Haven’t heard of this Los Angeles investment banker? Your loss. Because following his example could change your life.

Beutner’s recent career exposes the lies we Californians tell ourselves about our limits. Sure, we want our children to believe they can grow up to be anything they want. But we believe that rising to the top in a field requires years of preparation, not to mention knowledge, and experience.

Austin Beutner shows us we’re wrong.

In this decade alone, Beutner has gone straight to the top in no fewer than four fields in the City of Angels—without having to pay his dues in any of them.

It started back in late 2009, when Beutner convinced Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to appoint him to be first deputy mayor of the city of L.A. Without any prior experience in local government, he helped manage 13 city agencies. During that stint, he was named interim general manager of L.A.’s most fearsome government agency—the Department of Water and Power—without experience in utilities.

After leaving city government, Beutner, without experience in journalism, took over as publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

But all those were a mere appetizer for his latest job. Last week, Beutner became superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. With 600,000 students, it’s the largest school district in California and the second largest in the nation.

And if you think that earning such a position would require Beutner to have experience in school districts, you’re not thinking the right way.

What’s most impressive about Beutner is that he has had all these jobs in less than a decade. His stays in all of them were brief, about a year or so. Indeed, he also has managed to squeeze the building of a nonprofit called Vision to Learn, which provides free eye exams and glasses to children, into his sprint through L.A.’s major institutions.

Now, I admit that cynics might look at Beutner’s conquest of Los Angeles—the fastest takeover of a global city since the Visigoths sacked Rome—and suggest that there is something wrong in Southern California.

Austin Beutner, the new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, in a 2013 photo. Photo courtesy of Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press.

They might say that L.A.’s institutions must be awfully weak to keep seeking services of the same finance guy, no matter how shiny his Dartmouth diploma is. They might find it weird that he keeps getting jobs without producing sustained success at any of his stops.

To such critics, I say, you are prisoners of your small minds and narrow horizons. My fellow Californians, Austin Beutner is a model for us all.

His inspiring lesson for this state is that you can be anything that you want to be, with one enormous caveat. You have to want to be the leader of big, complicated institutions that Californians suspect are destined to fail, no matter who leads them.

Beutner’s method is not for just anyone. In the 21st century, to be able to pick any job you want, you need a background in high finance, which dominates the American economy. Beutner fits the bill: He worked at Smith Barney and the Blackstone Group, and then, after a stint at the U.S. State Department, co-founded the investment banking group Evercore Partners. After suffering serious injuries in a bicycle accident a decade ago, he decided to devote himself to public service—indeed, all public services.

But Beutner’s number one qualification is that he understands that most Californians have given up on governance. This state’s public institutions are so complex and dysfunctional that we feel utterly powerless to fix them.

Beutner’s rise has rested on exploiting this reality. He portrays himself as the rare Angeleno who hasn’t lost all hope in legacy institutions. So he studies up on a particular entity, and maybe forms a task force to produce a report. Then he tells all the rich people who matter in L.A. that he thinks there might be a way to fix it. Those rich people call their friends and the elected officials whose campaigns they fund, and pretty soon Beutner is running said institution.

It’s a double public service—since Beutner the public servant relieves the elites, and all of us really, of the responsibility of thinking about how to improve the city or the schools or the newspaper. No need to feel guilty about our lack of involvement. We’ve got Austin on the case.

In these jobs, Beutner works hard and advances intriguing ideas that might make sense. But nothing ever takes hold permanently because, before very long, Beutner is off to the next hornet’s nest.

And that can’t be blamed on Beutner. By definition these are short-term, no-hope gigs. And the people who fill them are sacrificial lambs (or, in Beutner’s case, sacrificial sharks). At DWP, Beutner was the ninth general manager in 10 years. At the L.A. Times, he was just one of multiple publishers fired by out-of-town ownership. And at L.A. Unified, he’s the latest in the series of superintendents: a district insider, a D.C.-area import, a Colorado governor, a Navy admiral, none considered a success.

The rest of us look at such jobs and ask ourselves, why would anyone bother? Beutner has discovered the answer: There is opportunity in California’s governing hopelessness. What, after all, is there to lose if you fail as school superintendent? Especially when even a modest effort can beat our low expectations?

“Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success,” said the late historian Christopher Lasch, who anticipated the Beutner Era in his classic book, The Revolt of the Elites: “Having given up the effort to raise the general level of competence—the old meaning of democracy—we are content to institutionalize competence in the caring class, which arrogates to itself the job of looking out for everybody else.”

Who are any of us to complain about Beutner’s short tenures, when we can’t be bothered to assist these institutions ourselves? Look at me. Back when Beutner was starting with the city, I was living in Los Angeles with young kids. But did I take over as L.A. Unified superintendent or offer to run DWP? No. To my shame, I surrendered to my own needs and bought a house in a good school district in the San Gabriel Valley.

Beutner is sacrificing so I don’t have to. And building a resume so that one day he might be U.S. senator or even president of the United States, a job for which he is already overqualified.

It’s high time we stopped whining about Beutner and other plutocrats running our institutions—and started emulating them.

I, for one, resolve to follow Beutner’s example.

Instead of writing this column for various California papers, I hereby offer myself as their publisher. (Would I really be any worse at running these legacy media businesses than their current operators?) Or maybe I should aim higher. Just as Beutner participated in reports on civic institutions before taking them over, I’ve reported on California water policy (I could chair the state water board), elections (I could be L.A. county registrar-recorder), and the arts (I could straighten out the war-torn MOCA in downtown L.A.). Heck, I wrote a well-reviewed book about Arnold Schwarzenegger. That means I probably could be governor or run a movie studio.

The magic of Austin Beutner is that he opens up new possibilities. He never sells himself short. Neither should you.

Yes, his L.A. Unified stay should be short—one board member whose vote he needed to get the job is under federal indictment. But don’t worry—the Los Angeles Opera, LAX, and the Dodgers all could use fresh leadership.

To follow Beutner is to follow the zeitgeist. Today, everyone knows that knowledge is power, and that power corrupts—so too much knowledge is corrupting. Yes, it’s a fallen world. But why not rise in it?

The post You, Too, Can Be Austin Beutner (No Prior Experience Necessary) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That sad fact speaks volumes about the challenges facing our state’s media. Because the deceased campaign wasn’t for a Senate candidate or for a ballot measure. It was a campaign on behalf of the Los Angeles Times.

The campaign didn’t get very far. In September, Tribune Publishing, the Chicago media company that owns the L.A. Times, unceremoniously fired the campaign’s chairman, Times publisher Austin Beutner, after a year on the job. The firing of Beutner from a job no one has been able to hold for long in recent years may have been predictable: Beutner, a former investment banker, had no previous experience in media, but had short stints as a mayoral candidate and a deputy mayor under Antonio Villaraigosa. But his dismissal touched off controversy. Beutner’s supporters portrayed Tribune (once again) as distant meddlers in the local paper, and Beutner as an advocate for local journalism (who might return if the paper were sold to L.A. billionaire Eli Broad). Tribune executives, who didn’t want to sell to Broad, countered that Beutner was a big spender who couldn’t meet companywide financial targets.

Lost in this L.A. vs. Chicago controversy was the question that should matter to Californians: Where might the Times have headed under a few more years of Beutner? And it’s too bad we never got more of an answer to that question. Because the available evidence suggests that Beutner and his team were in the early stages of an effort to transform the Times into the linchpin of a larger statewide civic entity that combined elements of a political operation and a media outlet.

Beutner’s effort was so ambitious—he had created an entity called the California News Group that also included the Tribune-acquired San Diego Union-Tribune and looked eager to add other media outlets across the state—that it was likely to fail. But the effort might have opened doors to a different media future in the state. California’s newspapers desperately need to transform themselves into more ambitious, and more activist civic entities—both to raise scandalously low levels of civic engagement in our communities and to ensure the papers’ relevance and survival.

Beutner, in his own writings and public statements, was emphatic in saying that the Times needed to be much more engaged in California communities and in political conversation. And the team of he assembled at the Times had little experience in newspapers, but would have been a welcome addition to any political campaign: Nicco Mele, well-known for his work with Howard Dean; Ben Chang, formerly of the National Security Council; former Obama aides Johanna Maska and Alejandra Campoverdi; Los Angeles City Hall aide Suzy Jack; and journalist-turned-immigrant activist Jose Antonio Vargas. He also hired another Southern California political player, Renata Simril, as his “chief of staff”—a job title common in government but unfamiliar to publisher’s suites.

Then this newspaper campaign went to work. The Times moved to put on more public events. Money was raised from foundations to support news coverage. Following the practice of political interest groups, the Times began to compile its own ratings—with letter grades—of local politicians. Beutner’s Times, like most modern campaigns (and not a few newspapers competing online), tried to create constituencies for itself, or communities of interest, via more than 20 distinct products separate from the paper (“verticals”) covering everything from food to education to race. In an attention-grabbing bit of pandering, a writer was even hired to cover “Black Twitter.”

Some of this raised eyebrows among traditional journalists. But this political turn for a newspaper isn’t new. It’s a return to the past—and a healthy turn at that.

When American newspapers were at their most influential—in the 19th and early 20th centuries—they were partisan organs that explicitly sought political influence, and weren’t shy about leveraging it. Many were subsidized by political parties, and editors doubled as advisors to elected officials. But those papers were also livelier than today’s papers—and far better at engaging readers and getting people to participate in civic life.

But news media changed in the middle of the 20th century, as the country grew bigger and less partisan. Political parties didn’t have enough money to subsidize bigger media, which instead were supported by risk-averse corporations and advertisers that valued political neutrality. More professional standards of reporting and writing were imposed. In the process, major media became elite organs with better-educated journalists who prided themselves on keeping their hands clean of the dirt of politics. (Confession: this Harvard-educated columnist, a former L.A. Times reporter, was one of them).

But in the past couple decades, the country—and California especially—moved in a different direction—more connected, more partisan, and more polarized. While some Internet publications and media outlets followed the audience down this politicized path, the major newspapers in California mostly kept their distance, and stuck with their cool objectivity. It’s past time for that to change.

If California’s newspapers are to survive, they’ll have to do much more than publish the news. They’ll have to be direct actors in political and civic debates, combining journalism and activism in ways that make their importance indisputable.

Beutner’s team was moving in this general direction, but political mistakes sabotaged the project. Beutner and his team couldn’t successfully manage the relationship with Tribune Publishing. Executives in Chicago, according to news reports, were suspicious that Beutner’s high profile might be the prelude to a run for office (his supporters deny this). Beutner launched a Publisher’s Book Club for readers, wrote frequent short columns under his name, and led a big public event on water with Gov. Jerry Brown. (Beutner’s name was placed next to Brown’s on event signage).

There’s also a question of whether the Times’ corporate, centrist politics under Beutner (pro-business, skeptical of labor, for fashionable reforms in education) were too close to those of L.A.’s political elite. The Times, if it is to survive, must be a political institution that offers ideas and provocations that engage the city—and that would seem to require challenging elites, not mirroring them. How? The Times could develop some class consciousness and champion the city’s working poor. Or it might adopt a libertarian stance and relentlessly challenge the thoughtless assumptions of the unions and Democrats who run the place.

There is a paradox here that Californians must come to appreciate. To engage us and unite us in a civic conversation, you must start by dividing us in ways that create debate and draw people in. And creating division is very difficult in today’s Los Angeles, and in today’s California, because there are no real wedge issues anymore. Big majorities of residents in each major region pretty much agree on big issues—we have sorted ourselves into communities of the like-minded. And so we can stop reading the paper and stop voting, confident that our disengagement won’t matter.

This lack of divides is a looming disaster for California: We don’t have enough of the collisions and conflicts—and resulting connections—necessary to unify and drive change in a big, diverse place. We need great newspapers, institutions, and politicians to identify dividing lines, pose hard questions, and get us arguing, and, yes, thinking anew.

The Times’ aborted campaign felt like a small first step on the path to building the new kind of civic and political media we need. Here’s hoping that our state’s other papers will pursue a more aggressive path and, as the best political campaigns do, stir us to action.

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