The following is a conversation between James Anderson, the head of Government Innovation Programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving on AM 970 The Answer in New York City.


Denver: If you had to leverage something that would have a positive impact on the greatest number of people possible, you’d be hard pressed to find anything better than making city mayors more effective at doing their jobs.  And that is one of the focus areas for Bloomberg Philanthropies. It’s a pleasure to have with us this evening, James Anderson, the head of Government Innovation Programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies. Good evening, Jim, and welcome to The Business of Giving.

Jim: Thank you. It is great to be here.

Denver: Why don’t we begin, Jim, by having you give us a brief overview of Bloomberg Philanthropies, its focus, and its approach?

James Anderson

Jim: Bloomberg Philanthropies is the umbrella that constitutes all of the different ways that Mike Bloomberg uses his philanthropy to make the world a better place. Our mission is to create greater, longer lives for the greatest number of people, and that brings us to cities across so much of the work that we do. We have a big focus on public health, mostly in low and middle-income nations, on educational reform here in the United States, on arts and culture around the world, on the environment– with a big focus on urban sustainability.  And the programs are largely focused on public sector innovation, overwhelmingly focused on helping local governments solve problems in new and more powerful ways.

Denver: That is one interesting charge. How many cities worldwide are you currently supporting, whether through grants or technical assistance, or through the other kind of programs that you have at Bloomberg Philanthropies?

Jim: Across the entire organization last year, I think we engaged somewhere close to 420 cities. Within the Government Innovation programs, I would say that’s about 250 across a number of different continents. As you noted, that support takes a number of different forms. Sometimes we provide direct grants to local government to help them fund innovative, new ideas to major urban challenges. We also provide a tremendous amount of technical assistance and coaching. We do a very significant focus on skills building and helping local governments learn the 21st century problem-solving skills that are common in the private sector, but not yet so in the public sector. Then we do educational and networking programs. Leadership development and idea sharing are big focuses for us.

We decided to focus on government uptake. How do we build the skills and the culture and the routines and the mindset within governments around using data that has as its ultimate expression and goal: getting folks to use evidence in their daily decision-making?

Denver: Let’s get into some of those initiatives that you champion.  Evidence-based, evidence in foreign policymaking. That was certainly a hallmark of the Bloomberg administration here in New York City, and it’s probably the best way to achieve positive outcomes for citizens. Speak to us of the challenges of doing this because it’s really not done as much as most people would like, and then of this initiative, to see that it becomes more of a standardized practice.

Jim: There’s been a growing chorus of advocates and academics over the past 20 years focused on evidence-based policy. When we started looking at this universe a couple of years ago, the observation that we made is that there seems to be a gap between the desire to use evidence and the actual uptake of evidence within governments. Now, I came out of Bloomberg City Hall and was spoiled in a sense because he came into city hall as the data guy. He built his business using data. Data is sort of the through line for his entire career, and he brought that culture into City Hall and oriented all of us around targets, data, charts. That was the currency of every single conversation. If you couldn’t talk about it in data, Mike didn’t really have patience for it.

Now, when we started looking at cities around the world; we heard mayors saying, “Yeah, I want to use data more often. I want to do more evidence-based policy. I know I’m funding things that aren’t producing the highest and best value that I think we could be producing with the scarce public resources.”  But the knowledge gap was significant. So, we decided to not focus on expanding the universe of evidence– which is a focus that is important, and many other actors are zeroing in on that. We decided to focus on government uptake. How do we build the skills and the culture and the routines and the mindset within governments around using data that has as its ultimate expression and goal: getting folks to use evidence in their daily decision-making? We do that. We have one very significant investment. Mike has now put a total of somewhere close to $80 million in helping local governments develop the skills, the awareness, the routine to use data in their daily operational decisions, in their management, funding, and policy decisions; and we do that in number of different ways.

What were they actually purchasing with government dollars? The long and short of it is they were purchasing a lot of inputs and outputs– activities, in other words. Are you engaging people on the street? Are you getting them meals? Are you getting them showers? Are you providing them with medical assistance? But not necessarily the outcomes that everybody in the world wants for homeless people, which is: How do we actually move you off of the streets and into a safer, more permanent housing situation? So, when you’re paying for inputs and wanting outcomes, you’re undoubtedly going to have a disconnect.

Denver: Can you give us an example of where data has led to a better outcome, where it’s been deployed intelligently?

Jim: I can give you a couple. We were doing some work with the mayor of Seattle. Seattle, like many West Coast cities, is experiencing an extraordinary challenge with homelessness. At the same time, the City of Seattle was really increasing its annual spend on homeless services, but they didn’t think they were getting a better outcome. So, we brought in one of our incredible partners; in this case, it’s the Government Performance Lab from Harvard University. They started looking at the way that the City of Seattle was procuring homeless services.

What were they actually purchasing with government dollars? The long and short of it is they were purchasing a lot of inputs and outputs– activities, in other words. Are you engaging people on the street? Are you getting them meals? Are you getting them showers? Are you providing them with medical assistance? But not necessarily the outcomes that everybody in the world wants for homeless people, which is: How do we actually move you off of the streets and into a safer, more permanent housing situation? So, when you’re paying for inputs and wanting outcomes, you’re undoubtedly going to have a disconnect. You’re not going to be making yourselves, your providers, your mayor happy.

So, we went in, and we helped them rethink the way that they were procuring homeless services. We socialized that with a small number of critical partners to get them on board, to test it, and now that has really scaled up, and they’re now using that approach, I’m pleased to say, even beyond the homeless services arena,  but more broadly– in human services and youth services. So, that’s a great example of helping cities understand how you can pay for results rather than activities, and the pressure that that puts on the system… that’s a really positive pressure for the people that you want to serve.

The thing that’s just incredible about it is, they’re pivoting radically in a way that they’re envisioning their public innovations. They’re getting critical feedback from their users that they’re bringing back into their product development.  By the time these cities launch these new ideas, they’re going to have so much confidence that they’ve worked out the kinks and that they’ve got a product that real people actually want to use. This is not something we’re training people to do in our public administration schools. This is a tool and a technique that very, very few cities are using in the world today.  And we’ve really made it our mission to bring this tool because we think it is such a powerful, powerful way for cities to de-risk their innovations and make sure that they’re failing at a small level, so they don’t fail in a big way later.

Denver: That’s a great example. Sometimes you wonder when you ask people about homelessness, and they’ll say, our homeless shelters are 99% full. You’re like, is that a success? Is that what the objective is? And it really isn’t. But that’s how they’re measuring themselves in terms of how filled they can get their homeless shelters.

You’re also an advocate for prototyping, and I believe it should really be a backbone of local government efforts to improve services and develop new policies and programs.  But this too is virtually unknown in the public sector. Why do you think prototyping is so rare, Jim? And how have you seen it work in the public sector?

Jim: It’s such a great question, and I’m delighted that you’re asking about it. Prototyping, as you are aware, and I’m sure most of your listeners are aware, is a commonly used tool in the private sector. When companies want to develop a new product or a new service, they don’t start by convening the experts within the organization, building a fully-fledged product, and foisting it into the world, and making an announcement.

They do the absolute opposite of that, which is they start building very small, low-fidelity versions of that new product or new service, and they immediately engage end-users. They want to understand how that cheap, easy, risk-free model interacts in real people’s lives, whether they can intuit how it works, how it will hang with other things that they’ve got happening in their daily lives; and they learn from those interactions. They bring the lessons back into the development process. They incorporate it, and then they circle back and do it again.

By the time they’ve gone through that product development process, they’ve tested every core assumption. They’ve tested their hypotheses. There’s no button. There’s no knob. There’s no design decision that hasn’t been experienced by small groups of users.  And so the product developers know that it’s going to work. In some ways, if you just think about it, that flies in the face of the way that we’ve trained public sector employees. There’s so much fear in the public sector that you would ever talk about something that is unbaked, undeveloped, not ready for primetime. There’s such a fear that the press will attack, that citizens will pounce that we’ve leaned heavily on experts and on asking the experts within government, and sometimes within our provider circles, to help us develop those new products and services.  And then we launch them into the world.

What we’re saying is: this is a really powerful way for governments that want to innovate more effectively to act. Prototyping as a new public intervention simply means starting with a cheap, low-fidelity model, testing it with your homeless individuals, understanding if they get it, how it would work.  Can they actually use it and make sense of it? And taking lots of notes and bringing them back into your product development loop. We’re now doing this with 35 cities across the country on a wide range of public solutions.

The thing that’s just incredible about it is, they’re pivoting radically in a way that they’re envisioning their public innovations. They’re getting critical feedback from their users that they’re bringing back into their product development.  By the time these cities launch these new ideas, they’re going to have so much confidence that they’ve worked out the kinks and that they’ve got a product that real people actually want to use. This is not something we’re training people to do in our public administration schools. This is a tool and a technique that very, very few cities are using in the world today.  And we’ve really made it our mission to bring this tool because we think it is such a powerful, powerful way for cities to de-risk their innovations and make sure that they’re failing at a small level, so they don’t fail in a big way later.

Denver: Very very smart. If I may dare say, I think it holds true in the nonprofit sector as well. Whether it’s tax dollars or whether it’s donor dollars, there’s this fear that the citizens or the donors are going to rebel if something fails, and I think we underestimate people. They want these kinds of experiments because they want it to work but we’re terrified…. I know we are in the nonprofit sector… that if I spend donor money on something that doesn’t work, we’ll never see more money again.

Speaking of prototyping, it’s a critical component of this year’s Mayors Challenge. The first time I think that’s been the case. Tell us about the Mayors Challenge, Jim. I think you’re in your fourth year now. What is the objective, and how does that challenge work?

Jim: Mike Bloomberg is a big believer that we need to look to local governments to generate new solutions to big challenges they face on the ground in their communities, and that those solutions can spread and produce a lot of benefit for residents in other places. He loves to talk about the fact that when he was at City Hall, some of his biggest successes– Bike Share, closing Times Square– were actually ideas that he borrowed from other cities. So, that’s a real foundation stone for our work here.

The Mayors Challenge is a way that we incentivize public sector innovation. We run these large-scale competitions…therefore city halls… We’re asking for mayors to develop bold, new thinking on how to address a big challenge that they face in their community. We’re looking for ideas that are:  number one, that are new, built on the shoulders of what’s come before; number two, that have the potential to have great impact; number three, that can actually be implemented. We don’t want pie-in-the-sky ideas that have no chance of actually getting off the ground. Our fourth criteria is around transferability. Are you developing a solution that will be interesting to cities and other places because they’ve got the same problem?

So, we run these competitions. We started this in the United States. It’s gone to Europe, it’s gone to a version in India, it’s gone to Latin America, and we brought it back to the United States  because Mike felt, and our board of directors felt very strongly, that in the current context, we need to really support our cities here at home and help them generate new thinking. The competition is underway. It’s been our most successful thus far. More cities have participated, I think somewhere close to 350 cities submitted ideas. We’re now in the finalist stage with 35 great mayors generating great ideas, and we will announce the winners in Detroit in October.

Denver: Maybe you’ll come back on the show for a couple of minutes and let us know who won.

Jim: We would love to, and maybe we could bring some of those city innovators. They just will blow your mind. I have to tell you, the best part of my job is getting to interact with these passionate, committed people in these city halls who are suddenly given a few extra resources that allow them to reconnect with their biggest dreams and ambitions for their citizens; and they are so enthusiastic. We were talking about prototyping a moment ago. Their eyes are opening up when we teach them the skill because they’re realizing that this is something they can use in their day-to-day work all the time, and they’re so excited for the resources, for the new knowledge, for the different way of approaching innovation. We should get a couple of them on your show. They would really…they would just blow your mind.

Denver: That sounds exciting. I don’t think people appreciate how little unrestricted resources that mayors have. So much of the money that comes in is all spoken for.

Let’s turn our attention to climate change. Cities are a big part of the problem. I think worldwide, it’s about 70% of emissions that lead to climate change come from cities. But they’re also a big part  of the solution, and you have an initiative looking to accelerate those solutions. Tell us about American Cities Climate Challenge.

Jim: We’re really excited about this. Mike Bloomberg has served as the United Nations special advisor on cities and climate impact for the last couple of years. In that capacity, he has traveled the world providing support and raising the ambitions of cities, civil society, and businesses to make a real impact on what he believes is the defining issue of our time. After the Trump administration pulled the United States away from its Paris Climate Agreement, a number of cities stood up and said: we’re still in.

Mike Bloomberg, along with Gov. Jerry Brown, helped to coordinate cities and states that wanted to still work to achieve those Paris climate targets because at the end of the day, we still need to hit them or we’re in real trouble. As all of these cities were stepping up and saying we’re still in, our really incredible team; we have a world-class environmental portfolio on leadership here; we’re really recognizing that there is a strong possibility that the ambition is going to be a little bit out of step with the actual capacity to deliver against it. So, cities are stepping up. They’re saying that they want to achieve those climate targets on very quick timetables. Do they actually have the resources, the knowledge, the technical expertise to start that work right now and to really accelerate progress against those goals?

Our conclusion is that cities really do need some help with that. So, the American Cities Climate Challenge is an effort that Mike and our teams have made to say, “Hey, if you’re really serious about reforming the way that your city does transportation and buildings– these are the two primary drivers for carbon pollution in most cities– if you’re really serious about focusing on those two areas and really want to take your work to the next level, we will infuse millions of dollars of new resources and handholding, and technical assistance into your shops to accelerate your progress. So, we opened that opportunity up for cities, I believe, in the late spring or the early summer. I want to say, 50% or 60% or the cities that were eligible have sort of come back and said, “We are in, and we would love to participate!”

And we’re now in the process of narrowing that down and interviewing cities to understand where we’re going to make those commitments. I expect that you will begin hearing about the cities that will be getting Bloomberg’s support come September or October; somewhere around there is the timeframe. It’s very exciting, and it’s just an opportunity for us to say: If you’re really wanting to make a mark on this issue, it matters in your community, you have the partnerships in place, and you as a mayor really want to make a leadership mark here, we’re going to stand with you and provide you the support you need to get there.

Denver: Fantastic. Sounds like you got a few things going on, Jim.

Jim: Here’s the thing about working for Mike Bloomberg. He has a lot of money that he wants to give away, and he wants to give it away in a smart way. If you believe to the point that you made when you opened, you get a really good bang on your philanthropic buck when you invest in city government. When you beef up the capacity of local governments to make better decisions, to use data in the way that they’re understanding the problems that they have in the community, the way that they’re assessing the different interventions that they could use, the ways that they’re measuring the impact over time; when you help them do all of that work better, it has a cascading effect across the entire city government.

By the way, cities are where people live. I think 70%, 80% of Americans now live in areas that we would say are sort of urban areas. We want to make sure that people in those cities are receiving quality public services. Whether that be transportation, or street or sidewalk repair, or better schools or safer streets– we know that when local governments are using data and understanding whether what they’re doing is actually improving people’s lives or not, we’re going to make all of that work. We’re going to make that world better for people. Yes. We have a lot going on, but we also know that when cities are your partners, your opportunity to reach so many people in a positive way is times ten.

Denver: It certainly seems that all the interesting things that are going on in government right now are coming out of cities, much more so than states or at the federal level. Let me ask you about disruptive technologies. You have Uber and Lyft and ride-sharing. You have Airbnb with home-sharing platforms, and there are disruptions in healthcare and ticket sales; what are you seeing for regulatory changes or other kinds of adaptations?

Jim: This is a big topic. I think the conflict between emerging technologies and so-called disruptive technologies and local governments, I think we’ve only seen the first chapter of what will be a long and salacious novel. We just finished… actually about six or eight months ago… a year of working with 10 local cities on the issue of autonomous vehicles. Cities everywhere are intrigued by this technology; we wanted to help cities muscle up, understand what the state of the world looks like. Who’s doing what kinds of pilots? What are the potentials for these technologies? The thing that we really came away with from that entire experience is: number one, there are incredible information asymmetries between the technology companies and the people in local government. That’s a real challenge. If folks in local government don’t understand the technologies, it’s really complicated to negotiate a good partnership that puts citizens at the center and elevates citizen needs.

Number one, there’s a need for assistance for local governments. Number two, what we’re hearing from mayors is that the big lesson that they’ve learned from Airbnb and Uber is that they can’t sit in the passenger seat of those relationships. Urban ecosystems are delicate ecosystems. You have to put civc values and civic aspirations at the center of the conversations with these disruptive and emerging technologists. I think what we’re beginning to see is mayors figuring out how they can have a strong, smart, affirmative, and equal role in those negotiations so that they can articulate what matters for me as the leader of the civic and what matters to my citizens. And how do we work with you to allow you to innovate and drive all of the incredible job growth, and opportunity, but do it in a way that aligns with our civic values?

I’ll give you a great example of that. Sam Liccardo is the Mayor of San Jose, California, not so far from Silicon Valley. Many, many technology companies, particularly those on the West Coast, wanted to start exploring autonomous vehicles on his street, and he said, “You know what? You’re welcome to pilot activities on our streets, but I want to see pilots that help me achieve things that matter to us, like connecting poor people to economic opportunity. I would welcome pilots using autonomous technologies to help me connect poor people to jobs because one of the problems that we have in our community is that poor people spend way too much time traveling to get to their day jobs, and way too much time traveling to get to their night job. Is there a way that these technologies can help make that life easier for people?” I just thought that was a great example of the city articulating a really primary challenge that it has and offering that up to technology and saying, “ Help us with this, and we will allow you to use our streets for research and development.”

Mayors arguably have a much harder CEO role than their private sector counterparts. Defining success is more complicated. Turning off failing programs is more complicated. They work in constrained political environments under the scrutiny of journalists. There are many, many challenges that a public CEO has. Most mayors come into office not having had a tremendous amount of executive management experience, and yet being a mayor is very much an executive role.

Denver: So practical and so real. They’re the voice of those people who are saying: I’m going back and forth and spending the better part of my day just trying to get to and fro.

I was reading the other day that the private sector spends about $42 billion on executive development, while in the public sector, that number has been closer to zero. Yet, there are very few jobs which are more important, multifaceted, and complex as being the mayor of a city, particularly a large one. Which is why last year, you launched the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. In fact, I think you just recently gathered with your second class of 40 mayors. Tell us about that program, Jim, and the impact you’re looking forward to it having.

Jim: Your statistic at the top is the key thing that caught our attention. Mayors arguably have a much harder CEO role than their private sector counterparts. Defining success is more complicated. Turning off failing programs is more complicated. They work in constrained political environments under the scrutiny of journalists. There are many, many challenges that a public CEO has. Most mayors come into office not having had a tremendous amount of executive management experience, and yet being a mayor is very much an executive role.

You’re managing large budgets. You’re managing large numbers of people. We saw a real gap. There simply wasn’t world-class leadership development  opportunities available for our public CEOs. So we partnered with the Business School and the Kennedy School at Harvard, and we launched a big program. We’re now in our second year. I feel a little bit bad for the mayors that joined us in the first year; we were testing things on them. We were prototyping. We just welcomed our second class into the program. I walked away from this week always in awe of the mayors and the energy and passion that they bring to the program, but also so impressed with our incredible partners at Harvard University who have just developed an incredible program for these mayors. Next week, we’ll be bringing each mayor, then invited to bring two members of their senior team, into a shadow program. So, they come next week, and we’re looking forward to having those chiefs of staff and chief policy officers here in New York.

Denver: Absolutely super. You sound very excited about what you do. Let me ask you about the workplace culture at Bloomberg Philanthropies. What do you find to be distinctive and unique about it that makes it such an exceptional place to work?

Jim: A few things. Mike Bloomberg, number one, is a famous manager to work for. It’s great to work for Mike Bloomberg because he provides a tremendous amount of support to the team here. Asks us to dream really big. Helps us, makes sure that we’re… asks us a bunch of questions to make sure we’ve done our homework, and then provides a lot of latitude for the incredible team that we pulled together here to do great work and to do it through incredible partnerships. Number one, it’s great to work for Mike.

Number two, our CEO, Patty Harris has really focused on collaboration and openness. We work in an open environment. We’re all seated around one another so that we’re not siloed off– one team against the next. She’s really promoting a culture here where we’re trying to leverage the strengths across our different portfolios. I think in a lot of philanthropic organizations…. I have a lot of friends that work in philanthropy. I think one of the challenges that many of the older organizations deal with  are very entrenched silos within those philanthropies. I would say that one of Patty’s key missions is to make sure that we build a different kind of culture here.

You and I talked a moment ago again about the American Cities Climate Challenge. That’s a really great example of a program that was inspired by insights that our environmental team had, and that we have worked in the government team collaboratively with the environment team to sort of…we’ve become experts at doing these competitions. So, they’re the climate experts. Rather than retreating to our own silos, we work together to do something that neither of us could probably have done on our own. I think that’s really a value that Patty and the leadership here has tried to put into place, and that’s fun. It’s a different way of working in the world. It just means there’s so many more yes’s than there are no’s, and that’s a fun place to come to every day.

Mayors have a lot of unfunded mandates. They’re being asked to deal with a lot of issues that national governments are not satisfactorily addressing, whether that’s climate change or mass migration, or any number of other issues; and they cannot do it alone.

Denver: Let me close with this, Jim. You probably know more mayors in the world today… as much as anyone. What are some of the aspects of being a mayor, a big city mayor especially, that most citizens would be unaware of, or at least not fully appreciate?

Jim: I know as many small- and mid-sized mayors as large mayors at this point. Let me just say that our programs now, we just had the mayor from Cheyenne, Wyoming sitting next to the mayor of Sao Paulo–one of the world’s largest cities and a very differently-sized American city. It’s really interesting, I think, being a great mayor; obviously, we talked about you need to be a good manager, and being a good manager, we know what that means. That’s about picking smart people, using data, not ideology to guide decision-making, empowering people and giving them latitude, encouraging them to take risks and supporting them when they make intelligent failures. All of that I think is really important.

I think the critical tool that mayors are trying to acquire today… I think more important than ever and probably more top of mind than it was 10 years ago: number one, how do we engage citizens effectively? This is something every mayor everywhere is focused on, and we can talk a little bit about why that is. The second is: How do we collaborate? Mayors have a lot of unfunded mandates. They’re being asked to deal with a lot of issues that national governments are not satisfactorily addressing, whether that’s climate change or mass migration or any number of other issues; and they cannot do it alone.

So, mayors are very focused on: How do we bring partners from civil society, academia, business to the table, articulate shared goals, and then manage together?  That also, I think, is really what makes a mayor a great mayor– is the ability to think in that way, and to think about partnerships as a major way that they do the public’s work. The mayors that look more narrowly at the levers of local government are the mayors that I think have a harder time, as the solutions are smaller. The ambitions are contained. We just know that it’s not enough.

So, I’m seeing more and more mayors that are coming to us. Even in the application process for our Harvard program, mayors are saying, “I need to get better at citizen engagement. Will this program help us? I need to get better at collaboration. Will this program help us?” So, that’s, I think, a really exciting thing that we’re seeing emerge, and I think is an important, critical part of being a good mayor today.

Denver: Your third class might have more than 40 mayors the way you’re going. James Anderson, the head of Government Innovation Programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies., thanks for joining me tonight. Tell us about your website. What’s on it for those who are interested in learning more?

Jim: Please check out our website. It’s a great place to go to get a great sense of the totality of our work, whether you’re interested in the deep arts and cultural investments we’re making in cities across the country, the climate change work that we discussed today. Go to www.bloomberg.org. Our web team is terrific. You’ll see on the website an opportunity to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. If you are a government innovation person, if you’re interested in all things public sector innovation, look for the subscription opportunity to the Spark Newsletter. We send out a weekly briefing on the work that we’re doing. Please check it out.

Denver: Thanks, Jim. This was a fascinating conversation, and it was a real pleasure to have you on the program.

Jim: Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Denver: I’ll be back with more of The Business of Giving right after this.

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