Leadership Quote by John Hickenlooper

Globalization is doing something sly to local pride: it forces mayors and governors to talk like CEOs. Hickenlooper’s lineup of “metropolitan Shanghai, metropolitan New Delhi or Paris” isn’t geography so much as a rhetorical ranking system. He’s naming the cities America reflexively treats as competitors, then quietly insisting his home turf belongs in the same sentence. The repetition of “metropolitan” matters; it’s a brand marker that signals scale, density, ambition. This isn’t about states versus states. It’s about city-regions as the real units of economic power.

The intent is pragmatic, even defensive: if the contest is for talent, investment, and cultural gravity, then the old arguments about diversity as moral obligation won’t win budgets or ballots. So he recasts diversity as infrastructure. “Richness of people” translates difference into an asset class, a form of human capital that can out-innovate, out-create, out-attract. The subtext is: stop treating pluralism as charity or guilt. Treat it as competitive strategy.

That framing also reveals the political tightrope. By saying diversity is “one of our greatest advantages,” he tries to disarm backlash without conceding the premise of it. It’s an appeal to self-interest aimed at moderates and business audiences who might resist identity talk but understand “advantage.” The risk is embedded too: when diversity is sold primarily as an economic edge, it can be discarded the moment it’s inconvenient. Still, as a piece of public persuasion, it works by making cosmopolitanism sound less like a lecture and more like a plan.