Reverie in the Round

First in my class at Harvard.  It’s a joke, of course, but it was also a little bit true.  If you’re the first in your family to go to college, occupying a seat at Harvard’s Kennedy School seems like a fraud on the scale of securing a major political party’s nomination for President of these United States.  It is that crazy / weird. 

At least it was for me.  Just a couple days past interviewing for the Davenport City Administrator gig, I was sitting in a class with eighty of some of the most accomplished people I’d ever met, being constantly tested, prodded and honed by the sharpest people in my line of work.  The joke of being first in my class was Davenport offered me the job my first week there.  So whether I was a Wisconsin county administrator or Iowa city manager was always a little unclear.

What was my line of work?  What were these people sharpening me for?  How could I be so impenetrably stupid to not see that coming?   How is it even possible for Linsky to be that smart or Fenn to be that sincere?  Who can I be, who do I have to be to honor this gift of public service?  Those were the questions that haunted me, and still do, just not quite as much.  The questions of where’s the closest Sam Adams and how do I talk this kid into loaning me his skateboard were so much easier.

Nearly every moment of success in Davenport can be traced back to those three weeks in Cambridge.  “Leadership is about disappointing people at a pace they can bear”.  How come nobody told me that before?  How come no one told me leadership isn’t about charisma and happily solving technical problems but about helping people come to grips with what is really going on, and risking what is necessary to achieve the required adaptive change?   Western Illinois University, University of Illinois, Roosevelt University, Northwestern University, Webster University … I’d like a refund.  Seriously, Marty Linsky sums it all up on one page (here) and you made me sit through years of time-wasting?

Arriving as the (are you serious, he’s not even 40) City Administrator of Davenport, the first impressions were, gosh that river sure is big, gee there’s twenty years of mess to clean up and boy, that Dee Bruemmer has got some speed on the ball.  Dee had been to the Senior Exec Program previously, and it showed.  Not every idea is a winner, but the determination to send someone from Davenport to each future class was probably my single best idea overlooking the Big Muddy.  Individuals can succeed or fail, but teams that are well resourced, well led and committed in mind and spirit to succeed do not fail often.  

So, off they’d go, to this place where maybe they felt a little like an imposter at the start.  But through the reading, thinking, furrowed brows, discussions and smiles, they’d come out the other end with daring, purpose and empathy.  They’d solve every problem placed in front of them, and reshape the playing field to turn problems into opportunities years into the future.  Some would go on to be U.S. Marshalls, County Administrators and City Managers elsewhere, alums of both 79 JFK Street, Cambridge and 226 Fourth Street, Davenport.    

It was fifteen years ago this week I arrived there.  The schedule in my crimson binder next to dad's flag on the office bookself is quite clear the last day was June 29, 2001. 

But I'm not exactly certain I ever left.