Speaking For Business

The many voices of business (back row, left to right): Dann Mead Smith, president, Washington Policy Center; Don Brunell, president, Association of Washington Business; Tom McCabe, executive vice president, Building Industry Association of Washington; Steve Leahy, former president, Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce; (seated) Pat Connor, Washington director, National Federation of Independent Business.

Jacobsen’s Law—coined by and named for the longtime Democratic state senator Ken Jacobsen, from Seattle—puts forth a theory about legislative life in Olympia: “If your bill is in trouble for no discernible reason, big timber is against it. If your bill dies for no discernible reason, Boeing is against it.”

But Jacobsen’s Law reflects a bygone era when the business community was largely big forest-products concerns, the aerospace giant and everybody else, and when the acronym for the Association of Washington Business, the equivalent of a state chamber of commerce, was translated by some as “Alcoa, Weyerhaeuser and Boeing.”

Today, as Jacobsen acknowledges, big timber is a shadow of its former self. And while Boeing still matters a great deal to Washington, it’s not clear how much Washington will matter to Boeing in the long run.

“Business has never been a monolith,” says Steve Leahy, who worked for the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce for more than 30 years, most recently as its president. “It’s certainly less so today then ever before.”

Today, the business community is really a gaggle of communities, a cacophony of voices and an alphabet soup of organizational acronyms—AWB and BIAW and NFIB and WTIA—the industry-specific trade organizations, the regional and local chambers, the business-oriented policy groups and think tanks, all clamoring to be heard by legislators, agency directors, regulators and elected officials.

“It’s more fragmented than it ever has been before,” Leahy says.

And it’s about to get more so. A group of business leaders and investors, seeking representation of what they call a more politically moderate viewpoint, is organizing the Washington Business Alliance.

David Giuliani is one of the co-founders of the Washington Business Alliance, which wants to take a more centrist approach in its dealings with the state legislature.

One of the business leaders involved in that effort is David Giuliani, the co-founder of Optiva Corp. (inventor of the Sonicare toothbrush), and more recently, the founder of a company marketing a skin-care brush, the Clarisonic. 

“There are existing business organizations, but a lot of them are politically polarized or have narrow interests or [are] limited in scope,” Giuliani says. “Business guys tend to be politically moderate. We tend to see

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