Looking for a Leader in a City That’s Lost Its Civic Culture : RLA: In searching for a person to run it, the organization needs to rethink its bias toward business and methods of choosing leadership.
RLA’s search for a new leader who will enjoy broad-based support from the city’s old-guard leadership may be doomed to disappointment. It may even be misdirected.
Los Angeles used to be run by civic leaders who could draw on a civic culture. If the goal was to build a music center, for example, the money was raised and the center was built. Politicians were necessary, but not sufficient. As for community leaders, there was really only one community that mattered, and it reached out to others only as far as it wanted to. The paucity of public buildings like the Music Center suggests that while L.A.’s civic leaders of yore may have engaged in good works, they were not especially eager to create structures for the masses.
That style of civic leadership is no longer enough. In fact, it is all but gone. There are leaders in the city’s various minority communities who represent constituencies and argue for the needs of their people. But in the mainstream, there are no similar leaders, no builders ofmusic centers and art museums.
The L.A. business community--the traditional core of civic leadership in every U.S. city--is dispirited and divided by the recession. Aerospace is leaving town. Real-estate development is on hold. The entertainment industry is thriving, but it has never expressed much interest in the city. There is, as Ray Remy, president of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce, put it, “no Kiwanis Club where everyone comes together.”
The civic associations that used to play major roles in governing the city are also quiet. A few still seek an active voice, but they struggle for membership at a time when most women are working and haven’t the time for volunteerism, and most business people are buried with too much to do and too few resources to accomplish much. The religious community, with a few exceptions, hasn’t the voice, and it may not have the constituency, for the kind of social action it undertook a generation ago.
If Mayor Richard Riordan has a vision of the city, he will be hard-pressed to enact it, given the weak role the City Charter assigns him. The members of the City Council, for their part, act more like community leaders than political leaders. As a rule, they lack politically important contacts in districts other than own. And, given the size and diversity of their districts, they tend to overlook smaller communities within them, concentrating instead on their main supporters. It used to be that a council member would become an honorary member of a Chinese family association, or a Mexican-American village club. Yesterday’s politics of recognition has been replaced by the politics of single ethnic representation.
As it begins its search for new leadership, RLA seems to have learned that big business is not going to come to the rescue in South-Central. Not now, at least, when big business is downsizing. Small businesses, which account for 80% of the commerce in the city, are a much better bet. So why is RLA looking for a CEO-type from a large corporation?
A CEO, to be sure, would bring resources to the non-profit riot-recovery organization. That is, after all, how business executives become civic leaders: If you buy a table for my event, I’ll buy a table for yours. But a retired CEO can only bring skills, and the skills it takes to run a large corporation may not be the right ones for nurturing small businesses in a complex, racially and ethnically diverse community.
There is also a philosophical question: Is a business leader the right kind of person to head RLA now? What’s needed, especially in a city where power has been atomized, is a leader with political experience, one skilled in working with different kinds of groups, developing consensus and forming coalitions. A CEO of a large corporation may have such skills, particularly if he or she has represented their corporation to the outside world, but they are not necessary for advancement within the corporation.
And not all business leaders have the time for, or the interest in, community leadership. The changes in the U.S. economy during the last decade have created a business structure that may no longer even allow for that kind of time and interest, let alone reward them.
The RLA experience should have reminded us how difficult it is in today’s Los Angeles to find one person to represent many. It is equally difficult for many people to make decisions. What’s needed is for many people to choose the one; to build a network of leaders from all the communities of Los Angeles--racial, ethnic, civic, business, religious--that can agree on one person. While diversity in the structures of power is needed, the idea that someone unlike yourself can faithfully represent your interests must be accepted again.
It takes resources, skills, commitment and optimism to change things, but waiting for a single L.A. leader who combines all these characteristics is like waiting for Godot. Maybe the solution is to build on networks of people who can bring these qualities to the table and let them select their own leader.
Instead of waiting for someone to bring us together, maybe it would be simpler to try coming together.
