DALLAS — Few, if any, major cities have five former U.S. ambassadors living in them and highly plugged into their business community. Dallas does, and Mayor Eric Johnson is trying to use that to the city’s advantage.
On Thursday, Johnson announced the formation of an advisory council headed by Jeanne Phillips, a senior vice president at Dallas-based Hunt Oil and an ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris under former President George W. Bush.
Phillips is joined by four other former U.S. ambassadors and Dallas business heavyweights: Richard Fisher, Kathryn Hall, Robert Jordan, and James C. Oberwetter.
"It’s unusual to have that many former ambassadors in one city," Phillips said in an interview Thursday with the Dallas Business Journal.
Some of the goals of the Mayor’s International Advisory Council include improving international business recruitment and building better business ties between the city and foreign investors and global trade partners.
Phillips said one thing the council may do is work with the Dallas Regional Chamber to boost the impact of international trade missions that the chamber leads and that Dallas and Fort Worth mayors have historically led.
Oberwetter led the regional chamber for many years and pushed hard to increase North Texas’ presence on the world stage, Phillips said, and the five ambassadors combined have powerful business connections worldwide.
"What we would do is assist the chamber and any other groups doing trade missions to maximize that effort," she said. "The contact that this group has throughout the world, both from their business experience and their international experience, I think will be a way to leverage other things that are happening in Dallas."
It’s too soon to say which international cities Dallas will focus more attention on, Phillips said.
First, the council will gather data about where the city is now expanding its efforts. Making those determinations, evaluating existing relationships and partnerships and prioritizing future efforts will be part of the process, she said.
Johnson said he created the advisory council because he believes that Dallas can play a more significant role on the international scene, and the former ambassadors agree.
"Dallas has many of the fundamentals in place to improve its standing internationally," Fisher, a former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in a statement.
Raising Dallas’ international profile will pay dividends long into the future, said Hall, the U.S. ambassador to Austria from 1997 to 2001.
"Increasingly, cities will be defined by their participation in international affairs," she said in a statement. "We must be ready for the future."
