Inside Mayor Menino’s Brain

About four years ago, I set out for Boston for an unusual date with its mayor, the legendary Thomas Menino. I was trying to find out how Menino’s brain worked.

Menino died on October 30, and none of the many obituaries and tributes really told you about his brain, which must have been remarkable considering he won five terms in office — one of the most successful city politicians in history — yet often seemed to many people like an amiable dunderhead.

My day with Menino was part of my research for a book, The Two-Second Advantage, about how computer science is learning from the study of brains — particularly, the study of expert brains. I wanted to catch a glimpse of Menino’s improbably-expert brain.

Here’s how the day started: Menino arrived on a spring morning to give a brief talk at a conference called the Great Neighborhoods Summit on the campus of the University of Massachusetts. As he walked from his car to the conference, his staff gave him some three-by-five cards with prepared talking points, but Menino didn’t look at them – he just stuffed them in his jacket pocket. Addressing the gathering, he seemed more like a favorite neighbor who was uneasily saying a few words to kick off a block party. He started with impromptu remarks, getting a laugh by making fun of Harvard – which went over big with the audience at UMass. Then he pulled out the cards and stiffly read from some of them, meandering from topic to topic before making a couple of good-natured closing jokes and going off stage to sustained applause. The effect was engaging and charming, but not so much that it would make anyone say: “Oh, that’s why he’s a five-term mayor.”

Menino was a C student through high school, thinking maybe he’d become an engineer. He went to Chamberlayne Junior College in Boston, wasn’t all that enthusiastic about his education, and graduated with an associate’s degree in business administration. For the next few years, he tried to figure out what to do with his life. He tried selling insurance and didn’t like it. He worked for Boston’s Redevelopment Authority, and got interested in local politics. In 1983, at 45 years of age, he ran for city council. “My wife and I knocked on every door” in the district, Menino told me. “There’s no magic to this business – it’s all hard work.”

Menino won the election, served on the council for nine years, stepped in as acting mayor for four months in 1993 when then-mayor Ray Flynn became U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, and in November 1993 won his first mayoral election. He was unstoppable after that.

I started to realize why as the day progressed. In one morning, Menino schmoozed with developers in his office, rode around the city’s neighborhoods in a car, appeared at small-time neighborhood events, and chatted up the clientele at the Dry Dock Café in a tired old industrial park he’d been trying to revitalize while downing a lunch consisting mostly of fried clams.

We talked about controversial decisions he’d made to put a skating rink in Boston Commons, merge two hospitals, defy striking firefighters and defend the city’s Muslim population after 9/11. All of those actions worked to the city’s – and Menino’s – benefit. Whatever topic came up – a proposed building, a park, a parade, a piece of legislation – Menino seemed to instantly understand all the ramifications it would have on Boston.

“I want to know everything – I can’t stay in City Hall,” Menino told me. “I never do polls or pay attention to them. They’re a snapshot of what people thought three days ago, at best. I don’t use consultants.”

He relies on, literally, talking to as many people as he possibly can. One of his long-time staffers, Peggie Gannon, noted: “I’m not sure he has a ‘political’ mind. It’s just hands-on, 24/7. He’s not behind a desk. He does things real people do. He’s keyed into little things. He sees the forest and the trees.”

Tufts University political science professor Jeffrey Berry once analyzed Menino by saying: “He’s managed to extend a personal touch that is unusual in a city the size of Boston. In his bumbling, inarticulate way, he does mange to give off a sense of, ‘I care.’”

Through the course of the day, I began to piece together some sort of understanding of Menino’s talent. Menino kept saying how on one hand he does so much personal groundwork, but on the other hand doesn’t deliberate about decisions or rely on polls or experts. “I don’t think a lot about anything – I just do it,” he said.

In fact, he can see the decisions and their impacts in front of him almost instantaneously. He can take in something about Boston and immediately make a highly accurate prediction about its impact.

Menino was clearly not born with special political talent. He was not brilliant in the manner of a high-IQ Ivy Leaguer. But over the decades, he methodically, dutifully learned everything he could about every facet of Boston, and chunked that deep knowledge into an efficient mental model that sat inside his brain. Using that model, he instantly recognized complex political patterns that affected Boston and analyzed everything that came before him.

That, in turn, let him rely on what he called instinct. He didn’t need pollsters or consultants because his mental model could predict what something meant more effectively than any poll or study. Ultimately, Menino was able to out-maneuver opponents and critics because he could make predictions and calculations about Boston a little better and faster than everyone else – an expert talent that, in the book, I called a “two-second advantage.”

Yet Menino had a hard time explaining how he did that. He was never, apparently, a very introspective man.

Late in the day, I tried to summarize for Menino what I’d learned about his talent, and asked him if this seemed right. “Yes, I think that’s it,” he said with a wide grin, amused that anyone would even want to do such an analysis.