How American Cities Lost Their Movers and Shakers

Corporate consolidation, globalized firms, and the rise of nonprofits quietly hollowed out the civic power that once built cities

I’ve written for years on how most American cities have seen a major erosion in their civic leadership capacity over the past 30 years. I’ve heavily linked this to changes in the composition of community leadership as a result of corporate consolidation, especially in the banking industry.

My most recent significant piece on this was a 2023 column in Governing magazine:

Changes in cities over the course of the last 30 to 40 years have greatly undermined local leadership cultures like the one which produced [Richard] Ravitch, a lifetime New Yorker. Among the biggest culprits was deregulation that led to corporate consolidation, particularly in banking, utilities and retailing. Back in 1980, the banks in most cities were locally owned and were limited by law to their home markets. Their CEOs were extremely powerful both in their companies and communities. And their personal professional incentives were aligned with those of their locality. The only way to grow their banks or electric utilities was to grow the community where they were based.

Today, many CEOs of once-local companies are branch managers of global firms. Their job is to sit on local boards and dabble in community relations, but they don’t really call the shots anymore. Companies that have remained locally based now typically have national or global reach, so the local market is just one element in a vast portfolio. In a more nationalized and globalized business culture, those who aspire to high corporate positions must take great care to echo standardized positions, particularly around ESG (environmental, social and governance goals) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). They are constrained by career considerations from taking any truly independent positions or actions.

Civic leadership has been democratized and diversified in recent decades. It’s no longer a small group of connected white male elites along with a Black leader or two, getting together in a room and deciding what to do. More inclusive leadership has brought many benefits — neighborhoods aren’t getting demolished for freeways today, for example — but has greatly complicated reaching consensus. With some exceptions like Dan Gilbert in Detroit or George Kaiser in Tulsa, few local business leaders today are able to step forward and assert leadership publicly or even behind the scenes. Civic leadership has been bureaucratized.

Thomas Edsall in the New York Times quoted me extensively on this, and also featured several other thinkers, in a more expansive treatment of the subject. The Christian Science Monitor also ran an interesting article in 2009 looking at this trend, focusing on Boston and Atlanta.

People have tended not to notice this shift, as it has happened slowly over many years. Although people - even the leaders themselves - in many cities sense that there’s a leadership deficit, they struggle to articulate what has happened and why specifically things are different today.

While it is easy to list major corporations that have been merged out of existence or gone bust, it’s not necessarily easy to see the impact on leadership composition and civic capacity.

To shed more light on this, I was able to use Claude to help do some analysis I had long wanted to undertake, but was not able to do until now. I look at the composition of participants in civic leadership development programs over time so see what has changed.

I use Indianapolis as the case study here because I am most familiar with it. But there’s no reason to think Indianapolis is unique in what I found. I believe basically every similar sized city and even ones that are bigger are showing similar trends. Claude largely validated this when I asked for cross-regional comparisons.

Every city today has a variety of leadership development programs. These trace back to an original that was launched, I believe, in Philadelphia in the late 1950s. They took off in the 1970s and 80s.

Indianapolis had one of the earlier programs, known as the Stanley K. Lacy Executive Leadership Series, or SKL. While there are several other programs in the region today, SKL remains the flagship, most prestigious one. It was started in the mid-1970s, and program materials from it were used by many other cities to launch their programs. The first trade association group of leadership development programs (now defunct) was headquartered in Indianapolis and helped spread program ideas around.

I actually spoke to an SKL class a few years ago, and it’s a great program from what I see.

SKL publishes a list of every person who has gone through the program, over 1,000 of them it would appear. I have long wanted to do a study looking at how the profile of the participants in the program have changed over time, but it was too difficult a project for me to take on. AI tools like Claude now allow tasks like this to be done in minutes. While its analysis may not be rigorous enough for academic publication, its findings are illuminating.

Claude divided SKL into various overlapping eras in terms of its participants and moderators (cohort leaders). First was what it called the “Founding Era” (Classes I-X, roughly 1976-1986):

The earliest classes drew from the very core of the Indianapolis civic establishment — old-money families, major law firms, banking, real estate, and the emerging Unigov-era Republican power structure. The names read like a directory of the families who built modern Indianapolis.

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This era’s participants were overwhelmingly white, drawn from corporate law, banking, real estate, and the major Indianapolis firms. The level of subsequent accomplishment was extremely high within the Indiana civic ecosystem — these people became board chairs, managing partners, and institutional leaders. But the scale was distinctly local and state-level.

Second was the “Maturation Era,” (classes VI–XV, roughly 1982–1991). This is when the program reached it apex, with several participants achieving national prominence (like former Bush Economic Policy Council Director Al Hubbard):

This stretch produced some of the program's most consequential graduates in terms of scale of eventual influence…This era shows the program at its peak institutional influence: it was selecting people who would go on to run major national organizations, hold senior White House positions, sit on state supreme courts, and lead the state legislature. The diversity was improving but still limited; the professional mix was broadening beyond pure corporate law into politics, media, and the nonprofit sector.

It then moves on to the “Middle Period”, (classes XVI-XXX, roughly 1992-2006):

The program continued to select solid civic leaders, but the peak concentration of "name brand" graduates begins to dilute somewhat. This is partly a function of time — many in these classes are now in their 50s and still building their legacies — but also reflects a broadening of the program's reach beyond the tight old-guard establishment….The classes get more diverse in this period — more women, more African Americans, more nonprofit and government professionals alongside the corporate lawyers and bankers. The professional profiles shift toward a more typical "emerging leader" mix: marketing executives, nonprofit directors, mid-career government officials, healthcare administrators.

Then there’s the Recent Era (classes XXXI–XLVIII, roughly 2007–2024). These people especially may not have had enough runway to fully rise to their career peak as of yet:

Several notable graduates emerge in this period, though the median profile is arguably more "solid mid-career professional" than "future titan."

Claude’s overall analysis of the trend:

The arc is clear:

The early classes (I–XV) drew from a concentrated, elite, old-guard establishment — the families and firms that ran Indianapolis through the Unigov era. The participants were already well-positioned by birth, education, or firm affiliation, and the program functioned as a kind of civic finishing school for people who were going to lead regardless. This produced an outsized concentration of nationally significant figures (Hubbard, Miles, Selby, Lytle, Bosma, Brooke).

The middle and later classes reflect a genuine broadening — more diverse racially, more women, a wider range of professions (marketing, nonprofits, tech, education, sports), more first-generation professionals rather than establishment heirs. This is a democratization of the program, and it’s arguably a good thing. But it also means the median graduate is a respected mid-career professional rather than a future national power broker.

The honest assessment: SKL's earliest classes caught the Indianapolis establishment at a moment of unusual civic concentration — the Unigov-era Republican coalition that deliberately built the city's sports, cultural, and business infrastructure was tight-knit, and SKL was essentially credentialing the next cohort of that coalition. As Indianapolis has grown, diversified, and become less dominated by a single civic power structure, the program has naturally evolved into something more broadly representative and less exclusively elite. The individual peak accomplishments are lower in the recent classes, but the program is arguably more representative of the city's actual leadership pipeline.

I then asked Claude to drill into the sector makeup of the participants, as it seems to have gone from corporate dominated to non-profit dominated. Here’s what it found:

Your impression is correct, and it's quite striking once you look at it systematically. The program has undergone a major compositional transformation — from one dominated by corporate and professional-services executives to one heavily weighted toward nonprofits, government, and what might broadly be called the "civic infrastructure" sector.

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The program has essentially migrated from being a corporate credentialing mechanism — where the Indianapolis business establishment identified its next generation and socialized them into civic responsibility — to something closer to a nonprofit and civic-sector professional development program that happens to include some corporate participants.

This isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does represent a fundamental change in what the program is. The early SKL was connecting people who already had, or were going to have, substantial private-sector economic power to the civic apparatus. The implicit theory was: “These people are going to run major businesses and control capital; we need to make sure they understand the city’s needs and feel a responsibility to serve.” The current SKL is more like: “These people are already working in community-facing roles; let’s give them a network and shared vocabulary.”

A civic leader friend of mine took this and ran it through ChatGPT to get some additional perspectives:

Old model: few people with massive concentrated authority. New model: many people with narrower, networked influence

Early SKL solved a key problem: “How do we make powerful people care about the city?” Modern SKL solves a different problem: “How do we connect people who already care?” Those are not the same.

You now have two largely separate ecosystems: 1) Economic Power Network and 2) Civic/Nonprofit Network. SKL used to bridge these two. Now it mostly sits in #2.

SKL has drifted from a power-alignment institution to a values-alignment institution. That’s a downgrade if your goal is influence over capital. It’s an upgrade if your goal is inclusive civic engagement.

Claude’s explanation for these shifts directly hits what I have long hammered about corporate consolidation, as well as the decline of the WASP Establishment. There are simply fewer locally headquartered companies in Indianapolis today, and thus fewer genuine corporate power brokers and “blue blood” heirs to populate this program if that were still the intent

1. The decline of locally headquartered corporate power. Indianapolis’s corporate landscape has changed dramatically since 1976. Many of the major firms whose executives populated early classes have been acquired, merged, or moved — the banking consolidations that eliminated Merchants National, National City, and others; the corporatization of old family businesses. The number of “major local corporate executive” slots available to fill has simply shrunk. Eli Lilly, Anthem, Cummins, and Simon Property Group still exist, but their executive ranks are more nationally recruited and less embedded in the Indy civic network.

The last bit highlights that merely retaining a corporate HQ doesn’t mean its executives relate to the local civic environment in the same way. The reason those corporations are likely still independent is that they became larger, more expansive national and global institutions.

Eli Lilly, for example, is a global juggernaut. It’s the world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company. It’s notable that Lilly CEO David Ricks, who has spent a quarter century at Lilly and built his career there, does not appear to have gone through SKL. Instead, he was doing things like running Lilly’s China business.

Ricks operates at the pinnacle of global capitalism, and, frankly, it would be a misallocation of his time to spend too much of it on local Indianapolis affairs. And even though he runs the company, even he can’t take too much “political” risk in his local engagement, such as by pushing controversial initiatives. Or at least it would be potentially unwise to do so; he needs to be channeling his risk taking into Lilly’s actual business. Notwithstanding that, however, Ricks has arguably done more civically for Indianapolis than any other business leaders since the last actual Lilly family member. He’s in effect padded the coffers of the philanthropic Lilly Endowment by over $50 billion additional dollars - increasing its giving capacity by over $2.5 billion per year, much of it within Indiana.

The key is that the corporate landscape in cities has changed tremendously in the past few decades.

Claude also highlights the growth of the non-profit sector - candidly, not necessarily a positive thing - self-selection bias, and a focus on DEI as factors driving these shifts. It also highlighted the shift in SKL from being run by the Chamber of Commerce (i.e, the business community) to a standalone non-profit (a civic sector NGO). This is a change that has occurred in other cities as well.

Changes in the composition of SKL are an indicator of changes in the composition of Indianapolis’ overall civic leadership more generally. There are fewer genuine mover and shaker types today, many more corporate functionaries and non-profit people.

The Final Four is being held in Indianapolis again this weekend. This is a legacy of the city’s efforts to use sports as an economic and civic development platform - originally to be “the amateur sports capital of the world” - in the 1980s. While the occasional city had hoped to use the Olympics as a brand booster, Indianapolis really pioneered the idea of American cities leveraging sports in the way we understand it today. It created the first ever city sports commission, the Indiana Sports Corp., for example.

People here have been asking for over a decade, “What’s the next sports strategy?” The reality is, there’s unlikely to be one. The leadership structure of Indianapolis and other cities today is less conductive to initiatives like that - which involve doing unique things that are not being done elsewhere, involving significantly political, civic, and financial risk. Not as many people today are able to take those risks and induce others to follow them.

It’s not that the people here are dumber or less competent than they used to be. But the entire economic and civic structure in which they are embedded is different. They are largely not part of old, influential families. They don’t run locally headquartered firms. If they do run local firms, those firms are part of a new era of globalized capitalism. There are way more of them who are part of non-profit type “stakeholder” organizations. And with the focus on inclusive leadership, there are just many, many more people involved.

The net result is ultimately lower capacity civic leadership.

Again, there’s every reason to believe this is now the norm in most places. I see the same trends playing out in Chicago and other cities I look at. The factors like corporate consolidation that help produce this operate at the national level, and so we should expect the impact to be pervasive (if not exactly the same everywhere).

Because our leadership problems today result in good measure from these kinds of structural factors, this suggests it won’t be easy to change things, at least at the local level.

Now, I don’t want to let our leaders off the hook entirely by suggesting everything is a result of outside forces. In my view, the Boomers have been incredibly bad at developing and empowering talent in subsequent generations, for example. Boomers want loyal soldiers in their own army, not to raise up people who might plausibly be generals in their own right some day.

Still, we have to recognize that structural forces are very much at play here.

Whatever the underlying causes, however, it’s clear that at the national and local levels, people do not even fully recognize the changes that have occurred in the nature of their leadership structures. There’s a sense that something is amiss, but not an understanding of what that is.

You can read Claude’s report on Indy’s SKL program here:

Skl Claude Analysis

176KB ∙ PDF file

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In closing, I’ll note that this kind of analysis shows the new capability space opened by AI. If I had wanted to do this kind of analysis without AI, it would have required enormous resources. I’d need people and money to track down who all the people in the various SKL classes were. Keep in mind, the organization only publishes a list of names by class. It doesn’t give titles, institutional affiliations, or even the year these classes took place. There are over a thousand people on the list, most of whom I’ve never heard of before. Even if someone much more knowledgeable and connected than me wanted to do this, it would be quite an undertaking.

With AI, I can just point Claude at the file, and it will do all the work for me. Perhaps it can’t identify every person on the list, but it can get a sufficient quantity of them to give a high level analysis. If the findings are interesting enough, someone could undertake a more formal study.

So much of the discussion around AI is around all the terrible things it might do or the ways it might harm people using it. But the possibility space opened by AI is endless. We have not yet begun to scratch the surface of the new capabilities that AI is going to put into the palm of our hand.

You should give it a try yourself. Take any historic list of people, run it through Claude, and see what interesting things it found. I ran a similar analysis of two long-running speaker series here in town, and also got really interesting and revealing results.

You now have the power to do things in minutes at nearly zero cost that even the most well-resourced institutions in town couldn’t easily pull off before AI. If you aren’t taking advantage of these capabilities, you are missing out on some very exciting developments in our world.

Cover image: 2006 Final Four by Stepshep/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0