Bay Area's future in green tech, Mendonca says

In the past two weeks, the business world has endured bank failures, collapsing markets, congressional quagmires and multibillion-dollar bailouts.

What better time to sit down with someone like Lenny Mendonca, a longtime business leader in the Bay Area serving a two-year term as chairman of the Bay Area Council.

The council represents 275 of the largest employers in the region. Those companies' top executives are members of the group. From his vantage point atop that influential organization, Mendonca has a unique perspective on what's happening locally, as well as nationally.

It doesn't hurt that Mendonca's day job involves being a director at the San Francisco office of McKinsey & Co. Inc., one of the world's largest consulting firms. Add in the Half Moon Bay Brewing Co., of which he is owner and founder, and you get the picture of a man whose experience spreads from small business concerns to globalization strategy.

Here's an edited version of a conversation a group of Chronicle Business section staffers conducted with Lenny Mendonca last week.Q: These have been some of the most turbulent times we've ever seen in this country, from a financial and economic perspective. Tell us your view of the situation from the Bay Area Council's perspective. How is the regional economy faring in relation to the national crisis?

A: Obviously, given the turbulence on Wall Street and Washington, D.C., we're in a period of extreme volatility and uncertainty. No matter how it plays out, we're going to enter into an environment where credit is going to be more difficult to get, where you'll have returned to more traditional spreads, in terms of risk premium, where you will have an environment where businesses are going to be forced to be focused on real value delivery, not just benefiting from the winds of a strong economy and easy credit.

And I think you're going to have a period of uncertainty about how deep and long a downturn's going to be. The Bay Area has performed relatively well through this. To the extent that there's saving grace in the Bay Area, it's the fact that we have more so than most other parts of the country, a very substantial dependence on connections to Asia and a growing Chinese economy. This has been very good for the Bay Area because of our export position.

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