An interesting little story in the China Daily a few days ago caught our attention.  It was about Seattle and Chongqing (whose name is written in Mandarin at the top of this posting).  These are sister cities.  You can read about the relationship between Seattle and Chongqing – which began in 1983 – here.

But back to our story.  It begins:

Over the years, aircraft, spacecraft and spare parts have been Seattle’s largest exports to China. But if Mike McGinn, the mayor of Seattle, has his way, the pride of place would soon be taken by the city’s green exports to China.

During a recent trip to Chongqing municipality in Southwest China, McGinn’s team inked a memorandum of understanding to enhance cooperation in the green building sector with the fastest growing city of China to promote sustainable development.

“China has been an important market for Seattle for some time. Seattle’s exports to China include airplanes from Boeing and software from Microsoft. With China’s economy developing in a more sustainable way, we hope to export our green building expertise as well,” McGinn says.

From a project management perspective, this piece was interesting:

As many as 23,000 jobs in Seattle metro area are in renewable energy, energy efficiency, environmental remediation, and recycling and waste management, according to the city government.

McGinn says two of Seattle’s largest clusters – IT and manufacturing – are closely related to the development of building energy efficient goods and services. This has helped Seattle maintain its leading position in the US green building industry.

Of those 23,000 jobs, many of them are project management jobs.  So this is opportunity knocking for many of us as PMs.

Collaborating and reaching out for new partners is an important part of sustainability – and an important lesson for project leaders.  As it says in the article:

Eric Phillips, Asia market leader of the Seattle-based NBBJ, a leading architecture firm in the US, who was part of the 42-member delegation to Chongqing with McGinn, has similar views.

“Seattle is a leader in the US for sustainable development of a city. There is a lot that Chongqing can learn from that type of process. On the other hand, Chongqing is building the development in a scale that the city of Seattle has never done. A lot of cooperation can be done between the two sides,” Phillips says.

Read the whole story here.

Oh, and for t hose of you (like us) who are a little geographically-inclined, here’s a map that will help you locate Chongqing.  We figure you don’t need a map of Seattle.  Just sniff, follow your nose to the coffee…