October 4, 2016: A 1959 trailer is on display at the Winnebago visitors center in Forest City. The center is where factory tours begin, but not where you’ll find the company’s top management anymore.
Last year, as I finished visiting every town in Iowa, I made it to Winnebago Industries headquarters in Forest City for a factory tour. It’s a very impressive place. The manufacturing process is emblematic of ingenuity and hard work. The company is a true Iowa icon.
Or is that wrong to say now?
The Des Moines Register asked the question this fall, after the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal stated it would begin treating Winnebago as a Minnesota company because its CEO, and an increasing number of top-level officials, work in Eden Prairie. Eden Prairie would be the seventh-largest city in Iowa, but up there it’s just another Twin Cities suburb. Just last week Winnebago hired a new vice president and general counsel. She will not live in Iowa.
A few weeks ago, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune interviewed Winnebago’s CEO. “We’ve had zero discussions with our board of directors about whether the headquarters of the company should change formally,” he said. “The soul of the company is in Iowa.”
Soul, yes, but. And it’s a substantial but. In a way, it’s connected to the continued drain of rural America. The Twin Cities footing “has helped the company recruit talent,” the Strib article says, and if you squint enough, the implied part is because those people can’t be found in Iowa. Or because those people aren’t willing to live in Iowa.
Nebraska lost ConAgra, in part, because its CEO didn’t want to live in Omaha. That isn’t the official explanation, of course, but. ConAgra’s HQ move to Chicago generated far more attention than what Winnebago is doing, but aside from taking the step of legal relocation the two seem substantially the same to me, just on different scales.
It is more than an academic exercise. Only three Fortune 500 companies have their headquarters in Iowa, and Rockwell Collins — which just scraped onto the list — is about to be slowly digested into a Connecticut-based firm. (The other two are Principal Financial and Casey’s.) Maytag was a Fortune 500 company, but it’s been gone a decade, demoted to a subdivision of Michigan-based Whirlpool. A city’s or state’s pride in being home to successful businesses and the attendant cachet — or at least the airport and hotel patronage — is not an invisible thing.
Is Winnebago an Iowa company? Or is it a suburban Twin Cities company with its major manufacturing facilities in Iowa? The financial statements may say one thing, but the wingtips and high heels on the ground say another.