From Titans to Technocrats

Today's urban leaders are more polished, more inclusive, and more powerless than the Titans they replaced — which is why the hardest problems go unsolved

A pair of articles about Columbus, Ohio were published last week that shed light on growing societal inequality in a “K-shaped” economy, and also the leadership challenges facing our cities and country. They expose something that local leaders across the country can feel but not quite fully understand or articulate, namely that the current model of civic leadership in America is weaker than people think based on success headlines.

The article representing the ascending top leg of the K was a great profile of a high tech industrial boom in Columbus (gift link) in the New York Times. It highlights the giant factories being built there by Intel and the defense tech startup Anduril. “Columbus,” the Times notes, “has been transformed. The metropolitan area has become a critical hub for advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence.” Founder Dennis DeMeyere says, “It’s wild. Everything is under construction. It feels like the Bay Area felt 13 or 14 years ago.” Manufacturing employment is up, growing 4.4% from 2021 to 2024. The city’s highly aligned and business friendly approach, dubbed the “Columbus Way” is credited for this success.

The descending bottom leg of the K was covered by Mark Barbash, a longtime veteran economic development official who is now retirement age. He warned in a Columbus Dispatch op-ed (free AOL link) that the Columbus Way is no longer fit for purpose in addressing the city’s major challenges. The city has 240,000 people living in poverty, about a fifth the population. Food bank visits have doubled since before the pandemic. Homelessness is at a record high. And housing prices have soared. What works for luring Intel can’t address these kinds of social issues.

Juxtaposed, these two pieces show the K-shaped society playing out in one city. A friend of mine describes Columbus as “60% Sunbelt, 20% Cleveland, 20% Appalachia.” Factor into that also that the city also has the second largest Somali refugee community in the United States, with an estimated 50-60,000 people, one that is experiencing social and economic integration challenges. It’s a mix of demographic and economic boomtown, combined with significant inequality and social challenges.

What’s happening that civic leadership seems so effective on headline economic matters, yet hasn’t been able to address the inequality or social issues highlighted? Barbash highlights, “Corporate leadership is less anchored to place, with executives whose networks extend far beyond the region and for whom civic engagement is no longer assumed to come with the territory.” And, “Growth no longer reliably creates broad-based jobs.”

These are true, but miss a more fundamental lack of economic alignment between corporate success, local success, and individual success for leaders today. And how Columbus’s leadership model has shifted, from one once led by Titans to one now organized around technocrats.

The Titans

I’ve highlighted many times the decline in civic leadership in America’s cities resulting from a combination of the decline of “WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment” type blue blood elites, and corporate consolidation that dramatically reduced the number of significant companies, and thus corporate leaders, whose economic interests were directly tied to the overall fortunes of the city where they were located.

In this older model, a relatively small number of tightly connected white male institutional leaders dominated civic life. In Columbus, this was the era of the so-called “Titans,” six particularly dominant city power brokers, as well as the constellation of other often intermarried, multigenerational Bexley-focused elites around them. (Bexley is an old money enclave city within Columbus, similar to Highland Park in Dallas). As Columbus Monthly wrote in 1989, “There are six. All are men; all are white. They are the people who can make a project move forward, or stop it in its tracks, if they so choose. They are the people who can weigh in, who run such strong institutions with such financial clout that they cannot be ignored in any decision affecting the overall community.”

In the era up through the Titans, civic alignment took place informally, through personal, and sometimes familial relationships. As Columbus Monthly said, “Politicians touch base with them; community leaders touch base with them, and they touch base with each other.”

Many of these older elites grew up together, went to kindergarten together, summered together on the same lakes. There were institutions like chambers of commerce and city clubs, but they were often supplemental to other longstanding personal ties. Prior to the 1980s finance revolution and deregulation, even CEOs who didn’t come from a blue blood background had businesses heavily tied to the fortunes of the local community, and with a lot of latitude to run their firms without activist investor pressure.

This group in Columbus was likely unusually cohesive and dominant because unlike many Midwest and Northeast cities, the Columbus elites never had to deal with ethnic political machines or similar rival bases of power.

This era lasted into the 1990s, when its economic and other bases fragmented. Two of the six Titans were members of the Wolfe family, which for at least three generations - over 100 years - had built the city’s dominant business empire. Over roughly a 35 year period they liquidated their holdings, starting with their bank (1984), then their brokerage (1998), the sale of the Columbus Dispatch newspaper (2015), and their local TV/radio group (2019). The Wolfe family still has a local philanthropy and some real estate, but is no longer “Titanic.”

Another was John B. McCoy, the third generation CEO of Bank One, the city’s largest bank that was once a major “super-regional.” McCoy had held basically every major civic position in town. Bank One was merged with First Chicago in 1998 and the headquarters moved to the Windy City. The McCoys are no more as a civic force, though the bank, now part of JPMorgan Chase, is still a huge local employer.

Two others were John Fisher of Nationwide Insurance, a mutual, and Frank Wobst of Huntington Bancshares. These were organization men, not family patriarchs. Interestingly, their businesses carry on in Columbus today, with Nationwide in particular a corporate anchor. One might naively think that a multigenerational family dominated business would be more likely to survive, but that’s not always the case. Neither Fisher nor Wobst had children of comparable stature in the city.

The last was Les Wexner, the upstart self-made man who built the Limited retail empire. While some spinoff brands are still in town, the Limited empire is not what it once was, and the elderly Wexner has been badly damaged by his deep ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

You can imagine similar dynamics playing out at lower levels in the hierarchy, dramatically reducing the economic base of personal civic power, and severing multigenerational traditions of leadership in the community.

This older leadership model also had something of a cultural underpinning of a “social gospel” ethos (or whatever you prefer to call it). In talking about the past, Barbash notes that Columbus’ “business, philanthropy, nonprofits, religious institutions and government worked from a shared playbook.” He explicitly lists religious institutions. There was a much more robust religious life and powerful religious institutions in that era, the remains of the “P” in WASP that had transformed into a sort of generic Judeo-Christianity in the postwar period.

The Technocrats

From the 1990s into the 2000s, cities began to sense that the old model of leadership was no longer going to be viable in the future, and began to create new leadership institutions and structures to compensate. These organizations were designed to regionalize, organize, professionalize, and formalize civic leadership in an era where old informal and familial ties could not be relied on.

Today’s CEOs, for example, aren’t third generation patriarchs, but individuals often hired from out of town and who likely won’t be in the city for the long term. They are more completely reliant on formal institutions for mobilizing leadership connectivity since they lack the pre-existing ties of the older elite. In today’s world they also cannot treat their corporations as a personal fiefdoms.

These new leadership structures and institutions would be staffed by professionals to enable focused effort on key civic priorities like economic development. This was ultimately a technocratic elite, with both the CEOs overseeing these organizations and their staff achieving their positions through professional competence under meritocratic conditions.

In Columbus specifically, the key organization was the Columbus Partnership, the local CEO council, founded in 2002. There have been variations of these CEO clubs going back over a hundred years to groups like the Commercial Club of Chicago or the midcentury Allegheny Conference in Pittsburgh. But there was a wave of new or reorganized groups of this type around the same time and addressing the same leadership issues, including the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership (1999), the Atlanta Committee for Progress (2003), and the Itasca Project in Minneapolis (2004, now the Greater MSP Partnership). Notably, groups like the Columbus Partnership include CEOs of universities, foundations, and other non-profit civic groups as well as for-profit corporations.

The Columbus Partnership created an economic development organization now called One Columbus in 2010, and recruited ace economic developer Kenny McDonald from out of town - not some local scion - to run it. It was an enormous success, as the Times article illustrates. This is what most people today mean when they talk about the Columbus Way.

This era was also when we saw tremendous growth in the “NGOctopus” of non-profit groups. In Columbus this included Campus Partners (1995) and the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation (2002). But there was also an array of various more charitable type groups, typically organized around advocacy or service delivery with foundation or government driven funding, not the older associational or membership based models (see Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy).

It was also an era of broadening of leadership. Rather than six Titans, there are 82 members of the Columbus Partnership. It’s no longer just white men, but women and racial minorities as well. Various constituency groups throughout the city, if not directly represented in elite organizations like the Columbus Partnership, have a voice as “stakeholders.”

Religion, however, has faded significantly. In contrast with how he talks about the past, when Barbash talks about the future, religious institutions are missing. He wrote, “What is needed is a table where business, philanthropy, nonprofits and government align on strategy.” Columbus today is in fact among America’s least religious cities, ranking 7th in one such survey, one of only eight cities in the country where “unaffiliated” is the top religious choice.

The Limits of Technocratic Leadership

This second model of civic leadership successfully grabbed the baton from the older one. For a time, it has seemed to be as good or better than the old model. Cities like Columbus boomed or came into their own. Columbus, for example, is now a genuine big league city, with franchises in the NHL (2000) and MLS (1996). Columbus has never been a larger, more important, more influential city in America than it is today. In fact, it’s positioned as potentially the first Midwestern breakout city to join the Sunbelt boomtowns. If Columbus were a stock, I’d buy it.

The new system was also fairer in some ways. No longer, for example, would a freeway simply be plowed through an urban neighborhood. Leadership would be more inclusive, if not genuinely democratic.

However, as with corporate consolidation, some of this urban success story was not only a result of local efforts but also macro trends external to Columbus itself. Cities generally started to revive in the 1980s, with a big takeoff in the 1990s. This was the era of the so-called “super mayor” like Rudy Giuliani in New York, Richard M. Daley in Chicago, and Tom Menino in Boston. Is it likely that all these cities got amazing mayors at the same time, or that those mayors, who may well have been skilled, benefitted from a general shift in the urban fortunes?

As cities were coming back, the large Millennial generation started graduating from college and moving to urban centers. This turbocharged central city growth and spread it out beyond the elite centers. The Great Recession from 2007 to 2010 actually benefitted cities, as it inhibited people from buying houses and moving to the suburbs.

Columbus has been growing, but most of its stats are very similar to its neighbor Indianapolis, another sprawling state capital without a heavy industry legacy. Most likely both cities are being shaped by similar forces in ways that have benefitted them in similar ways.

Looking behind these positive trends, we can also see that the new technocratic leadership model has limits. Most importantly, the leadership class that comprises it is structurally weak. It no longer has the kind of real personal, economic, or social power that the old “Titan” style elites did. These leaders exist in a national or global, not local talent marketplaces. They are technocrats, not Titans. As a result they can only remain bankable within the marketplace to the extent that they reflect the current consensus of it, apart from any local needs or considerations. Their careers and positions are much more fragile.

This is the root of what Barbash is seeing when he wrote, “When the same handful of leaders decide everything, the answers tend toward the cautious and the incremental.” But that risk aversion is a core element of the technocratic leadership model, not a result of a handful of leaders making the big decisions. The Wolfes or Les Wexner in his prime could say or do anything they wanted, for good or for ill. We even see some legacy of that older today in select places, such as with Dan Gilbert in Detroit. Gilbert is another self-made man, one who poured billions of dollars into buying up and redeveloping downtown Detroit real estate, and moving key companies he controlled and their thousands of employees into those developments, at a time when that looked like folly.

Technocrats cannot take that kind of risk. Just as one example, look at the Covid era. In Columbus, like in most other cities, this class opted for an extended hard lockdown strategy, with very lengthy periods of school closures and work-from-home. It also pivoted to make BLM/DEI the central organizing principle of urban institutional life in the city for two to three years in the wake of the George Floyd killing. The Columbus Partnership turned hard into racial equity, with then CEO Alex Fischer saying, “If we keep it up week after week, month after month, year after year—I think we can change Columbus, and I think we can make a huge difference. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much energy, depth and commitment by a broad segment of our leadership, which is exciting.”

It’s notable that this is very similar to what leadership in other cities did, showing Columbus’ leaders following a national consensus, not local needs. And there was a very high level of local leadership unanimity in these choices.

Later, as the national consensus changed, Columbus’ leadership changed with it. As the DEI movement went into a partial retreat nationally, the Columbus corporate community mirrored that. There were also some attempts to rebalance on work from home, again in line with national trends.

Privately, many business and civic leaders will acknowledge that cities and their institutions “over-corrected” in the Covid era (as one such leader described it to me). Not that they should have done nothing, but they went too far for too long. This over-correction inflicted enormous harm on America’s downtowns and urban centers, such as in their office based employment base, likely setting them back a decade or more. Downtown office employment may never recover in some cities.

Columbus has been more fortunate than most here. It still has very high downtown office vacancy, but has been a leader in converting office space to residential. It as also not fallen prey to the hard left political insurgency that became so successful elsewhere.

But the key point is this: today’s post-Titan technocratic corporate leaders in Columbus must be risk-averse consensus followers. They mostly cannot step out of line no matter what the implications for their city. They probably can’t even have an honest public conversation about what happened from 2020 to 2022. In fact, one could argue that this is likely more true in Columbus than elsewhere, because cities that boast of their high levels of civic alignment, as with the “Columbus Way,” tend to be places where public dissent is frowned on or simply not done.

This is why the social problems Barbash notes are not being solved. Today’s urban civic leaderships mostly must follow the national consensus. That consensus is consistent with working to attract high-value employers. But the consensus moves on the matters Barbash cites are basically not solving those problems anywhere. To potentially solve them, Columbus leaders would need to undertake uncertain, risky, expensive initiatives that are not being done elsewhere. The degree of difficulty in doing that is high. Add to that the missing religious element that would have been more squarely focused on those social challenges, and you can see the difficulties.

What Barbash proposes is effectively doubling down on the technocratic leadership model: more convening organizations, more civic training for leaders less locally rooted leaders, etc. But this can’t overcome the structural problems, one resulting from the shift from Titan to technocrat. Solving that is, admittedly, difficult.

Barbash exhorts regional leaders by saying, “A region cannot be economically successful and socially strained at the same time and still sustain its growth. Eventually, one track pulls the other down.” But realistically, Columbus, like many other places, can probably continue powering ahead on its present success track even if the bottom leg of the “K” is struggling.

Rather than too much poverty, the main risk to Columbus today might be a macro change that puts the upper leg of its K-shaped economy at risk. If addressing that challenge required challenging the national elite consensus in some way, I’m not sure if Columbus’ leadership (or that of most other cities) would be able to do that. The way America’s urban leadership classes responded during the Covid era, in ways that really hurt their own cities and downtowns, should be a cautionary tale against thinking they’ll rise to the occasion in the future. Until yet another new model emerges, the technocratic approach to urban leadership will remain with us, with all the strengths and weaknesses that come with it.