Photo by Rachel Buth
There are some people who know how to makes things happen and John Daniels is definitely someone who can do that in Milwaukee. The chairman emeritus of Quarles & Brady, board chair of Aurora Health Care, former chair of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation and outgoing chair of the Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC) is known as someone who can bring people together despite their differences and work out an agreement in which everyone feels they got a fair deal. Currently, Daniels is working on revitalizing Downtown Milwaukee because he believes a city cannot survive if its downtown fails. As one of his final acts as chair of the GMC, he created a broad-based task force that will work to ensure that the city will prosper and thrive in the coming decades.
Education is also close to Daniels’ heart. He’s committed to closing the achievement gap between the city’s white and minority students and raising student performance overall. To that end, he champions Milwaukee Succeeds, which targets third-grade reading proficiency, as well as novel ways to attract and retain new teachers, such as by developing teacher housing in the Dover Street School in Bay View.
Daniels met with the Shepherd to discuss the future of Milwaukee as he leaves his position at the GMC. Here’s a portion of our wide-ranging conversation.
You’ve just completed your term as chair of the GMC. What are some of the issues you dealt with there?
I said at the annual meeting of the GMC that when I walked into the GMC a couple of decades ago the room looked a lot different when I came in there as a relatively young lawyer. But it wasn’t just the people in the room. It was the issues that are at the forefront. Historically, the GMC was very effective on what I would call big construction projects. You name the big construction projects and the GMC had a very important role in most of them.
I think as the world became more complex, and the community became more complex, that the kind of things that are important for the growth of the community are not anchored as much around the physical assets. You’ve got to have them. But you also have to have an abundance of talent and you have to have talent that wants to be in this community and you have to have a sense of a community in which the arrow is pointing up. It’s sort of hard to describe. It’s the ability to see what we can accomplish in Milwaukee and be willing to take some risk to accomplish it. We are understated in that regard I think. I think it’s sort of baked into the culture that that’s a good thing to always be understated.
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The GMC as an organization is pretty conservative. So how, in your term at the GMC, did you move the ball forward?
I would say [using] the ability to get people who have different opinions to talk to one another, not to convince the other guy that he’s right or wrong, but to say we’re both coming here with a set of beliefs that we believe strongly, but is there something here that is common to both of us. Something that we would both walk out of the room and say it was a win. One of the challenges of those discussions is you really want to have the confidence of people so you don’t go out and talk about it. But if you accomplish things you can see the consequences. I think one thing was saying we’re going to approach this not with any hard positions to start with, although we recognize that there are different interests, but we are going to get down to things that we can have a common interest on. In my experience that results in moving things forward.
Is any new initiative universally well received in Milwaukee? Minneapolis, for example, seems to have a more progressive business community, while the Milwaukee business community has historically been more conservative. For example, there used to be a number of John Birchers, which was not totally representative of our city as a whole. Do you think Milwaukee as a community is far ahead of and pushing the business community forward?
My perception is that the people who are leading the business community are willing to engage in stuff to make changes. I think the challenge is that you’re running a global company so you are all over the world. It’s not like 40 years ago, when you were here all the time and you were socializing with the same people all the time.
In general they are open to finding solutions. But I think you’ve got to have a really crisp way of presenting it and it’s got to be supported by the data. You can’t really convince people to do these sort of things just for quote-unquote the good of the community. That argument doesn’t resonate really well. You say to people we are now at a point in Milwaukee where over the next decade or so we are either going to be a good city or a great city, are you willing to be all in on some different things to make that happen?
As chair of the GMC, what obstacles did you encounter that surprised you or disappointed you?
I wouldn’t call them obstacles but I think the most important thing was how much could you really accomplish and how do you make sure you capture that and avoid losing the whole deal? If someone comes to you on an issue that the GMC ought to be all over every day, and you think that result is sort of the right result but there’s a significant number of people who say we ought not to be there, typically they don’t say no. They say, let’s study that more or they’ll say there are some other considerations. Generally it’s not a hard no. To me the most important thing is figuring out how much of this objective I can get. If I can get 90% of the objective and get it done, I take it.
The GMC didn’t take a position on the streetcar. Why?
The streetcar is a perfect example of what I was just talking about. The reality is that there were people who felt very strongly about the streetcar both ways. To me, the streetcar was never really the issue. To me the real issue was how we make Downtown Milwaukee vibrant for the next decade. What I wanted to do was let the policymakers decide the streetcar, and I wanted the issue to move from sort of episodic stuff, the streetcar and the next project to, OK, we’re all in for Downtown for the next decade and we want to plan, we want to be engaged, and frankly we want some different voices at the table.
So my result there was to go find people who get stuff done, to have a Downtown task force of people who are really looking forward to the future, who are committed to drive the community for the next several years around Downtown. I think that’s going to have a lot more impact in the future relative to our community. I don’t think it’s any secret, although the GMC didn’t have a public position on the streetcar, that it was actively engaged in making sure that people who were making the decision were talking to each other.
There’s a growing and unhealthy income and wealth gap here and around the country. When you sit around the table with business leaders at the GMC, and issues of the minimum wage and income inequality come up, do people say we’ve got to do something?
I think the most important thing is not necessarily the mechanics of how you get there but developing a notion that everybody’s got something in the game is important. For me, I’m much more focused on changing educational opportunities for people. That’s the thing I think can change the game more. I think you can move the needle a lot further if you dramatically improve skills. That’s where I think the dialogue has to come from leaders saying we’re not satisfied being the middle of the pack on education. We want to be at the very top of all of the cities in the country. When you say that, people say, are you dreaming? But there is no reason in my opinion why that shouldn’t be the stated goal of the community.
Do you feel higher education is getting out of reach for too many students, especially those from families who haven’t previously had the opportunity to go to college?
I definitely think that it’s critical that higher education opportunities are affordable. This is something I feel really strongly about. When you get to the point where economics screens out really talented people, that’s when you’re going to have significant risk. I think the cost of education is clearly approaching that point. Anytime you are cutting off talent, you’re going to get something you don’t want. It’s a hard discussion for people, but for our country, with the competition out there globally, we have got to have the best talent. And if we overpay a little bit for that opportunity, I’d rather be on that side of the equation than screening out kids who have the talent to pursue higher education but don’t have the money.
Is Wisconsin on the right course?
I just don’t know enough about the entire state. I think that there is a desire to find where we fit and we haven’t quite figured it out.
Is Milwaukee on the right course?
I think Milwaukee is headed in the right direction. I know there are a lot of statistics and you can say Jeez, how can you explain the unemployment and some of the disparities? What I mean by the right course is that I think that with the right leadership and the right resources in Milwaukee it can dramatically improve its place among major cities in the country.
I really believe we are in a window where the things that happen in the next few years are going to shape this city for the next 50 years. If we can develop a vibrant Downtown that attracts young people, that attracts people who are intellectually curious, that brings people who have skill sets that are world class, I think it’s going to make a dramatic difference. The key—and this is the real challenge, I think—is that everybody’s got to feel part of the rising tide. It just can’t be sort of one portion of the community that says things are great and you’ve got a significant portion of the community that is like, what are they talking about?
We heard a lot of that in the streetcar debate, that it was just going to be for the latte-drinking elites and not benefit anyone else.
Some things will help more constituents than others. But the key is when you look at the entire plan, is everybody getting lifted up? That’s my question. If you ask me is any one discrete thing critical to me? No. But if we create sort of a really vibrant Downtown area and we start creating jobs for people who are in the central city and we start engaging in activities that bring people into apprenticeships and the like, that brings people up and gives people a chance, that’s what I feel strongly about. The real $64,000 question is, will Milwaukee capture a vision of itself that elevates it to a world-class American city? That’s the real issue in my mind.
Part of making Milwaukee vibrant is ensuring that people feel welcome here, that there’s a place for them and there’s enough culturally to spark their interest.
That’s important. Frequently, especially when diverse people are being recruited to the community, I’ll get a call from a company saying we want to attract this person, we really think they are terrific, they fit great in our organization, and the ultimate question when you talk to those people is, how do you really feel about living here? Those may not be the words. So when they see things like the Shepherd, things that give them a different cultural cue about the community, it creates in them a sense of yeah, this can work out.
You were involved in the original Bradley Center deal. What do you think of the potential for a new sports arena to be built with some public financing? Do the new Bucks owners owe the community anything if they do get public support?
I think more broadly. I think that businesses that benefit from our community as part of their mission have an obligation to return things to our community. I don’t care what business it is. The really good businesses get that. I’m a big sports fan. I’m all in for having a sports facility here. But that’s not the sole reason why I think it’s important. I think that what can happen in Downtown Milwaukee and the jobs that can be created and the business opportunities that can be created are so significant that you can’t pass it by. Businesses have an obligation to return something to this community. Once we have more of that dialogue it doesn’t become the exception, it isn’t a conversation about a particular project.
Do you think Milwaukee is in charge of its own destiny?
I think that Milwaukee needs to adopt the view that we’re going to lead and address our own fate. Instead of Milwaukee sort of bemoaning things it cannot control I’m much more interested in building a city that causes others to really want to look to us as a leader.
Let me be really specific. If you look at sort of notions of, for example, segregation in this community, that is something that has been embedded here for a very long period of time. It’ll help if Milwaukee can find a way for the new generation, which I think the new generation wants, to be part of a community that is much more diverse and interactive. If you have Downtown Milwaukee and it is intellectually exciting, diverse and economically vibrant I’m telling you that that’s what’s going to attract kids from everywhere to want to be here. This is my take. I’m less concerned about the things I don’t control and I’m more focused on the things that if we really wanted to lead we could control.
