Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them. No matter how much I liked my clients and my colleagues, delivering for them could not furnish that deep level of purpose that I craved.

what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story.

The twilight will unfold, unhurried, across the St. Joseph Valley. There is soon just enough to make out the heron, if we are lucky, stalking cautiously on the opposite bank. To some he is a villain, guilty of helping himself to fresh protein from neighbors’ koi ponds, but to me he is an elegant bird.

heard from former Baltimore Mayor and then-Governor Martin O’Malley about being a good mayor: that leaders make themselves vulnerable. It was an odd thing to hear from a mayor best known for data-driven performance management, not for emotional resonance. But that was precisely the point: using data in a transparent way exposes leaders to the vulnerability of letting people see them succeed or fail. Being vulnerable, in this sense, isn’t about displaying your emotional life. It has to do with attaching your reputation to a project when there is a risk of it failing publicly. The more a policy initiative resembles a performance where people are eager to see if the performer will succeed, the more vulnerable—and effective—an elected leader can be. The possibility of highly visible failure has an exceptional power to propel us to want to succeed, and that power can be harnessed to motivate a team or even a community to do something difficult.