Empowering Young Leaders to Bring Shared Prosperity to America’s Cities

With American corporate profits at an all-time high, it would be easy to celebrate the success of the U.S. economy.  Yet the sad fact is that the American economy is doing only half its job.  Yes, large U.S.-based companies are thriving, as are the well-off individuals who run them and invest in them.  But working- and middle-class Americans are struggling with stagnant incomes, weak job prospects, and deep economic insecurity.  Prosperity in America is not being shared. This divergence in America’s economy has many causes.  Some causes will be hard to reverse.  For example, globalization and technological change have put American workers in competition with skilled workers around the world and with automation that can complete routine tasks.  Those genies are out of the bottle and are not going back in.  But other causes of the divergence are unnecessary, self-inflicted wounds.  In particular, U.S. society has systematically underinvested in the shared resources that underpin working- and middle-class prosperity: our education system, the skills of our workforce, our infrastructure, our basic R&D and supply networks.  And Washington is too paralyzed by partisan­ship to do much about it. The good news is that in cities and towns across the U.S., local policymakers, businesspeo­ple, educators, nonprofit leaders, labor leaders, clergy, and others are coming together across sectors to restore and reinvent these shared resources.  To mention just a few examples, we see:

• community colleges working with companies to train the graduates that employers want to hire;
• elected officials and university leaders partnering to get ideas out of laboratories and into startups faster;
• educators partnering with businesses and nonprofits to transform school systems; and
• coalitions of leaders coming together to upgrade critical infrastructure.

Such efforts share a few traits: they are local, they span sectors, they produce shared prosperity, and they are long-term. Eager to fan the flames of these local sparks, a faculty team at Harvard Business School has partnered with civic leaders across the country to launch the Young American Leaders Program.  In late 2014 and early 2015, we asked senior champions in each of nine cities to identify ten individuals who they believed would help lead the city in the future.  Importantly, each ten-person team reflected the rich diversity of its city: participants came from government, business, educational institutions, nonprofits, the press, and other sectors. Then in June 2015, we gathered the 90 young leaders on the HBS campus for, in essence, a boot camp in cross-sector collaboration for shared prosperity.  For three intense days, the group learned about best and worst practices from across the country and around the globe.  They assessed the shared resources in their communities and envisioned collaborations that might improve them.  Perhaps most importantly, they connected with one another, shared their experiences, and taught our faculty about the realities of collaboration. Young leaders hailed from Boston, Massachusetts; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Columbus, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Miami, Florida; Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota; Nashville, Tennessee; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Seattle, Washington.  Why these cities?  In each of them, we found senior leaders who are shaping their communities today and who collectively have a broad view of, and credibility with, the next generation.  These local champions helped us to identify up-and-comers who are energetic, creative, positive, and collaborative, with a track record of civic engagement. While our program focuses on the United States, the challenges we examine have global relevance.  Nearly every community in the world is struggling to share prosperity widely.  Many of the lessons we have learned apply to cities everywhere; indeed, in some cases they were drawn directly from the experiences of cities outside the United States. After the immersion on campus, we are encouraging each city team to apply what they have learned to benefit their hometown.  We will keep the young leaders connected to each other, to us, and to future cohorts.  Over time, we aim to develop a cadre of young leaders who have the will, the skill, and the connections to work across traditional boundaries to help their communities thrive.  This is a model, we believe, that can work in cities across the country and around the world.   Jan W. Rivkin is the Bruce V. Rauner Professor and Gabriel P. Ellsworth is a Research Associate at Harvard Business School. The authors are grateful to the Young American Leaders Program’s faculty team, including Rebecca Henderson, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Karen Mills, Gary Pisano, Michael Porter, and Mitch Weiss.   The article was originally published in the 2015 Global Action Report, an annual synthesis report produced by the Global Action Platform in collaboration with Diplomatic Courier. Republished with permission.