Some people seem to think someone else could have done better. And it’s nice to believe in the transformative leader. Call it the Fire-the-Coach Fallacy. Sometimes, installing a new leader of an organization leads to better performance. But far more often, as some simple Freakonomics blogpost would tell you, we overestimate the importance of changing the coach or the CEO. It’s not that CEOs are not important, but the preexisting conditions within and surrounding a company are just more important.

Unlike a lot of leaders, Otellini seems aware of this fact. “Intel’s culture is blessedly not the culture of a CEO, nor has it ever been,” he told me. “It’s the Intel culture.”

The difficulty for Intel relative to a startup is its ability to make changes quickly. In the near term, the challenge will be in mobile.  Here is an exchange between Madrigal and Otellini:

“How well do you think Intel is thinking about ultracheap?” I asked.

“Oh they got it now,” he said, to the laughter of the press relations crew with us. “I did this in ’05, so it’s [been more than] seven years now. They got it as of about two years ago. Everybody in the company has got it now, but it took a while to move the machine.”

It took a while to move the machine.

It will be interesting to see how Intel fares during the next era as Otellini hands over the reigns to his successor, Brian Krzanich, who has been with Intel since 1982.

The city of Shenzhen was basically a greenfield with modest beginnings.

Finally, after a full day’s journey in the intense heat, they arrived at their destination. It turned out to be just across the border from Hong Kong — not far from the Lo Wu crossing where all foreigners made their entry into mainland China. (In these days you couldn’t fly directly to Beijing from the outside world.) The bewildered Americans followed their hosts to the top of a dike, where the Chinese guides gestured at the vista spread before them. It was not clear what they were meant to look at. All that the Americans could see was the usual South China landscape: There were rice paddies, worked by peasants and their water buffalos in the time-honored manner, and duck ponds. There were a few trees, and here and there a modest peasant dwelling. What the Chinese were describing seemed to bear no relationship to the observable reality. This, they told the Americans, was the location of something called the Baoan Foreign Trade Base. The party had designated it as a special location for foreign investment. According to the plans under consideration, it would soon be the site of chemical factories and textile mills and manufacturing plants. And, oh yes, there would also be plenty of hotels for the foreign businessmen. It was going to be a wonderful chance to make money.

…The Baoan Foreign Trade Base was located in a village that was named, like the nearby river, Shumchun. It later became known under a different version of the name: Shenzhen.

The goals of the Chinese leadership were audacious.  They thought big regardless of past perceptions and skepticism.

The next day, after an uncomfortable night spent in the only existing local hotel (which had no electricity or running water), the Americans attended a briefing where the Chinese unrolled blueprints that depicted acres of factories, warehouses, and other facilities. The plans betrayed a startling ambition. “It was really hard to believe,” Gorman recalled. “Nothing in China at that point happened quickly — except politics. Business and construction didn’t happen on those kinds of timelines.”

…Gorman and his compatriots, all of whom had experienced firsthand the xenophobic legacy of the Cultural Revolution years during their visits to China, could hardly be blamed for feeling skeptical. What they were not yet able to appreciate was the fact the Chinese were deadly serious about their plans to invite overseas investors into new “special districts” that were already well into the planning stages.

Deng knew that catching up would require adopting and adapting successful rules and technologies from the rest of the world. If Shenzhen was successful, it would be a model for reform — a demonstration for what could be possible that could be copied throughout China.

He had spent his years in exile brooding over how to stimulate the Chinese economy, and he had concluded, after his return to power in the early 1970s, that his country had to tap into the global marketplace for technology, know-how, and management expertise.

…Deng had calculated that if only 5 percent of the counties and 5 percent of the citizenry became “relatively prosperous,” this would translate into 100 counties and 40 million residents — the equivalent of a medium-sized country and presumably a powerful catalyst for change.  Shenzhen was the first on his list of 19 places targeted for early prosperity.

Deng, a reformer who thought like an entrepreneur and an innovator, applied the use of special economic zones, that in turn, fostered new entrepreneurial norms.

It is inevitable, perhaps, that we tend to focus on leaders when we examine grand political and economic transitions. But they are not the only actors in these dramas. Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues triumphed precisely because they unleashed the creativity and the entrepreneurial urges of millions of Chinese.

…In December 1978, back in Guangzhou but still on the run, he [Rong Zhiren] heard a radio broadcast publicizing the results of the historic Third Plenum in Beijing, the meeting that sealed the triumph of Deng’s pragmatic course of economic reform. Like millions of other Chinese, Rong understood that something fundamentally transformative was under way — and that included an opening for entrepreneurship. “I knew this policy would last because Chinese people would want to get rich,” as he later put it. In January 1979, he decided that he would be one of the first to take a chance. He applied for a business license.

But what is it exactly that we are glimpsing? What makes a great city a city is not its buildings and streets—its physical infrastructure—or even the patterns of people in public spaces. A great city, one that cannot be fully seen, is composed of the relations among those people. Those relations—among neighbors, passers-by, shoppers, shopkeepers, cars, and pedestrians—make it possible for people to rely on one another to some degree and for everything to hang together. When it works right, people feel safe and free to move from place to place, to break old ties and form new ones, and to create new ideas and leave old ones behind.

Eric Jaffe at Atlantic Cities on Culture and Crossing the Street

More broadly, the way culture governs pedestrian behavior is becoming a fascinating lens into city life. Previous work has suggested that American and Europeans give directions differently and that certain city residents tend to walk faster than others. Oddly, Tokyo residents have been clocked as some of the world’s swiftest city walkers; maybe some of that speed is an attempt to make up for all the time spent waiting for the light to change before crossing the street.

Edward Hugh on Declining Populations

In fact populations dying out is nothing new in human history if we move beyond the most recent world delineated by nation states. In hunter gatherer times populations occupied increased or reduced proportions of the earth’s surface as climate dictated. In more modern times, islands have been populated or become depopulated according to economic dynamics (think the Scottish coastline). More recently, it is clear the old East Germany would have become a country in need of “resolution” had it not sneaked in under the umbrella of the Federal Republic. Why people should find the idea of country failure so contentious I am not sure, perhaps we have just become accustomed not to have “hard” thoughts.

Wonkblog on Falling Fertility Rates

Lewis has a fascinating, chart-heavy essay over at the Breakthrough Institute pointing out that birthrates are dropping rapidly almost everywhere around the world — with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, mostly.

…So what happened? Lewis examines a number of hypotheses, from rising incomes to growing female literacy. Those are all moderately correlated with the decline in birthrates and could help explain the shift. But, curiously enough, nothing seems to match up with the trends as neatly as the growth in TV ownership and media exposure

Wonkblog on Ending Poverty

China has mostly run its leg of the relay – with economic growth that has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty and, almost on its own, put the world on trend to reach Kim’s goal. …Relatively few Chinese remain in this circumstance of dire poverty, while the numbers of extreme poor in India and sub-Saharan Africa remain enormous.

But another, larger, and more serious setback came less than a month later, when Instagram introduced new terms of service, prepared by a Facebook lawyer, which quietly allowed the company to access users’ photos for advertising purposes—without seeking permission or notifying them. Headlines such as instagram can now sell your photos for ads underscored the outrage of users—not to mention its celebrity following—who threatened to abandon the photo app over the change. (Instagram’s user numbers actually grew during this period.) Systrom quickly backtracked by removing the offending clause, but the damage was done—especially given Facebook’s reputation for intruding on the privacy of its users.

…Systrom says he treated the controversy as a learning experience, telling his team to consider Instagram a small country and to imagine how people would feel if someone had suddenly changed all the road signs to a different color.

Planet of Cities sets an ambitious agenda—nothing less than formulating evidence-based rules for managing the worldwide growth of cities during the 21st century. These rules attack the central ideal of the urban planner’s conventional wisdom—the Containment or Compact City Paradigm, showing it to be unworkable and unrealistic.

Read the full review here.

Germany is reshaping the European economy in its own image. It is using its position as the largest economy and dominant creditor country to turn members of the eurozone into small replicas of itself – and the eurozone as a whole into a bigger one. This strategy will fail.

Public Transportation Patterns Across Cities

Ridership is an identifier for how cities are utilized—whether they are centralized, decentralized or have multiple focal points, whether activity concentrates during rush hour as people are entering or leaving the city center(s), or whether activity is spread out over time. As the transit passenger data suggests, Geneva is centralized while Zurich appears to have multiple centers, and activity is concentrated during rush hours. Activity in San Francisco on the other hand is more evenly spread out, both spatially and over the course of the day. These insights are not only useful for city planners and transit authorities, who can get a sense of what areas see high and low ridership and understand what areas are underserved by public transit.

Stuart E. Eizenstat and Robert I. Lerman on the Potential of Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships train youths and adults by combining work-based learning with classroom instruction in a unified program that leads to a recognized and valued occupational credential. Trainees earn money and contribute to production while they learn, often in a plant where they can be employed full time. They graduate with a sense of pride and identity as a member of an occupational group. Employers bear most of the training costs, but the value added by apprentices often exceeds their wages; employers also save recruitment and training costs and can be confident that apprentices who complete their programs have job-relevant skills.

Infrastructure Needs in the Developing World

The infrastructure requirements alone in emerging-market economies and low-income countries are huge – 1.4 billion people still have no reliable electricity, 900 million lack access to clean water, and 2.6 billion do not have adequate sanitation. At the same time, an estimated two billion people will move to cities in the next quarter-century. And policymakers must ensure that the investments are environmentally sustainable.

To meet these and the other challenges confronting the developing world, infrastructure spending will have to rise from around $800 billion to at least $2 trillion annually in the coming decades. Otherwise, it will be impossible to achieve long-term poverty reduction and inclusive growth.

The New York Times Magazine on the Role of Urbanization in Poverty Reduction 

Since 1980, the proportion of the developing world living in urban areas has grown to about 50 percent, from 30 percent, and according to the World Bank, that migration of hundreds of millions has been instrumental in pulling down poverty rates — and will be for a broader set of countries going forward. Cities bolster access to health services and public resources; infant-mortality rates, for instance, are 40 percent lower in urban Cambodia than in rural Cambodia. And workers themselves become more productive, often by making the switch from labor-intensive work like farming to capital-intensive work like manufacturing. Urban poverty is hardly attractive — slums are cramped, unplanned, unhygienic places — but it is, in many cases, less deadly.

Haughwout’s research uses the COMPS dataset from the CoStar Group to identify two types of transactions: purchases of vacant land and purchases of parcels with structures that the buyer intends to tear down. By examining these transactions, Haughwout effectively hones in on the price of the land itself.

Among other results, Haughwout finds a quadratic relationship between distance of a parcel from the city center and the log price per square foot. The relationship, with the most expensive land nearest the city center, is consistent across cities though the gradient is less steep in some cities than others.

By developing a better understanding of land values, Haughwout’s work opens up the possibility of, among other things, helping to detect real estate bubbles, judging the impact of policy interventions, and providing information for more efficient property taxation.

Rapidly growing cities in the developing world must start with the basics, Clos said, thinking about just one thing to start: the street grid and the public realm. In New York City, planning commissioners laid out “the streets in 1811 that we’re still walking on today.” The zoning and regulations and real estate development changed many times over in the two centuries that followed; Manhattan was designed before there was such a thing as a car. Yet the grid has been a remarkably resilient and enduring feature of the city. “The street pattern is the foundation of urban planning.”

…But while an average 32 percent of the land in successful cities is devoted to streets and sidewalks and public space making up the public realm, that figure is only 2 percent in the cluttered shantytowns and favelas of informal settlement.

Clos summarizes the enormous upside to simple planning of roads, trunk infrastructure, and public space.  None of this is new, as the historical case of Manhattan’s expansion suggests. Stakes in the ground are key to ensuring that all current and future city residents have their own stake in the urban social fabric.

The payoff is better living conditions, basic sanitation and drinking water, and the promise of all that human capital participating in a well-functioning economy.

America’s cities are the engines of its growth. Though the immigration bill before Congress would help cities by increasing the flow of legal migrants, cities would be even better served by a bill that makes immigration decisions local. State governments are in a far better position to understand the immigration needs of the towns and cities within their borders. The federal government should allow them to sponsor region-based visas.

For more on this issue see Adam Ozimek, Shikha Dalmia, Richard Florida, and Nancy Scola.

Replete with scores of color photographs, maps, graphs, and other images, this volume brings new life to the tried and true ecological view of cities. Angel (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy) presents propositions about optimal urban development, asserting that cities must plan for housing, transportation, and public works in order to cope with inevitable urban growth, but he also suggests that there is such a thing as too much planning as well as too little. After summarizing the history of world urbanization and the emergence of a global hierarchy of cities, Angel presents ecological patterns accompanying urban expansion in a comprehensive sample of over 3,000 cities around the world, with more intensive study of smaller sub-samples. He explores classical concepts and measures of urban ecological research, including the size/rank rule for city distributions, central place theory, and the like, with new insights provided by the global scale of the data analysis. The author spends a good deal of time analyzing patterns of population density but does not include the recent innovation of population-weighted density calculations, which would have offered yet another angle of vision on the world’s cities. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. — E. Carlson, Florida State University