Leading Through Crisis for Municipal Leaders

For city halls and municipal associations specifically: this is told by someone who ran the meeting, held the press conference, and signed the resolution. Expect the version with the council votes, the union conversations, and the budget lines in it — not the TED-talk abstraction.

On April 11, 2021 — ten miles from the courtroom where Derek Chauvin was being tried — a Brooklyn Center police officer killed Daunte Wright. Within hours, Mayor Mike Elliott was managing a national crisis: protests and tear gas in a residential neighborhood, global media on his lawn, a city council at war with itself, and a grieving family.

This is the inside account of those first 72 hours and the year that followed: the decision to take command of the police department, firing the city manager on live television, holding a community's trust while the country watched — and the mistakes and costs that came with all of it.

The talk is built for leaders who make decisions under pressure: what to do in the first hours, how to communicate when every word is parsed, and how to keep an institution standing when the crisis doesn't end on the news cycle's schedule.