Foxconn-Wisconsin romance almost had frosty start
Walker didn’t initially plan to attend April 28 meeting with chairman
The relationship between Gov. Scott Walker and Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou — ultimately credited as an important factor in Wisconsin securing the immense electronics factory the company plans to build — almost got off to a rocky start.
The rough patch, indicated in a chain of emails that were among Foxconn-related documents released two weeks ago, cropped up last April, just before Walker and Gou first met in Washington, D.C.
The meeting, which took place on Friday, April 28, in the office of Reince Priebus, then chief of staff to President Donald Trump, almost didn’t happen.
The series of events began late in the morning the previous Wednesday, when a White House aide in the Office of American Innovation telephoned Cole-
man Peiffer, business and investment attraction director at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
The aide said Foxconn was interested in meeting with Wisconsin and Walker in Washington about a potential $10 billion, 10,000-job project. Other states were being invited, too, the aide said.
By mid-afternoon, the aide had followed up with an email, saying Gou was “very keen to meet with Governor Walker and his team about this project.”
But an adviser to Walker didn’t think the governor could attend in person on such short notice, and the significance of the meeting wasn’t yet clear, Peiffer later wrote as he summarized the events.
So the original plan was that WEDC secretary and CEO Mark Hogan, who already was planning to go to Washington on a personal visit that weekend, would meet with Gou.
Walker would call in via teleconference. The meeting was set for 2 p.m. Friday.
But early Thursday afternoon, Peiffer got an email from John Garnetti, deputy director of U.S. strategic initiatives for Foxconn.
“Unfortunately,” Garnetti wrote, “our Chairman needs to leave D.C. at noon and therefore is unable to join the call with the Governor. Senior Foxconn management will attend on his behalf, and they, of course, would welcome the opportunity to speak with the Governor.”
Things then changed quickly. Within a few hours of receiving Garnetti’s email, Peiffer wrote back: He had just spoken with Walker’s executive team. The governor, Peiffer said three times in the four-sentence email, now planned to be at the meeting.
That, in turn, seemed to change Foxconn’s plans. Gou found that he didn’t have to leave Washington after all. He could stay and meet with Walker, which he did, beginning the personal relationship credited with helping the state secure the Foxconn project.
The evening before the meeting, with everything scheduled and the critical participants on board, Peiffer, who appears to have worked relentlessly on coordination and research, provided a timeline of the events in an email to WEDC deputy secretary Tricia Braun.
Closing the message, Peiffer wrote:
“In all honesty, the last 24 hours have been crazy with this project as we have scrambled to gather information, vet the projects reliability, and coordinate schedules. We are working off Foxconn’s short timeframe request trying to make a short notice and difficult meeting happen. The Office of American Innovation was extremely happy and impressed that we were able to meet the client’s demand.”
Braun replied, “Coleman, Thanks for this info. I don’t think you could have done a more thorough, timely job. Let’s go win this one too!”
Which is what eventually happened, and it started with the first Walker-Gou meeting that almost didn’t occur.
“Governor Walker’s active involvement in the planning for this project from the beginning was a major factor in Foxconn’s decision to locate its investment in Wisconsin,” Foxconn said in a written statement. Asked why Gou opted out of the meeting when Walker wasn’t going to be there, then changed his plans, a spokeswoman didn’t respond.
Did Gou feel snubbed when Walker initially wasn’t going to come to Washington?
Maybe, said Hart Posen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, who studies corporate strategy and decision-making under uncertainty.
“Gou (a multi-billionaire who runs one of the world’s biggest companies) is clearly a more powerful figure in the global sense than is Gov. Scott Walker, and he should rightly feel like the bigger player on the world stage,” Posen said.
But Posen thinks the back-and-forth on the first meeting was more about showing commitment than respect.
Wherever it might go, Foxconn was going to need public financial incentives that almost certainly would require special legislation — and the political clout of that state’s governor, Posen said.
“If Walker wasn’t going to show up, then there was no sense that Wisconsin was taking this seriously,” he said, “and then there’s no point in Gou showing up.”
Psychologist Robert Cialdini, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University and longtime researcher into the science of influence, said by email that Gou clearly “was expecting more than a meeting with a second-tier person along with a teleconference with the governor.”
Whatever the reason for Gou’s initial withdrawal from the meeting, it was a critical event, prompting the Wisconsin team to realize what it could lose, Cialdini said.
“And, what we know from the research is that the prospect of loss is more powerful than the prospect of gain,” he said.