Walk the Walk: The #1 Rule for Real Leaders by Alan Deutschman

Author:Alan Deutschman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2009-08-28T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Five

When You Walk the Walk, You Gain a Firsthand View

Here’s the difference between a good leader and a great one: consider two mayors of New York City, seven decades apart, and how they traveled to the office in the morning.

In January 2002, when Michael Bloomberg began his first term as mayor, he would commute the same way that millions of other New Yorkers did: by foot and by subway. Bloomberg walked the four short blocks from his Upper East Side townhouse to the station at Lexington Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street. He would descend the narrow stairs, swipe his magnetic fare card at the turnstiles, and wait on the platform. Then he would take the No. 6 local train for two stops to the Fifty-ninth Street station, where he would get off, descend another set of stairs or escalators, and wait on yet another platform to switch to the No. 4 express train for the rest of the ride downtown to the City Hall station.

Bloomberg was sharing the struggle and the hardship with his fellow citizens. He, too, contended with the crushing crowds, the uncomfortable temperatures, the occasionally repulsive smells, and the inevitable and infuriating delays: one time he was stranded with hundreds of other commuters on a motionless No. 4 train for a half hour.

When the new mayor “talked the talk,” he revealed ambitious goals for reducing the traffic congestion that snarled midtown Manhattan and for cutting the carbon emissions that cause global warming. He encouraged his fellow New Yorkers to take public transportation. By riding the subway every day, he was walking the walk.

Bloomberg’s commuting habits were extraordinarily popular with the media and the citizenry. The New York Times called him the city’s “first subway-riding mayor.” Newsday lauded him as a “regular Joe Commuter.” Bloomberg invited reporters, photographers, and television news crews to come along with him, and they responded enthusiastically. When NBC’s news anchor, Brian Williams, rode the No. 4 train with him during the morning rush hour, Bloomberg bragged about how the subway got him around town faster than a sport-utility vehicle. Even though he was a billionaire who could easily afford to hire a full-time chauffeur, Bloomberg seemed to prefer the subway.

At least that’s how it looked during Bloomberg’s first term. But then, during his second term, in the summer of 2007, the New York Times found that the mayor was still talking the talk but no longer walking the walk: although he claimed to commute by subway “nearly every day,” the reality was that most days he would be driven between his townhouse and City Hall by police officers in a hulking Chevrolet Suburban SUV. The Times reporters found that Bloomberg actually took the subway to work only around two days a week. And even then, he no longer walked to his neighborhood station. The SUV picked him up at his front door and whisked him twenty-two blocks to the Fifty-ninth Street station so he could bypass the local train and get right on the express train, simplifying and speeding up his commute.

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