Rudy rolls with the punches

During his two terms in office, he reduced crime, poverty, budget deficits and unemployment. Now he's being tipped as a Senator, even President, and is coming to Dubai in November to headline a leadership conference.

Former New York Mayor, honorary knight of the British Empire, future Presidential candidate of the United States: however you define Rudy Giuliani, he makes headlines. Who can forget the images of him, sleeves rolled up, helping his city through the recovery process after September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre?

Giuliani will make his first ever trip to the Middle East to address the Leaders in Dubai conference on November 29 - 30, the city's largest event since last year's Annual Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

According to Sheena Dunne, Project Director for the conference organizers, LEADING MINDS, his presence at the event will contribute to a seminal event. "Giuliani has been dubbed 'the leader the nation yearned for" and his forthright views on leadership and politics have made headlines over the last decade. He will join six of the world's most influential business leaders for the event, including General Electric's charismatic former CEO, Jack Welch, which will deliver inspirational content as well as dynamic debate."

Giuliani will be prepared for a mixed reception: having refused a $10 million donation from Saudi Arabia's Prince Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz soon after the attacks, he made headlines for his firm stance. This is not to say he was expressing anti-Arab sentiment, rather that he declared that political comments were not appropriate at the time. Giuliani insisted that the first memorial service should include a Muslim imam and he was vocal in his comments that the city's Arab-Americans were not to be blamed.

Few remember that the September 11 attacks were just one part of Giuliani's climatic final months in office, which were not made easier when he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer. He led the city through an anthrax scare and an air crash - and much of this can be contributed to the immense trust and goodwill he had earned after his honest and hype-free handling of the people at Ground Zero. The measure of his popularity was seen when his successor as mayor, Michael Bloomberg, was trailing his Democrat opponent by 20 points, until Giuliani added his political weight to the campaign, sending Bloomberg to City Hall.

The 60-year-old Giuliani's popularity has now transcended the state boundaries and he was voted Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2001. Some have tipped him to replace Dick Cheney as George Bush's running mate for the 2005 Presidential elections, and a ticket to the White House looks a possibility. World leaders, including Vladimir Putin, Nelson Mandela and Tony Blair came to New York to tour Ground Zero by his side. French President Jacques Chirac nicknamed him "Rudy the Rock."

His qualities as a leader were not restricted to his tenure after September 11. When Giuliani took over at City Hall on January 1, 1994, cynics declared the city ungovernable, while New Yorkers yearned for change. Cities across the USA were feeling the influence of a rise of urban crime in the early 1990s, and the effects of gang warfare, drugs and street violence were most keenly felt in New York City.

As mayor, Giuliani returned accountability to city government and improved the quality of life for all New Yorkers with overall crime falling by 65 per cent and New York City's law enforcement strategies have become models for other cities around the world.

When he took office, one of every seven New Yorkers was on welfare. Giuliani is credited with restoring the work ethic, implementing the largest and most successful welfare-to-work initiative in the country, and leading the city to an era of broad-based growth with a record 450,000 new private sector jobs created in eight years.

He took over a city full of homeless people, drug dealers and 2,000 murders a year. A decade later, the city may have budget deficits and job losses, but it has been transformed into a community that is channeling its energies into the business community, and public and private initiatives alike.

According to Giuliani, there are five principles that are common to any leader. The first is having a set of beliefs and knowing what they are. The second is courage: "Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is feeling fear and being able to overcome it. Optimism is essential to courage and is a lot more fun than pessimism."

The third principle, he believes, is preparation. "If you prepare for everything else relentlessly, you will be able to respond to the unexpected as if intuitively." Giuliani assumed that New York was under threat from terrorism, and built on lessons learned after a terrorist bomb in 1993. He created the Office of Emergency Management and built a $13 million emergency command center in the World Trade Centre complex. He increased security and restricted access around City Hall, and held drills playing out 10 disaster scenarios, from anthrax attacks to truck bombs to poison-gas releases.

The preparation and the drills ensured that when it happened, everyone in city government knew how to respond. In the weeks after September 11, but before anthrax was sent to targets in Manhattan, Giuliani held meetings with the FBI to discuss the threat. From these briefings, Giuliani was able to brief the public properly: he treated the public to honest information and when he told the public not to panic, they didn't.

Principle four is teamwork. "No leader ever operates on his or her own. A leader needs to know his or her strengths and weaknesses and figure out how to counterbalance the weaknesses. All human institutions have weaknesses."
Finally, a leader needs to communicate. "You've got to be able to talk to people and express what you believe. Listening matters as much as talking."

Giuliani was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1944, and was the son of working class Italian immigrants. Having graduated magna cum laude from New York University Law School, he joined the office of the US Attorney in 1970 and was later named Chief of the Narcotics Unit before becoming Executive US Attorney. He was named Associate Deputy Attorney General in 1975, and after spending three years in private practice, was named Associate Attorney General in 1981. Giuliani was appointed United States' Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1983, earning national acclaim for his prosecution of organised crime figures, drug barons, and white collar criminals.

In 1989, Giuliani ran for mayor and was defeated, but was successful when he ran again in 1993, as the candidate of the Republican, Liberal, and Independent-Fusion parties. His commitment to increasing quality of life in the city struck a chord with the voters and he laid out an ambitious agenda for change.

At his inauguration, he said: "Dream with me of a city that can be better than the way it is now. Believe with me that our problems can be reduced, not magically resolved. Plan with me to make the realistic changes that will actually make people's lives better than they are right now, and work hard with me to apply these plans to improve our city."

Powerful sentiments, but Giuliani had a mountain to climb. Between 1990 and 1993, the murder rate in the city averaged 2,000 a year, 340,000 jobs disappeared and taxes were increased to the total cost of $1.5 billion. Giuliani's first campaign was against crime, where he implemented a "zero tolerance" approach. The result: a 44 per cent drop in overall crime and a 61 per cent drop in murder, making New York the safest large city in America.

To stimulate the city's floundering economy, Giuliani eliminated or reduced certain taxes, which stimulated the hotel and tourism industries and created 180,000 private sector jobs. To counter the $2.2 billion budget gap upon taking office, Giuliani lowered projected spending by $7.8 billion through cost-cutting measures and productivity improvements. He kept the rate of spending below the rate of inflation for the first time in the city's history and created a $500 million reserve fund.

Giuliani's sweeping reforms and hands-on style of leadership were the tonic that New York needed, and in 1997, he became only the second Republican to be re-elected as mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia.

Giuliani was expected to run for US Senate in 2000, but withdrew after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer - the seat was won by former First Lady Hillary Clinton. It seems certain that he will run for higher office, either as a Senator, or as George W Bush's running mate, but one thing is certain. He's not finished making history yet - and opens a new chapter with his first appearance in the Middle East at 'Leaders in Dubai.'