The prophet’s first job is to tell us things we don’t want to hear. “Prophecy… is not foretelling but forthtelling,” writes Robert Farrar Capon in The Astonished Heart. “The true prophets confront you with what is actually going on now, no matter how much it hurts or threatens, so you can walk into the future with your eyes open.”
Dr. Jim Crupi of Plano, Texas is not a prophet—he’s a business consultant – whose Web site lists a number of successes, from helping a major soft drink company increase revenues by $25 million a year to training U.S. Army generals “to embrace radical change in a world of uncertainty.”
Crupi’s report, Putting the Future Together, seems to have popped open the capital area’s insecurities like a case of soft drinks left in the desert sun. Too inside, some critics say. Doesn’t address the city’s key issues of poverty and education, say others.
Underlying much of the uncertainty about Crupi and his influential sponsors is this question: Why do we need this Texan telling us what to do?
“A sign of maturity for Richmond is when we don’t need to call on someone from outside to be honest, when we can be honest for ourselves,” John Moeser, visiting fellow at the University of Richmond’s Center for Civic Engagement, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
I called Crupi recently to see what he thought – about Moeser’s observation and other reactions to the 55-page report commissioned by 40 (mostly) anonymous business leaders and companies for a reported $150,000.
“I both agree and disagree with him,” Crupi said, when asked about Moeser. “He’s saying that when we don’t have to bring anyone from the outside we’ve reached a level of maturity, and it’s incorporated into how we think and work. Where I part company with him is that it is also a sign of maturity that you’ve recognized it’s important to bring people in to look at people objectively … Part of Richmond’s problem is that it hasn’t done that enough.”
This lack of awareness became painfully evident, Crupi said, during the more than 100 interviews he said he conducted with business, political and community leaders from Richmond and surrounding counties. When he posed a basic question—“Tell me what global forces you think are shaping Richmond’s future?”—Crupi said the typical response was “total silence,” or what he called a “deer in the headlights reaction.”
“They just don’t think about it,” he said. “It’s not on their minds. They’re not thinking strategically—literally.”
Ah, that word again—“strategically.”
As Crupi presented his findings to several hundred people gathered in the dim, chilly expanse of the Siegel Center in late November, I heard him use the S-word a number of times, along with the T-word: Tactics.
“Richmond leaders tend to be tacticians,” he said at the Greater Richmond Chamber event. “They don’t tend to be strategists.”
He held up a glass. Some will read the report and say the Richmond area is half empty, Crupi said. Others will say it’s half full.
Alluding to his first report for business leaders in 1992, he said, “Fifteen years ago the glass was half empty. Today the glass is half full.”
Enough with the “who moved my cheese”-y metaphors, you might say. And I agree.
In our hour-long phone interview, I told the easy-going consultant that after all his talk about the importance of strategy, I was surprised at how tactical he went. He dished out a full menu of possible solutions to the area’s problems with public schools, transportation, and overall appearance.
And he tossed out this political hot potato: Why not start a regional transportation authority funded with a 1 cent regional sales tax?
Why all the T-wording?
Tactical ideas should spark creative thinking, Crupi replied. “My job is not to do Richmonders’ work for them. My job is to look at what I think the key issues are, where I think the fault lines are and then say, ‘Here’s what I think the issues are’ …. My fantasy is they read the report, and it creates some kind of reaction—
And that reaction leads to some kind of action.”
For example, on page 41 he proposes creating “the first large downtown office park in the nation to spawn a major commercial development.” He envisions a mixed-use project (complete with a park with bike trails, ponds, and a fountain) around The Diamond, straddling the Downtown Expressway, Broad Street and I-64.
That idea may not fly, he said, “but the underlying point is how to balance commercial development and residential development,” and do a better job of melding form and function inside the city limits.
“At the end of the day you can’t have a strategy without paying attention to this issue because your future depends on it,” he said.
Still, the report’s critics have a point: Who appointed Crupi the prophet of Richmond? The voters? Seems like they picked another guy to do the job—and Mayor Wilder was nowhere in sight when the report was released at the Siegel Center.
Doesn’t this hired gun approach lend credence to critics who say men in suits are trying to ram their agendas down the people’s throats? Isn’t this a kind of shadow government—one whose cabinet members aren’t listed anywhere in the report?
“I don’t buy that argument,” Crupi replied. “A city is a group of people. A company is a group of people. Every group has leaders. Those leaders are a smaller proportion of the total” and they “took it on themselves to look at these things. The real question is: If they weren’t doing this, who would be?”
Crupi defended the need to grant people anonymity to get them to be honest. “I promise people anonymity because I want people, when they sit down with me, to tell me exactly what’s on their mind. I’m not a reporter.”
But he also said he pressed people to be brutally frank, to the extent of saying, “If you’re not willing to be honest with me, then let’s not have this interview.”
No one backed out, he said, but it often took some prodding by Crupi, who said he holds a master’s degree in counseling. “You’ll have to decide whether you trust me,” he recalled saying.
Trust seems to be at the core of this whole, highly-orchestrated affair. Do you trust private sector leaders such as Jim Ukrop and Robert Grey who have spoken out about the report’s importance in making progress? Do you trust the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which provided front page coverage before and after Crupi’s findings, and spent a ton to publish the entire report?
Or does the whole thing have a top-down, slightly elitist cast that flies in the face of trusting the often time-consuming and burdensome democratic process?
Those are questions I’m still pondering, even after talking extensively with the good doctor. As a student of human behavior, I found some of Crupi’s clinical-sounding judgments about our hometown most intriguing. For example, on page 14 he wrote, “When asked to describe the area’s personality, 102 out of 108 leaders said it was schizophrenic, shortsighted, and afraid to have a conversation with itself.”
He used phrases like “risk averse” and said the area “struggles with feelings of inferiority… Psychiatrists tell us that a schizophrenic’s cognitive deficits show themselves as problems with attention and the executive functions that allow us to plan and organize.”
Whew! I knew this could be a nutty place at times (see: Wilder v. Richmond City Schools), but little did I know how close we were to cracking up.
To understand Crupi’s vision of Richmond’s future—and his tendency to think VERY BIG—it helps to understand a bit about his own past.
“I remember growing up in the Sixties, and I remember they were bringing big time baseball to Atlanta, and then Atlanta had the Braves. Then they built this big time hotel, the Hyatt.
“Then Atlanta started talking about becoming the world’s next great city in the late 1970s.” At that time, becoming a world-class city was “doing business in Missouri,” he wryly noted, and some people laughed at the dreamers. “But they believed.”
But what really fired young Crupi’s imagination was his hometown’s shared dream of hosting the 1996 Summer Olympics. “What I remember is the sense of the possible,” he said. “When the Olympic Games came along, you couldn’t have people say we couldn’t do that.”
And, he added, the “real payoff of the Olympic Games weren’t economic.” It was the generation of a spirit of the possible that permeated the place.
“All of a sudden people started teaching about where Germany is. Kids began to believe that the world is their oyster. It was one big education program.”
While he’s not suggesting Richmond try to host the Olympics, Crupi clearly believes in the power of thinking—and dreaming—big.
“What people don’t appreciate enough is that when you do things in a community and make dreams become real, you’re setting a base for a generation that’s incalculable. No amount of money spent” can bring that, he said.
“What Richmond needs to do,” he concluded, “is not let its successes go to its head, and not let its mistakes go to its heart.”