year, but with the 2012 version of 50 Kansans You Know. “I firmly believe that we are the most collaborative state in the nation,” Rose told us. “We do things not for someone to receive credit; we couldn’t care less about the credit—we just we want our state to be the best.”
Something else we learned: Kansas has highly accomplished individuals almost anywhere you turn. Of the 100 people recognized so far, we’ve been able to spotlight people from nearly 20 sectors. Among them are public officials, retailing and restaurant operations, manufacturing, energy, technology, transportation, hospitality, communication—they literally come from every walk of life.
And not just from the major metropolitan areas of Kansas City, Wichita or Topeka, either: nearly half those recognized to date come from smaller communities, ranging from tiny burgs like Cawker City and Horton to college towns like Lawrence, Manhattan and Pittsburg.
How do people achieve so much across such a great expanse? Maybe the best explanation for that was offered by Wichita’s Jill Docking, who suggested that the state’s social structure had unlimited opportunity hard-coded into it: “I think what’s unique about being a Kansan,” she said, “is that it’s a state small enough that individuals can really have a significant impact” in their respective communities.
Opportunity, then, combined with the right values, gets you here: To 50 Kansans You Should Know.