“You are either moving forward or you are going backward,” Jim Shelton, CEO of Blue Meridian Partners, said, encouraging those in the room to push the state for greater commitment. “The winds are blowing in your face, especially right now.” He pointed to the need for a broader culture in which kids who follow along with everyone else will succeed, a culture that doesn’t require exceptional luck or drive to make it. “But it means bringing everybody into that ethos so that it seems normal that that’s how it works.”