CLEVELAND, Ohio - During the last two years, Cleveland has celebrated a series of wins: hosting the Republican National Convention, breaking the sports curse with an NBA title and watching more construction cranes dot the downtown sky amid a revival more than 15,000 residents strong.

But the city and the region also have many lingering problems. A group of civic and business leaders - some established, some emerging, a few publicly but most behind the scenes - has begun to argue that it's long past time to aggressively address them.

Last year, the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., called Cleveland the most distressed large city in the nation. In late April, Business Insider ranked the metropolitan economy last out of 40 major markets.

Local skeptics question the fairness of those comparisons. But even boosters say that when it comes to economic competitiveness, Northeast Ohio isn't cutting it.

"On a fundamental level, we are clinging to average, and average is not good enough," said a recent report from the Fund for Our Economic Future, a regional alliance of foundations, businesses, universities and civic groups.

The authors called for much better collaboration, a sense of shared purpose , and broader definitions of success that bridge racial and socioeconomic divides. Today, they wrote, "Northeast Ohio's economy is too much icing and not enough cake."

After penning a critical column about the Cleveland-area economy for Smart Business magazine in January, attorney Jon Pinney received calls and emails from corporate and community leaders. In a follow-up column, Pinney lobbied for an economic development summit to get all the players in one room and develop a unified, regional strategy for growth.

Pinney, who wrote Cleveland's successful GOP convention bid, plans to expand on his recent writings during a speech at the City Club today. During more than two hours of interviews over the past month, he would not say much publicly, preferring to keep a low pre-speech profile.

Is it a leadership problem?

He's not alone in expressing frustrations.

"We don't have a bold, captivating vision of where we are trying to take this region in the next five to 10 years," said Baiju Shah, chief executive officer of BioMotiv, a Shaker Heights-based company focused on speeding up development and delivery of medicines. "What I see, it's so dilute. And there's a lot of kind of motherhood and apple pie statements."

Shah, who has a background in consulting and led the bioscience-focused nonprofit BioEnterprise for years, described a local culture in which leaders and organizations are so focused on pleasing funders, boards and partners that the result is milquetoast rather than motivating.

Other business and civic leaders said they're fed up with "spin" and tired of trying to fight for seats at what feel like increasingly insular tables where decisions get made. One community development executive said it feels as though Northeast Ohio is experiencing an "existential crisis," highlighting achievements while hiding systemic problems and failing to develop trust or unity among regional players.

"Sometimes, I wish I could pick Cuyahoga County up and shake it," said Richey Piiparinen, a Cleveland State University demographer. "We've been hanging on, and we've been hanging on as a tribe. And there's some changes, but it's just such a slow go because of the lack of a visionary component."

David Abbott, longtime executive director of the George Gund Foundation in Cleveland, acknowledged that conditions could be better.

But "the issue of where we are economically, there's not simply one answer to that," he said. "It's a question of how you turn around the proverbial battleship. The challenges we face are a product of our history and our culture and our population, in many ways, so you don't turn the ship around easily or quickly."

Is it the economy?

Edward "Ned" Hill, who teaches economic-development policy at Ohio State University, used two words to describe calls for a unified, regional economic-development strategy: "It's nonsense."

The 18-county region isn't an integrated labor market, Hill said. It's big, unwieldy and fragmented, and a new mission statement or leadership coup won't change that.

Northeast Ohio is home to a diverse array of businesses and industries, he said, but most of them are at a slow-growth stage of their life cycle. "The issue is how do you reload. And, frankly, if I knew, I get the freakin' Nobel Prize."

In its recent report, titled "The Two Tomorrows," the Fund for Our Economic Future highlighted three major priorities: Creating jobs, preparing people for those jobs and ensuring that workers can commute to those jobs, through more thoughtful site selection and better transportation.

Those are huge hurdles. Employment growth in health care has been offset by losses in manufacturing. A stagnant population faces longer commutes between homes and workplaces. Growing employers want educated, high-skilled workers, who are in short supply.

"People tend to think that economic development is about attracting Amazon or attracting some other company," Abbott said. "But it's really about economic competitiveness, attraction plus all of these other issues - making this the kind of place that is attractive to the kind of talent that is fueling the economy in the 21st century."

Hill said Northeast Ohio ought to focus on improving schools and public health, making government more effective, widening access to free outdoor amenities, and speaking honestly about race, poverty and inequality.

"Don't pay attention to the people who do the rankings," he said. "What are your health outcomes? What are your educational outcomes? Are you able to retain the kids you've invested in? What are the returns on investments in public services, in comparison to costs? And do you have land that's available to accommodate new activity?"

Or is it both?

Some civic leaders and businesspeople say the region suffers from "a lot of self-inflicted wounds," created or worsened by power plays, infighting and personality conflicts.

The Fund for Our Economic Future's recent report noted that companies and site selectors described "a confusing cacophony of voices" and "entities working at cross purposes."

In an interview, one site selector said that Northeast Ohio has more business-development groups than other metropolitan areas he works in, and those groups are doing more things. But they don't seem to be coordinating very well.

"It's no particular organization's fault," the site selector said. "It's a failure of the collective."

Changes underway

Three organizations steer local economic development efforts: JobsOhio, the private statewide economic development corporation; Team NEO, its regional affiliate; and the Greater Cleveland Partnership, one of the nation's largest metropolitan chambers of commerce.

JobsOhio executives say they've recently made some behind-the-scenes changes to the relationship between the three groups.

Since February, JobsOhio has had a Cleveland-area director on the ground here, with plans to add two coordinators. In January, a new Cleveland-area retention and expansion council met for the first time, its members chosen by JobsOhio, Team NEO and GCP. And the chamber is taking on more responsibility for corporate retention efforts in Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties.

Kristi Clouse, JobsOhio's executive director of operations, noted that 2017 was a record year for Northeast Ohio in terms of the number of committed new jobs and related payroll. The 18-county area posted its best numbers since JobsOhio's inception in 2011, and led the state.

That's little comfort, though, to business leaders and academics who argue, as Jon Pinney has, that we're already losing ground to Columbus, Cincinnati and other peer regions.

"My perception, from a little bit of distance, is there are at least enough people who aren't satisfied with where we are as a region, and they're craving this sense of a plan for where we're heading," said Shah, the BioMotiv chief executive.