G.T. BYNUM

Your cities can be saved or squandered in one generation. So let's agree to set aside our philosophical disagreements and focus on those aspirations that unite us. Let's grasp the opportunity that is presented by innovation to build better communities for our neighbors. Let's replace a focus on partisan division with a focus on results. That is the path to a better future for us all.

a kid should have an equal shot at a good life in our city, regardless of what part of town they happen to be born in.

The conventional wisdom is that to win an election, you have to dumb it down and play to your constituencies' basest, divisive instincts. And when somebody wins an election like that, they win, that's true, but the rest of us lose. The conventional wisdom is that to win an election, you have to dumb it down and play to your constituencies' basest, divisive instincts. And when somebody wins an election like that, they win, that's true, but the rest of us lose.

what I love about city government is that the citizens can create whatever kind of city they're willing to build.

When something like this hits you in a campaign, you have to decide how you're going to respond, and we had a novel idea. What if, instead of responding with partisanship, we responded with a focus on results? What if we ran a campaign that was not about running against someone, but was about bringing people together behind a common vision? And so we decided to respond not with a negative ad but with something people find even sexier -- data points. And so we emphasized things like increasing per capita income in our city, increasing our city's population, and we stuck to those relentlessly, throughout the campaign, always bringing it back to those things by which our voters could measure, in a very transparent way, how we were doing, and hold me accountable if I got elected.

a lot of people, when you talk about data, people think of that as a contrast to creativity. What we've found is actually quite the opposite. We've found it to be an engine for creative problem-solving, because when you're focused on a goal, and you can test different strategies quickly, the sky's the limit on the different things that you can test out. You can come up with any strategy that you can come up with and utilize and try and test it until you find something that works, and then you double down on that. The other area that we've found that it lends itself to creativity is that it breaks down those old silos of ownership that we run into so often in government. It allows you to draw all the stakeholders in your community that care about homelessness or crime-fighting or education or vacant and abandoned properties, and bring those people to the table so you can work together to address your common goal.

When something like this hits you in a campaign, you have to decide how you're going to respond, and we had a novel idea. What if, instead of responding with partisanship, we responded with a focus on results? What if we ran a campaign that was not about running against someone, but was about bringing people together behind a common vision? And so we decided to respond not with a negative ad but with something people find even sexier -- data points. And so we emphasized things like increasing per capita income in our city, increasing our city's population, and we stuck to those relentlessly, throughout the campaign, always bringing it back to those things by which our voters could measure, in a very transparent way, how we were doing, and hold me accountable if I got elected.

The conventional wisdom is that to win an election, you have to dumb it down and play to your constituencies' basest, divisive instincts. And when somebody wins an election like that, they win, that's true, but the rest of us lose. The conventional wisdom is that to win an election, you have to dumb it down and play to your constituencies' basest, divisive instincts. And when somebody wins an election like that, they win, that's true, but the rest of us lose.

a lot of people, when you talk about data, people think of that as a contrast to creativity. What we've found is actually quite the opposite. We've found it to be an engine for creative problem-solving, because when you're focused on a goal, and you can test different strategies quickly, the sky's the limit on the different things that you can test out. You can come up with any strategy that you can come up with and utilize and try and test it until you find something that works, and then you double down on that. The other area that we've found that it lends itself to creativity is that it breaks down those old silos of ownership that we run into so often in government. It allows you to draw all the stakeholders in your community that care about homelessness or crime-fighting or education or vacant and abandoned properties, and bring those people to the table so you can work together to address your common goal.

Your cities can be saved or squandered in one generation. So let's agree to set aside our philosophical disagreements and focus on those aspirations that unite us. Let's grasp the opportunity that is presented by innovation to build better communities for our neighbors. Let's replace a focus on partisan division with a focus on results. That is the path to a better future for us all.

a kid should have an equal shot at a good life in our city, regardless of what part of town they happen to be born in.

what I love about city government is that the citizens can create whatever kind of city they're willing to build.