RUNNING CITY GOVERNMENT: THE CHUCK AND CAMILLE SHOW

Camille Barnett has it. The polite call it influence; the realistic call it power. Call it what you will. She’s got it.

At 33, Barnett occupies the highest staff position ever held by a woman in the City of Dallas. She’s the first deputy city manager Dallas has ever had. She’s second in power – uh, influence -only to City Manager Charles (Chuck) Anderson.

That makes her The First in some pretty significant ways. And she can claim another less obvious but just as important first: She’s undoubtedly the first Dallas city official (maybe the first city official anywhere) to quote Max Weber, H.L. Mencken and Heraclitus, who said, “Nothing endures but change.”

If the Greek philosopher was right, the management team of Anderson and Barnett should endure a long time, at least until Max Goldblatt’s monorails glide above the city’s streets and the Cowboys finish last. They’ve brought change, for sure, and plan to bring more. And the changes have begun at the top, with the 43-year-old Anderson and his young deputy city manager.

“I make the final decisions, but I believe in team management,” says Anderson. “Once we have defined the direction we’re going, Camille has the capacity to take that to the organization and get it going with or without my presence. She knows me well enough to make a decision in my absence; she also knows me well enough to wait and check with me if she’s uncertain.”

In 1968, Camille Barnett (then Camille Cates) was studying in Europe as cops were fighting flower children in the streets of Chicago. She heard of some trouble while abroad, but it was not until returning to Lawrence University in Wisconsin that she realized how extensively Chicago had radicalized the nation’s politically active youth. American campuses were in ferment, and Camille Cates felt the changes all around her. “Nothing endures but change.” She was already learning that.

“Really, that period of my life made me get into this business,” she says as she watches the city streets empty from her attractive fourth-floor office. She had been a political science major with a strong interest in languages and traveling. In another time, she might have joined the Peace Corps. “But when I came back from Europe I realized I didn’t know much about my own country. And, particularly, I didn’t know anything about the cities.”

In the fall of 1969, Camille went to Chicago to enroll in an urban studies program. “It was one of those educational experiences that was very much born of the Sixties,” she says. “It was highly experiential.” True to the times, the course was people-centered, meeting in tenement slums and parks, not in classrooms.

During the trial of the Chicago Seven and about the time Black Panther Fred Hampton was killed by police, Camille worked as an assistant to Alderman B.ll Tinker, one of the few elected city officials not beholden to Mayor Daley’s machine.

“I was right in the middle of all this, physically, psychologically, emotionally,” she says. “I thought there must be a better way to run cities. There must be. And that’s when I realized that my desire was to make cities better places to live.”

So a city manager was born, but not without pain. Today she worries that her success has put more than four floors between her and the voiceless people who need better cities in which to live.

“I used to have people come to me and say they wanted a day-care center or whatever,” she says. “Part of what I had to learn was that their reaction to me had nothing whatever to do with my feelings about them or about the merits of their proposal. They were reacting to me as an authority figure. I kept wanting to say, ’Hey, I’m not what I look like. I’m on your side.’ I had a sense that I’d become what I once protested against. But my thought was to get inside the system and fix it.”

Chuck Anderson has been fascinated by politics since his own less-turbulent college days, but while at Kansas University he concluded that he didn’t want to be a candidate for office -and he’s never changed his mind. He did, however, want to be near the pulse of city politics. The city manager’s job, he says, allows him “a marriage of the opportunity to manage and to participate in the art and science of politics.”

Anderson is driven by a coiled intensity that seems lacking in the more relaxed Barnett. “Camille is less impatient, more willing to pause when it’s appropriate,” he says. “She can step back and go with the flow until she sees how things shape up. I have a need to go in, control and fix the situation.”

Faced with what he saw as a bloated bureaucracy at City Hall, Anderson moved early in his tenure to reduce the number of city departments by 10 (from 32 to 22). He has hired more black managers, in keeping with the city’s renewed commitment to affirmative action.

Anderson has drawn some fire from critics for one of his favorite reforms, the productivity task forces. At a price of $100,000 a month, 30-odd department heads and assistant department heads are on paid leave, studying methods of improving efficiency in city government. Skeptics have called the task forces “paid vacations.” Nonetheless, Anderson and Barnett defend the groups, and their reports will be made to the council this summer.

In the creation of the task forces, as perhaps nowhere else in his brief tenure, Chuck Anderson reveals one of the mainstays of his management philosophy: He believes in calculated risk-giving employees (and himself) “the freedom to fail.” But he’s fully aware of the consequences of expensive failure in budget-conscious times.

“We’re betting on benefits that are going to come later,” he says. “We believe it’s going to happen. But if it doesn’t, I’ve got a bunch of poker chips on the table that the council’s going to pull over to their side.”

The day-to-day relationship between the city manager and the deputy city manager goes smoothly, largely because of their similar views on human nature and organizational behavior. Anderson worries that government bureaucracies, without the profit incentive of the private sector, tend to lose sight of their purpose and stagnate. By helping employees to do their jobs creatively, he and Barnett hope to provide an ongoing stimulus that will duplicate the “dynamic tension” found in profit-seeking organizations.

A healthy tension definitely crackles through the Wednesday-morning agenda briefings conducted by Anderson and Bar-nett. The meetings are another new feature introduced by Anderson. All department heads are expected to attend the meetings, whether or not they have something scheduled for the council meeting that day.

Anderson and Barnett are fully in control at the meetings, cross-examining department heads on the most minute details that may cause a council member to stumble and waste precious time. They bristle with information about proposed zoning changes, equipment sharing, the Wood-Young couplet and other matters.

“On Wednesdays I’m like a coach for the Cowboys,” Anderson says, “I’m up for the game. I’m really not up to foolishness on that day. I’m grilling and drilling, not in an unkind manner, but I am intensely issue-oriented. I’m expecting results, and the department directors know it. In those meetings, team management is not workable, because I’m hammering out a product that’s going to the council.”

The agenda briefings are also a microcosm of the Anderson-Barnett working relationship. Almost like veteran police detectives working a suspect, they alternate between being “hard” and “soft.” “All this needs to be spelled out much more clearly than this memo has it,” Anderson tells a director whose disappointment is plain. Later, informed that an information slowdown is forcing some employees to work late hours typing the briefing packets for the council, Anderson devotes a few minutes to lecturing the laggards. Tension grows in the room until Barnett, as if taking her cue, snaps the meeting to a close: “On that cheerful note,” she laughs, “let’s adjourn and go down for a talk on employee morale.”

First cautious chuckles, then genuine laughter, fill the room. Later in the day, Barnett says to Anderson, “How are you, Chuck? You don’t seem to be having a good day.” The remark, he admits, makes a difference in his day. Barnett and Anderson are highly attuned to each other’s moods, often talking in a kind of shorthand-when one finishes a sentence the other begins. They move almost instinctively to shore each other up, keeping an emotional equilibrium in the office.

“We do balance off each other,” Barnett says. “It’s a caring relationship. We hear all this about it being lonely at the top, but one of the advantages to this relationship is that we both have someone we can trust.”

It’s a trust developed over the years when the two served as assistant city managers. Their spouses are friends, the couples see each other socially and they share many interests.

“She’s a good lightning rod for me,” Anderson says. “I can dissipate my frustrations through her without spilling it un-creatively out into the organization. If one of us comes on too hard, the other can be the nurturing kind of manager.”

The realities of an ever-growing, diversifying Dallas, coupled with Anderson’s longstanding belief in delegating authority, resulted in Camille Barnett’s becoming deputy city manager, a post that’s common in other large cities. Put simply, Anderson is the city’s chief executive officer. Barnett serves as chief operating officer. She keeps tabs on most of the day-to-day functions of the city manager’s office, coordinating the work of the four assistant city managers. It’s not unusual for Barnett to schedule as many as 10 meetings a day.

While Barnett holds the fort at City Hall, Anderson is free to do a number of things he believes a city manager should do. Above all, he’s visible-with the council, out in the community (he averages three speaking engagements a week) or visiting with groups of employees.

Lately, Anderson has been taking his reorganization plan to the troops, selling the new deal face-to-face to city employees. Arriving windblown and a bit late to one such meeting, he faces a group of employees who have no qualms about telling the boss exactly what they think. Some nod appreciatively as he outlines his management plan; most are impassive and seem to be reserving judgment.

Anderson speaks of the trauma associated with major change in an organization. More nods. Again comes the pitch for creativity, the plea for a new commitment to productivity. Coming to affirmative action goals, he pledges to open the door to more minority members “without lowering standards.” A young black woman looks daggers at him. But it’s Anderson’s only faux pas; in the question period that follows, he handles himself smoothly and praises the employees for their willingness to accept new ways of doing things. He answers one question a bit glibly, then backtracks to say, “I think I sort of danced around that one. Can you be more specific so I can give you a better answer?” And he leaves the group with this thought: “My capacity as a manager is measured not by having all the answers, but by asking the right questions.” It’s good rhetoric, but a listener senses more at work here than simply style.



ANDERSON AND Barnett are positive, can-do people who seem most comfortable when driving toward a clearly defined goal. In an article she wrote three years ago, Barnett praised an essay on “The Science of Muddling Through” in administration. But there’s no evidence of muddling when she talks about her working style.

move very quicKiy toward a conciu-sion,” she says. Assistant city managers attempting to brief her on the background of a problem may find her insisting that they get quickly to the point, produce the bottom line. It’s a tendency she has had to fight. “I have to be careful that I haven’t overlooked information or ignored the way somebody feels about something,” she says.

She’s got the brains, the books (and she’s read them), the Ph.D. (in public administration from the University of Southern California). But she laughs when asked if she’s the resident intellectual at City Hall. “I guess the downside of that label is that you have no practical sense,” she says. “You like to think a lot but can’t talk to people and can’t do anything. I certainly don’t see myself that way.”

Neither does Chuck Anderson, who believes in her practical ability as much asshe has confidence in his managementstyle. “People see that we work in a partnership, not a hierarchy,” says Barnett,”and that’s how we want them to workwith us, and with each other.”