Courage provides the strength to say and do the right things. It’s also what separates the best of us from the crowd.
Leadership as “a Kind of Genius”
Seeing the opportunity for change is the genius of leadership and often involves finding paths that are hidden to everyone else. Herding people through those passages is the practice of leadership. Here’s how to be better at the genius parts of leadership.
Lesson Five: Vision and Demographics
By design or by chance, cities are headed somewhere. But where? And if there’s a vision for your city, how do you know if it can succeed? The answer lies in demographics.
Lesson Two: The Switching Yard of Change
City hall isn’t so much a public policy factory as a switching yard, where ideas come in from the outside and are acted on. So where do big public policy ideas originate in your city? And what happens to them as they move along the tracks? This could be a rich source for your reporting, and an eye-opening series of stories for your readers.
Lesson One: It’s All About Land Use
Forget about the NIMBYs vs. greedy developers showdowns. The real stories in local government are about efforts to create more interesting and attractive urban environments, and the people involved in these efforts. Some are elected officials or city workers, but many aren’t. They’re people in neighborhoods doing things that are slightly unusual, such as walking, biking, or taking buses to work . . . or restoring old homes.