Introduction: Leading from the Middle By the winter of 2008, I knew the drill. With four years as mayor of Oklahoma City and twenty years as a sportscaster and news anchor under my belt, I had done twenty thousand newscasts and thousands of interviews. I'd interviewed hundreds of people myself-and sometimes those people were not in a very good mood. As mayor, I'd won heated campaign debates, faced angry citizens in city council meetings, testified in the United States Congress, and talked policy with the president of the United States. But sitting backstage that day, I was as nervous as I had ever been. I was about to go on Ellen. Interestingly enough, I wasn't the only one making my first appearance with Ellen that day. Ellen's "headline" guest was a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old country singer I had never even heard of before. But her stories about breaking up with one of the Jonas Brothers mesmerized the crowd. It was probably going to be a breakthrough day for Taylor Swift. I was crossing my fingers that it would be for me, too. Besides the fact that I was just some mayor of a small city in the middle of nowhere, I faced a deeper challenge: the subject I'd been invited to talk about. I was there to talk about being fat. Or I guess more accurately, about getting real and losing some weight. And not just my personal weight-loss journey, either. Other politicians had done that much before. I was there to talk about an oddball idea I'd had just a couple months earlier. Without any authority, or reason to know for sure it would work, I'd done something that was borderline nuts. I'd gone to our city's zoo, stood in front of the elephants, and put my entire city on a diet. Being a relatively new mayor, I had reasons to be risk-averse. This was-no doubt about it-risky. A calculated choice, but risky nonetheless. A lighthearted take on a serious subject. The country was beginning to focus on obesity. I figured we could either be an example of the problem or an example of a city that was not afraid to do tough things. My feeling was that the first step toward actually dealing with obesity was to start a conversation about it. But as I sat backstage in my oversize dressing room waiting for my chance to talk to a few million people all at once, I started second-guessing myself. It was pretty lonely back there. This dressing room had my name on the door and was large enough for an entourage of ten people. I guess most guests on Ellen bring a couple of limos full of support staff. I was all by myself. Just me, my backpack, and my doubts-the last of which were growing by the minute. If I'd wanted to distract myself, the table and the refrigerator were fully stocked with snacks. But that was no help at all. Like the rest of my city, I was on a diet. The irony continued. This should have been one of the most exciting times of my life-a TV journalist turned mayor of my hometown! About to go on Ellen! I had been preparing for this for my whole life. Ellen DeGeneres was already a red-carpet, A-list celebrity at the top of her game. This interview would be in front of a Los Angeles studio audience (not to mention millions of viewers at home) who were all expecting something good. I had arrived with material I thought would be funny. But as her producers rehearsed with me how the interview would go, I realized I didn't need to be funny. I was the straight man, and she was the comedienne. I just kept telling myself, "Relax." For all that pressure, I couldn't lose focus. Somehow, I needed to break through the noise and turn this five-minute interview into some real positive attention for my city. I reminded myself that I was a veteran of television. I had thousands of hours of TV news and sports under my belt. Most of them had gone exceptionally well. Sure, every once in a while, there would be a disaster. Twenty-five years earlier, my first TV boss once tried to console me after my sportscast completely fell apart live on the air. "You know, when you are in a car wreck, sometimes you don't get to get up and walk away," he reminded me. "That's the good thing about television," he continued. "No matter how bad it is, you can always get up and walk away. So it can't be that bad." There was a knock on the dressing room door. It was time. A stagehand was ready to walk me toward the stage. He seemed surprised that I was all alone in that big room. I asked if I could leave my backpack and get it on my way out. He thought that was funny. As I stood behind the curtain waiting to be introduced, Ellen joked about what the city's weight-loss plan might actually be. "I hope he isn't just asking them to move away!" she cracked. That was funny. I could tell by the crowd's laughter, and I laughed myself as I stood backstage. But what really hit me in the interview was that she and her audience were not laughing at us. They were laughing with us. Then Ellen brought me onstage. "When a survey ranked Oklahoma City as one of the fattest cities in the nation, our next guest sprang into action, asking the residents to lose one million pounds. Please welcome the mayor of Oklahoma City, Mick Cornett." The Wrong Lists at the Wrong Time The plan worked. Something about this initiative put our city on the national stage for a moment. And for the first time in a long time, if we played this thing right, it could be the kind of attention we wanted. I'm not sure I would have seen it then, either, but a lot of cities across Middle America were on the cusp of big ideas and bigger changes. The willingness to take a risk and invest in our future was a bigger trend than I could have ever seen on my own. But those bigger changes in smaller cities were already afoot. Around the time I was elected in 2004, Oklahoma City was starting to emerge as a community worth noticing. The city was just on the verge of coming out of the economic slumber and boom-and-bust cycle that had driven many young adults and highly productive professionals of my own generation-and the companies they worked for-to leave town for bigger and brighter places. How did I know we were turning the corner? We were starting to show up on "the lists." The lists? Take a look at the bottom of any webpage, and you'll probably see a link to one of those top-ten lists and city rankings the mainstream media and clickbait bloggers love to put out every week. Bloggers love to rank cities. And mayors, and evidently readers, too, like to see where we stack up against the competition. Up to that time Oklahoma City had so rarely made any positive list that when I first noticed us appearing anywhere them, it was kinda cool! #4 Best City to Get a Job! #2 Best City to Start a Business! #7 Coolest Downtown! #5 Best-Tasting Drinking Water! At the time we weren't number one on any of these lists, but just to appear on them was great PR for the city. We joked at city hall that we were finally "somebody"! And then came the one list on which no mayor wanted to see their city. The list of the Fattest Cities in America. There we were, right near the top. OMG. Now, I'd like to point out that we were on that list with a lot of really cool places! Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami. All places I'd love to take a vacation. These weren't cities that you'd typically be afraid to be associated with. But still . . . I didn't like being on that list. What I decided to do about it defied the laws of PR in a way and brought national attention to one of these forgotten Middle American cities. Not for showing up in the middle of the pack on some arbitrary ranking, but for our willingness to face our flaws and then do something about it. That day on Ellen, Oklahoma City was worth talking about. And since then even more cities and metros, as small as ten thousand and as big as one million, that most Americans call home are doing the same. Facing their weaknesses, deciding to see them as opportunities, and taking action. This may just be one of the most exciting trends in America in generations. From Good to Great? Try "Worst to First" It took several years of work before my hometown started showing up on "the lists." But in the twenty years since the Oklahoma City bombing, our city has gone through a lot of change. Almost all of that change has been for the better. Most of it has been truly remarkable. I like to say it this way: Our community of change-makers has taken our economy, our downtown, our city, our standards, and our view of the future "from worst to first." In just a few short years, the people of Oklahoma City built a beautiful new downtown baseball park, saving our AAA baseball team. We also built a new central library; rebuilt our performing arts center, convention center, and fairground facilities. We built the Bricktown entertainment district along a canal (that we also built) next to what for decades had been a dry patch of grass that adults had a habit of calling "the river." We rebuilt every school in the OKC school district, with tremendous support from our suburban communities to focus on the inner-city schools in greatest need of investment. And there's more. A lot more, really, but in the end we invested over $5 billion (and what feels like as many hours) in public and private money, creating what National Geographic called the "Pride of the Plains" on its 2015 list of the best vacation destinations in the world. Trust me-growing up in Oklahoma City, we thought of ourselves more as a truck stop than an international vacation destination. From the depths of our financial struggles of the early 1990s and the devastating attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City has risen from very likely the worst economy in the country to one of the strongest, most resilient, diverse-and proud-places there is. But this transformation is a lot more common than you'd think: and maybe even a little bit easier than it looks. The Big Idea: Small Places, Punching Above Our Weight Some version of the "turnaround" story is at the heart of the history of most of the great cosmopolitan capitals and global gateway cities in our nation today. Cities like Boston were rocked, not necessarily for the first time in their history, by globalization in the middle of the twentieth century. Between 1950 and 1980, populations shifted south and west and textile and manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Boston shrank by nearly 30 percent in population. As this trend grew nationwide, many city leaders and national pundits wondered aloud if the age of urbanism was over. Not only has Boston turned around its population growth-something any mayor will tell you is absolutely essential for a city's future-they have found their footing for the next century in a diverse economy, inventive higher education, incredible institutions, and an increasingly global reach. In this transformation, Boston is not alone-nor will it be the last city to find its competitive advantage in the needs of growing companies and families in a quickly changing world. In truth, this pattern has played out in its own way in almost all of the great cities Americans treasure. For example, in Seattle in the early 1970s times were much darker than they are now. Boeing, following years of growth in a dramatically expanding economy, suffered major setbacks and laid off more than forty thousand workers in a year's time. Unemployment in the Emerald City reached as high as 25 percent. Business leaders were seriously worried the city would clear out completely. And long before there was such a thing as an Internet millionaire or anything called Amazon.com, there was a billboard on the road to the airport that read will the last person leaving seattle-turn out the lights. We know the rest of the story there. Seattle has found its way. And the same basic narrative has played out in cities like Charlotte, Portland (Oregon), Denver, Atlanta, Nashville, and my own city. When times are tough, good places with great people dig deep and find a way to blaze a trail to the future. And it is this sort of adventure that hundreds of mayors and cities find themselves in the beginning stages of today. Big Enough for Scale, Small Enough for Change The turnaround story for cities is by no means a special territory of smaller or midsize cities, to be sure. Who can forget the heroic efforts of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in New York or Mayor Ed Rendell in Philadelphia in the 1990s? At a time in our nation's history when cities were far from the hubs of innovation and opportunity we see them as today, leaders like these truly achieved the impossible. But in part because the reality is that most Americans live in our country's smaller and midsize cities, and in part because of some new, exciting ideas growing in these places, a true revolution is coming that will shape the way we think about the fabric of our nation for decades to come. For the sake of this book, I'd like for you to think of Middle America not so much as the Midwest, or "flyover" landlocked places, but as the cities wherever they sit where most of our citizens and families live, work, and play. Those smaller markets and cities that the vast majority of Americans call home. Now, a range between ten thousand and a million residents might seem quite wide, but just ask anyone from Indianapolis or Columbus (both about eight hundred and fifty thousand residents) whether they feel more at home in Manhattan, New York, or Manhattan, Kansas. The city turnarounds and stories of new growth you'll read in these pages are not just more common than you'd think. They are increasingly replicable, and build on assets that hundreds, maybe thousands of cities have. The tools and allies are more practiced and available than ever. And what really drives this change is our communities' openness, optimism, resilience, and diversity. These exceptional traits of our country and our economy are the only tools you'll ever really need. Excerpted from The Next American City: The Rise of Livable Midsize Metros by Mick Cornett, Jayson White All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
