Extended Analogy Day: Sports Edition

I meant to post this yesterday to go with the Analogy Day themed posts...but I didn’t.

I previously posted on the business analogy with City Hall, and I still think it’s very flawed, but let’s look at two of our mayor’s passions to put it in terms that might relate to him: sports and business.

Mayor Ford is more of a football guy, but I think the appropriate analogy here is to the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays of Major League Baseball. And he did leadoff his Empire Club speech with a baseball analogy, so this probably isn’t too far off-base.

Vince Naimoli Era

The Tampa Bay Devil Rays (who would later drop Devil from their name) were an expansion baseball franchise in 1998 owned by Vince Naimoli (read more in Jonah Keri’s book The Extra 2%). Naimoli was a successful local businessman who made his fortune as a turnaround specialist. What he would do is buy failing companies and slash every expense possible until they were profitable. He was very good at this and subsequently applied this approach to his baseball team.

The thing is, a baseball team is not a utility company. A lot of the success of the team from a business perspective comes from ensuring a positive fan experience. Naimoli didn’t appreciate this. Instead, he pursued his mission of cost-cutting with single-minded intensity. These included:

• ·         Having a zero tolerance policy for outside food in the stadium. When an elderly woman was denied entrance because she needed almonds for her diabetes, she had to wait outside the stadium until after the game to leave with her tour group
• ·         A high school band that was scheduled to play the national anthem was asked at the last minute to pay for tickets for each student
• ·         Naimoli thought the Internet and e-mail was a fad, and refused to pay for it for team staff. This meant that they had to setup their own access and the sales and marketing team was reaching out to groups from Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL addresses.

This penny-pinching and thriftiness alienated fans and local businesses, who did not want to be a part of the team culture. For Naimoli, it was just business; he is renowned nationally for his philanthropy and giving nature. 

Likewise, Rob Ford is noted for helping others out of pocket and genuinely caring. But this approach is disconnected from how people are treated at City Hall. Consider the parallels:

• ·         At the first all-nighter Executive meeting, a mobility-impaired woman was denied her speaking slot when she didn’t have enough time to get from the overflow room to the main room.
• ·         Ford has consistently railed against the 25,000 free metropasses that are given out, many of them to TTC employees who use them to get to work and people who are blind or otherwise cannot get around the city.
• ·         Despite promising to use better metrics to improve service for citizens, Ford and his allies voted to stop expanding 311.

Naimoli wasn’t just a spendthrift. At times, he got impatient with the time it takes to build a team and abandoned a youth plan to overspend on over-the-hill players. These were unwise investments motivated by a desie to have something shiny rather than something good. In turn, the team cut back on investing in the future and gave up draft picks and prospects.

Likewise, Rob Ford abandoned the paid-for and planned Transit City plan in order to pursue the white elephant Sheppard extension that could well be one of the worst financial and planning disasters in Toronto’s history in the odd chance it gets built. He and his brother also tried to sell off the Port Lands for a shiny Ferris wheel, monorail and megamall. And now there’s an attempt to solve capital problems by selling 10% of the dividend-returning Toronto Hydro. All of these decisions are short on analytical thinking and borne out of impatience and impulsiveness.

While Naimoli was owner, the Devil Rays were the laughingstock of the league. They couldn’t do anything right and had historically bad seasons. That all changed when a couple of Wall Street investors recognized the mismanagement had an opportunity to grow. 

Prudent Investment and Creative Thinking

Their first aim was to win back the fans’ trust by treating them with respect and going the extra mile to show that. So they refurbished the stadium, had great promotions at the stadium and gave free parking to all fans who attended (note: please don’t do the latter for all citizens!) They also knew they had to seek new revenues for their small-market team, and began an innovative concert series after games that diversified their demographics.

Not only did the Rays improve their fan experience, they won. On their very limited payroll, the Rays improbably put together a winning team due to out-thinking their competition. Using innovative metrics and tactics such as re-thinking the value of draft picks, young pitchers or why the sacrifice bunt is a bad idea, they identified the best ways to grow and manage a team. The team has since made the playoffs in three of the past four years while playing in the toughest division.

Rob Ford's 25-Person Roster

It’s the Tampa Bay Rays success story that we were promised in the campaign (save the subway idea, which has always been bad) but instead we’re getting Vince Naimoli management. Toronto is really fortunate in that it has a lot more opportunities to grow than a small market baseball team, although it can use some of the same techniques. Tampa recognized that they had a limited payroll given their market size and worked within that. But they also realized that they had to seek opportunities to grow that market size and internal revenue in order to be sustainably competitive.

This realization and thinking- the recognition that investment and creativity done right produce real results- is what we need in this budget process and general city planning. Vince Naimoli failed because he couldn't adapt his experience and outlook to the needs of his franchise. He failed to look deeper into the situation where opportunities existed and went for the quick-fixes. The city of Toronto is far more important than a sports franchise or most any business, and we can't afford those practices. 

Analogy Day: Taking Gravy Far Too Seriously

A tourist visits Toronto

In a way, I never really got the gravy metaphor. I mean, gravy is delicious. Sure, it’s something to have in moderation, but it’s also something to look forward to.

OK, I get it, the idea was to use gravy as a stand-in for the waste within City Hall and focus on the core material. But let’s step back for a moment and see if this analogy is actually a good thing. No, seriously.

2 tablespoons pan drippings

2 tablespoons flour

1 cup milk

1 cup water

Salt and pepper to taste

Gravy is a sauce made from the juices that naturally run from meat or vegetables during cooking. That’s it, not too evil. In fact, it’s a good thing. Making gravy involves taking the secondary runoff from the core material and using it to complement the meal. As opposed to, say, completely wasting that secondary material. Looked at that way, gravy is actually efficient. We take it for granted, but it uses innovative thinking to maximize the materials at hand, precisely what Rob Ford promised he would do.

I can acknowledge that gravy-as-metaphor means something else, that it’s something which is superfluous or unnecessary. Looking at it from that angle too, the gravy metaphor is limited.

When people travel and come back saying they loved a certain place, they’re not going to tell you they loved the fact that chipmunk suits weren’t expensed or a local politician didn’t throw a lavish party. Of course, these things should not be tolerated. But what people really admire in a city are the intangible bonuses. They’ll talk about how the great architecture adds to the mood and character of the city. Or they’ll talk about how pedestrian shopping provides a unique and  more meaningful way to experience the nuances of the city. Or maybe they’ll talk about a great festival or cultural event that was unique and significant to the area. These things are gravy in one sense: they add flavour to the city by using creative thinking to build on the existing structure.

That’s not waste, that’s adding value. So even the most core metaphor of the Rob Ford campaign has problems when you pick it apart. Sure, cancel your council snacks and trim expenses where possible, but the ability to distinguish between waste and value-added reuse and investment is what makes for good management. Failing that is wasting opportunities.     

Analogy Day: City Hall as a Business

National Geographic

So today is analogy day here at the Clamshell, something Cityslikr has addressed recently. 

Analogies are powerful and useful rhetorical tools as they can transfer the properties of an argument into a parallel that is more relatable and understandable. Unfortunately, analogies can be used to misrepresent or hide the flaws in poor arguments.

But today we’ll go through some Fordian analogies and see how they hold up.

First up:

We need to run government like a business

Recently Team Ford has also trotted out the ‘we need to budget like families do,’ a canard that has been debunked. So too has this ‘government like a business’ nonsense; government exists to take care of things that the private sector and its profit-seeking motive is ill-equipped to.

But just for a minute, let’s play this game. Let’s grant the analogy that government should be run like a business in order to look at the quality of the management.

It’s really hard to quantify what makes a great executive, but let’s use the definition that they deliver value through measured risk and meeting target deliverables, set a positive tone for the company with their leadership and sell others on why their particular company is a worthwhile enterprise.

Delivering Value and Meeting Targets

Delivering value as an executive requires a blend of skills, from using analytical thinking to measuring the tradeoffs in various choices to meeting the targets you set out to achieve. Let’s look at the biggest projects of the mayor’s team to evaluate progress in this area.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the mayor’s “Transportation City” plan, which involved cancelling Transit City, building a Sheppard extension and burying the Eglinton LRT line.

I’ve previously written about the lack of value on theSheppard line, and it seems the invisible hand of the free market is giving a thumbs down to it as well. Initially Ford promised $4 billion of the $4.6 billion would be funded by the private sector, but it turns out unicorns do not exist.  

He also asked the province for an advance on completing the Eglinton LRT line on-budget even though his plan has lacked the analytical foresight  common sense to deal with the Don Valley.  The Sheppard line was promised to be completed for the Pan Am games, but now that promise has been reduced to completing one station.  These are not the project management planning characteristics of a skilled executive.

Likewise, Team Ford’s Quixotic gravy crusade is going poorly. Thus far, around $30 million worth of ‘waste’ has been cut, but these include things like the Christmas Bureau for needy children and the Hardship Fund for low-income seniors—hardly what voters had in mind. Despite these cuts, the Ford Team will fall dramatically short of their promise to find $525 million inwaste for 2011. 

Transportation City and the KPMG project failed to measure real value and tradeoffs, analyze problems in implementation or get anywhere close to achieving what the Ford Team promised. If these results were announced at an annual shareholder meeting, the stock would immediately plummet and the demands for management’s resignations would be instantaneous.

Setting a Positive Tone

The CEO is seen as the leader of the organization, the person that sets the tone and direction of the workplace.

In the past week I’ve spoken with a number of City Hall bureaucrats for various reasons, and have added the question to each of them to characterize staff morale. Universally, they say that it is either terrible or the worst it is ever been. One staffer thought it was just her department for a while but then when she asked around discovered that was not the case. Many staffers offered unprompted comparisons to the Mel Lastman years, saying that times were tough then but no one doubted his passion for the city.

This was the common theme of comments from city staff, that they are led by an administration opposed to the very idea of government, and thus them.

This is a problem. You want to change how the city works? Great. That involves motivating a great team- 45,000 employees, in fact- to buy into and implement your ideas. Sometimes workplace culture needs changing, but you don’t go about demonizing people and then hope they adopt your ideas.

A winning CEO has a winning personality to motivate those around him or her, and that is not the case here.

Promoting the City

Lastman, for all of his shortcomings, also had no problem promoting Toronto. He understood that a mayor or CEO is chiefly a cheerleader for their organization and they can grow through more recognition and investment.

Rob Ford, for his purported business acumen, has not used this approach. Instead, he has said whenever he can that Toronto is close to broke and doesn’t have any choice but to cut beloved programs, including libraries and childcare.

This is not a culture that attracts investment or respect. Granted, pointed and realistic conversations about the city’s finances are important and should be encouraged. But that’s not what we have here. Instead, we have an administration that’s focused solely on one ideological angle- cutting- at the expense of growing what they have.

It’s short-sighted management. To continue the business analogy, I didn’t buy an iPad Wednesday because Apple has a good balance sheet. I bought an iPad because Apple provides a good product. Their balance sheet is due to the products and services they provide, just like a city prospers based on its liveability.

Executive Summary

So if we really are treating the city like a business, our management sucks. It hasn’t delivered the value they promised, it hasn’t treated its employees or investors (citizens!) with respect and it hasn’t improved the city’s image.

Since it’s Analogy Day, there is a certain kind of executive that the Ford management style is reminiscent of.  It’s a corporate raider style. It’s an outsider coming in, not caring about respecting other stakeholders or underlying value and stripping assets for short-term gain before bailing. It’s not a great growth strategy and it’s not something one should want to be compared to.

NEXT UP: Re-thinking the gravy analogy