Frank Martin

Maybe the most dispiriting things a reformer faces, when she’s trying to fix a major community problem—or maybe turn around an entire city—are the twin evils of cynicism and finger pointing. And if you prefer your evils in threes, add another: apathy.

In my experience, every city has some version of these problems: big cities and small towns, places in long decline and even those on the rise. And they come from people in low places and high. I’ve known mayors who were hard-bitten cynics, chamber of commerce executives who blamed everyone else for what went wrong, and newspaper editorialists who described every new idea as the Titanic weighing anchor.

So what do you do when you’re faced with such a wall of civic doubt and negativism? I’ll get to the things you should do shortly, but let’s begin with the things you shouldn’t:

Don’t become part of the problem. Specifically, don’t point fingers at others, don’t blame the community for things that go wrong, and don’t give up.
And don’t do the opposite, which is to overpromise. Leaders who promise too much (“we can turn this around in 90 days”) end up digging the cynicism hole even deeper when they fail. If you need a slogan, try this one: “Let’s do what we can.”

And what are the things you can do? Start with attitude. You can be positive without being a Pollyanna. The secret is to be quietly confident. Jack McColl, who worked for many years in rural development in the Midwest, wrote a wise little book 20 years ago called “The Small Town Survival Guide.” In it, he described a group that he called the “coffee-break cynicism society” whose delight, he said, was in describing every civic improvement as certain failure. His advice: “Cultivate your ability to smile and say, ‘Let’s try.’ “

But ultimately the only thing that overcomes widespread cynicism is success. Doing something. Succeeding. Then doing something else, and succeeding there too.

Which begs the question: Where do you start? I’ll give you the advice I’ve heard from two highly successful mayors. One was Bill Frederick, the three-term mayor of Orlando in the 1980s.

Frederick’s advice was to pick the biggest, most visible thing that you knew with certainty you could accomplish, then bring every resource to bear on accomplishing it. It worked for Frederick, and it worked a decade later for Frank Martin, the late mayor of Columbus, Georgia, who worked mightily to change attitudes in his city. Martin used what he called his “man on the moon” strategy to complete a big civic project that had eluded one mayor after another, the building of a civic center in downtown Columbus. (Again: big, visible, doable, done.)

But here’s the key: One data point is not a trend, and a single success will not change a community’s cynicism. For that, you need repeated successes. Martin followed the civic center by building a stunning 22-mile river walk, a new set of recreational athletic fields downtown, and then, improbably enough, by staging in Columbus one of the events of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the women’s softball competition. (If you want the full story of what Martin did and how it laid the groundwork for Columbus’ eventual revival, you can read about it in my book, “The Great Project.“)

Most civic leaders aren’t mayors and aren’t called upon to turn around an entire city. But the same principles apply if you are trying to improve a neighborhood, change a lethargic government agency, resurrect a nonprofit, or deal with a crime problem. Be quietly confident and don’t overpromise. Focus on one big, visible project and move heaven and earth to get it done. (If it can be completed in ways that exceed expectations—“on time, under budget, and with unexpected quality—all the better.) Then refocus and repeat. And then repeat again.

Keep in mind that you’ll always have rock-throwers, and some will always deny progress. But the more you accomplish, the less others will pay attention to them, and the quieter and quieter the coffee-break cynicism society will become.

This is part of a series of brief postings called Rules for Reformers. For an introduction to the series, please click here.

I’ve met a lot of mayors over the years. Some were smart, a few were philosophical, many were shrewd, but only a handful were strategic. One of the few, Frank Martin, died a few weeks ago.

Martin was the mayor of Columbus, Georgia who, in a single term in office in the early 1990s, changed his city. Yes, you read that right: He served a single four-year term. (It was his decision. He finished his term to acclaim but chose not to run again.) And in that single term he set in motion changes that are still being felt, 20 years later.

I met Mayor Martin when I was researching a book about the remarkable turnaround of Columbus’ downtown, which was a desolate and hopeless place in the 1970s, only to be reborn three decades later as a thriving business, cultural, entertainment, and educational center. I wanted to know how these things happened, and that led me to the political leader who had changed the arc of the city. (If you’re interested in the book, you can find it here.)

We had three long conversations, one by phone, one in his office, and a third for a podcast. Each time we talked I was impressed by how his mind worked. He had the ability to look at something familiar (the city he had lived in his entire life or the government he presided over), see assets and opportunities that others couldn’t, and move decisively toward them. And, in a nutshell, that’s what great strategists do.

And one more thing: He knew how to change people’s minds. That’s important because, in civic work, it’s not enough to see the right thing to do. You have to bring others along with you. Martin knew that words weren’t enough. If you wanted to change people’s minds, you needed actions as well. Bold actions.

When he became mayor in 1991, Columbus was at a very low ebb. For 15 years, a handful of business and civic leaders had been searching for ways to turn around the downtown, without much success. For one thing, there was the sheer size of the problem: Block after block of empty storefronts, sleazy bars and porn shops, and some of the tackiest retail imaginable. The good stores had moved out of downtown in the 1960s, and many of the offices had joined them in the 1970s. (No one lived downtown then.) A few new projects had been built—a convention center, a hotel, a new office building or two—but the tide was still running out for downtown.

And beyond that, there was a huge impediment to change, which was the citizens’ deep-seated cynicism. After seeing decades of decline, they thought the downtown was hopeless and any effort to help it was throwing good money after bad. In fact, they thought the same of the city itself. In the citizens’ minds, Columbus was, if not declining, going nowhere and nothing could change it.

So, where do you begin when you’re trying to save a city that doesn’t believe in itself? Martin’s answer was to start with a bang, with what he called his “man on the moon project,” a project so ambitious and difficult to achieve that, when it does succeed, the civic self-doubt fades away. He found such a project on his first day in office, when he opened a closet in the mayor’s office and discovered a complete set of plans for a civic center. A previous mayor had commissioned the plans and then quietly rolled them up and stowed them away, defeated by the project’s politics and finances.

That, Martin decided, would be his “man on the moon project.” He would build the civic center that a line of mayors had talked about but been unable to deliver. To make a long story short, he did just that, and Columbus has an impressive new civic center today. But Martin didn’t stop there. While he was working on the civic center project, he put together a huge bond referendum that in addition to financing the civic center would make sewer improvements, build sidewalks and parks, and construct a major new softball complex near downtown. He campaigned furiously for the referendum and got it passed.

From the outside, this may not seem like much, but in the sleepwalk that was Columbus in the early 1990s, it was a huge awakening. And Martin was just getting started. The sewer project had an interesting feature, he came to understand. It involved running miles of storm water pipes alongside the Chattahoochee River. And here’s where Martin’s knack for strategic thinking came in: Why not turn this sewer project into a major new public asset by placing a river walk on top of it? (The idea wasn’t his, but he once he heard it, he grasped what it could mean.) He approached the city’s foundations and businesses, and they agreed to put up the additional money. The result is one of the largest and most attractive urban river walks in America today, stretching more than 20 miles.

And the softball complex? It became the way that Columbus got a share of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when it served as host for the women’s softball competitions. The city that doubted itself was suddenly seeing itself on international broadcasts, with its beautiful new riverfront improvements as a setting.

I could go on and on about Martin’s accomplishments and how they laid the groundwork for the downtown’s revival. (Again, if you’re interested, read the book.) But at the center of things was a civic leader who combined the mind of a strategist with a shrewd understanding of human nature and what it took to move people.

And these are the things the best leaders do: They see unnoticed assets, find ways of making them greater and far more apparent, and bring others along on the journey. Cities need an army of such people, but sometimes it takes only a few. Or, at the right time and in the right place, just one.

Photo of the Columbus Riverwalk from The Great Project, used with permission

Dealing with the Cynics

The Leader as Strategist and Persuader

About Otis White

The Great Project

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