Let’s say the recently-hired municipal manager of a small city, with a population of just under fifteen-thousand, walks into a party. It’s a busy affair, with others standing and talking throughout the room.
Someone walks up to him, and says, “Hey, City Manager, did you know that your two immediate predecessors are here, too?”
This development could become more than circumstance; it could become an opportunity.
What to do?
There’s a simple, three-step process for a situation like this:
1. The current city manager should look around the room, and locate his two predecessors.
2. He should think about all the things they did while in office.
3. He should then make sure he doesn’t do any of those things.
Success.
Let’s be candid: the last two city managers had failed administrations. The former of the two was (ever so gently & politely) moved out, and the most recent one left after making a hash of project after project and after repeated attempts to find another city manager’s job were unsuccessful.
If they’d managed differently, after all, they wouldn’t have become the current city manager’s predecessors.
I know, and you know, that there’s a powerful desire of a few to pretend that everyone in authority has always managed as though a philosopher-king. It’s worse than an embarrassing habit of obsequiousness – it’s the cause of mediocre policy, of economic & political failure, and of cultural stagnation.
It’s also, without a doubt, demographically doomed. The upcoming generation, slowly replacing those now retiring, wisely and simply rejects these small-town appeals to mere authority.
Someone looking on decades yet ahead will find insufficient value in reliance on titles. In a city where many thousands of smart people are reading, writing, and talking to other each day, there’s the worthy accomplishment of an official’s perceptive work and there’s the flimsy crutch of status and position.
It’s easily possible for an official to have a long and successful career, with more than one approach on policy being viable.
It’s improbable, though, that anyone will get far by pretending that the botched past has been other than, simply put, the botched past.