September 26, 1972
Page 32384
ADDRESS BY GRAHAM W. WATT, PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL CITY MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, last week it was my privilege to attend the conference of the International City Management Association in Minneapolis. The opening speech of the conference was given by my good friend, Graham W. Watt, the association's president and the Deputy Mayor of the District of Columbia, as well as the distinguished former city manager of Portland, Maine.
Mr. Watt's enlightening address discussed the changes in management and particularly the new stress on activism and involvement of city and town managers in leading their municipalities. I believe that Senators will benefit from reading Mr. Watt's address; therefore, I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
REMARKS OF GRAHAM W. WATT, ICMA PRESIDENT, DEPUTY MAYOR OF WASHINGTON, D.C., BEFORE THE 58TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CITY MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., SEPTEMBER 18, 1972
The paradoxical times we live in are well characterized by the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Dickens wrote, "it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; ... it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."
Dickens was writing about the time of the French Revolution, but he could have been setting the stage for this Conference.
On the one hand, our citizens are enjoying more material wealth than any other people in history. More of our young people are in colleges and universities than have ever gone on to higher education anywhere. We have walked on the moon and touched the stars. In these respects we are living in "The Best of Times . . The Season of Light . . . The Spring of Hope.
On the other hand, unemployment and inflation have been an unmitigated disaster for tens of millions of Americans. Our educational system teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. Never have our cities seemed in such bad shape.
In these respects, ours seems "The Worst of Times ... The Season of Darkness ... The Winter of Despair.
As a nation, we traditionally have not been given much to despair. Carl Sandburg once said in a most eloquent paragraph, "I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us. I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun, fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision.
President Kennedy was fond of the story of a French Marshal who asked his gardener to plant a tree. "It will take 100 years to grow," the man observed. "In that case," said the marshal, "there is no time to lose. We must plant it this afternoon."
In a similar vein, we are reminded of Lincoln, a practical man, toiling and hoping during a dark time in history, queried by a friend as to whether he might be working on some fresh plan to save the country. "No" the reply came, "There is only one thing to do, keep plugging away."
So I address you today as "men and women of will and vision," impatient to plant your tree, destined to keep plugging away, confident that these can indeed be "the best of times."
MEN AND WOMEN OF WILL AND VISION
A year ago, I came to this position as President of I.C.M.A. with a fear and a hope. My fear was that a popular stereotype of City Managers as shadow-persons, cautious, often dull, apolitical, passive might be truly based.
My hope was that this stereotype was a myth; that it is not accurate today, if, indeed, it ever was.
What have I found about myths, fears and stereotypes?
I'm relieved to tell you now that my fear was unfounded and delighted to tell you that my hope has been sustained completely.
As I have traveled to meetings with you all across the nation, I have come to identify a growing group of action-oriented managers – a new breed of managers – leaders and risk-takers. In our profession. we have many men and women who see themselves involved in shaping the future of our urban society and making things happen.
I've put a label on them. They are third generation City Managers.
How do these third generation managers differ from their predecessors?
The first generation of City Managers were custodians of the public trust. They were the men who first brought business-like practices into local government. By their success they established the role of the professional administrator in local government.
The second generation managers (which is the way I would have characterized most of us five years ago) are the men who added sophistication to the earlier model; they experimented with new financing techniques to accomplish physical improvement programs, they utilized computer technology, and they have institutionalized program budgeting.
But I have found in my past year of meeting with managers across the country that there is a cadre of third generation managers working in our towns, cities, and counties – what's more important, it's a large and significant group. Just as the Cookinghams, the Ridleys, and the Brownlows were reformers and change agents in their time and in their way, the third generation manager is a new reformer in this time.
Early municipal reform was concerned with "how to do it better." Today, this is still our concern, but we are also very much involved in the debate over what it is that cities ought to be doing.
The third generation manager is concerned with concepts and purposes as well as operations and process. He accepts the advice of former HUD Secretary. Robert Weaver, that:
"Action without program, problem solving without problem analysis, day-by-day decisions without a philosophy are a travesty of public administration. They are inexcusable and dangerous in the modern world where public policy is so vital to the well being of all citizens.”
What else sets the third generation manager apart? It is that he has added to his formal training qualities which can't be taught in the university – the quality of humanity and the quality of leadership.
A principal characteristic of the third generation manager is his humanism. To paraphrase Charles Reich, he is a man enjoying a new relationship to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land.
It is of more than passing interest that an increasing number of third generation managers are entering the profession from new but allied fields, like the model cities program and community development, and through mid-career transitions. This new career development ladder leading to the manager's chair produces a manager with a humane sense of community. Managers who are leading their cities to effective participation in these new social programs share this humane quality. These managers are accustomed to listening to the citizens they seek to serve, to getting to know them and to meeting them on their turf. They are finding out what the real needs are.
How important this is, is illustrated in one scene in the movie "The Public Will.” Hal Holbrook, the actor who narrates that film, talks about priorities and how city governments must be responsive to what the people want. "Ask a man if he wants housing," Holbrook says, "and if that's the only question you ask, you're apt to go off half cocked and get his house started. But ask the same man which he wants more, a house or a job, and you're likely to get a totally different answer." If American local government is to be truly responsive, then the people who run the government have got to get to know those who don't.
I know that you are listening, and I know many of you are up to your elbows in making your cities better places by working with community groups and by serving as catalysts to make things happen. That is part of being a third generation manager. Yet there is more.
The third generation manager displays his humanism in his management style as well.
He seeks to create a government which responds more sensitively to the needs of those who are a part of that system. He works to overcome the impersonality of the organization; he believes that hierarchy must concern itself with the individual. He effects a style of management which encourages this transformation of his own organization as a worthy, though difficult, goal.
Another distinguishing characteristic – perhaps the most significant – of the third generation manager is his quality of leadership.
More than 20 years ago, Clarence Ridley told a group of Texas Managers, "To be a manager, you must first be a man." That's what this Conference is about: The Man in Management.
The Individual.
The human being who alone, and who with his brothers everywhere, makes and will always make all the difference in the world.
Leadership is an intensely personal characteristic. Men lead and women lead. Organizations, systems, agencies cannot lead. A manager, armed with ideas that have come to fruition exerts infinitely greater influence over progress than any management science system. Progress results from action upon a few good ideas, action which more and better techniques and technology can support, but never initiate.
Think what this means.
In 1957, a committee of citizens working under the Chairmanship of John Gardner observed:
"There is a premium on men and women with a talent for innovation, for individuals who can move beyond the limits of present fashion. In a time of breathtaking technological and social changes there is a need for people who understand the process and the nature of change and who are able to cope with it."
Men and women who will exercise courageous leadership in these times of change still command a premium.
Change can be planned and directed for the benefit of our communities. And each of us has the opportunity and the obligation to bring about in our community the kinds of changes that our vision embraces.
I say each of us, for if not the public manager, to whom shall we look. To whom has the community entrusted executive direction of the powers of local government? Who in the community has greatest opportunity to communicate with elected officials and with leaders of the many organizations within the community? Who has been engaged to bring professional expertise to the job of community development?
To see need, to identify a problem, to possess idealism: even these are not enough. It is the solution that we strive for. Remember Robert Kennedy's oft quoted words: "Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream of things that never were and say, why not?"
We cannot wait for others to dream, look for others to act; we must not relegate solutions to the national level and then throw up our hands in despair at the immensity of it all.
To dream the impossible dream, and to make things happen, takes more than long days at work.
It takes commitment. Our new Miss America, Terry Anne Meeuwsen said it so simply in her interview two weeks ago: "Commitment is the most important word in my vocabulary, for I firmly believe that one man is no more than another if he does no more than another." Energy and commitment also distinguish the third generation manager.
Sometimes I think that our country has been afflicted by an unrecognized plague that could be called "urban problemitis." The symptoms of the epidemic can still be detected: myriads of people in every field fretting endlessly about "urban problems," and applying that worrisome label to every variety of real or imagined ill. Sometimes, too, it has seemed that even municipal managers have not been immune to "urban problemitis."
Certainly it is necessary to perceive the imperfections and wrongs about us, to be informed of problems. Yet I am reminded of Robert Frost's observation that "The reason worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work."
Doing the job, as all of you know, means that from time to time you are going to be shot at, about which Winston Churchill remarked, "Nothing in the world is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."
PLANTING AND HARVESTING – THE FERTILE SOIL OF ICMA
So far, I've been talking about the individual, personal role of managers and managership. What about our collective characteristics, expressed by and through our Association?
Since the Goals Project of 1968 and 1969, we have become a unified profession. We are increasingly numbering as ICMA members, the COG Directors and the county administrators.
Within our Association, both are accommodated as subgroups, as are managers of large cities and managers of our smallest communities. Perhaps it is time for us even to consider what should be our relationship with those mayors who are the chief urban administrators in their cities, as well as with model cities, planned variation program and community development administrators who exercise broad management responsibilities.
Ours is an open profession, too. In my opinion, this is another strength which we should preserve. We ought not close the door to those who wish to join us, whose jobs qualify them for membership, and who are willing to abide by our reasonable standards of professional conduct and our Code of Ethics. We cannot close our doors any more than we can close our minds. To close either would shut out light, new vistas, and the energizing breeze of change.
Our diverse membership, unified in the Association, gives ICMA strength and it provides us the unique opportunity to speak to many new issues as we now are doing through our National Urban Issues Project.
Through ICMA and our National Urban Issues Project we are developing a proper professional approach to national decision making and priority-setting as they relate to cities and local government.
I am convinced that as a profession, we have always had a greater capability, a larger potential, than we demonstrated. Some of our most severe critics have recognized this and their criticism has been founded in our failure to apply our full potential to accomplishing the things we profess to believe in.
Now we are changing that. We are taking an historic step for our profession. Through our National Urban Issues Project we can have major impact on basic policies which determine the quality of urban life in America. This new activity will make our Association a direct participant in the discussions and decisions relating to national urban policy at the legislative and executive levels.
The national government is becoming the leading force in our society's efforts to cope with urban problems. For us, this has meant trying to deal at home with problems and difficulties affecting the citizens to whom we are responsible, while the development of the policies and the mobilization of resources to combat those problems has been out of our hands. We have desperately needed to become a part of a decision system which is national in its character. We are doing that.
We are not alone in this effort. The National League of Cities has pioneered the strategy of developing comprehensive municipal policy statements as the basis for an action program.
The work of the Committee for Economic Development is well known to all of us. More recently, the American Institute of Architects published its National Policy Task Force Report which closes with these words that have much meaning for us:
If we are to achieve some coherence and not let freedom vanish into chaos, we have no alternative but to deal with all the tumbling forces and facts of here and now, and then find levers that have the power not only to move but to win majority consent.
This is more than a "clear concern" as I'm sure you realize. Our experience in the 60's points up our need for better predictive capacity about what the future holds and a greater ability to deal more directly with the development of that future. Not only must cities be better able to anticipate the implications of such policies as model cities, employee labor relations, manpower development, neighborhood involvement, and grants review, they must be able to respond in pro-active fashion.
Our National Urban Issues Project will bring our urban expertise and our managerial point of view to bear on policies as they are being developed at the national level. The result will be more rational and reasonable programs for us to manage at the city level.
As we continue our pursuit of a glimpse into the future, remember Albert Schweitzer, a great humanitarian who served his fellow men in a remote locality in Africa, and yet through his ideas, he served people everywhere. Schweitzer was no longer a young man when he reminded us, "It is through the idealism of youth that man catches sight of truth, and in that idealism he possesses a wealth which he must never exchange for anything else."
While our profession is the product of its past, it is a young profession.
While we build on the tradition inherited from those who have gone before, I know from our work together over the years that there is a great deal of youthful idealism within all of you who serve your communities in public management.
So we listen to the youth among us. We seek to know their minds and their hearts, else we cannot know the future. That future will soon be in their hands.
True we all run along the ragged edge of that broad generalization which would say that all our young are of a single mold. There are those who have made no inquiry into the past nor examined the present and whose judgment we need not report. However, we should listen carefully to the youth who bring to the examination of our society the vision of idealism, the foresight of the informed, and the wisdom of a trained intellect.
Those who have submitted to an intellectual discipline speak with a wonderful wisdom. Listen to one young professional as he lays it out for us:
"We are not today what we were yesterday. Tomorrow we will have turned again to something else. This inherent quality of change, of constant adaptation to a changing community environment, is the essential ingredient in the recipe for our future success.
"Life is a quest to know the unknown, to make certain the uncertain future. As managers, we must continue to develop personal curiosity, imagination, a sense of humor, distrust of dogma, and self-understanding as alternative to an all-embracing ideology; the future demands of us flexibility and not a rigid structure that breaks when hit by the unexpected.
"The manager is an individual who alone must respond in his own way to a tomorrow much different than today."
This young professional comes out with Clarence Ridley: Management begins with a man; and with the theme of this Conference: Man in Management.
PLUGGING AWAY
One final thought, before I bring these remarks to an end. This Conference is a time when we should ask ourselves whether the unspoken values and assumptions we all carry around with us still reflect the world we really live in.
Even truth changes. What we once knew to be a fact just isn't any more.
Only 400 years ago, the world was flat. It was a fact that people lived by. It was true.
But even so the round earth spun in space.
Today, the world is a sphere. It is a fact that we live by now.
(But even now there is a "Flat Earth Society.")
That in a nutshell is the dilemma of man: The truth we think we know changes (constantly).
I believe we face a dilemma of belief in our profession. I can express it best as questions which reflect an unknown quality inherent in our concern.
Has the stress of this decade disclosed a weakness in our form of government?
Do city managers really do anything about the problem of racial discrimination? Or unemployment? Or inadequate housing? Or education?
Is our goal recovery from urban ills or is it to cushion the impact of urban decay?
Have our efforts really contributed to the improvement of our cities?
Have Mayor-Council-Manager teams in Council-Manager cities been courageous and innovative?
How often do you feel like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland who was obliged to run ever faster to stay where she was?
I have no answers for these questions, and I know many managers are uneasy about such basic issues. Our record is good – on a relative scale – but we can't escape the fact that our problems today are essentially the same as those of 5 years ago – and some are even more serious today than before.
Martin Meyerson, President of the University of Pennsylvania, has this discouraging view:
"Local government, which had been in the forefront of administrative innovation has lost that vitality. The City Manager movement had once been an inspiration for all government . The steam seems gone. Perhaps the malaise is a general one of our country and our world."
Another commentator, Nicholas von Hoffman, writing in the Washington Post exclaims:
"The long run is here. We've been buying their whimpy plans, programs and pilot projects for decades. The due date has come and gone on all of them, and there's nothing to show for it but new proposals to decentralize or centralize, to coordinate or to better utilize our resources. None of it has saved the cities or seems to have anything to do with whatever it is that has destroyed them."
Could it be that we have been so overwhelmed by the need to do things that we have had too little time left to think about what we are doing? Today operations seem to dominate purpose.
The practical has taken over from the ideological, and while this seems to have many advantages, pragmatism may be misleading us.
Are we performing a ritual rain dance which won't necessarily bring rain even though it does make the tribe feel better? Have we become entrapped in a snare of belief that since society is increasingly complex, then the problems of that society and their solution must be equally complex?
A central challenge before us must be the constant effort to simplify, to develop clean lines of attack, to ferret out complexity, to seek basic issues and focus on them.
One of our members has said:
"More stress must be placed on the moral edge of management. Neutrality and bargaining for their own sakes can be an illusion. A good manager must have the capacity and confidence to lead."
Complexity and change, pragmatism and philosophy, establish a cordial climate in which the third generation manager may function. We have these managers in increasing number; we have opportunity for them to display their effectiveness. This fortuitous combination is ample reason for optimism about our urban future.
Recently at a meeting of ICMA's Urban Corps Advisory Committee, one of the members said of her involvement in the community, "Where you are is where it's at." A profundity so simply stated that its message to us may be missed.
Where you are is where it's at.
Not only do we not have to look for the center of urban activity, we cannot escape it. It is part of us and we of it.
There hangs on the wall of my office a poster by Sister Corita with these words found on Adlai Stevenson's night stand after his death. I suggest that they apply as aptly to you as to those whose likenesses illustrate the poster: John and Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King:
"It can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not trim his sails, but instead, challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people."
And when you – and those who strive with you – have caused the wind to blow more kindly over the world's people, remember then what we are told in the Book of Tao: "When the best leader's work is done, people say 'We did it ourselves!"'.