A City Run by Strangers

The Seattle Way built one of the great economic engines in history. The people now asked to save the state don't even know each other.

On June 25th, Governor Bob Ferguson signed Executive Order 26-02, creating the Governor's Economic Development Council — the first body of its kind Washington has convened in two decades. The order is, in effect, an admission: the state can no longer take its prosperity for granted.

The warning lights are real. Unemployment here is among the highest in the nation, the tech layoffs keep coming, and the companies built in this state are increasingly building their next chapter somewhere else. So the governor has convened twenty-six of the most accomplished people in Washington — the heads of Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon, the presidents of its great universities, the ports, labor — to tell him how to stop it.

King County is the engine of the state's economy, and for half a century it was one of the most powerful economic forces in the country — home to the largest charitable foundation on earth, and a cultural capital besides. Government did not build that. A web of people did: they knew one another, solved the region's problems themselves, and handed government finished answers rather than waiting for it to act.

That web had a name once. We called it the Seattle Way. And the crisis the governor is naming is not really about taxes or unemployment. It is what happens when that web comes apart — and his task force is the symptom.

Before weighing what these twenty-six might recommend, I wanted to know something simpler. Do they know the place they've been asked to save? Do they know each other at all?

Every major hospital, university, arts organization, and social-service nonprofit in King County publishes its board of trustees. I cross-referenced all of them against the members of the governor's task force who live and work here — the people of this region he is leaning on to save it. I could find exactly one who currently serves on any of those boards. One. The chief executives of Boeing, Alaska Airlines, T-Mobile, Puget Sound Energy, and the Port of Seattle, the presidents of the University of Washington and Fred Hutch — not one serves on the board of a hospital, an arts institution, a shelter, or a foundation he does not already run.

Someone will say a board seat isn't the only way people come to trust each other — that surely these people know one another from business, from deals. Maybe. But in this case, I actually doubt they do. And it misses the point.

A nonprofit board is where the city's leaders genuinely build something together. It's where they bond over hard projects, learn to trust each other, and come to love the place they're remaking. It's where loyalty is forged.

This isn't about etiquette, or missing the galas. It's about whether this group can do what the governor asked of them at all. You don't save a region with an executive order. You save it the way it was built — by people who saw a problem and fixed it themselves, because the loyalty to act together was already there. That's the part you can't appoint.

Here is the mechanism, because it is the part everyone waves past. Civic service brought the state's most capable leaders together to work on problems none of them owned. And serving side by side, year after year, did more than improve those institutions. It bonded them. Solving hard things together builds trust, admiration, even love — not only for one another, but for the place they were remaking.

That trust compounded. It moved from the nonprofit boardroom into business, where leaders who trusted each other built companies together, which grew the jobs and the tax base. It moved back through the same nonprofits as private wealth, funding a United Way that became the most generous in the country. The circle closed: the trust that built a company was the same trust that funded a shelter, because it was built by the same people, in the same rooms.

So Washington's trouble has two causes, and only one is on the governor's agenda. The visible cause is policy — the taxes and practices driving employers out. The deeper one is that the leaders he has gathered never built the trust that once produced both the prosperity and the safety net. He can change the tax code. He cannot command the circle back into being.

The honest objection is that the city has outgrown this model — that today's companies operate globally, and a chief executive whose market is the world cannot be expected to spend Tuesday afternoons on a hospital board. It is a comfortable theory, and the record demolishes it. The people who built the global companies are the same people who built the civic institutions, and they did both at once.

Costco is the proof twice over. Jeff Brotman, its chairman, was a founding Ambassador of the United Way program and hosted its first gathering at his lakeside home; Jim Sinegal, its co-founder and chief executive — a man who visited every warehouse on earth in person — chaired a university board and sat on the trustees of Fred Hutch.

Blake Nordstrom ran one of the country's great retailers — a five-time honoree on Harvard Business Review's list of the best-performing CEOs in the world. For six years he and his wife, Molly, chaired the United Way's major-gift campaign, and he spent two decades working on homelessness beside the people who ran the shelters.

And the pattern holds today. Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, sits on the governor's new task force. A decade ago he and his wife, Kathy Surace-Smith, chaired the United Way campaign and raised a hundred and twenty million dollars — while he ran the legal and corporate affairs of a company operating in more than a hundred and twenty countries, and she chaired the board of Fred Hutch.

The most global executives this region ever produced made the time. We have instead, increasingly, a class of leaders who run their companies here and live their lives here while quietly opting out of the work of holding the place together — and we are looking at the result.

So who knew how to do this, and what did they understand that the task force does not? No two people built this city. But two stand out as its clearest teachers.

The first is Jim Ellis, a bond lawyer who never held office. As a private citizen he cleaned up Lake Washington, built the region's transit system, and through a campaign called Forward Thrust gave Seattle its parks, its aquarium, the Kingdome, and the Mountains to Sound Greenway. The genius was never the projects; it was the method. He pulled business leaders and ordinary citizens into committees that didn't just advise but built the thing and took it to the voters — a patient craft he called neighboring, trust assembled one relationship at a time, through civic leagues that have since hollowed out. The line at the center of his memoir reads as if written for this task force: the institutions of free people, he warned, "cannot exist unwatched and untended."

The second is Mary Gates, and her life is the proof of everything I have been describing. For decades she gave the United Way of King County five percent of her income and five hours of her week, led it nationally, and served eighteen years as a University of Washington regent. Her creed was plain — "from those to whom much is given, much is expected" — and she lived it as a duty, not a flourish.

By 1980 that service had seated her on the national United Way board beside the chairman of IBM. In conversation she mentioned her son's small software company. Not long after, IBM took its chance on Microsoft. The most consequential economic event in this region's history happened because a lifetime of giving had placed a woman next to the right person at the right moment. And the creed did not stop there: she passed it to that son, and it became the largest foundation on earth — a Seattle mother's ethic now blessing the whole world.

That is the engine of the whole thing: presence creates proximity, proximity creates trust, and trust creates the deals and the accidents of fortune no spreadsheet can plan.

Now look at the people the governor actually gathered. They do not sit on these boards, and most of them have never worked side by side on anything — so the trust that built this place isn't theirs to draw on. The knowledge of how it was done is simply gone from the top of the city, and gone on every side of it. The tech campuses have forgotten. So has City Hall. Does our new mayor, Katie Wilson, even know who Jim Ellis was?

I know the machinery worked because I watched it from the inside. My father ran KIRO, and read some ten thousand editorials on the air over his years there — editorials shaped in part by Jim Ellis and Mary Gates, who served for years on his board. The man who built the region's prosperity and the woman who built its conscience were helping shape the ideas this city heard each night, together, in my father's company. That was the Seattle Way: the same hands that built the city were shaping even what it heard on the evening news.

To my father, running KIRO was a public trust, not a private asset. If you worked there, you were expected to give — a share of your salary to the United Way, your hours to the community — and those things were tracked. If you didn't, you didn't advance. It sounded severe then, and it sounds severe now. But that was the point: in Seattle, doing well came with an obligation to give back, and meeting it was what earned you your place. My generation kept the rewards and quietly dropped the obligation.

The same web that built the prosperity also built the safety net. The same rooms, the same people. For years the United Way of King County ran an Ambassador program that recruited the city's most prominent people to give at the highest level, and the roster was the city itself. Its Million Dollar Round Table was chaired by Jeff Brotman of Costco and Scott Oki of Microsoft. The campaign chairs included Frank Blethen, publisher of The Seattle Times; the banker Phyllis Campbell; the jeweler Herb Bridge; and Rick Fersch of Eddie Bauer. At its height, the United Way of King County was the most successful in the nation. The people who ran the companies also ran the safety net, for the same city, at the same tables.

And you can measure what its fraying has cost. The United Way of King County held the top spot for years, cresting near a hundred and twenty-five million dollars in a single campaign — for a stretch the only one in America over a hundred million. This year's goal is fifty-five point six million, less than half. There is more private fortune in this city than ever; what has thinned is the presence that once moved it.

The proof is the governor's own roster: of the task force members based in King County, exactly one currently sits on the board of a major community institution. Let me say plainly what that is. It is embarrassing, and it is unacceptable — that the leaders of this region, asked to save the economy their own city anchors, have so thoroughly stopped showing up for it. In the generation I grew up in, that would have been unthinkable. Here, you earned the right to do business by giving back. If people did not see you rolling up your sleeves, your calls did not get returned.

And you can see what the number means when you look up from it. It is on the sidewalks downtown — in the doorways and the tents and the overdoses, in the people the net was built to catch and no longer does. Understand what a frayed web looks like in the end. Not a budget line. A person on the pavement.

And before anyone blames growth: the city has added only about two hundred thousand people in sixty years, and lost population for a stretch. The same-sized city once built a World's Fair on a deadline. The population held steady. Its leaders stopped showing up.

What the governor is attempting now is to manufacture that web by executive order — to name twenty-six people to a council and expect the trust to follow. But it doesn't work that way, and it never did. The web grew the only way it can: through decades of showing up beside one another, until they trusted each other enough to solve hard problems and build big things.

This group has none of that to draw on. They will meet over Microsoft Teams four times a year, hand a few hours of input to a governor who has spent his tenure at odds with their own businesses, and return to their towers. You cannot legislate trust. It is grown, or it is absent.

And here is the part I have to say to myself, and to my friends, before I say it to anyone in Olympia. We are the generation that inherited this and did not tend it. We still care, and we still work hard — but we privatized our time. We poured it into our careers and our children and our own four walls, and quietly withdrew it from the institutions that hold a city together. Prior generations built institutions. Ours built traveling youth sports teams.

My father was barely at a soccer game. What he did instead — the boards, the campaigns, the rooms — mattered more to the city his children would inherit than any sideline ever could. I do not say that to excuse him, or to indict the rest of us for loving our kids. I say it because we told ourselves that putting family first was virtue enough. It wasn't.

A great region was never built by spectators, or by a body that only advises. It was built by citizens who showed up — who saw a problem and formed the kind of committee Jim Ellis meant, the kind that builds the thing itself. That habit of showing up was the Seattle Way, and it is still the way forward, for the city that forgot it and the state that depends on it. Which leaves one question worth asking. Are we still those citizens?

If we are, we already know what to do. Study how it was done. Read the book Ellis left us. Ask the people who built it, while they are still here to ask. Get on the boards, and learn one another's names again. Give the way they gave, and roll up your sleeves.

Ellis told us himself what is at stake, in a line worth hearing in his own voice before we adjourn another meeting:

The city that is alive is never completed and always needs work.

 

Michael R. Hatch is an investment manager based in Seattle. A Seattle native, he attended Lakeside School and has served on the boards of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee Foundation, the Seattle Symphony, the Henry Art Gallery, Intiman Theatre, Seattle Children's Theatre, PONCHO, and other civic and cultural institutions.