Don’t Lead Alone: Think Like a System, Act Like a Network, Lead Like a Movement!
Cleveland Justis & Daniel Student
254 pages, Fast Company Press, 2023
Do you want to be the biggest boat or do you want to get many boats in the water?
In the aptly titled “Cracking the Network Code: Four Principles for Grantmakers,” Jane Wei-Skillern, Nora Silver, and Eric Heitz deliver ideas on how organizations can work together within and outside their sector to build their impact. Principle four is to be a “node, not hub,” which means to see yourself as one part of a larger web of activity, not a central station. To accomplish this as effectively as possible, the authors suggest getting “multiple boats in the water.” In other words, success is about how many different boats can make up your fleet, not about being the biggest boat in the fleet. We call the skills needed to get all these boats in the water, “Acting Like a Network.”
Our new book, Don’t Lead Alone: Think Like a System, Act Like a Network, Lead Like a Movement!, seeks to teach simple leadership skills that can help readers understand their desired impact and how it fits into a larger picture, connect their work to others and find new collaborators, and bring those collaborators together and move them in a unified direction.
Most of us learn these skills through trial and error and often failure. Worse, we typically stay in our self-reinforcing silos, sharing perspectives and frustrations with like-minded people, limiting our vision of what we can accomplish with people different than ourselves.
As consultants to nonprofit organizations that work closely with public entities, particularly in the parks and public lands sector, we’ve seen firsthand examples of the benefits of partnership. Most people don’t know that nearly every national, state, and city park has a nonprofit that raises the funds and provides key operational support that enable you to enjoy its trails and appreciate its programs. In this case study from our book, we dive into three of the skills we identified to Act Like a Network: Getting Out of Your Silo, Acting as Part of a Whole, and Learning Other Professional Languages. To see these skills in action, we chose an excellent case study from the park sector: the partnership that birthed and maintains The Presidio Trust in San Francisco.—Cleveland Justis and Daniel Student
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At the northern tip of the “City by the Bay” lies one of the most stunning pieces of land in North America. Home to the Ohlone Native people for centuries, the land now known as the Presidio of San Francisco served many uses over recent years, mostly militarily. With the arrival of the New Deal programs, World Wars, and the concurrent growth of the US military in the first half of the 20th century, the Presidio saw a significant buildup, including investment in hospitals, major housing complexes, and the addition of the Crissy Field airstrip. In the same era, the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge also played an important part in the Presidio’s infrastructure since the south anchorages and approaches are located on Presidio land.
Like many military bases, the Presidio became outdated when its lands and infrastructure were no longer needed for strategic military interests. On approximately 1,500 acres of land, the Presidio housed over 870 buildings and structures, some dating back to the US Civil War era. In 1994, this was deemed to be excess to the army and the land was transferred to the National Park Service (NPS). The NPS is best known for managing large tracts of natural resource intensive parks like Yosemite, Yellowstone, or Grand Canyon. Of course, these parks also have significant human-built infrastructure to support visitors. While it can’t compete with the army, the NPS nevertheless has substantial resources—it is a multimillion-dollar federal agency with tens of thousands of employees. Still, many in Congress and the local community were concerned that the federal government couldn’t allocate NPS the necessary resources to manage a sprawling former military reservation. They also worried that the rest of the national park system would suffer greatly if substantial resources were allocated to manage a national park in an urban area like the Presidio. Further, prominent members of Congress questioned whether the US government should provide taxpayer funds to support a park in such an expensive urban area. Many fiscally conservative members wondered whether it made more sense to sell the park’s vast real estate assets to pay off the federal deficit.
A long and complicated political battle ensued that, like many things political, resulted in a grand compromise—the idea of forming the nation’s first and only self-supporting national park. Many were concerned that the idea would at best fail and at worst set a precedent whereby the government would expect other national parks to be self-sustaining, thus ushering in an era of disinvestment in parks. Congress ultimately decided to provide initial funding for 15 years and then require self-sufficiency moving forward. The legislation stipulated that if self-sufficiency wasn’t achieved, the vast real estate and land holdings of the Presidio would be sold as excess US government property, likely ushering in commercial development of previously protected property.
A fierce debate followed about what would happen to the Presidio. Could a national park actually become financially self-sufficient? Would the NPS have the capacity and skills to manage a tract of land that was so different from the majority of its other responsibilities? Would the NPS have the business skills to create a self-sufficient park? What would happen to these treasured lands, and what would San Francisco look like if these lands were developed? The debate became personal and ugly at times as politicians and constituents felt the weight of the future of San Francisco and public lands in their laps. Further, the NPS itself felt as if its competence and its mission were under question and threat.
The solution involved many months of hard work, lobbying, community meetings, and political wrangling. A new organization was formed, a wholly owned government corporation with a self-sufficiency mandate called the Presidio Trust. The Trust is a hybrid organization—it acts in part like a national park and in part like a real estate rental and development company. Legally it is a government agency, and it oversees many traditional park management and preservation functions over a vast collection of historic buildings and sensitive park lands. However, it also has broader borrowing and leasing authorities than most other government agencies, employees lack typical civil service protections, and the director reports to a board of directors appointed by the president of the United States, rather than through the NPS system. Most parks are supported by federal appropriations, and yet, due to the vast real estate assets in the former military base, many believed that the Trust could become self-supporting through leasing the assets. Simply put, the Trust had the potential to change the traditional model of national parks in the United States. And many would argue, it did just that.
The lessons of the Trust’s success are many—indeed numerous authors have written about the topic. Noteworthy to us is that the success of the Trust exemplifies three critical skills to Act Like a Network: Getting Out of Your Silo, Acting as Part of a Whole, and Learning Other Professional Languages.
Getting Out of Your Silo
The leaders working to make the Presidio Trust a reality believed that they needed to get outside the silo of park-based models and scour the country for case studies of different kinds of sites that provided a relevant background for the formation of the Trust. The team turned to the venerable consulting firm McKinsey and Company, which agreed to take on the project on a pro bono basis. They assigned a team of consultants to the project who analyzed 19 models of public/private/ governmental partnerships that could serve as models for the Presidio. Most of the models studied by McKinsey were not park-based models. Of the 19 models the consultants studied, only eight were NPS sites. The consultants drew their findings from a wide array of partnerships that had the potential to act as examples for the new network for the Presidio. For example, the McKinsey team studied the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, which was responsible for redeveloping much of the area around the White House in Washington, DC. From this model, the consultants drew important ideas about ways in which private developers, leasing experts, and nontraditional financing sources could be brought into the network and what approaches could be utilized in the effort to make the Presidio self-sufficient.
Many believe that this approach of looking outside national park–based models was essential to the success of the Trust. Prior to the publication of McKinsey’s findings, the discourse was limited—should the NPS manage the Presidio or not? Following publication, the conversation broadened significantly to focus on what skills were needed to make the Presidio a success and how those skills should be deployed and by whom. It was these recommendations that helped the leaders working to design the Presidio’s governing organization to create successful operational structures and pave the way to creative financing, real estate leasing, and new models for national parks that ultimately led to the Presidio’s success.
Acting as a Part of a Whole
The leaders working on the Presidio transformation saw it as much more than a national park site—they saw it as a cultural treasure important to the very soul of the country. They wanted to rise above the bickering between NPS officials, neighbors, and the City of San Francisco and elevate the conversation. They saw the Trust as part of a whole of cultural institutions in the United States, much like the venerable Smithsonian museums, Pearl Harbor, or Metropolitan Opera.
As a result, they convened an influential group of civic and corporate leaders called the Presidio Council. The Presidio Council was active in lobbying to save the Presidio, researching models to ensure the sustainability and protection of the Presidio, and securing funds to pay staff and lobbyist costs. The Presidio Council included CEOs of major corporations, leaders of museums and cultural institutions, and executive directors of major environmental organizations. The Presidio Council also had a small paid staff that included a consultant responsible for lobbying and keeping track of key legislation regarding the Presidio. The group had deep political and social connections—they had access that allowed them to influence policy in both California and Washington, DC. Perhaps equally importantly, they had credibility in a variety of spheres because they were leaders from multiple sectors. Especially noteworthy in the composition of the Presidio Council is that it comprised artists like Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), activists like Carl Anthony of the Urban Habitat Institute, and environmental and park leaders. Talk about getting many boats in the water!
The members of the Presidio Council broadened the network of support to save the Presidio and shifted the conversation to an entirely new level. The group helped others see that the Presidio was much more significant than many perceived. They elevated it from a regional concern in the San Francisco area to being part of a whole movement of preserving cultural institutions. They moved the conversation away from discussing the Presidio as just one of hundreds of national park sites to viewing it as an iconic American place. This shift in attention changed Congress’s attention and helped the Presidio gain important legislative authorizations that helped it succeed. The Presidio Trust was born and became the hybrid organization to care for the Presidio and ensure its financial and environmental sustainability and its rightful place in American environmental and historical preservation.
Learning Other Professional Languages
The Trust, first and foremost, is an organization charged with preserving and enhancing irreplaceable natural and cultural treasures. Like most national parks, the Trust employs hundreds of park professionals, rangers, natural and cultural resource experts, and the like. And yet the Trust deeply understands and practices the professional language of real estate. The Trust employs hundreds of real estate professionals—people who restore, fix, transform, and lease real estate. In this way, the Trust is not unlike many real estate companies. Their professionals plan, finance, improve, transform, and lease historic buildings at market rates. They also partner extensively with commercial real estate brokers, and their hundreds of units of residential property are comanaged with residential leasers. The revenue from this leasing and real estate activity is at the core of what makes the Trust self-sustaining.
There are, of course, occasional tensions between the real estate and park functions of the Trust. The important lesson is that both professional languages exist in the organization. Traditionally parks and real estate were at odds. The Trust has bridged the gap and helped people realize that both are essential to the Presidio. The park building functions are supported by the real estate leasing. And, of course, the reason that people want to live and work in the Presidio is because of its unique park attributes.
Conclusion
Despite the controversies, most would say that today the Trust is a success—it reached its self-sufficiency goal ahead of schedule and restored hundreds of buildings and many acres of parkland. The Presidio is transformed. It is a stunning place to recreate, adventure, and enjoy an unparalleled park experience. It preserves sensitive species and habitat and tells the stories of several centuries of history. And it does this at little or no cost to the federal taxpayer.
A visit to the Presidio is always memorable, and we hope this inspires you to make the trip. It is a constant reminder of years of important history. It welcomes us to pause and reflect. Simultaneously, the Presidio shows us the power of what happens when we act like a network.