Mapping the Future: Leadership in Search of a Sense of Place

How can today's cross sector leaders utilize "placeless" technology to serve residents living in a particular community?

The School of Public Policy’s Project for Cross Sector Leadership and the City of Santa Monica will co-host a discussion at the Santa Monica Library entitled, "Mapping the Future: Leadership in Search of a Sense of Place." In this fast-moving and engaging conversation, public leadership experts Kate Coleman and Stephen Goldsmith will reveal research from their forthcoming book showing how public sector and nonprofit leaders can unlock public value and increase performance by incorporating a sense of place in how they plan, act, and communicate. They will also provide a framework for GIS experts to advance the importance and applicability of their work.

Problems facing cities exist in systems, not in agencies. The disconnected nature of many services multiplies the complexity of service delivery and dilutes effectiveness. These problems occur across agencies, across governments (city, county, state, and federal), and across sectors (government, nonprofit and for-profit contractors).

The underlying goal is to deepen awareness by government and nonprofit senior managers about how thinking and acting with a geographic or place-based orientation will create better decision making inside their enterprises and how it will further cross sector collaborations.

Coleman has thirty years of experience as a senior executive in the private and social sectors where she has successfully participated in multiple significant organizational transformations. For the past year, as a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow, she has applied that experience to research that focuses on obstacles to nonprofit efficiency and effectiveness. Coleman has taught classes in a variety of settings, most recently at the Institute for Nonprofit Practice at Tufts. Her ability to communicate and engage audiences is the product of having given hundreds of presentations in which she translated complex ideas into simple concepts with real world applications. From Coleman's service on the board of the University of Chicago's Graham School for Continuing Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, she recognizes the need for students both to understand theory and prepare for emerging career opportunities.

Goldsmith is the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and the Director of the Innovations in Government Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He directs Data-Smart City Solutions, the Project on Municipal Innovation, the Civic Analytics Network and Operational Excellence in Government. Previously, he served as the Deputy Mayor of New York and the Mayor of Indianapolis. His most recent book is A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Governance.