I am about a third of the way through The Power Broker. Whitney bought me a hardcover copy for our anniversary in May 2024 and it has been sitting on the shelf in my office staring at me for almost two years.
The thing nobody tells you about this book is that it is enormous and the typeface is small and the pages are thin and you cannot read it on a treadmill or in bed without dropping it on your face. So I read about 14 pages a night when I can. At this rate I will finish it sometime in 2027.
What I keep thinking about is how Robert Moses got things done by working in the gaps between agencies. He understood the bureaucratic plumbing better than anyone else and he used that knowledge to route around opposition. The lesson for me, which is maybe not the lesson Caro intended, is that the people who actually move things in any system are the people who understand how the system works at a level of detail that nobody else has bothered to learn.
This applies, somewhat depressingly, to multifamily operations software too. The companies that win are the ones whose product teams know things about the customer's workflow that even the customer's own team has forgotten about. We try to be that kind of company. I think we are sometimes.
Whitney pointed out that I am drawing a business lesson from a book about a man who destroyed neighborhoods. I told her that was unfair. She gave me the look she gives me when she is being patient with me. We left it there.