Reading the platforms for candidates for Shelby County mayor often feels like entering a time warp.

Often, the platforms could apply to 2000 as much as to 2026.

The ideas put forth seem to change little from election to election.  There are the same issues, there are the sweeping generalities, there is the lack of specifics about implementation, and there is the lack of a defining vision – not a collection of plans or an assortment of position papers but a unifying vision that answers the question: what are Memphis and Shelby County trying to become? 

It’s a troubling reality because it attests to how our community has at best been running in place for way too long, and our leaders seem reluctant to challenge us to be more, to be bolder, and to define success as more than incremental change.

In a sense, we have seen incrementalism as a governing philosophy.

In other words, campaign websites and flyers are long on slogans and short on telling us how Memphis and Shelby County will be different if they are elected.  It’s hard to escape the feeling that candidates are playing it safe at a time when our community needs an intervention and disruptive innovation.

The Kind of Leadership Matters

This isn’t to say that the people running for county mayor – and Memphis mayor before them – are not good people who care deeply about their community.  It’s just that we need leaders who can inspire us by their ability to articulate a transformative future for our community and then mobilize each of us to see our place in it.

That seems to happen in cities that transform themselves.  They do it with aggressive goals, aligned institutions, and accepting that not every initiative or program will succeed.  We, by contrast, often govern as if we are afraid to take a risk.  In basketball parlance, we are playing not to lose rather than playing to win.

Government and business leaders talk about resilience, momentum, and opportunity, but their actions tell a different story.  They set modest goals, celebrate incremental wins as major victories, and define today’s success in comparison to how bad things used to be rather than how good they need to become. 

In this way, leaders act less like they are leading a city with exciting assets and potential and more like they are triaging a city in decline.

Asking Bolder Questions

A county with bolder leadership would ask harder questions:

  • Why is Memphis and Shelby County losing population, and how do we leverage our distinct culture to do something about it?
  • Why do so many young professionals leave, and what is the plan to encourage them to join us in in a movement to turn this community around?
  • Why is poverty here still among the worst in the U.S, and how do we scale avenues of opportunity with living wages that can reduce it?
  • Why are income increases and entrepreneurship lagging peer cities, and how do we improve a languishing trajectory that’s a barrier to success?
  • Why is it morally tolerable to have an intractable child poverty rate and accept year after year the absence of an audacious plan that could galvanize the entire community to do something about it?

Here’s the thing: leaders in thriving cities speak in the language of ambition, such as reducing poverty in half in 10 years, growing population by 50,000 in 10 years, becoming the top city in the South for minority entrepreneurship, and raising the median wages above our peer cities. 

These are the kinds of goals that leaders who truly believe in their community set.

The Price from Defensive Leadership

The leadership dilemma is not entirely officials’ fault.  After all, they spend so much of their time responding to criticism and complaints, whether crime is up or down, state government’s latest interference, and the scandal of the day, whether it is a county commissioner’s guilty plea to tax evasion, the incredulous rise in salaries at Greater Memphis Chamber, or xAI’s questionable commitment to its own water recycling facility.

In this environment, leaders too often govern as if they are trying to keep the city and county from getting worse.  It’s a mindset that our community is fragile and lucky to tread water, and it becomes contagious with the public.

It also produces a brand of defensive leadership.  Memphis leaders – unlike those in more successful cities – spend time responding to negative comments and narratives. The impulse is understandable because leaders want to defend their city; however, the hair trigger reaction to every negative comment means leaders are not projecting outward confidence. 

Cities that succeed talk less about what critics say and more about where they are confidently headed. 

It’s not as if Memphis and Shelby County lack assets. The question is: do leaders here act like people trying to build one of the country’s most successful cities – or like they are trying to manage one of its most troubled?

We have public officials, civic leaders, and businesspeople who care deeply about our community.  The problem is more nuanced: their cautious leadership suggests a city trying to manage decline rather than drive transformation.

Civic conversations are regularly dominated by being about managing problems.  There’s no question these issues deserve attention, but they shape the psychology and the execution of leadership, which becomes about preventing things from getting worse rather than making them prominently better.

Cities Become Their Leaders

Memphis has launched several impressive projects in recent years – Tom Lee Park, Memphis Art Museum, an improved Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium, renovations to FedExForum, and more.  They are evidence that the city can think big in certain contexts.

However, they also reveal a pattern: our community often expresses its ambitions through physical projects rather than systemic change. That kind of change is much more challenging, requires sustained action over time, and calls for sustained cross-sector collaborations across political cycles.

That’s not easy in the framework of the entrenched challenges facing Memphis.  Over decades, they are like water dripping on a stone.  The stone – in this case, bolder leadership – gives way and aiming higher feels unrealistic. 

It leads to incrementalism that comes from the long experience of managing difficult circumstances, and as leaders absorb too much of the narrative of a struggling city. 

Here in lies the problem.  It’s been said that cities rarely outperform the expectations of the people running them.  They become what their leaders believe they can become.

There’s a subtle – but crucially important – distinction between leading a struggling city and internalizing the idea that your city is destined to struggle.  Leadership here has often drifted into the latter – not intentionally – but in ways that show up in tone, ambition, and expectations.

Running In Place While Losing Ground

At its core, the issue may be that leaders here aren’t failing.  Perhaps, it’s that too often, their behavior is that bold success is unrealistic, falling into the “it’s good enough for Memphis” mindset that too often defines actions and ambitions.  In other words, it’s best to play it safe.  

Transforming that mindset is the most important step toward transforming our community itself.  If leaders instead focus on modest improvements and cautious strategies, our community may remain stuck in a cycle of languishing progress that never quite breaks through.

But if leaders behave like they are guiding a community capable of major transformation, our trajectory can look much different.

When we say Memphis is running in place, we generally take that to mean that we stay in the same relative place in key rankings about cities. 

Wrong.  While we’re doing that, others are running past us in incomes, GDP, and other key measurements of economic success. 

For example, in 2017, local attorney Zach Hoyt wrote a blog post here that pointed out the tale of the tape.  When ranked against peer cities, Birmingham, Little Rock, Louisville, Nashville, New Orleans, and St. Louis, Memphis was #2 in GDP in 2001.  By 2005, it was #3, #6 by 2010 and last place by 2013.

The Water Is Boiling

Today, Memphis and Shelby County are like the mythical frog in a pot of boiling water.  As the myth goes, if a frog is dropped into boiling water, it quickly jumps out; however, if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, the frog acclimates to the changes, assuming that a little extra heat is harmless.  Eventually, the frog fails to escape and is cooked to death, but by then, it has lost its strength and it’s too late to act.

There are milestones that suggest it applies to us.  Two are Regional One Health and Shelby County Jail.  Both are evidence that we fail to act until the water is boiling – and both have become crises. 

Our risk is stagnation – not through a single failure but through the gradual erosion of ambition from the lack of transformative leadership.  It’s why most of all, it requires leaders that would reject the quiet assumption that Memphis is destined to lag behind the cities we most envy. 

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