Leadership Quote by Bill Janklow

Scale is Janklow's favorite weapon here, and he wields it like a blunt instrument meant to leave a dent. By translating 3,000 jobs in Sioux Falls into the equivalent of 300,000 in New York City, he isn't doing math so much as doing politics: turning local economic development into something that sounds nationally momentous, and making a small place feel like the center of the action.

The specific intent is persuasion through proportional drama. Janklow wants constituents, reporters, and corporate decision-makers to treat a Citibank win in South Dakota as not just a tidy boost but a transformational event - the kind of headline New York would need a stampede to earn. It's boosterism with a spreadsheet, a way of preempting skepticism about why a major bank would be tied to a mid-sized Plains city, and why taxpayers or regulators might be accommodating in the process.

The subtext is a claim about dignity and leverage: small states matter, and they can play the big-city game if they understand incentives. It also quietly recasts dependency as savvy. If you have to sweeten the deal, the quote suggests, that's not capitulation - it's strategy, because the relative impact is so outsized that it justifies exceptional measures.

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th-century arms race of state-led recruitment, when politicians competed to import employers and celebrated jobs as proof of competence. Janklow frames economic policy as a scoreboard, and he knows exactly which numbers make his home crowd feel like they won.