Why @JohnToryTO should hire @MorganBaskinTO

The team that will help transition John Tory into his role as mayor includes key members of his campaign team, mayoral candidate David Soknacki, and non-profit, business and academic leaders.

 

 John Tory is a smart man with a background in managing big organizations.  One of the keys to any form of successful leadership is recognizing one's own strengths and weaknesses and building teams that fill out your capacity.

 

It's clear this is what John Tory has in mind as he builds his team.  It's also clear that he's not slacking off on the political acuity side, as he's made a point of saying he hopes to find ways to include his main rivals for the Mayor's chair, Doug Ford and Olivia Chow.

 

 While John Tory is a good man with right intent, he's decidedly old-school and upper-class.  His approach to management is equally grounded in a old-world, top-town mentality - this was reflected in past comments about the need for women employees to hustle more and his difficulty in accepting the concept of white privilege.

 

These aren't abject human failings on Tory's part so much as they are limitations.  We can't truly know what we can't experience - it's why the smartest urban planners in the world often neglect design-thinking pieces around accessibility, navigability, etc.  It's why we have a representative democracy in the first place.

 

John Tory has done a great deal of good for a great many communities, but he doesn't necessarily understand their day-to-day reality or have the capacity to see the world through their point of view. 

 

This is especially true of millennials. Of course, he's not alone in this - baby boomer managers and employers from every sector are struggling to recruit and retain millenials.

 

The problem they are facing is one of culture change.  Once at the forefront of social change, babyboomers have become the establishment.  They fundamentally don't get the priorities of today's youth; they have trouble seeing the modern forms of interaction and ideation that millenials practice as anything other than a lack of discipline.

 

This shouldn't be a problem for Tory - he's smart enough to recognize what he doesn't know and fill out his team with supportive players.

 

Which is where Morgan Baskin comes in.

 

If you haven't heard of Morgan Baskin, she's the 19 year-old who ran for Mayor.  Put it another way - she's a millennial that understands the motivations of modern youth who was gutsy and tenacious enough to hustle in an old-school way John Tory would be familiar with.  She also happens to be wicked-smart, well-versed on issues and an effective communicator.

 

As a result of having run for office, Morgan has amassed an impressive network of supporters and partners who rightly recognize her as a young leader to watch.  She also has an insider's familiarity with the political process that few youth - including those weaned on partisan politics and youth forums - can match.

 

Right now, Morgan is weighing her options of what to do next, which school to go to, where to dedicate her focus post-election.  Among the options she is considering is study in either public policy or urban studies.  She remains passionately committed to systems change in Toronto. 

 

Who better to lead or at least advise John Tory's youth employment/civic engagement push? 

 

Hiring Morgan in some capacity (ie, a paid position) would be a smart move on the part of Team Tory.  She can do the job, she can communicate Tory's message (and bring the message of youth back to him) and beyond that, it's good optics. 

 

A big challenge old guard employers/policy makers face is that they are seen as tokenizing youth rather than taking them seriously.  Giving a millennial a significant, paid role on his team with a clear mandate is a great way for Tory to send the message to Toronto's youth that he's serious.

 

Would Morgan be interested, though?

 

Morgan's nobody's pasty; she wouldn't take on a token position, nor would she be content to be a one-way messenger.  Morgan is a quintessential millennial; she's diplomatic, but not willing to push messages she doesn't believe in.  Engagement, not sales, is her focus.

  

If Tory were to consider adding Morgan to his team, he'd have to make sure the position offered was one she could relate to, grow in and find fulfilment through.  That's just the way it is with millenials.

 

I think it would be a great match; Tory would gain a fresh face, powerful communicator and a bridge to millenials.  Morgan would have a great opportunity to hone her skills, build her brand and facilitate the kind of change she knows is required. 

 

Plus, doing so would be a clear, early indication that Team Tory is serious about doing a better job engaging the City's youth.  Figuring out how to bring Morgan on to his team would also be a useful exercise in millennial engagement for Tory himself. 

 

Introductions made - I look forward to seeing what happens next.

 

What Tim Hudak has in Common with Steve Jobs

I have seen leaders that distort reality of an event, outcome or situation.  The impact this has on satisfaction, motivation, engagement, individual self-efficacy and a host of other factors of individual and organizational success is significant.

Steve Jobs was really good at getting his teams to drink his Kool-Aid.  Whatever the market reality was didn't matter - through charisma, condescension, sheer force of will and whatever other trick he could muster, Jobs got his way.  

It didn't always work in Apple's best interests, which is why he lost the company in 1985.  The devastation of this experience would teach Jobs a valuable lesson, enabling his future return to grace.

Tim Hudak is faced with an interesting challenge; once again, the facts that he's sticking to are being picked apart by professionals as not supporting the policy benefits Hudak's shilling.  

Hudak has built his entire campaign around the Million Jobs Plan - which demonstrably doesn't add up to a million jobs.  It's possible Hudak figures the market will produce that many jobs regardless of what he does, and can claim victory for gravity, but I would suggest Hudak's not quite that cynical (though some on his team definitely are).

When recently asked about the deficit left by the last Conservative government he was a part of, Hudak said it never happened.

When faced with tough questions at his campaign launch, he walked off stage rather than answer them.

What has he ever done when challenged on the veracity or feasibility of his plans?

He's stuck by his messaging, tuned out the questioner and bullied or fired the person challenging him.

For his part, though, Hudak never wavers, never questions himself, never accepts that maybe he's got it wrong.

Which, frankly, is delusional.

Hudak has a distorted view of reality that he demands those around him see, or gets frustrated with when they can't.  He refused to accept Peter Shurman's requests to run where he lives; he canned Dave Brister for criticizing the Right To Work plan, which Team Hudak ended up moving on from anyway.

Before this election, there were many in the PC Party who were waiting for the post-election opportunity to turf Hudak as a liability - much as what happened to Jobs.  Politics tends to be a bit less forgiving than business, though - once gone, it's unlikely Hudak will ever be back.

Give the tightness of the race, I would imagine even those PCs that are fed up with Hudak are holding out hope he can eke them a win - but what then?

Hudak has been dismissive of his own, elected Caucus - he is, after all, the boss.  He's made moves and taken steps that have left egg on their faces unnecessarily, like leaving a Northern candidate to defend Hudak's dismissal of the Northern debate.

What happens if he becomes Premier?  What if it's public servants with facts, experience and expertise who are challenging Hudak on his ideologically-driven policies?  What if it's a First Nations group that gets defensive because Hudak decides to crack down on cigarette smuggling without "committing sociology?"

It took a massive defeat and some damage to the Apple brand for Steve Jobs to burst his bubble of delusion, even to a small degree, and step put into this reality-based world of ours.  

The same will ultimately hold true for Hudak - the only question is how much collateral damage he inflicts before then, and if it will be just the Ontario PCs or the whole province that's on the receiving end.

Hudak Whack-A-Mole: Priorities Need Context

I woke this morning to the voice of Tim Hudak talking up his Million Jobs plan.  

You have to give Hudak this - he's got a wicked voice for radio.

As part of his spiel, Hudak dropped that well-worn phrase "if you have a hundred priorities, you don't have any."  There is logic in this; bouncing around from one hot-button issue to the next is like throwing starfish back into the ocean one at a time.  It wastes time, energy and resources without addressing structural problems.

This is why plans are so important; a solid plan identifies a problem and lays out a path to solve it systematically, with reference to all the potential road bumps along the way.  A good plan starts with a SWOT analysis to get the lay of the land.

This is basic Sun-tzu; know yourself, your enemy and the terrain, you will never be defeated.

Of course, Hudak has been defeated, repeatedly, which suggests he has continuously failed to understand one or more elements of these pillars to success.

I have written at length about what I think Hudak's key weaknesses are - in a nutshell he's stubborn, functionally-fixed and over-confident in himself, which means less able to accept advice from others.

Which is too bad, because there's a nugget of advice I used to hear regularly from one of his key advisers that he would do well to consider now:

If you haven't identified the right problem, all your efforts will be pointed in the wrong direction.

An example of this would be Rob Ford's fixation on "the war on cars" and "subways, subways, subways."

What problem is he trying to solve?  By the look of things, he wants to get people off the roads so that more cars can ride on them.  He also wants suburbs to have easier, car-free access to the downtown core via subway.

You can see the problem inherent in this - if more people from the 'burbs are taking the subway downtown, that means more, not less people on the streets, competing with cars throughout the day.  

It would also mean an even higher number of new passengers transiting through main stations like Union, which is taxed to the max to manage capacity as it is.  

But I doubt Rob Ford has ever tried to commute into town and move onto The Path in the morning.  The Path, of course, is the underground artery for Bay Street and Toronto's business sector.  Making that portion of town harder to reach makes no sense.

And that's before considering the fact that Toronto isn't just a business hub - it's tourism, livability, conventions, art, so on and so forth.  People want to live downtown because it's a fun, accessible place to be.  

If you remove the pedestrian accessibility, you start to starve off pedestrian traffic.  And if there's no major solution for parking, you're going to end up with a ridiculously crowded subway system and cars driving in circles looking for places to park - meaning, more people will just give up and stay away.  

But back to Tim Hudak.  He's identified a million jobs as what Ontario needs, although we actually have 588,000 unemployed.  Does this mean he's anticipating Ontario's unemployed population to grow by a half-million under his watch?  Does he want to import more labour, perhaps through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program?  Or would some of these jobs be taken up by chain gangs?

A million jobs sounds great, but scratch the surface a little bit, and the problems start to emerge.  What problem, exactly, is he trying to solve?

Well, his priority is jobs, period; his rationale for this is that Ontario's economy isn't in great shape, but given all our advantages, working together we should be far better off than we are.  Fair enough.  We do have lots to offer here and we have the capacity to be stronger than we are.

Part of why Ontario's economy has been so rocky of late, however, has to do with the global economy; corporations that are looking to reduce costs are looking for the cheapest, most regulation-free regions to settle in.  Especially when we're talking traditional manufacturing positions that require little training, you can pretty much settle anywhere.

So they're going to Bangladesh, where they don't need to invest in their human resources or safety infrastructure.  But they're still selling to us - cheap products, cheaply made by abused labour.  There's a problematic picture emerging here that will impact those corporations in the long-run, but in the short-run their goal is to make as much money as quickly as they can, regardless of consequences to others, and move on.

Hudak backed away from Right to Work for the election, but there's no reason he couldn't revisit it should he win.  Whether intentionally or not, he's trying to make Ontario competitive for low-pay, low-skilled jobs with some of the worst labour-condition jurisdictions in the world.  Does he think that's good for Ontario's best interests?

This is also a one-note plan; he tells us each of his candidates has a plan in their back-pockets; are they tailored?  What will work in, say, Timmins-James Bay won't function in Kitchener-Waterloo or Trinity-Spadina.  How does his plan support diversified growth in fields ranging from advanced manufacturing to agriculture?  Where's he at in terms of nurturing all the new industries emerging courtesy of the Knowledge Economy?

Beyond that, he seems to have an expectation that once you have jobs, people will fill them and all will be well.  This is naive, like assuming that a horse brought to water will drink.  Particularly when it comes to Ontario's under-employed populations; New Canadians, First Nations, youth, people with various physical and mental illnesses - there are all kinds of hurdles that need to be overcome from both sides for sustainable employment to happen.

Where does Hudak stand on occupational mental health?  Where does he stand on the emerging management revolution as new leaders find better ways to motivate and compensate employees doing knowledge work?  

All of his policies seem geared to the behavioural economics of a bygone age, that of the Industrial Economy.  How does he think he can move us back that way successfully as the rest of the world marches forward?

Hudak has a plan and he's prepared to stick to it - but it's the wrong plan with the wrong goals. 

 Since he doesn't understand himself, his opponent or the terrain that is Ontario's opportunities in the global economy, he would inevitably spend much of his tenure as Premier playing whack-a-mole, picking fights to score wins while our economy failed to improve and the population became increasingly restless.

Under these circumstances and having finally won the centre seat, what would Hudak do?  Whatever it takes to win, of course.  And he'd have all the resources of government at his disposal to do so.  

Expect, of course, for this whole Open Government thing.  The call for transparency and the growing, international movement towards holding government to account is taking root here just as much as it is anywhere else.  As transparency of decision-making processes would run as contrary to Hudak's partisan interests as it does to Stephen Harper's, one could expect him to move away from Open Government and focus on restricting data access.

Otherwise, people might start questioning his rationale and as we've seen, he doesn't respond well to being called out on irrational choices.

Unfortunately, the genie's out of the bottle on this one.  It's beyond Hudak's control to go back to a time he may be more comfortable with.  Trying to reverse the course of history would only inflame our structural crises, which may be a good thing - sometimes it does take a brushfire to clear away yesterday's detritus and allow for new growth.

Which, when you think about it, actually fits perfectly with Hudak's personal philosophy.  He doesn't believe in corporate welfare, social welfare or state involvement in pretty much anything.  Hudak's all about survival of the fittest - that which is best able to succeed on its own should be allowed to do so, laissez-faire style, with that which can't fading away.

This may prove a fitting analogy for Hudak's political career.  After all, it's that which is best able to adapt that survives.