Welcome to Competitive Wisconsin Inc.’s Leadership publication. Leadership: Energy is the first in a series of annual Competitive Wisconsin, Inc. (CWI) “LEADERSHIP BRIEFING” publications dedicated to providing Wisconsin’s public- and private-sector leaders and decision makers and the general public with data and information about the eight most pressing challenge-opportunity areas they have consistently identified in recent years. Those eight areas include energy, the focus of this first publication; workforce recruitment and retention; workforce housing; health care; early care and education; broadband; transportation; and, rural resurgence.
CWI’s decision to publish an annual Leadership Briefing Series was informed and driven by the work we’ve done over the past four years with our Wisconsin Tomorrow BE BOLD Initiative, which in 2025 led the CWI Board of Directors to conclude that CWI could be most useful at this juncture in time to local and regional leaders on two particular fronts, including:
◾ Strengthening and enhancing CWI’s own data and information infrastructure so that local and regional leaders have digital access to timely, relevant, credible, actionable information regarding their priorities; and
◾ Assisting local and regional leaders to achieve optimal outcomes related to addressing their priorities by strengthening and enhancing their local and regional decision-making infrastructure.
As the bold text above suggests, when we decided to prioritize access to data and information, we did so, knowing that local leaders and decision makers need and want data and information that is timely, relevant, credible and actionable. To those ends, the CWI Leadership Briefing Series has been designed as a flexible and evolving information database. More specifically, here’s what our readers, viewers and listeners will have access to with every edition of Leadership, including this very first edition focused on energy:
◾ Timeliness: The Leadership Briefing Series publications under the Leadership banner will come out annually covering a two-year retrospective, situation summary and prospective (e.g., 2025-26). In addition, however, CWI will provide a quarterly update on the challenges and opportunities covered in each edition.
◾ Relevance and Actionability: Each Leadership Briefing Series publication will be informed by the work CWI and others are doing to support and sustain local and regional economic and community wellbeing. In addition, CWI will solicit input from local and regional leaders regarding specific data and information needs they have and will, periodically, convene panel discussions and interviews with experts and practitioners on those topics.
◾ Credibility: CWI understands that credibility can only be earned and must be sustained over time. In an effort to underscore our commitment to that premise, we asked and will continue to engage professional long-time journalists to write a number of the articles for Leadership publications. Additional unassigned articles are attributable to Competitive Wisconsin, Inc.
Doing this important work is going to take time. Over the next 12 months, CWI’s goal is to produce three to four Leadership reports and increase that number to eight reports for the 2026-27 annual Leadership Briefing Series. A digital version of each of these publications with additional information will be available at CompetitiveWI.com shortly after the print version is released.
We sincerely hope you’ll give us your feedback and help us make each edition better than the last. Thank you for your interest.
On behalf of the CWI Board of Directors, enjoy!
Mark O’Connell, President & CEO, Wisconsin Counties Association; Co-Chair, Competitive Wisconsin, Inc.
