HOUSTON—Rich Karlgaard, a columnist and the publisher of Forbes, offered investors and executives a three-pronged analysis of why the oil and gas business thrives while much of the country struggles through a sluggish economy. He provided insight on what “winners” in a wide range of companies—“Silicon Valley companies and Texas oil and gas companies . . . publicly traded, privately held, large, small—are doing today in this very challenging economy.”

“What's going on in the economy? What’s really going in the economy? What does it take for companies to succeed?” he asked at Hart Energy’s recent Energy Capital Conference.

June 2009 was the “statistical end” of the most recent recession—the country has been through 11 since 1946—but 70% still think the recession is ongoing, he noted.

The national economy is “not so great—other than here, other than Silicon Valley and other than northwestern North Dakota,” he said, referencing the oil and gas booms in Texas and North Dakota and the tech boom in part of California. The overall economic growth not counting these regions, he said, has been about 1.5% on an annualized GDP basis. “Do you know how bad that is?” he asked.

The uneven paces of growth and shrinkage “go a long way to explaining why 70% of Americans still think we’re in a recession.” The Texas oil and gas production, he said, accounts for 30% of economic growth.

The economies specific to oil and gas and the Silicon Valley have fared differently because the people running them have looked critically at strategy, execution and cultural values. Investors should evaluate whether the companies they are interested in “meet most of these criteria,” Karlgaard said.

Strategy assesses “who you are, where you’re going and what you want to accomplish” along with sizing up competitors and the marketplace. Savvy business owners and leaders will assess what Karlgaard calls “disruptive threats.” These are products, services or other factors that are “seeking a market that you didn’t know existed.” The combination of horizontal drilling and fracking is an example, he said. It has been “disruptive to people thinking the old way.”

Execution examines logistics, capital structure and whether tasks will be completed in a certain time frame. The combination of strategy and execution is often not enough to succeed, Karlgaard said. To do that, you must pay attention to corporate culture. Karlgaard mentioned the attributes of healthy corporate culture that are in his book The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success.

The cultural values of trust, smarts, teams and taste, he said, combine to make a healthy corporate culture. The people working together in a company must have internal trust, while the company must project trust outward to its customers.

Smarts, Karlgaard said, fit into the corporate problem of “how do we take the people we have and make them better?"

Teams, Karlgaard added, are vital to a company’s survival. The myth of the lone hero, he said, is just that, noting that even so, many in the industry are perceived as such. “The wildcatter is a lone hero; Boone Pickens is a lone hero; Harold Hamm is a lone hero. These are the images you get when you read about these guys,” he said. Many of these so-called lone heroes, including Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) fame, had complementary opposites—in Jobs’ case, Steve Wozniack—and therefore were part of a team, Karlgaard said.

Taste, Karlgaard said, is “the ability to connect with people both emotionally and intellectually. You see, when you connect with people intellectually, you prove that you’re smart, that you’re a logical thinker,” he said. He also noted that a balance between “cold” intellect and emotion is necessary for trust and teamwork. He used the example of Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks Corp.(NASDAQ: SBUX), as someone who “did not have empathy with employees.” When Schultz teamed up with Howard Behar, the business became very successful with a healthy corporate culture, Karlgaard said.

Lastly, having a credible, consistent and authentic story is vital for a company’s success, Karlgaard said.

Asked about the overall economy, he said, “I think we’re going through a bad patch right now.” Yet, he pointed out that he sees a combined tech and energy renaissance in the future, resulting in a manufacturing boom. He sees this happening despite the fact that the “heroes in this industry”—the shale entrepreneurs and leaders—are “not generally treated well by the mainstream media.”