(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 592: New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Joshua Schank to talk about his book New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies: Improving Policy Outcomes in the Public Sector. Joshua talks about the inner workings of LA Metro, benefits of openness and transparency as well as strategic planning. We also share frustrations about meetings, transit board structures, and agency fiefdoms.

You can find this episode at Streetsblog USA

Also find this episode and our archives here.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

We’re a consulting firm that works primarily with transit agencies on strategy and finance. I’ve been here about four and a half years. Prior to that, I was the chief innovation officer for LA Metro for six and a half years, and before that, I had a long career in Washington, DC, starting as the transportation policy advisor to Hillary Clinton during the authorization of what became SAFETEA-LU.

And after that, at the Bipartisan Policy Center running their transportation program before becoming the president and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation. But now I’m based in Los Angeles, and I teach at UCLA when I have some time to do that, which is really fun. And I also write, which is, I guess, what we’re here to talk about.

The lifestyle is much more comfortable. You have access to way more things that you can do without a million other people trying to do them at the same time. So it is a place that I think is much easier, particularly to raise a family, but also to have a comfortable lifestyle.

I’m in San Francisco, and I grew up in Texas, so I have no reference for the East Coast at all necessarily. So I’ve been there a number of times, uh, for conferences and things, but my world is Texas and California for the most part, and maybe a little summer in Colorado.

Is this something that you found out that you were interested in when you were a little kid, or is it something that you grew into later in life?

So I was growing up in suburban Connecticut at the time, and my father took a sabbatical and we went to live in Paris. And in those days, in the ’80s in Paris, it was totally acceptable to turn your 10 or 11-year-old child loose on the city and let them roam free as they desired, which is exactly what my parents did.

And the freedom of being able to get wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, was incredible to someone who until that point had been restricted to when I could convince my parents to give me a ride somewhere. So I really appreciated and loved that, and from then on was kind of committed to the idea that everyone should have that freedom of movement, whether you can drive a car or not, whether you choose to drive a car or not, uh, we should all enjoy those same liberties because that’s what brings happiness and prosperity.

How long did it take you to pull all the lessons that you learned together at LA Metro?

None of us were real experts in how to make change in a public agency, and we were learning while we were doing it, and we made a lot of mistakes. And the point of the book is to say, look, hey, here are the mistakes we made and here’s where we had some success, so you can learn from that. Uh, once we left- The three of us started thinking about, me and my co-authors, we started thinking about, like, what is it that we would have done differently, and let- can we define those in more simple terms in terms of, like, what are the specific rules that you should follow?

What are the specific tactics that can be especially useful? Because we think that would be really helpful for other people who want to make similar change. And so that’s what we did, but yeah, we’d been thinking about them for some time before we started to write them down.

We thought that would be far more interesting to people and keep them reading so that they could absorb those lessons.

Um, I think that there are lots of people who couldn’t believe that we would write, uh, so explicitly and candidly about that experience. But we thought it was really important for people to understand what really goes on in these agencies. You know, there’s a lot of effort by public agencies to preserve themselves as their top priority, and we can understand that.

I mean, they’re preserving themselves for a good reason. They perform a critical function, and we don’t want to see them go away. But at the same time, there’s a lot of improvements that can be made as to how public agencies run and operate, and many people who’ve never worked in them are not aware of those critical changes that are necessary.

So we thought this was a good way to bring that to light, and there are some people who don’t want it to be discussed as openly as we did, but, you know, we’re big believers in that kind of transparency.

He’s telling us what’s happening behind the scenes?” Like, they couldn’t believe that. But I thought, first of all, it’s a great way to build trust with your team, and secondly, it’s the only way you can actually tackle problems is by being open about what they are. And when you hide things from people, it’s much harder to get to the nub of what the issue really is and therefore solve it.

We don’t wanna share that.” And so we were like, “Well, what’s the point of creating all this good information if you can’t share it with everybody,” right?

The way that operations are run for the average bus company or bus agency is very militaristic in nature. It’s very top-down. You know, there’s, there’s a chain of command and authority. And while that might be really critical for military operations, and has some value for bus operations, it really isn’t a great way to run public policy, and public policy depends on openness and transparency to be successful, and the ability to question when your superiors say, “Hey, do this.”

The ability to question that and say, “Why? Why is that important? Uh, maybe could we do it a different way?” That’s really central to good public policy.

It is not for him to be the big hero and take all the credit. It’s not for him to preserve his job above all else. It’s for him to help others become the future leaders of tomorrow. That’s how I met Phil, is that he was involved with Eno, which, you know, does a lot of leadership training courses for people in public transit.

That’s how we met each other, and leadership training really is something that is often underestimated as far as what people need to be successful in the public transit and in public policy in general, but Phil is very focused on leadership. That’s the reason why he’s such a good leader, is not because he’s the world’s biggest transportation expert, but he certainly knows his stuff, but that’s not what makes him special.

What makes him special is he knows how to lead. He knows how to bring people along and get people all working on the same page, and support people who are willing to take risks and make real change.

uh, started out, and they have folks underneath them that have come up through the ranks and done amazing things as well, and it always starts with this one person who believed in a lot of people.

The first big leader I worked for, for example, when I was at Bipartisan Policy Center was Emil Frankel, who was the assistant secretary for transportation under Bush, prior to that had been the secretary of transportation in Connecticut, and his leadership style was exactly the one that I’ve imitated and the one that Phil has, which is being transparent with everybody, being completely accessible to everybody who works for you, and sharing in success and owning the failure.

I think that’s the most critical component, right? If you’re gonna have an innovation office, if you’re gonna make the chief innovation officer in the office of extraordinary innovation, you have to be ready to own the failures and also give credit for success, and that’s exactly what Phil did.

It’s not something you see often at transit agencies.

This isn’t some kind of side project where we try to do a new thing here or there. This is the centerpiece of what we’re trying to do. We are going above and beyond. We’re setting expectations very high to start with, and that’s, you know, that’s a choice that people can make in leadership. You can set high expectations, and when people fall short, say, “Look, we set them high, and we got a lot done because of that.”

Uh, you can overpromise and underdeliver, right? That’s one strategy. Or you can underpromise and overdeliver. I think in public transit, the reason that overpromising and underdelivering is the right call is that it is so difficult to get people to take those risks and to get out of their shell, that you have to set very high expectations for people to get anywhere

You wanted four things. You wanted bus lanes, microtransit, congestion pricing, and PPPs. Why pick those four, and what was that meeting like with Phil when you came in and said, “I want these things, and if we can’t do them, then I’m not coming”?

I don’t know. I, I, that’s certainly not how I would’ve talked to

And why those four things? Well, because at the time, we were looking at a time when on-demand public transit and using your smartphone to connect people to vehicles was becoming a thing that was a radical transformation in urban transit, and public transit was at risk of completely missing that boat and not taking advantage of it.

And so I wanted to figure out how could they take advantage of it. Why bus lanes? Because anyone who’s ever studied transportation planning is very aware of the fact that bus lanes are the cheapest, quickest, most effective way to start moving people more quickly through condensed urban areas. That’s how you do it.

That’s what works, and I wanted to make sure that Phil was open to that idea. Pricing, same thing. You know, we all, we’ve all studied transportation planning enough to know that pricing, whenever it has been implemented, is an effective means of accomplishing numerous goals that we all share with respect to transportation improvements, and I wanted to make sure that that was on the table.

And then P3, because project delivery is now, and as it has been for a long time, is just way too slow and unaccountable in the US, and P3s are a mechanism by which you can potentially bring greater accountability to a major capital project. Now, whether they’ve successfully done that or not, we could talk about, but they certainly have the potential to do that if you structure P3s in the right way.

But also, he was very interested in project delivery, and that’s partly why he took the job. He knew Measure M was coming, and that there was gonna be an opportunity to build out transit in the region, and he wanted to take advantage of that. So he was definitely very open to all those things. Uh, I think that both he and I were a little naive about what it would take to accomplish all of those things, but that’s also one of the things I talk about in the book.

Like, you need a bit of naivete to be successful in this field. Because if you talk to the average person who’s worked at a transit agency for 30 years and you said those four things in 2015, they would say, “You’re out of your mind. We’re never gonna be able to accomplish those.” Okay, that’s one answer.

But the truth is we were able to accomplish a lot of those because we believed somehow that it could be possible, and that’s partly what you need to be successful

of folks who control but don’t control, but do control but don’t control the whole process of creating policy and moving things through the line at LA Metro.

I started my career at New York MTA. I knew something about how they functioned, but I didn’t quite understand, uh, how bad it could be as far as… I imagined, I imagined in my naive mind that most people working in the agency shared the goals that I had. Like, basic things, like improving public transportation.

You know, trying to reduce the number of trips by car. Like, the types of things that you would assume if you’re working at Metro, you care about those things. But there’s a whole swath of people working in and around Metro who just don’t care about those, or any public agency, who just don’t care about those things because that’s not why they got into it.

The person running HR is unlikely to be passionate about transportation. Person running procurement, unlikely to be passionate about transportation. So there’s a lot of people who are in the… And then the board staff are the most egregious example, because the board staff are essentially political people who are now put in a position of dealing with transportation experts at this big agency.

So for those who don’t know, this board staff are essentially support staff for the elected officials who run Metro, who sit on LA Metro’s board. They’re the equivalent of congressional staff, which I was a congressional staffer myself one time. I understand how that works. The difference is that as a congressional staffer, you do get to make really important decisions behind the scenes that lead to legislative change, right?

You make really important decisions and, and you help inform your boss about how to vote on those decisions, what amendments to put in, et cetera. In this case, the people who are doing this, um, are almost like in the job themselves because the electeds have another job. The elected’s job isn’t to be on the board of Metro.

The elected job is to be the county supervisor, be the mayor of Los Angeles, be what- whatever that role is, which also includes sitting on the Metro board. So that you wind up with these staff who have an outsized role and outsized influence, and that’s one thing that makes it unusual. The second thing is that because of the Brown Act The board staff can serve as a proxy sometimes for responding to metro board items, because the Brown Act says that if you’re gonna have all the board together in a discussion, that you have to have it be a public meeting.

You can’t do that behind closed doors, except under a special set of circumstances. So board staff briefings at Metro were created so that the board staff could hear Metro items before they go to the board, and give the likely reaction of Metro board members behind closed doors. And those board staff briefings are where a lot of policy gets made, uh, and people hear and discuss what’s gonna happen, and you’ve essentially got, you know, staffers who are 25 or 30 years old, or maybe they’ve, you know, been there 40 years, but they’re political people who are reacting to transportation experts who have come up with answers to s- to solutions.

So it becomes a very challenging situation that when I got there, I, I almost couldn’t believe it was happening. I,

The, the structures make sense from trying to protect-

So California, almost all the agencies are structured that way here, right? You almost always have elected officials on the board, or sometimes in a couple of cases, they’re elected directly to the board, which I’ve heard is even worse. But if you’re an elected official serving on a board of a transit agency, everything that the transit agency does is gonna be put through that hyper-political lens, and it’s gonna be much harder to have the regional perspective.

So I w- I would argue, and based on my experience at Metro, and I think the book doesn’t say this explicitly, but I believe That strong governance reforms are necessary in California if we’re going to have public transit agencies that are successful.

And so you have to work with it, right? You can’t change it right now. You can in the future, but at the moment, you dance with who brung you.

When we were most successful was when we communicated with and worked with board staff on issues long before they got to the board so that they were part of creating, co-creating with us those big changes. So Metro Micro is a great example. Metro Micro, the microtransit program that we created, from the very beginning, we were working with board staff on what that would look like.

They were bought into the idea. We wanted to make sure that they were comfortable with every step of the way. That’s why the board passed it. Same thing with the Metro strategic plan. There was not a moment where we weren’t communicating with board staff about what was in the plan and how that was gonna transform the agency.

So that’s typically how you can be successful within these environments, and relationships is not just about professional relationships. I talk about this in the book too. Sometimes you really do have to, you know, spend time getting to know people on a social level so that they’re able to connect with you on more than just that one issue when you talk to them, where they can understand, well, you’re getting some pushback, and they’re, they’re gonna stick their necks out a little bit to help you because they understand fundamentally that you’re a good human being who’s trying to do this for the right reasons, and you connect on that level.

So finding the allies within your organization who you can develop strong relationships with is one of the most critical components of success.

Um, but I- I’m a, an unselfish player, and I’m someone who loves, above all, to be able to sprint down the court faster than the other guys and get a layup in there. So whatever that says about my personality, you can read into for yourself.

Like, what’s, what’s this, uh, you know, connection worth in order to get things done inside the agency?

And from the moment I started doing that, I started building relationships with some of the people who were in that group, because even if you never say a word, when you play basketball with people, you have to communicate and figure out how to work together to solve a problem. So some of the ways that people play basketball can tell you a lot about how well they’ll work with you in a public agency in dealing with a problem.

If someone is very committed to showing off how great they are at shooting three-pointers, then that’s probably not gonna be as much of a team player who’s gonna work to get things done. But if someone’s trying to figure out, how do I get the best out of each person on this team to win this game, that’s the kind of guy you wanna work with.

When we got there, the tap card wasn’t that old. It had only been rolled out pretty recently. So Metro was one of the later agencies to adopt a fare card in lieu of tokens, and that was because Metro has 23 different transit agencies that it deals with, trying to get them all on the same card. There’s 88 cities in LA County.

There were a lot of complications in trying to bring all those folks along. And the folks who had built that coalition, that political coalition, had built all the relationships we just talked about to be able to do that. So when we come into that scenario and say, “Oh, that’s great that you did that, but, hey, now we all have the iPhone,” and, you know, some agencies are not even requiring that at this point.

You could just have a credit card. “Can we move towards that?” They’re like, “Who the hell are you?” Like, “Where you been, man? We, we just spent 10 years painstakingly building this system to get to where we are now, and you’re coming in telling us that this isn’t good enough, and you know how to get it to the next level?”

They did not react kindly to that, and I can understand why. But on the other hand, this goes to the issue of transparency. If we came in and said, “Hey, what are the options for getting this to the next level?” A different set of folks might have reacted differently and said, “Yeah, you’re right. We should be thinking about that.

Let’s collaborate on how we bring this to the next level. Let’s collaborate on how we can build the fare payment for the next century that really is far more advanced than what we have today.” But that wasn’t the reaction, and that wasn’t the reaction because that particular part of Metro was a, what we call in the book, an impenetrable fiefdom.

They were not interested in collaboration. They were interested in making sure that they kept control, strict control, over the things that they had under their purview. And collaboration was not of interest to them. They had what they needed to have to do what they needed to do, and if you came in and tried to mess with their stuff, they were gonna push back.

And that’s why we talk about in the book how critical it is to recognize an impenetrable fiefdom when you see it and back off and move on to other things, because we wasted a lot of time and energy trying to work with and collaborate with those folks when it was, it was kinda pointless.

Why can’t we do tap?” I w- I’d just gotten back from London, I think, and I was, like, tapping my credit card, and they’re like, “Well, people like their Clipper cards, you know? Cl- people… We’re doing what people like.” And so it’s, it’s fascinating to see, like, kind of the path dependence almost of we’ve done this thing, and so people like it, and so we wanna keep doing it even if there is an improvement down the line that’s possible.

But at, at Metro, a lot of people had not been on it, and unfortunately, that is true of many American transit agencies, is the people who work there are not necessarily users, and as a result, they often miss the customer’s real perspective on things. Just as an example, when I first got there with fare payment They were still in the phase where you could load your tap card by going to a website, but when you loaded your tap card by going to a website, it would not immediately appear on your tap card because the bus was not equipped to understand that you had loaded your tap card yet.

Until it went back to the depot, it was not going to get that information. So you could load your money on a tap card and then try to get on a bus, and they’d say, “Sorry, you have no money on your tap card.” To me, from a customer’s perspective, that’s crazy. Like, why would you even start there? Don’t start with that.

You’re just disappointing people. Get it to work and then roll that out. Uh, but that’s just not how things were thought of.

From the outside, people could look inside of the world that you’re showing us and say, like, “This is all, this is all bullshit.” How do you hold people accountable if, you know, the riders are, you know, doing what they’re doing, they’re getting on the buses and trains, but the people inside of the agency, like you said, they don’t ride, they don’t understand kind of what’s going on.

They’re… control their little fiefdoms. Like, how do you keep them accountable in this huge bureaucracy that kind of just goes along on its own merry way?

I work with public transit agencies around the country, including some in the Bay Area. I don’t know if you’ve seen the SamTrans strategic plan, but that’s one we worked on, and I’m very proud of it, and I’m very proud of what they’re doing with it, because when an agency takes a strategic plan and makes it into an actual item Which certainly SamTrans has done, and I think Metro has done as well, that’s how you introduce accountability.

Because the strategic plan says, “Here’s the vision for what we’re trying to accomplish, and then here are the goals that will help us get to that vision. And then here are the specific initiatives that we’re going to take to accomplish each of those goals, and each of those initiatives has a specific timeline and a specific lead.”

So there’s a person who’s held accountable, or at least a department that’s held accountable, and there’s a timeline under which they’re held accountable. And if you do that, then you’re at least getting agreement upfront. We all agree these are the things we’re gonna do. We all agree these are the things we’re gonna be held accountable for, and we’re gonna be very public and transparent about how, what we’re doing on that.

I think that is a huge step forward for any public agency that wants to introduce accountability. The problem that you run into with those strategic plans is if you don’t have a strong leader, this is why Phil, again, was so effective. If you don’t have a strong leader that’s willing to push people, then people within the agency will say, “Well, no, I don’t, I don’t think I can do that in that amount of time,” or, “That seems a little too hard,” or, “Let’s scale that back.”

And they’ll set their sights on what they think is something that they’re more likely to be successful in accomplishing. And the key to a good strategic plan is to push people beyond what they would normally think they could do

What was the benefit that you got out of those?

So it wasn’t circumventing the procurement process, but it was opening a portal to new ideas from the private sector in particular. And the reason that was so powerful is that when a new proposal came in, we would gather the departments that were relevant to that proposal and have a discussion about, okay, what do we think about this idea, and is this something that we should be considering seriously?

And when you do that, you push people to think beyond what they’ve already been considering. Now, instead of just saying, “Well, your job is…” And this is what something Phil made very clear. It’s not that your job is just to keep doing what you’re doing. Your job is you always have to be looking out for what else you should be doing or what the new thing is you should be considering that will better accomplish the same goal that you might have had before.

So the vision stays the same, but how you accomplish it can change based on new ideas, new technology. And a lot of times, we would get these new proposals, and we’d come and bring the relevant department, and they would say, “No, thank you. We’re not interested.” In fact, most of the time they would say no. But then they had to justify it.

We had to write a memo to Phil, and then to the folks who were submitting the proposal, explaining why we had rejected it. So that forced them to at least give really good answers for why they were rejecting a proposal. And in many cases, once they started to think about it, or once they started to really consider it, and we pushed them a little bit, they would say, “All right, maybe this is something that we would wanna move forward with.”

So it opened a door to new ideas that I think many transit agencies lack

It was completely insane. But that was the kind of stuff you’re gonna get. You’re gonna get some things like that. But you’re also gonna get some things that are very feasible. You know, one of the projects I was very proud of was we got a proposal for a gondola from Dodger Stadium to Union Station that was proposed to be completely privately funded, and that project is still moving forward.

That’s the kind of thing you get when you say to the private sector, “Hey, we’re open for business. We want your ideas.” They start to think, oh, maybe this kind of thing could be possible. Maybe Metro or maybe whatever agency is someone we could work with on really new, radical stuff.

Because, you know, the gondola is definitely controversial locally. You know, internally is one thing, but then also, like, how you deal with the politics on the outside of some of these proposals of some of the things that you wanna do.

That’s what the gondola is, and that’s what a lot of the projects we worked on are. It’s, like, really game changers. Congestion pricing’s another one. When you work on things like that, there’s gonna be political controversy. Now, the question is, what do you do about that political controversy? Because it’s inevitable that political controversy’s gonna happen.

In the case of both of those projects where we saw highly political challenges, we did a lot of the, what Phil would call, downfield blocking before those projects came to light. You know, we had the idea, as I said, I had the idea for congestion pricing long before I got to Metro, but we waited until the right time to present that, when the political winds of opportunity were going in the right direction and we could throw that idea out there.

That’s when it came up. For the gondola, that idea I’m sure had been around for some time as well, but they saw an opportunity politically with the backing of the mayor at that time, and with the, with Phil being at Metro, to push that forward. The problem with politics is that political winds change, and there’s a new mayor in Los Angeles who’s not as supportive of either of those project, and isn’t thinking that that’s something that she wants to get behind.

Uh, and you can’t control that. You can only control the fact that you try to take advantage of the winds blowing in the right direction at the right time.

Now, we were very much hindered in trying to understand the answer to that question Because trying to get the data from the finance folks to really understand whether that would be the case or not was nearly impossible, but it was something that was worth considering. The problem that free transit ha- is that free transit has now become more of a political slogan.

We were thinking about it in terms of, hey, this is a cost-neutral way to just improve ridership and to get more people riding. Now it’s become a, oh, I’m, I support free transit because I want to become mayor of this city, and it shows that I care about people who ride public transit, who tend to be low income.

And as I’ve said in many places, free transit is only a benefit if you’re clear on what your objective is that you’re trying to accomplish, and if the objective is, well, we really wanna help low income people, it’s far more effective to give low income people money to use on transportation than it is to make fares free for everybody.

And that’s the problem I have with the free transit proposals that we typically see today is they’re not well thought out. Another strategy, which I know Metro is now implementing, which I love, is the mobility wallet, right? You give people cash to spend however they want on mobility, and that can also increase transit ridership while also targeting money for transportation to the people who need it the most.

That’s the kind of policy that I like.

They just heard it somewhere at some policy forum from kind of more a left-wing perspective, and it shows up, and it’s frustrating, especially when you know about frequency and you understand the policies, you know, paying for it. Right. And what people outside of transit circles feel about paying for transit and those types of things, it gets more difficult.

So it’s an interesting discussion, but I, I, I just noticed that you had proposed it before, but it was also in connection with congestion pricing and trying to sell another policy, so there’s something that’s connected there versus just throwing it out there as an idea to win a mayoral election.

It, it’s kind of like the opposite of bumper sticker politics, but it has become more of a bumper sticker. Like, free transit, isn’t that great? I’m giving you something for free, so elect me. That’s very different than, hey, if we put in congestion pricing, then we could offer transit for free, which is a great way of improving transportation overall as a comprehensive package.

There are, uh, a lot of meetings because if you’re trying to get an agency of 11,000 people and a city of four and a half million people and a county of 10 million people

to agree with you, you gotta do a lot of meetings. And that, that’s, that’s, that’s democracy, right? I mean, democracy does require building consensus and, and building support for change. Uh, that is, that is the world we live in. Um, now could there be a way of not having as many meetings? Sure. Uh, you could have stronger political leaders, you could have stronger agency leaders who are saying, “You know what?

I see that there’s support for this. We’re moving forward,” and that’s, that’s the end of the day. But we don’t typically have that in most places, so you’re gonna have a lot of meetings. Now, why is there yelling? There’s yelling because, uh, people who are strongly trying to protect their fiefdom or strongly trying to prevent change for whatever reason that they have to prevent change are often going to be in a position of being unable to explain to themselves or others why they are doing it.

Because it doesn’t feel good to be the person who’s saying no to new ideas, I’m sure. I’m… I don’t know that well because I, I’m not often that person. But if you’re a person who’s saying no to new ideas and you think you’ve got a good reason for it, but you’ve got someone else in your face saying, “Not only is this a good idea, and not only are you wrong, but I’ve got the backing of the CEO who wants changes to occur and is gonna override you if you don’t do this,” that puts people in a pretty defensive posture.

And sometimes I, I think, uh, uh, it’s fair to say yelling is the last refuge of the powerless. That bec- becomes very contentious when you feel like you don’t have the power to do what you wanna do.

Because just like customers are on the front lines and you need to listen to them, the workers are on the front lines and you need to listen to them. They probably know more things than you could possibly imagine. If you can get them to tell you what they are, you’re gonna fix a lot of problems. So I’m a big believer in employee surveys.

The challenge with employee surveys is building the trust in the first place that an employee feels like they can fill out the survey and not face repercussions. It’s amazing how many folks at agencies are worried about being honest in those surveys because they’re worried that they could be punished for that.

You have to have enough trust to allow them to do that. And then the second thing is you have to come back to them the next year and say, “You said this. Here’s what we did. Here’s why we didn’t do this. Here’s why we did this.” You have to show them that you’re listening and you’re making changes as a result of their comments.

But if you do those things, it can be a very powerful and important tool for making improvements at a transit agency.

And to some extent, we found some wins there, right? There were bus lanes that were put into downtown LA when no one was looking during the pandemic that are still there now, and that’s great. But to a large extent, unfortunately, what happened in transit is that people retreated a little bit and they said, “This is a crisis for transit, not just a medical crisis.

This is a crisis for transit because people are not riding it, and we’re losing all kinds of revenue, and we don’t know when that revenue’s gonna come back.” And our perspective was, well, that’s a great opportunity for us to explore, you know, other sources of revenue, ways of saving money, like doing things differently.

And unfortunately, we h- often ran up against the opposite, uh, which was people saying, “Now’s the time I don’t wanna take risks. Now’s the time when I want to avoid risk.” So I think my lesson and my takeaway from that is that a crisis can be an opportunity, but it’s not enough to have a crisis. It has to be very clearly stated by the leaders, the political leaders and the leaders of the agency, that we believe that this is the time to make change.

And I think we didn’t do a great job of making that clear. We didn’t have the support from the electeds to use it as an opportunity to make real change, and so we, we fell flat on a lot of those

Her and Jeff were able to get a lot of stuff out of that, and I find that fascinating that there’s some agencies that, that were able to, like, kind of push forward a lot of different things, and then some had trouble because of that kind of feeling of, “I’m in an unsafe space.” I mean, and, and also, to be fair, I mean, Metro had a lot of deaths during the pandemic as well for frontline workers, so there’s probably a lot of fear that comes from just facing this thing that was happening and seeing something.

You know, change is one of the biggest drivers of fear, right? Um, and so you have fear from the actual things that are happening, and then you have fear from this, this change that’s coming, which, you know, humans don’t do generally well with it.

That was part of what, part of what Phil did was hold senior leadership teams at different, uh, hold senior leadership team meetings at various divisions throughout the r- uh, area, uh, on a regular basis. So we were often going and talking to people on the front lines. I think the, the pandemic created a new level of contention between labor and management because labor was taking the brunt of that pandemic from a health perspective.

And even though Phil and lots of other executives continued to come in every day, uh, most of the Metro employees who were not on the front lines were not coming in and were protected, and that was seen as a, as a big differential

And because we had the mix of agency insiders and naive outsiders like myself, I think that was a really winning combination for trying to make change. If it had just been one or the other, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. And I can’t emphasize enough, having now done this several times, right, when I was at Eno, and then at Metro, and now at InfraStrategies, the people you work with and the people you hire are the most critical factor as far as your success.

And being able to judge which people are the right people to hire is not only, I would say, the most important skill of any leader, but is also where leaders tend to make the biggest mistakes. And I, I, I point to some of those mistakes in the book. I, I made some mistakes in that area, too. We all do. Uh, but getting that right and being honest with yourself about what kind of person you need is critically important.

So I imagine that’s similar for you in that you’re trying to hire people that care as much as you do.

And that’s because, as I said in the book, and I, we, we all follow this Tam principle, uh, named after Tam Nguyen, who was one of the folks who I met who worked in my office. The Tam principle is first you have to decide what it is you’re trying to achieve, then you get back to, all right, what are the steps to achieve it?

And the mistake that we often make in life and in public transit is we start with like, I’m gonna do this thing. Why? Why do you care about it, is the most important thing, and if the answer to why do I care about it is because I want to earn a paycheck, or because someone told me that this was a good thing for me to do, that tells you a lot.

If the answer is because I want to change the world and I see that this is something that’s missing in the world that needs to happen because of all these positive outcomes it will create, that’s the kind of person you want to work with

Or what did you learn from writing the book that you hadn’t been thinking of beforehand?

I don’t remember if I quote it in the book, but one of the first things that Stephanie Wiggins, who was the deputy CEO, one of the first things she said to me when I got there was, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to get what you want?” And it’s a really great piece of motivational leadership advice, because if you’re focused on being right and not on getting what you want, you’re often going to be missing the outcome that you care about because you’re so focused on being right.

And I think writing the book led me to all kinds of understanding about ways that I could have done better, mistakes that I made, ways that I let my ego get in the way of accomplishing that outcome, and I wanted to make sure that other people understood that. And I think a lot of the lessons in the book are related to that.

The extent to which you can say, “It’s not about me, it’s about the outcome,” and then take all the hits you need to take in order to get to that outcome, the more successful you will be. And I think writing the book and being honest with myself about the missteps was an important phase in that evolution.

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