Neil Fraser
December 6, 2004
WHAT is the one single factor that can most positively affect an organisations performance?
Nearly thirty years ago I had the very great privilege of being taught by Teddy Weinshall, Professor of Business Science at Tel Aviv University. Weinshall, then possibly in his sixties, had made a lifetime study of organizational structures and the issues that most positively affect growth in corporate financial results.
His conclusion, after analysing the financial results of hundreds if not thousands of companies over decades, was that if corporations wanted to maintain above average growth in the long term, they should change the chief executive every seven years!
Its something I've always remembered and having headed up the Central Johannesburg Partnership for now over twelve years the last seven in its current private non-profit form I feel that it is time for someone else to take over. As a non-profit organization my decision obviously isn't related to financial results, but, as I move onto the wrong side of 65, it is time for a fresh approach.
So I will be stepping down at the end of the year and my colleague of some years, Katherine Cox will be taking over our project work whilst Anne Steffny of KUM will take over responsibility for our CID operations. Stepping down from executive positions in both the CJP and KUM does not mean however that I will be ending my relationship with the inner city. My wife is wont to say that the city is my mistress, and, if that is so, then the city and I are about to move into a deeper, more meaningful relationship!
Twelve years ago, when we established the CJP, the city was on a downward spiral that had started a good decade or more earlier. We saw it plateau at probably its lowest level between 1995 and 2000, and then, slowly start to move upwards. From 2002 the upturn became more pronounced attracting increasing investment from both public and private sectors.
There have now been a number of great interventions that have helped to turn the tide. The challenge is now how to maintain and, in fact, accelerate growth. As I wrote some time ago, I really feel that it is time for the city to raise the bar - to embark on projects at greater scale and hopefully that is the next stage that we will move into.
However, an immediate hurdle to overcome is local government elections next year. The City cannot afford to shut up shop during 2005 because of electioneering. Further down the track, 2010, approached properly, will bring all kinds of leverage to the urban renewal process, but if approached properly is the key.
Urban decline is quick and painful, urban revitalization is a slow, deliberate process that requires patience and commitment from both the private and public sectors. Over the past four years the City has attracted some incredibly dedicated and hard working senior officials and politicians and it has been a great privilege to work with many of them.
As in all huge corporations, there are also those that appear disinterested or quite content to allow processes to become paralysed through bureaucratic bumbling, plain stupidity or over-inflated egos. Joburg certainly has its fair share of these. But, success attracts success and I would like to believe that as the revitalization process gathers momentum, the City will continue to attract and foster talent.
Hopefully, the small nucleus of current talent will also help turn a generally re-active approach to a more dynamic one. Many local authorities, particularly in South Africa, are reactive by nature. But there are a few cities around the world that are proactive and one quickly becomes aware of the difference between them and the mass of others.
I have, for instance, found it quite strange in Joburg that one of the major responsibilities of local government, the quality of the public environment, appears to be of so little interest or concern to council.
I make that judgement because it has largely been left to the private sector to take the lead in upgrading the public domain yet it is the refurbished and managed public environment that acts as a platform from which much of the revitalisation successes spring. It would be great to see the emergence of precinct plans for upgrading every area of the inner city resulting from public/private consultation processes. But I ramble!
In 1997 a young man by the name of Saul Hertzikowitz joined the CJP and, amongst other things, started looking at the image and the marketing of the city. It was at a time when the city was getting unbelievably bad press and he suggested that I should put out regular bulletins providing the good news about which the media appeared to be either totally disinterested or cynical. So, Citichat was born! Although I initially wrote irregularly, by 1999 it had settled into a once a week routine.
Thursday nights, when I sit down to write, seem to come more often than every seven days! But it has introduced me to a wonderful group of city lovers spread all over the globe and I trust has helped to raise a greater awareness of the people, processes, projects and efforts being made to build this great city into what it deserves to be, a World Class African City.
I intend to take a short sabbatical in the New Year before I plunge back into the urban maelstrom, God willing. I have some wonderful projects that I am hoping to be involved in, as this week's headline states 'My love affair isn't ending, its moving to a different level!'
My next Citichat will be in mid/end February and probably fortnightly thereafter.
Over the past few years I have, from time to time, quoted from the work of various urban writers and journalists. One of these has been Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group who produces the Neal Pierce Column. His latest is a wonderful story on a whiskey warehouse-turned-museum in Baltimore and I want to end 2004 with the following extract:
Mixing patriotism and whimsy, civic pride and celebration of human ingenuity, the new museum complex on Baltimore's Inner Harbor has just added a Jim Rouse Visionary Center. Rouse, who passed away in 1996, was the developer-idealist who formed a multi-billion dollar real estate firm, founded the mixed-income new town of Columbia, Md., invented the festival marketplaces in such cities as Boston and Baltimore, and then created the Enterprise Foundation to spread affordable housing across America's less fortunate neighborhoods.
Throughout his career, Rouse insisted that cities are far more than an economic sum of their parts -- population totals, roads and ports and rail, offices and business output. Rather, he argued, cities' ultimate mission is to elevate the dignity of the individual human being, to open up frontiers of "the humane and the beautiful." "Unless cities "work for people," he said, "they are not working well at all."
May you have a peaceful and blessed festive season and may 2005 be the year that we get the inner city to elevate the dignity of every individual human being and to truly work for all its peoples, best wishes.
