I exhaled, took a bow, and walked toward the piano. I had decided at the last minute not to bring sheet music. It was just me and the instrument, the orchestra to one side and the audience to the other. I had given speeches to crowds this size with no discomfort, but this was terrifying. Lose your place in a speech, you can take a breath and resume. Lose the orchestra in a fast-moving passage, and you might never find your place again. But I had practiced this thing into the deepest furrows of my brain. I was ready. I settled onto the bench, breathed again, looked at the maestro, and gave a little nod.
The clarinet began with that famous trill, turning into a scale that bends into a high note, sounding just enough like a siren to suggest that the piece is in some way about the American city. The horns join in as the clarinet swingily pipes out the main theme, then the other sections begin joining in. I enter with the low notes on the piano, raising the tension in a slow crescendo up to the big moment when the orchestra arrives in full force. At first the piano is doing little more than punctuation, but then the powerful chords come, and the thrilling sequence of flying fingerwork, urgent yet disciplined, fast and precise, one passage supposedly inspired by the rhythm of an accelerating train as a panicking Gershwin sat on board and scrambled to compose the piece in time for the deadline of his composer’s commission.
I kept time with the maestro out of the corner of my eye, alternately working the piano and hanging back during the passages of rest, until the final, lyrical flight known to anyone who has ever seen a United commercial or Woody Allen’s Manhattan. The review in the Tribune later would say that “technique sometimes took precedence over expressiveness.” Still, “Although it looked like stunt casting . . . Buttigieg acquitted himself well,” the critic concluded. I muddled a couple runs but felt the thrill of nailing most of the hardest parts, all the while sensing the audience following intensely as the piece soared to its emphatic and muscular finale.
And when it was over, the crowd sprang onto its feet. Through the glare of the stage lights I made out a few familiar faces but saw mostly strangers, cheering, delighted. I’ll never know if it was the music that moved them most, or the spectacle, like the end of a tightrope act, of seeing someone succeed who might have fallen at any moment.
THE EXPERIENCE BROUGHT TO MIND a comment I had recently 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.
TWO WEEKS AFTER that Gershwin performance, I committed publicly to a more widely consequential effort: to confront a thousand vacant and abandoned houses in a thousand days. It would become one of the defining projects of my administration, but it also had the potential, like the symphony performance, to be my most visible disappointment. Previous administrations had torn down hundreds, but never seemed to get ahead of the contagion of blight. By the time I was campaigning for mayor, it was the number-one issue we heard about when knocking on doors and making phone calls. Despite years of work and millions of dollars, there always seemed to be more vacant houses than the city could deal with—so many that when I first took office, no one could confirm how many we even had.
It was clear that we would need to do something different, with more resources and an intense approach. Soon after taking office I convened a task force, which spent a year analyzing the problem. Mayor’s office interns were handed over to code enforcement to help count and classify properties. County, state, federal, private, and nonprofit partners came to the table. We debated the use of land banks, explored novel applications of federal funding, and explored the role of utility disconnections in speeding or slowing progress.
The result was an extensive report explaining the various conditions and issues to take into account. The sophistication of the analysis was at a level South Bend had never seen before. But I was also fearful that we had just done one more exercise in describing the problem, without actually solving it. And I knew the residents of our city had no use for a data-obsessed mayor who didn’t know how to turn analysis into action.
Without a different level of motivation, our administration and community might never get ahead of the issue, no matter how well we had assessed it. Worse, knowing the many nuances of the issue could actually make it harder; anyone who has sat on a big committee with lots of experts knows the feeling when people around the table display their expertise by mentioning one complication after another, admiring the dimensions of the problem in an ever-deepening discussion that cries out for some modicum of simplicity so that there can be action.
So, after a session sitting with my team over a draft of the report and talking through ways to announce our findings and begin moving toward an approach to actually fix the problem, I leaned back in my chair and took a breath before proposing that we use the richness of the report to back a goal of childlike simplicity: “Let’s promise to deal with a thousand houses in a thousand days.”
The faces of my staff immediately tightened with worry; they, after all, would have to do most of the implementation.
“It’s a little more complicated than that, Mayor,” someone piped up.
They were right, but it was also clear that a simple (or even simplistic) goal would create the kind of risks, and rewards, that could cut through the problem of analysis paralysis. When I added that we should create a real-time online scoreboard to update how many houses we had fixed, demolished, or failed to deal with, the staff members looked simultaneously excited and terrified.
The announcement certainly made us vulnerable, even more so than when I had stepped out onto the stage at the Morris. The public would know if we succeeded or not, and would hold us—that is, hold me—accountable if we failed. But with that vulnerability came a kind of energy, too. People would be watching closely, keen to pick up on mistakes, looking to see if we could really achieve this audacious goal. And inside the administration, the team would have a sense of urgency and focus motivated by a desire to deliver for the public. Just as I couldn’t miss more than a day of practice, we couldn’t miss any opportunities to raise funds, prod bureaucracies, or persuade residents to help us meet the goal. The very difficulty of meeting the deadline would provide its own propulsion, making good on Bernstein’s adage.