Stefan Jacoby
President and CEO
Volkswagen of America, Inc.

When it came time to move Volkswagen’s U.S. corporate headquarters from Auburn Hills, Mich., Stefan Jacoby sought a location that would be attractive for recruiting talented employees for jobs in sales, marketing and product development. Before long, it became clear that the Greater Washington region was his answer.

“We find that we have great potential offering a location like Greater Washington, in recruiting people from Lexus, Nissan or Toyota,” says Jacoby, who oversees the company’s automotive business in the United States.

Jacoby moved about 150 Volkswagen employees from Michigan this spring and has also been recruiting 250 marketing, finance and business administration professionals to work in Volkswagen’s environmentally friendly glass building in Herndon, Va.

“The decision to move to Greater Washington was not a decision against Michigan,” Jacoby says. “It’s a decision that’s integrated into an overall strategy.” He says in order to grow the group (which includes the VW, Audi, Bentley, Bugatti and Lamborghini brands) from a niche player selling 330,000 vehicles in the U.S. market to a bigger player selling 1 million vehicles, Volkswagen needed to make a major change. Moving to just outside Washington, Jacoby says, sends a clear signal to the head office in Germany that change is under way. His goal is to grow Volkswagen in the next decade from 6.2 million vehicles to more than 10 million vehicles sold worldwide each year.

Jacoby says part of his focus in Volkswagen’s new Greater Washington home will be on improving traffic with more compact cars and developing better navigation systems to help alleviate congestion. He will also center on energy-saving products, such as a high-temperature fuel cell, hybrid, diesel and conventional vehicles with engines that significantly reduce fuel consumption.

“We love the environment here in Greater Washington,” says Jacoby, who was born in Hanover, Germany, and began his career in 1985 at Volkswagen. “It’s not only Washington itself, but also the booming areas of Virginia and Maryland. We are very convinced we made the right step.”

Samuel A. Schreiber
Regional President, Wachovia,
Greater Washington, D.C. / Baltimore
Chairman, Greater Washington Initiative

When people ask Sam Schreiber about business in Washington, his answer’s a cinch: “It’s a do-business kind of town.”

In the nine years Schreiber has lived and worked in the Greater Washington region, he has discovered just how hospitable it is for all types of businesses. “It’s one of the greatest places to do business,” he says. “You can be involved in the community as much as you want to be.”

Schreiber, who began his banking career in Texas, says it’s a misconception— and a dated view—that Greater Washington is a government town. “The government is important because it’s a tremendous asset,” he says. “But it’s no longer the only asset. There’s a balance now that wasn’t here 10 years ago.”

Part of that balance is a “green-collar” workforce of nearly 14,000 environmental workers, which makes up a multibillion-dollar segment of the economy. Greater Washington’s residents purchased more hybrid vehicles in 2006 than Boston, New York or Chicago, and the city outpaces all other major metro areas in green building, with 35 Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified projects completed and 487 registered to receive certification.

Schreiber says Greater Washington has a wonderfully resilient economy. The region leads the nation in median household income and has had the lowest unemployment rate of the top 10 metro areas in all but two months of the past seven years. “It has a tremendous quality workforce that is supported by superb higher educational institutions,” he says.

Schreiber has been with Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia since 1989 and held executive positions in New Jersey and Georgia before moving to the capital region. In his job, he is responsible for the company’s banking operations in Maryland, D.C. and Northern Virginia. But when it’s time to leave work, the Northern Virginia resident enjoys the area to its fullest.

“From a quality-of-life standpoint, you’re sitting in the world’s capital, and there’s so much to do in terms of history, museums, recreational activities and sporting events,” he says. “How can you not love the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran and the Kennedy Center?”

Barbara J. Krumsiek
Chair, CEO and President
Calvert Group, Ltd.

Barbara Krumsiek knows firsthand that when you recruit an executive, you recruit a family. When she moved to the Washington area in 1997 to take her position at Calvert, the 32-year-old investment management and mutual fund firm headquartered in Bethesda, Md., she uprooted her family from their apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and moved them into a house in Bethesda with two acres and a creek. “We had a lot of adjusting to do,” she says, “but it’s been a marvelous experience for my family and me.”

Today, when Krumsiek recruits, she talks about the well-kept secrets of living in the region: a restaurant scene she says rivals New York’s, the extraordinary array of sporting events, the region’s physical beauty and the 234,000 acres of parkland and more than 800 miles of bikeways. But she also lets her female recruits know that Greater Washington is a particularly attractive region for women.

“The region is in many ways a meritocracy,” Krumsiek says. “Education matters, and as women have moved forward quickly in areas such as law, medicine and business, it’s become the region with the most female executives [per capita nationwide].” Among the top 10 metropolitan economies, the Greater Washington region also has the highest labor force participation rate among women.

Krumsiek, who served as the 2007 chair of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, says the area boasts a good mix of business and recreational opportunities. “We’re an intelligent region, with think tanks and documentary filmmakers, but we also have fun here,” she says. “You could be hiking on the Potomac or going to a baseball game at the new ballpark.”

She says she tries to attract the country’s best talent in the mutual fund business, and she has been pleased at Calvert’s success in doing so. Krumsiek has led the firm through a period of dramatic growth— its non-money-market fund assets have grown more than 550 percent in the past decade—and she credits the attractiveness of the region. “It’s a great place to raise a family, and people enjoy the quality of life—in and out of the office,” she says. “The Greater Washington region is more than the sum of its parts.”

Matt Erskine
Executive Director
Greater Washington Initiative

Born in Silver Spring, Md., and raised in Fairfax County, Va., Matt Erskine was no stranger to Washington when he was hired as the new executive director of the Greater Washington Initiative. But it had been years since Erskine had lived in the region, and he’s thrilled—for many reasons—to be home.

“Greater Washington is special,” says Erskine, who has lived and worked in Boston, Atlanta and New York. “It’s not only the capital region and seat of our national government, but it’s special in terms of diversity and culture. It offers such a rich variety of everything a world city and premier business destination should offer.”

In his new post, Erskine will focus on building relationships with business executives, elected officials and local economic partners to market the region to site selectors and corporate decision-makers. He is the former deputy secretary of commerce and trade under then-Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, and he is the former president of PLAY, a management consulting firm in Richmond, Va., specializing in advising senior management of Fortune 500 companies.

Greater Washington, which is the nation’s fourth largest regional economy, has seen a lot of change since Erskine’s childhood days here. Forty years ago, the area’s economy was dominated by the federal government, which employed more than 30 percent of the workforce. That share has decreased to just over 11 percent today.

“Clearly, the Greater Washington region benefits from the fact that the federal government is here,” Erskine says. “That plays a huge role in the stability and resiliency of the economy. But the region is much more diverse now.”

Erskine emphasizes the region has the best-educated workforce in the country (21 percent has a graduate or professional degree and 46 percent has a bachelor’s degree), and it has an incredibly international workforce (20 percent is foreign-born). But it’s more than statistics that make living and working in the region worthwhile.

“I love the outdoor and cultural sides of Greater Washington,” Erskine says. “My family enjoys biking along the river, going to museums and eating in the region’s ethnic restaurants. In terms of the combination of all the different factors, Greater Washington truly leads the way. That’s why I’m excited to be in this role. It’s a great region to market and we have a compelling story to tell.”