The new order.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: UPFRONT - Editorial

This, our annual Business Handbook issue, is when we take measure of the Tar Heel economy, sizing up where it has been, trying to figure out where it's going. As such, it's a magazine full of charts, graphs, lists and rankings. To produce them, our editors must find, collect and analyze reams of data. But numbers, if not put into proper context, are no more than cryptic ciphers. That's why we try to illuminate them through the perspective of people and places. We turn them into stories.

The tales we have to tell this year concern what is actually happening--not what those who try to shape the state's economy wanted to or thought would happen--as North Carolina continues its transformation from a state dependant upon agriculture and its homegrown manufacturing to one that turns increasingly to the new industries springing up to provide jobs for its people.

We decided to focus on the Triad not only because it is the heartland of the textile, tobacco and furniture industries--the three-legged stool that propped our economy up for so long--but because it's a microcosm of the state itself, a place confronting an array of challenges and opportunities that, in one form or another, people face across North Carolina. As one of its chief economic developers says, "We are the poster child for a region in transition." To show how another place is reacting to this transition, we chose Rocky Mount, hardest hit of the state's metro areas by those forces of change.

In compiling our annual listing of the largest private-sector employers, we wanted to dig deeper, so we included nonprofit companies, a sector that has...