Last year, we wrote a series of posts about great mayors because Memphis has never had one. It seems like an apt time to revisit it to see how things are going in City Hall.
Here’s the post:
With A C Wharton now in the mayor’s office with a mandate for action, he – like most of his predecessors – has an opportunity to be a great mayor. There is little resemblance between Shelby County Government and City of Memphis Government, but his terms as county mayor should give him a head start in setting his vision and the agenda to achieve it.
There is no job harder in any city than its mayor’s. There is no decision that goes unnoticed and there is no decision that is not magnified with the intensity of the faithful watching the color of the smoke coming out of the Vatican chimney. And yet, done well, there is nothing that compares to the impact on the future than a city mayor.
We’ve spotlighted seven mayors in the past week or so who transformed their cities, often righting them in the midst of challenges and setting a strong course for a better future. So what are the lessons that we can learn from these great mayors?
Story-telling
The City Narrative Matters. One essential lesson is that these mayors articulated and embodied the narratives for their cities, and in so doing, they developed cohesion, sense of community and a shared purpose. Effective leaders tell stories, stories that we all of us can see ourselves in.
This may all sound too ethereal, but it is nevertheless grounded deeply in the real world, because a city’s narrative creates sense of place and meaning. “Vibrant communities have a brand narrative that is a compilation of origin, creed, context, symbols and action that attracts people and commerce and consumes resources,” said branding expert Patrick Hanlon.
“Vibrant communities stand for something. Vibrant communities have a lexicon that their members understand. Finally, vibrant communities have a leader…(who) ultimately is responsible for weaving together these strands of civic pride and responsibility.”
Here’s the thing: Memphis doesn’t have a narrative. There is no common story that ties us all together into a community with shared values, symbols and rituals. There is no common narrative that describes what we stand for and what we believe in.
Lessons
The mayors we profiled seem to understand this, and their stories and their symbolism created a thread that stitched together the fabric of their cities. Mayor Wharton has expressed an understanding of the role and importance of a narrative and story-telling, and because of it, we expect that he will give this narrative brand the attention that it needs.
So what are the other themes that can be taken from the examples of these seven mayors?
Start with a global perspective. Cities compete in a global marketplace of ideas and business, and because regions are the competitive units in this marketplace, these mayors emphasized regional collaboration and set out to end turf wars and self-defeating competition. As Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper said: “Denver doesn’t compete anymore with Seattle or San Diego. We’re competing with metropolitan Shanghai and metropolitan Bombay. If we don’t begin working together at a much higher level, we’ll find that not just our grandchildren’s jobs but our children’s jobs will have gone away.”
Know your budget. Every one of these mayors insisted on frank assessments of their city’s fiscal state as the baseline for all strategic decisions. Job one was to understand the city’s books, and job two was to make sure everyone else understood them, too. The foundation is to be honest and transparent in all financial matters.
Listen. These mayors traveled all over their regions to hear from fellow mayors, businesspeople and constituents. They never forget that they are public servants first and foremost.
Choose your battles. Each of the mayors started with a signature issue — economic development, improved services, infrastructure upgrades, financial integrity, civic design – that laid the groundwork for broader success.
Never Stop Building Your Team. These mayors hired the best people to head up crucial operations. For example, Mayor Hickenlooper charged his transition team with finding the best people in the nation to head up schools, law enforcement, and planning. Politics didn’t matter. But when he talked about Denver’s progress, he credits his partners, his predecessors, his employees, his advisers, his wife, his parents – everyone but himself. This is no accident. It’s part of his strategy of keeping his team together.
One Word: Leadership. A team of brilliant young data analysts and hard-charging senior managers never substitutes for hands-on executive leadership.
Running in place. Marginal improvements in performance numbers from much harder work may obscure the fact that the system being used is antiquated. Often the entire process needs to be redesigned from the ground up, and a decisive leader can change as much with a memo as he can with an ordinance.
and we get 18 years of hairington.
I apologize for this being long.
Memphis has a narrative.
It doesn’t know how to make sense of it yet, but, I have faith, and suggestions on that.
Please stop calling things like narratives a “brand”. It makes it sound very fake.
That is what a “frank assessment” looks like. It isn’t always pleasant or agreeable to the assessee, at least at first blush, but, if the assessee can get over it quickly and let go of the anger it can move on through acknowledgement of what is. I imagine our budget assessment will be no different. Transparency that is provable by the average Joe is a great antidote and preventative to gossip, rumor, and superstition, knee-jerks to frustration over being ignored, objectified, and finally self objectified.
Listening is crucial, CRUCIAL with a capital CRUCIAL.
Team building is a skill few master. AC is good on this.
I think you touched on ONE BIG and very important part, and IMHO you didn’t give it its due, maybe you under rate it:
“The Lexicon” .
Right now, vast swaths of Memphis PEOPLE, HUMANS, are inculcated in the culture of failure, for more than three generations. They HAVE a lexicon. • The Lexicon of failure. •
Being multigenerational, it is now cultural. That doesn’t make it one bit harder to get rid of and transform into another lexicon, one that’s more effective:
The Lexicon of Success.
One thing you’ll notice of truly successful people, who did not get there by oppressing others, is that they all speak it fluently.
One thing that is important about it is that it is a lexicon independent of anything else. With it, you can create anything and everything is possible, you have only to design a future worth living into and it will arrive, by doing what works.
People in Memphis, even the poor and once incarcerated are HUMAN BEINGS that were hoodwinked to believe that they were worthless and didn’t matter, the slaying of MLK Jr. was another nail in the consciousness. The knee-jerk to that, PC policies that went too far and became a hobbling, and anger, bitterness, drama, cynicism, suspicion and a downward spiral into violence and drug abuse as a cultural norm, has been protracted causing instability and tension, not success.
The narrative is the comeback. What a comeback it will be. Any help we get will be icing on the cake, but we CAN do this, and it won’t be one of those things where people can be excluded unduly, everyone has to do some part, and the first step is acknowledgement of where we’ve been, where we are currently, and ONLY then letting go of the past. You can’t build our future by covering up the past, a foundation of shifting sand to be manipulated by some future oppressor, it must be built on reality. You can’t authentically speak the language of success without actively building a future based on that reality.
What’s it going to hurt to just admit the reality?
No one is going to eat us if we do.
NO, they won’t. It won’t hurt, it only helps, the beginnings of a backbone. Reality will eat us if we don’t.
We have more upside potential than you can measure, and with our new leadership and “grown ups” at the helm, listening, acknowledging, designing something worth living into, IT’S ON!
That’s the ONLY game worth playing in Memphis.
Purity, judgement, ethics, + mercy intelligently applied = morality, holiness and justice.
No politics, no color = Memphis, it’s human beings win.
Oops, the most important part about the two lexicons:
The lexicon of failure evolves accidentally.
The lexicon of success can be taught on purpose to anyone and retained by anyone.
You often talk about the stats of college grads almost as if they are the only people who CAN succeed, BUT, if you look at the failure stats of college graduates, it’s not so plain. There are PLENTY of college grad failures.
Why?
They never developed the language of success. It isn’t taught at most colleges.
We could actually teach it in public school for ages 8 and up. It is cathartic to learn and never forgotten.It facilitates the ability to generate epiphanies whenever necessary to transform any failure into a success.
Zippy, you are on the money. The prevailing narrative of our city is failure, pessimism, cynicism, distrust, fear, and contempt (among a myriad of other depressing nouns). I really appreciate what you write at the conclusion of your first post. Memphis desperately needs mercy and justice and those good gifts from God; and not just for a narrative. Memphis needs those gifts at its heart. If we return to those roots of faith (and they are deep in our city), a beautiful, powerful narrative will flow from that. Civic narratives, like personal ones, spring from identity. It’s much deeper than branding and I believe you are speaking to that. Keep up the good work, Sir.
Also, this article was great. Thanks SCM.
Christopher, you got it. And the second part is toward the solution.
We CAN teach the language of success in elementary school.
What will come out of it?
Gangs and other such ills will just subside due to lack of interest, no more cultivated feeder system for the CJC, criminal attys, the private corp that runs the prison, no more complaints about prison overcrowding, jail overcrowding, or bad neighborhoods.
Isn’t that what we have been talking about? Better neighborhoods safe enough to attract talent AND KEEP IT, a “City of Choice”?
How do we plan on getting there today? By incarcerating till everyone is in the pokey, thus making the streets safer because they are empty?
Where will the money for that come from? Judges will only put them in for a week anyway, so it won’t work.
And all the law enforcement in the world will not turn the city around, we need it badly, but, it can only manage the worst.
We have to have a long term affordable yet extremely effective plan to turn things around for good.
That’s why we MUST begin teaching this in schools.
BUT, MCS can’t do this, obviously, MCS is an abysmal failure, THEY DO NOT KNOW HOW TO TEACH IT. That is very sad in 2010 in America, but, that’s where we are.
So what?
Because MCS does not speak it, know it when they hear it, or teach it, they will have to take a course on it, and then a course on how to teach it. Right now MCS spends upwards from half a year reviewing what students forgot from the previous year before anything new is breached, If we taught the language of success in MCS for the first two or three weeks and included support during the year, that would end quickly. Grad rates would shoot through the roof like a rocket. Our stats would be so good that the rest of the country would wonder what we are eating.
We’d be eating success, eating it, sleeping it, dreaming it, LIVING IT. Racial tension would disappear overnight. There’s no room in the language to support it.
The first words in the bible are “In beginning there was the word”.
This is a metaphor indicative of the fact that we arose from language and that God wants you to know this. “They will be known by their words,” this means that you are going “to be” what language you speak.
If you speak success, you will be success.
The only way to stop speaking “failure” and stop failing is to seek out a teacher to learn and speak The Language of Success.
Step fully committed into a well designed future of success and heaven and earth will rearrange itself to support you NOW.
Don’t blow this chance.