Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

The Purpose of a City

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For 30 years, I’ve read and reread Peter Drucker’s books. Drucker was a professor, writer and consultant who may have singlehandedly created the study of business management in 1945 with his magisterial book about General Motors, “Concept of the Corporation.” Drucker taught many things about how large organizations work, but his greatest skill was an ability to focus managers’ thinking without simplifying their tasks. And here’s an example: In 1954, Drucker defined, in 13 simple words, why companies exist. He wrote, “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”

Savor that for a moment: Companies don’t exist to make profits (profits are a means to an end, Drucker would say), or provide jobs for employees (again, means to an end), or benefit society (wonderful if it happens, but it’s a byproduct, not a purpose). No, the purpose of a business is to create customers because, without them, there would be no profits, jobs or social benefit. So every company’s focus must be, first and foremost, on creating customers.

I’m no Peter Drucker, but I’d like to try my hand at defining a purpose for cities: Cities exist to create citizens. Not to generate economic gains (they do, but as a byproduct), or provide a home to the arts, entertainment or learning (again, byproducts), and certainly not to support a government (it’s a means to an end). I would argue that the real purpose of cities is to create a group of people who will take responsibility for their community. And it’s this willingness to accept responsibility that is the difference between a resident and a citizen.

The good news is that cities are almost uniquely positioned to do this. States don’t easily create citizens, nor do nations; rural areas do it only with the greatest of difficulties. But cities have three unique assets for building responsibility-seeking citizens:

  • The people are already there. Cities are natural gathering places, so you don’t have to have a special meeting at the state capital or in Washington, D.C. to get the interested parties together. They’re around, seven days a week. And proximity is critical to building responsibility. If a person is concerned about an issue, there’s no need to read about it in the newspaper or watch it on CNN; she can go down to city hall, raise her hand and participate.
  • Cities are not abstractions like states or countries; they’re tangible places that you can see, touch, hear, smell and walk around in. As a result, the issues that concern cities—economic development, housing, public safety, downtown development, water and sewers, roads and schools—are far closer to the everyday concerns of people than those that preoccupy Congress and state capitals.
  • Maybe most important, cities can be molded by their citizens. They can determine the city’s physical form, the streets, buildings, sidewalks and connections. And that form, over time, will mold them. In that sense, it’s a feedback loop: the more you consciously shape the urban form, the more the form changes you and others around you.

When you put these things together—the accessibility of cities, their concreteness, and the opportunities for physical and social change—you can see why citizenship is much easier to create in cities than anywhere else.

And here’s maybe the best thing: Cities get much better as they create more citizens. Just about every problem in a city is easier to manage if citizens will step forward to help, from social ills and unresponsive government to a struggling local economy. So, just as businesses must focus first on creating customers in order to achieve their other goals, cities should focus first on creating citizens if they want to make progress in any other area.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. Daniel Kemmis, the former mayor of Missoula, Montana, wrote a wonderful book in 1995 called, “The Good City and the Good Life” in which he described how important it was for cities to create responsibility-seeking citizens, even if just a few at a time. Kemmis wrote:

If every meeting that dealt with a difficult public issue could, by its own dynamic, produce a half-dozen people who took upon themselves some measure of responsibility for the way people treated each other, we would solve problems at a much higher rate than most of us in most of our cities have ever experienced.

I’ll talk in the future about how cities can create more citizens and point to one city that’s actually doing it, but let me close with an important caveat: Citizen creation is not the work solely of city governments. Governments can do a lot to encourage and facilitate citizen involvement, but we need many community institutions to be involved, from schools and neighborhood associations to youth groups and foundations.

It’s only when people are surrounded by opportunities to get involved in their communities, opportunities that come at them from many directions, that we can move large numbers from being passive residents to active citizens.

Photo by Matt Malone licensed under Creative Commons.

From Provider to Partner

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There’s a vast change underway in how local governments relate to their citizens, as governments move from being providers to partners. Almost everywhere you turn, you see this shift. Here are three examples:

  • The rise of business improvement districts. I’ve heard former mayors who served in the 1960s and 1970s talk about how shocked they were to learn that businesses would voluntarily raise their taxes in order to improve their surroundings. And yet, by the 1990s the BIDs were everywhere. The original idea was to take over services that cities could no longer afford (like cleaning up graffiti and planting trees), but BIDs have grown into surprisingly effective planning organizations as well.
  • The vast expansion of public-private partnerships. Cities have been creating public-private partnerships for decades; it’s how stadiums and civic centers were built in the 1980s and economic development programs were funded. But we’re now into partnerships that couldn’t have been imagined even a decade ago, like building toll lanes on highways and privatizing downtown parking meters. Some of these ventures will prove to be bad ideas, but they demonstrate how far you can go in marrying profit motives with public purposes.
  • The arrival of philanthropy in government services. Again, this is the sort of thing that leaves former mayors shaking their heads, but cities everywhere are turning to non-profits and foundations to fund—and manage—public assets. Name a major municipal service area that touches the lives of citizens, and you’ll likely find philanthropy at work, from park conservancies and public land trusts to police and library foundations. I haven’t seen donors lining up to support solid waste, but surely it can’t be too far off.

I could go on and on—there are many examples—but the shift is undeniable and the implications are clear: Governments no longer “own” local problems; they “share” community problems with others. And as you move from owning to sharing, new skills are required of government leaders: that they be able to identify others to share the burden, and that they be able to work as partners and not directors. And for that, they must learn patience and restraint, and this is much, much harder than you might think.

I’ll talk about restraint shortly, but first a bit more about the great role shift. I ran across a good description of the change in a report by a group called PACE, which stands for Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. In it, the city manager of Ventura, Calif., Rick Cole, said the difference was between a vending machine and a barn raising:

“With a vending machine, you put your money in and get services out,” says Cole, a former alternative newspaper publisher and mayor in Pasadena. “When government doesn’t deliver, they do what people do when a vending machine doesn’t deliver,” says Cole. “They kick it.”

“The more useful metaphor,” he adds, “is the barn raising. It’s not a transaction, where I pay you to do work on my behalf, but a collaborative process where we are working together. Government works better and costs less when citizens do more than simply choose or ratify representative decision makers.”

Which are the next great barns to be raised? There are two areas where governments will make great partnership strides in the future. First is in neighborhood improvements; second is in bringing volunteers inside local governments.

With neighborhoods, this means letting residents take the lead in listing and prioritizing their needs, and insisting they take a major role in providing the solutions. I know, I know. We’ve tried for decades to find a workable model for neighborhood involvement without much success. But that’s because we’ve only done the first of these two things—we’ve asked people what they want and haven’t insisted they share the burden. To use Rick Cole’s metaphor, we’ve let people describe the soft drinks they want and the price they’d like to pay (essentially nothing), and when local governments failed to deliver, we’ve watched them kick the vending machines. We need them to grab a hammer and start raising the barn.

I’ll write in the future about the idea of volunteers in government. I know it sounds far-fetched, but I would point out that we already have volunteers in a range of government work, from volunteer firefighters and parents who help out in classrooms to volunteer librarians. (Next time you’re at your public library, ask the librarian to point out who works there for free.) Governments haven’t learned to ask for volunteers, but when they do, they’ll be surprised how many step forward. Here’s the key, though: They can’t manage volunteers like employees. So add to the list of skills governments must learn things like volunteer training, motivation and coordination.

Final thought: I first saw a local government acting as partner and not provider in 1994 when I wrote a magazine article about a South Florida city called Delray Beach. (You can read the entire article here.) The key to change in Delray Beach was a mayor, Tom Lynch, and a city council that had learned to be a dependable partner without becoming a dominating presence. Here’s a glimpse of how restraint works:

When a problem becomes apparent, civic leaders help the people most affected organize themselves to study it and come up with solutions. When the citizens arrive at some solutions, the city offers to be part—but only part—of the resolution. The group that’s most affected must accept the bulk of the responsibility.

It’s in this constant tension over responsibility—is everyone doing his part to solve this problem?—that Delray Beach generates both solutions and leadership. No one looks to city hall to figure out what to do or even to do it once it’s figured out. But they do keep close watch to be sure the city, the business community and non-profits live up to their ends of the bargain.

City hall is willing to “facilitate” the problem-solving process, help find resources and take some of the responsibility when the solution is arrived at. But it won’t tell people what to do or take on the work for them. As Mayor Lynch explains, “If someone comes to us with a problem, our role isn’t to solve the problem but to connect them with other people who can help them solve their problem.”

A decade and a half ago, I was amazed by this approach and even more by its results: not only a popular and well-managed local government in a city that had turned itself around—but a much happier citizenry as well. It turned out that, in Delray Beach, people preferred being partners to constituents. Come to think of it, they probably would have enjoyed barn raisings to vending machines, too.

Photo by Load Stone licensed under Creative Commons.

A Case Study in Small-P Politics

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In 1961, more than 110,000 people spent time in New York City’s overcrowded jails, and the number was rising fast. Many weren’t convicted of a crime; they were awaiting trial and couldn’t afford bail. Bail is basically an insurance policy. You (or a professional bail bondsman) put up something of value to insure you’ll appear for trial. Problem was, poor people, including many who worked in low-wage jobs, had nothing of value and not enough cash to afford a bail bondsman. So they sat in jail, often for months, before trials.

There was another way: A judge at arraignment (that’s the court appearance immediately after arrest) could release a defendant on his own recognizance—basically because, in the magistrate’s judgment, the defendant was unlikely to flee. But most of the arraignment judges in New York or other big cities knew nothing about the defendants other than their names and charges. And since no one wanted to release a defendant who might take off—or, worse, commit another crime—it was far safer to send people charged with theft, disorderly conduct and assault to the Tombs, as New York’s jail was called, than to risk headlines.

Enter a young man named Herb Sturz, who wondered if there weren’t a better, more humane way to treat poor people who had made a wrong turn—a way that could also save the city millions in jail costs. Sturz is the subject of a remarkable biography by New York Times reporter Sam Roberts titled “A Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems.” Briefly, Sturz figured out (by asking questions no one had thought to ask) how to create a better system of granting recognizance releases.

There isn’t space here to describe what Sturz learned along the way and how he learned it (but if you’d like to know, I recommend the book highly). It’s important to know, however, that Sturz worked with five objectives in mind:

  • Master the problem: Sturz had to know how the bail system worked and why it didn’t work better. Importantly, this wasn’t to point the finger but rather to know what had to be done to change it.
  • Build trust: As with most things in cities, authority to change the bail system was widely dispersed among judges, prosecutors, the police and politicians (who feared a scandal should criminals be released too easily). If anything was to change, all had to be convinced since any of them could have stopped reforms dead in their tracks.
  • Make an overwhelming case for change: Nothing important ever changes unless you can demonstrate why it should change, so Sturz had to show—from the standpoints of fairness, economy and public safety—that the reforms were better that the status quo.
  • Document the results: This was how he built trust. Sturz became a master of the “demonstration project,” which used controlled experiments to show that the reforms would do what he had promised. In the bail project, he and his team interviewed defendants and rated them for their suitability for recognizance release. Half who were judged to be suitable were recommended to a judge for release (and the judges overwhelmingly agreed); half were left in the old system (that is, some made bail but most stayed in jail). After a large number of these cases had gone to trial, Sturz could demonstrate that just as many released on recognizance showed up for their court appointments as those who made bail. More striking, far more of those who were released (on recognizance or bail) were exonerated or had their charges dismissed. (One theory: By being free, they had time to devote to their defenses.) The key was the rigor of the experiment, which made the results hard to deny even for those who could hardly believe them.
  • Respect authority: Even as he was asking judges and police officials to change how they worked, he did so in the most respectful way possible—by couching his ideas as something that would save money and make their lives easier. Sturz never sought the limelight. Over the years in a succession of reform projects, he always gave credit to people in authority and stepped forward only if someone had to accept blame. In doing so, he became one of New York’s most trusted authorities in the areas he cared about—criminal justice, substance abuse and improving the lives of the poor. (When Ed Koch became mayor in 1978, he made Sturz his deputy mayor for criminal justice.)

In summary, then, when Sturz arrived at a solution, it was holistic, systematic and efficient. It brought along those who might have stopped it. And it was delivered with the right reasons attached—not indictments of failure but opportunities for savings and public acclaim—and often with the promise that it would ease the jobs of those who had to implement the solutions.

As Roberts described Sturz’s quietly revolutionary reforms, they were so commonsensical in retrospect, they hardly seemed the work of a genius. But, he went on,

It took a kind of genius—someone wise and persevering enough to assess what was wrong, quantify the benefits of fixing it to all the stakeholders in the status quo and devising a simple, just, efficient solution.

Sturz, Roberts wrote, “spotted things other people hadn’t seen, even things that had been staring them in the face every day.” He continued,

He would pose questions that they hadn’t asked, even when those questions seemed mundane. And by peppering participants at every level with even more questions, by meticulously dissecting the responses, by crafting hypothetical fixes and subjecting them to challenging testing and experimentation, he tried his hand at transforming illusions into practical answers.

This is the heart of “small-p politics,” which I wrote about in an earlier posting. It’s small-p because it’s not the politics you normally think of, of campaigns and vote-trading. This is about listening, questioning, relationship building and, eventually solution building. It’s about dealing with obstacles and answering objections (“what if he flees?”) and signing up the permission-givers. It is the patient, unglamorous work of removing boulders and building walls. But this is what the workhorses of our communities do as the showhorses wring their hands.

So what happened to Herb Sturz’s efforts to reform bail? Not only were his solutions adopted in New York, but they were taken up in Washington and by 1966 had become part of a major reform of federal bail procedures. Afterward, state after state adopted the recognizance release approaches that Sturz had pioneered in New York. “In sheer volume,” one New York judge wrote in 1966, “probably never before in our legal history has so substantial a movement for reform in the law taken place in so short a time.”

Photo by Troy licensed under Creative Commons.

Rereading a Classic About Community Leadership

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In 1991, I read Alan Ehrenhalt’s brilliant analysis of who runs for public office, “The United States of Ambition.” (Note: Alan is a friend and occasional colleague.) The book begins with a description of candidates of the 1990s and how they were different from candidates in the past, and continues with chapters profiling the changes at the local, state and federal levels, including who runs for president.

When I reread “The United States of Ambition” recently, I was surprised by how much I remembered of Alan’s book—and a critical part I had forgotten.

Here are three most important things I remembered:

  • Few political analysts spend much time looking at who runs for office, Alan wrote, but a lot could be learned from looking at this “supply side” of politics.
  • The key change was in what Alan called “the decline of deference” and the rise of “freelance” politicians who represented no one but themselves.
  • This change in who runs for office, Alan said, resolved an old debate between sociologists and political scientists on who makes decisions for American communities. In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of sociologists studied cities and towns around the country and came to the conclusion that most important decisions were made by a handful of people, the “power structure.” Political scientists did similar studies and found that important decisions were made by shifting coalitions, not cohesive groups. Alan’s answer: The “structuralists” (sociologists) were describing the past, while the “pluralists” (political scientists) were describing the future.

It’s a smart book that’s brilliantly reported and well written. If you like local politics, you’ll be fascinated by Alan’s description of how places like Concord, Calif., Sioux Falls, S.D., Greenville, S.C. and Utica, N.Y. changed, sometimes overnight. At the center of the stories are the politicians. One year, elected officials are people with deep connections to a traditional group of community leaders. Then an election comes along and, bang, the voters put in a group of politicians no one had recruited and few had even heard of before they ran. (You’ll particularly enjoy the story of how in 1974 the voters of Sioux Falls tossed out a longtime mayor who sought and followed advice from a group of business leaders, replacing him with a “shaggy-haired, 27-year-old disc jockey who had run because a listener dared him to on a weekday morning call-in program.”)

The United States of Ambition

The “mutiny of 1974” wasn’t peculiar to Sioux Falls, Alan wrote; it was part of a generational shift away from people who served on school boards, city councils and county commissions out of obligation to the community and toward candidates who ran for office because they loved the game of politics. These new-style politicians, self-motivated and self-sufficient, excel at campaigning.

The skills that work in American politics at this point in history are those of entrepreneurship. At all levels of the political system, from local boards and councils up to and including the presidency, it is unusual for parties to nominate people. People nominate themselves. That is, they offer themselves as candidates, raise money, organize campaigns, create their own publicity, and make decisions in their own behalf. If they are not willing to do that work for themselves, they are not (except in a very few parts of the country) going to find any political party structure to do it for them.

And this is a dramatic break from the past, Alan added:

. . . (T)he successful candidates a generation ago were those who bore the stamp of approval of the town’s informal leadership organization. “When we were kids growing up,” a Sioux Falls businessman in his forties recalls, “everybody knew who would win the elections. The person who had been in Rotary and had been endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce always won.”

These were the things I remembered from my first reading: the decline of deference and the sudden jolting changes as a new, “freelance” type of politician emerged in communities.

What I had forgotten was Alan’s caution that this new style of “unbossed and unbought” politician—which independent-minded Americans tend to like—carried a risk. The risk: That in overthrowing the “power structure” we would settle for no power at all. Here’s how Alan describes the downside of the truly independent political leader:

(P)ower can evaporate. When it breaks loose from those who have held it in concentrated form, as has happened in American politics over the last generation, it does not necessarily change hands. It may be dispersed so broadly that it might as well have disappeared into thin air. And leadership, which ultimately depends upon the existence of power, may disappear along with it.

The irony of pursuing office in the 1990s is that one may reach a position of influence, find no established elite or power structure blocking its exercise, yet discover that it is more difficult than ever to lead.

In the cities he profiled, that’s what he found: Newcomers with “no strings attached” also had no ability to pull strings to get things done. “Unbossed and unbought” sometimes meant unmoored and adrift. ” . . . (T)he mayor who doesn’t owe anybody a thing doesn’t have many tools to govern with either,” Alan wrote. “Candidates nobody sent can be very appealing; leaders nobody sent can be dangerous.”

The result, in city after city, were elected officials with too few connections and little in common to work together.

We have replaced governments that could say yes—and make it stick—with governments that offer a multitude of interests the right to say no. We have elected and empowered a generation of political professionals whose independence and refusal to defer makes concerted action, even when necessary, quite difficult.

I think this is exactly so, and it’s why I believe leadership has become the single most important factor in communities today—because it’s so easy to stop things and so hard to move things forward. We can’t depend on a power structure or elected officials to lead anymore. The first doesn’t exist in most places and the second often can’t deliver. It takes a broader group of people working together, using new skills to lead our cities and towns.

I’ve already talked a little about what those new skills are; we’ll talk more about them in the future. But the need for new leaders and new leadership skills is greater than at any time in my memory. Thanks to Alan Ehrenhalt for telling us why.

Photo of sign by Mark Sardella licensed under Creative Commons.

About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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