HOLONOMY: the science of interacting parts within wholes.
Holos = Whole.
On = Part.
Nomy = Systematized Knowledge.
The Study or Science of Wholeness.
The balance between Self-Assertion and Integration.
Matthew Dolan, Susan Tompor and John Gallagher, Detroit Free Press
8:23 a.m. EST November 8, 2015
One
year after a federal judge approves Detroit's bankruptcy exit plan,
progress has been made while looming challenges remain, especially city
pensions
The
City of Detroit has more than enough cash to pay its daily bills.
Thousands of busted streetlights have been replaced. City retirees still
receive pension checks, and valuable paintings remain ensconced in the
gilded halls of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
That's the good
news. But a year after a federal judge approved a cost-cutting and
reinvestment plan in the nation's largest-ever municipal bankruptcy
case, Detroit's financial future still hangs in the balance.
Among the greatest concerns: a multibillion-dollar pension bill that starts coming due in less than a decade.
The
city is on the hook to make a balloon pension payment estimated at more
than $100 million in 2024 alone. But if the pension investments do not
perform as anticipated, the bill could be significantly higher.
So
far, the early returns for the investments since the bankruptcy are
falling short. City officials and their watchdogs are already
considering paying more into funds much sooner than prescribed by the
city's bankruptcy exit plan confirmed only a year ago. It's unclear how
Detroit would foot the bill.
How the triumphalist mutation of
liberalism and the anti-liberal politics of identity have together
brought us to the age of exhaustion.
In
watching the flow of events since the turn of the century, even the
casual observer cannot help but be struck by the divergence of opinion
about their meaning. The title of this essay gives the reader notice of
the direction of my thinking, namely, that these several decades
constitute the serial unfolding of two competing party
understandings—one from conservative Republicans, the other from
progressive Democrats, of the meaning of history, each of which guides
domestic politics and foreign policy into definitive and sometimes
procrustean channels. While the conservative version has recently
foundered and its adherents are seeking to find their voice anew,
progressives celebrate the seeming inevitability of their vision (as did
conservatives after 1989). But they approach a shipwreck of their own.
The conservative version failed because
it was predicated on a fixed and unwavering understanding of human
nature that was supposed to be true for all peoples, at all times, in
all places: Liberal Triumphalism. The historical task, many
conservatives thought, was to order politics and commerce in accordance
with that vision. At home, this vision has not prevailed, and what
remains of it is under escalating attack by progressives who have been
emboldened by their hold on political power and nearly all the other
institutions in society. Abroad, the failure—ideational, not military—in
Iraq and Afghanistan to transform authoritarian regimes into
liberty-loving ones has raised deep and troubling questions about how
universal this particular conservative vision of human nature really is.
The conservative “end of history”—ended.
In the progressive moment that is now upon us, progressives argue for a
new version of the end of history. Categorically opposed to Liberal
Trimphalism, progressives offer up a vision that is nevertheless naive,
unworkable, and dangerous. Where conservatives largely sought to extend
their own fixed understanding of human nature abroad, progressives have
sought, with some success, to overwhelm longstanding political,
commercial, and societal understandings at home. Divided by what they
oppose, conservative Republicans at the end of the Cold War and
progressive Democrats today have nevertheless been united in their
belief that an “end of history” of their own devising is, in principle,
possible to engineer and to manage.
This brief sketch has a certain heuristic
elegance. It does not, however, fully canvas the facts and ideas that
swirl about us “like mental dust”, as Alexis de Tocqueville called them,
when describing the status of ideas in the democratic age.1
A more nuanced reading of the contemporary moment and describes three
different paradigms that organize the facts and ideas around us and vie
for our allegiance. The reason is that not all conservatives, and not
all progressives, fit neatly within one or another of the two basic
paradigms; the Venn diagram overlaps—within the minds of conservatives
and progressives, and within the parties of which they are
members—complicate matters. This is especially true today for
conservatives, because recent failures have brought certain background
strands of thought to the forefront,2
whose proponents now seek to offer them up as the organizing center for
the next generation of conservative thinkers and politicians. But this
is true also of progressives, whose recent victories have prompted some
to wonder, as E.J. Dionne recently put it,3
whether we are witnessing an “acceleration of history.” This question,
unthinkable while conservatives dominated the field after 1989, will
invariably set modest progressives against the more emboldened sorts,
and divide a now ascendant progressive party over the question: Just how fast
is America as we have known it, and the world beyond its borders,
bending to the will of progressives—or, rather, to the will of history
itself?
The three paradigms that vie for our
allegiance, therefore, are: Liberal Triumphalism; the anti-Liberal
Politics of Identity; and The Great Exhaustion.
Universal high-speed Internet access is a popular dream these days—everyone from the president to Google, Inc., has embraced it. And the tech press is full of testy critiques wondering why typical broadband speeds in the United States lag so far behind those in, say, South Korea.
Just five years ago, this wasn’t such a hot topic. Back then, the discussion—and action—wasn’t led by the federal government or the private sector. The first movers were a number of diverse but forward-thinking municipalities: cities and towns like Chattanooga, Tennessee; Lafayette, Louisiana; Sandy, Oregon; and Opelika, Alabama.
Motives and solutions varied, of course. But as high-speed connectivity is becoming recognized as crucial civic infrastructure, Chattanooga makes for a useful case study. Its journey to self-proclaimed “Gig City” status—referring to the availability of Internet connections with 1 gigabit-per-second data transfer speeds, up to 200 times faster than typical broadband speed for many Americans—started with visionary municipal initiative, built upon via thoughtful private and public coordination. Most recently, this effort has even begun to show tangible effects on city planning and development, particularly in the form of an in-progress reimagining of a long-sleepy downtown core. In short, Chattanooga is starting to answer a vital question: once a city has world-class Internet access, what do you actually do with it?
The story begins more than a decade ago, when Chattanooga’s city-owned electric utility, EPB, was planning a major upgrade to its power grid. Its CEO, Harold Depriest, argued for a plan that involved deploying fiber-optic cable that could also be used for Internet access. After clearing local regulatory hurdles, the new system was built out by 2010, and every EPB power customer in the Chattanooga area—meaning pretty much every home or business—had gigabit access. But you had to pay for it, just like electricity. And the early pricing for the fastest access was about $350 a month.
“They had very, very few takers,” recalls Ken Hays, president of The Enterprise Center, a nonprofit that since 2014 has focused, at the behest of local elected officials, on strategizing around what Chattanoogans call “the gig.” The head of Lamp Post Group, a successful local tech-focused venture firm, made a point of signing up immediately, Hays continues. But on a citywide level, “we didn’t have the excitement” that talk of gig-level access generates today. And in 2010, he adds, “there weren’t many good case studies out there.”
But broader change was afoot. The announcement of Google Fiber—the Internet search giant’s foray into building out high-speed online infrastructure—sparked new interest. And in 2013, Jenny Toomey, a Ford Foundation director focused on Internet rights, helped organize a summit of sorts where officials from municipalities like Chattanooga, Lafayette, and elsewhere could meet and compare notes. “It was still pretty nascent at the time,” recalls Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. McCarthy, an economist who was then director of metropolitan opportunity at the Ford Foundation. But that summit, he continues, helped spark new conversations about how such initiatives can make cities more competitive and more equitable, and less reliant on the purely private-sector solutions we often assume are more efficient than government. “And over the course of two years since, this issue has just exploded,” he says.
In fact, that summit turned out to be the rare event that actually spawned a new organization: Next Century Cities, founded in 2014, now has more than 100 member municipalities. They share best practices around an agenda that treats high-speed Internet access as a fundamental, nonpartisan infrastructure issue that communities can and should control and shape.
Against this backdrop, Chattanooga was taking steps to demonstrate how “the gig” could be leveraged. The Lamp Post Group had moved into downtown space, and superlative Internet access was just a starting point for the young, tech-savvy workers and entrepreneurs it wanted to attract. “If we don’t have housing, if we don’t have open space, if we don’t have cool coffee shops—they’re going to go to cities that have all that,” says Kim White, president and CEO of nonprofit development organization River City Company.
Starting in 2013, a city-center plan and market study conducted by River City proposed strategies to enhance walkability, bikeability, green space, and—especially—housing options. More than 600 people participated in the subsequent planning process, which ultimately targeted 22 buildings for revitalization (or demolition). Today, half of those are being redeveloped, says White, and more than $400 million has been invested downtown; in the next year and a half, 1,500 apartments will be added to the downtown market, plus new student housing and hotel beds. The city has provided tax incentives, some of which are designed to keep a certain percentage of the new housing stock affordable. The city has also invested $2.8 million in a downtown park that’s a “key” part of the plan, White continues, to “have areas where people can come together and enjoy public space.” One of the apartment projects, the Tomorrow Building, will offer “micro-units” and a street-level restaurant. “I don’t think we would have attracted these kinds of businesses and younger people coming to look,” without the gig/tech spark, White concludes. “It put us on the map.”
The gig was also the inspiration for a city-backed initiative identifying core development strategies that led to the Enterprise Center pushing a downtown “innovation district,” says Hays. Its centerpiece involves making over a 10-story office building into The Edney Innovation Center, featuring co-working spaces as well as the headquarters of local business incubator CO.LAB. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has a project involving a 3D printer lab in the Innovation District, and even the downtown branch of the Chattanooga Public Library has been made over to include a tech-centric education space.
EPB, whose original fiber-optic vision set the Gig City idea in motion, has long since figured out more workable pricing schemes—gig access now starts at about $70 a month—and drawn more than 70,000 customers. More recently, it has also offered qualified low-income residents 100-megabit access, which is still much faster than most broadband in the U.S., for $27 a month. And its efforts to expand into underserved areas adjacent to Chattanooga have become an important component of broader efforts to challenge regulations in many states, from Texas to Minnesota to Washington, that effectively restrict municipalities from building their own high-speed access solutions.
In short, a lot has changed—in Chattanooga and in other cities and towns that have pushed for Internet infrastructure that the private sector wasn’t providing. “Most of this work right now is happening at the local level,” says Deb Socia, who heads Next Century Cities. “It’s mayors and city managers and CIOs taking the steps to figure out what their city needs.” The implications for crucial civic issues from education to health care to security are still playing out. And precisely because the thinking and planning is happening on a municipal level, it won’t be driven solely by market considerations that favor what’s profitable instead of what’s possible. “The beauty of it is,” McCarthy summarizes, “it’s a both/and argument.”
Rob Walker (robwalker.net) is a contributor to Design Observer and The New York Times.
Virtually all leaders believe that to stay competitive, their enterprises must learn and improve every day. But even companies revered for their dedication to continuous learning find it difficult to always practice what they preach.
Consider Toyota: Continuous improvement is one of the pillars of its famed business philosophy. After serious problems in late 2009 led Toyota to recall more than 9 million vehicles worldwide, its leaders confessed that their quest to become the world’s largest automobile producer had compromised their devotion to learning.
Why do companies struggle to become or remain “learning organizations”? Through research conducted over the past decade across a wide range of industries, we have drawn this conclusion: Biases cause people to focus too much on success, take action too quickly, try too hard to fit in, and depend too much on experts. In this article we discuss how these deeply ingrained human tendencies interfere with learning—and how they can be countered.
Bias Toward Success
Leaders across organizations may say that learning comes from failure, but their actions show a preoccupation with success. This focus is not surprising, but it is often excessive and impedes learning by raising four challenges.
Challenge #1: Fear of failure.
Failure can trigger a torrent of painful emotions—hurt, anger, shame, even depression. As a result, most of us try to avoid mistakes; when they do happen, we try to sweep them under the rug. This natural tendency is heightened in companies whose leaders have, often unconsciously, institutionalized a fear of failure. They structure projects so that no time or money is available for experimentation, and they award bonuses and promotions to those who deliver according to plan. But organizations don’t develop new capabilities—or take appropriate risks—unless managers tolerate failure and insist that it be openly discussed.
Challenge #2: A fixed mindset.
The psychologist Carol Dweck identified two basic mindsets with which people approach their lives: “fixed” and “growth.” People who have a fixed mindset believe that intelligence and talents are largely a matter of genetics; you either have them or you don’t. They aim to appear smart at all costs and see failure as something to be avoided, fearing it will make them seem incompetent. A fixed mindset limits the ability to learn because it makes individuals focus too much on performing well.
By contrast, people who have a growth mindsetseek challenges and learning opportunities. They believe that no matter how good you are, you can always get better through effort and practice. They don’t see failure as a sign of inadequacy and are happy to take risks.
Challenge #3: Overreliance on past performance.
When making hiring and promotion decisions, leaders often put too much emphasis on performance and not enough on the potential to learn. Over time, Egon Zehnder, a global executive search firm, had developed a sophisticated means of evaluating candidates that considered not only their past achievements but also their competencies. However, it found that in numerous instances, candidates who looked equally good on paper performed differently on the job. Why?
A partner at the firm, Karena Strella, and her team believed the answer was individuals’ potential for improvement. After a two-year project that drew on academic research and interviews, they identified four elements that make up potential: curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination. They developed interview questions to get at these elements, along with psychometric measures applied via questionnaires. This new model now plays a key role in the search firm’s assessments of job candidates. Egon Zehnder has found that high-potential candidates perform better than their peers with less potential, thanks to their openness to acquiring new skills and their thirst for learning.
Challenge #4: The attribution bias.
It is common for people to ascribe their successes to hard work, brilliance, and skill rather than luck; however, they blame their failures on bad fortune. This phenomenon, known as the attribution bias, hinders learning (see “Why Leaders Don’t Learn from Success,”HBR, April 2011). In fact, unless people recognize that failure resulted from their own actions, they do not learn from their mistakes. In a study we conducted with Chris Myers, we asked participants to work on two different decision-making tasks spaced one week apart. Each task had a correct solution, but only a few people were able to identify it. We found that participants who took responsibility for doing poorly on the first activity were almost three times as likely to succeed on the second one. They learned from their failure and made better decisions as a result.
Leaders can use the following methods to encourage others to find the silver lining in failures, adopt a growth mindset, focus on potential, and overcome the attribution bias.
By Bill Laitner, Detroit Free Press 9:30 p.m. EDT October 4, 2015
Three years ago, Pontiac’s former emergency manager issued a demo directive: the city's big parking deck must be torn down. But no one saw what was coming: costly court fights with an office complex.
For years, Pontiac has forged a legal and public battle to tear down its big Phoenix Center parking structure, smack in the city center, claiming the cost was too much for the economically-downtrodden city.
On the horizon, though, is a possible reversal of the demolition order, an about-face that regional planners say could be a sign of a long-awaited rebirth for downtown Pontiac.
Three years ago, Pontiac’s former emergency manager issued the demo directive. The city's big deck, built in the 1970s, had swelling maintenance costs that Pontiac couldn’t afford, emergency manager Lou Schimmel said. He was seconded by Oakland County officials, who’d been monitoring Pontiac’s fiscal troubles.
But no one saw what was coming — a series of losing court fights with an office complex that depends on the Phoenix Center deck for its hundreds of employees. That ran up another kind of cost: mounting attorney fees. As of October, the total was more than $595,000, Pontiac City Administrator Joe Sobota said.
With the litigation stuck in the Michigan Court of Appeals, legal jousting could go on for years, said Michelle Harrell, attorney for the Ottawa Towers office complex, which sued Pontiac in 2013 to block the demolition. Until recently, both sides seemed dug in for an endless siege.
Yet, in the last three years, as Oakland County saw the Great Recession fading fast, Pontiac’s fiscal status soared. Reversing decades of deficits, Pontiac this year expects to enjoy a $10.8-million surplus in its general fund, Mayor Deidre Waterman said. Thanks to that surplus, Waterman this month hired Berkley’s city manager as Pontiac’s new deputy mayor.
The surplus is allowing new dreams to take shape for revitalizing the city’s long-moribund downtown. They include a reconfiguring of the ill-advised Woodward Avenue loop around the downtown.
After years of inaction, regional planners this month endorsed un-doing the loop, so that motorists cruise through the downtown, not speed past it, Waterman said. In addition, an old theater shows signs of reopening, and a restaurateur with deep pockets seems intent on opening a barbecue joint, she said.
Downtown Pontiac’s warming prospects, coupled with the city’s rising attorney fees for the Phoenix Center, had Waterman repeating her long-held view — the parking deck should stay. But in a major departure, former emergency manager Schimmel said he'd go along with that.
“I have said discreetly to all parties, including the mayor, that any solution they come up with to end this litigation, I would favor,” Schimmel said Friday. His view remains crucial because Schimmel still oversees Pontiac’s finances from his role, appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder, on Pontiac’s Transition Advisory Board. He signaled that, at last, he would defer to Waterman on the Phoenix Center.
“I’d like to see the mayor settle this,” said Schimmel. Ironically, it’s Schimmel who's largely credited with ending the city’s fiscal woes, through sweeping layoffs, privatizing and budget balancing, bringing on the very conditions that seem to justify keeping the Phoenix Center.
The sprawling deck has 2,800 parking spaces on three stories, topped by a vast rooftop amphitheater that holds 3,000 fixed seats plus space for 3,000 lawn chairs. The rooftop concert site once drew not just Pontiac residents but music fans from across the county, said Mike Stephens, a partner with his father Chuck Stephens and other investors in the Ottawa Towers office complex.
“They’ve had Aretha Franklin, the Beastie Boys, a lot of R&B artists, and people continue to say they have fond memories of coming here,” Stephens said. “We’d like to see that come back,” he said.
That would be by night.
By day, saving the structure would let Stephens fill the twin Ottawa Towers with new office tenants, bringing as many as 2,000 more workers to the downtown, “to buy lunch and gasoline and who knows what else,” said Blair McGowan, owner of the Crofoot Banquet Hall and nightclub, a block north of the Phoenix Center.
After Schimmel ordered the deck razed, the city closed it in August 2012. Crofoot customers soon complained, said McGowan, who besides running his Pontiac business is a partner in restoring Detroit’s Masonic Temple. When the Crofoot holds a concert, “people only have so much patience — they want to park nearby and come right inside in their club clothing, but the surface lots fill up, and then they can’t find a place and they just leave the city,” he said.
A decision to keep the big deck would show that Pontiac has learned what others know across metro Detroit, in myriad downtowns and shopping spots: Parking drives development. New decks are going up in Mt. Clemens and Rochester. Other towns including Ferndale are mulling whether to build them.
In auto-centric southeast Michigan, a region largely bereft of mass transit, not much happens without access to abundant parking for consumers as well as employees, said Deputy Macomb County Executive John Paul Rea.
“As Pontiac fills their storefronts, there’s probably going to be a need again for that parking capacity,” said Rea. He spent eight years in Macomb County’s planning department, pushing development in widely scattered shopping districts.
“In Macomb County, we’ve got a $65-million capital improvement program under way, and a big part of that is building a three-story structure next to our (county administration) building in Mt. Clemens, not just for people to utilize our county services but also to engage the downtown’s needs,” he said.
Parking decks are ideal for driving the intense, multistory urban developments of the future, said Mark Nickita, an urban-planning architect and an elected Birmingham city commissioner.
Nickita is familiar with the Phoenix Center deck; his firm once studied Pontiac’s downtown for would-be developers. In the resulting plan, “we kept the deck and effectively skinned it with a new exterior,” he said.
Decades ago, Birmingham’s leaders went on a deck-building spree, erecting five parking decks on the perimeter of the downtown, Nickita said. The approach fueled so much development that Birmingham’s leaders are back at it, discussing whether to add a sixth parking structure and add additional floors to an existing deck.
“Parking decks have been a huge contributor to the success of our downtown,” Nickita said.
Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com or 313-223-4485.
The link below is to the (annual?) teen battlefield RUN.
http://www.teenbattlefieldrun.org
This is just a part of what this group does.
The aim of the group is to "motivate and empower" teens.
I am just learning about them.
I spoke to a principal named David Edwards recently. They are working to help teens
learn to deal with a wide array of life issues.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Club topic on Ottawa Towers Open House for September 19, 2015 - Phyllis Carroll invited her fellow graduates of the Detroit Microloan Collaborative -
who will be participating in the Open House & Co-Locating.
Todd Gulich speaking on Tech Shop as part of the unfolding PLAN (he visited and toured on the way to MOPOP Festival and picked up materials for distribution on behalf of our CROSS-POLLINATION efforts in developing the Entertainment/Entrepreneurial District)
Hubert Price, on advocacy towards a Library Annex at Ottawa Towers as part of the unfolding PLAN
Phyllis Carrol introducing fellow Entrepreneurs, recently graduated from Lifeline Solutions, New Economy Initiative, Women's Foundation collaborative Entrepreneurship program at Tech Town - supported by Michigan Economic Development Corporation and Huntington Bank -
Tae Wallace on Community Center development in 8 School Properties purchased by Ottawa Towers
Bethany on her evolving fashion line in partnership with Phyllis Carroll
Harrell's Italian Ice, Christine Myers
Kevin's Cheescakes - moving into 2nd Stage
Daniel Johnson - Dignity Memorial Providers of Detroit
For context, viewed Bruce Katz on the future of Innovation Districts and Placemaking - to understand the assets of Ottawa Towers and Phoenix Center as aids to catalytic economic and community development efforts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g58dujNkN2U
