Our newsletter has a new name and a new look that better reflects who we are and what we do. The new name is derived from our signature work known as City Dividends.
City Dividends
Making Small Changes that reap Big Economic Dividends
To achieve city success, it is essential to motivate, mobilize, focus, and accelerate action.We believe the best way to do that is by using the “Power of Progress.” This theory of action is based on what Harvard Professor Teresa Amabile calls the “progress principle”- the single most important motivator and catalyst of positive action is making progress and showing forward momentum in meaningful work. Small but regular “wins” have a cumulative increase, and can trigger much bigger reactions.
The progress principle informs our City Dividends, premised on research and experience that show measurable progress, or “moving the needle,” on targeted work can reap large economic growth dividends for cities, and accelerates movement on important goals. City Dividends focus this idea down to the power of one: showing that the difference in one percentage point, one mile, one measurement (a small step) has the potential to yield a large economic dividend (a big idea)—which helps demonstrate measurable progress.
CEOs for Cities has already developed three City Dividends—the Talent, Green, and Opportunity Dividends. Each dividend reflects one small change that leads to a big difference:
- The Talent Dividend: A one percentage-point increase in the four-year college attainment rate for the population aged 25 and older in the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan areas is associated with an $856 increase in annual per capita income for the metropolitan area, totaling an increase $143 billion for the entire nation.
- The Green Dividend: If we can reduce the number of miles traveled per person per day in the 51 largest U.S. metro areas by one mile, the nation would save $31 billion on fuel and the expense of purchasing and maintaining vehicles.
- The Opportunity Dividend: A one percentage-point reduction in poverty in the nation’s 51 largest metro areas is associated with government savings of $31 billion per year—as each additional person in poverty is associated with $19,000 in anti-poverty expenditures in a metropolitan area.
City Vitals
Benchmarking your City’s Success
You will notice that our newsletter is divided into four sections:
Connected City; Innovative City; Talented City; Your Distinctive City.
Here’s why.
Given the complex, interconnected problems that cities and regions face, it is critical to frame and organize work that puts a focusing lens on the city and region, and helps to see and understand the critical levers for city and regional success. Framing is critically important, because, as Wayne Dyer has noted, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
It is important to benchmark city/regional performance in the four areas most vital to CITY success that spell out the word ‘CITY’: Connections, Innovation, Talent, and Your distinctiveness. These are what we call City Vitals.
Connected City
How does your city connect it physical, human and social capital? Cities thrive as places where people can easily interact and connect. We measure the local connectedness of cities by looking at a diverse array of factors including voting, community involvement, economic integration and transit use. Our measures of external connections include foreign travel, the presence of foreign students and broadband Internet use.
Innovative City
How does your city foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship? The ability to generate new ideas and to turn those ideas into reality is a critical source of competitive advantage not just for businesses but for cities and regions. Invisible and weightless, ideas can’t be measured directly, but the footprints they leave in the economic landscape can be traced by counting numbers of patents, the dollar value of venture capital investments, the extent of personal entrepreneurship and the number of small businesses.
Talented City
How does your city develop, retain, attract, train, and employ its talent? The indispensable asset in aknowledge economy is smart people. Talent, which we measure byeducational attainment, the numberof creative professionals, themigration of well-educated youngadults and the number of foreign born college graduates, reveals theunderlying intellectual capital a regioncan draw on to build its economy andto weather the inevitable shocks ofcompetition and change.
Your Distinctive City
How does your city find its authentic voice? It’s DNA? How does it link and leverage its distinctive assets? The unique characteristics of place may be the only truly defensible source of competitive advantage for regions. In a world of global competition, a strategy of “pretty much the same, maybe cheaper” is a recipe for mediocrity and economic stagnation. Our measures of distinctiveness are inherently incomplete. Every city has its own unique characteristics for which there are few, if any, statistics. We offer some initial measures of distinctiveness drawn from market data about consumer behavior and its variance across U.S. metropolitan
Cities should assess their City Vitals and adopt City Dividends because they can’t afford to drive into the future without collective energy, intense focus, and a well-informed, accelerated path to success.
The future belongs to those cities and regions who can frame their opportunities and challenges, act in ways that demonstrate measurable progress, and connect and engage with the smartest people and the smartest ideas in the most places and in the most ways. In the words of Steve Jobs, the cities and regions that “tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires” will be the ones that change their future and our nation’s future.
Lee Fisher
President and CEO
CEOs for Cities