Michael Dawisha

The first real fight Michael Dawisha picked as a CIO was about driving directions.

He had just taken over technology at a large nonprofit in the mental health system. When the state hospitals emptied out in the 1990s, people who had spent their lives inside institutions moved into ordinary houses on ordinary streets. “You and I both drive by dozens of group homes every day on our commute to work,” Dawisha says. “You just don’t know it.”

“These are human beings just like everybody else. They deserve as much of a chance at life as anyone else, even though they need supports.”

Michael Dawisha, Genesee County

Keeping that promise is unglamorous work, and some of it looked, from the outside, like nothing at all. Vans pulling into mall parking lots. People getting out, some in wheelchairs, some in head protection, into the open air where everybody else was. That was a real service, with a name and a measure attached to it.

What nobody there did was check the work. “It’s an honorable mission that I thought was really something beautiful,” Dawisha says. “But what they didn’t do is utilize any kind of science to measure their services.”

Which is how he ended up arguing about driving. The case managers were spread across three counties, visiting people where they lived, and somebody assigned those visits by feel. Dawisha pulled up a map and started routing them. More people seen. Fewer miles driven. The same job, done better.

“Today you consider that low hanging fruit science,” he says. “But back then it was revolutionary.” It still cost him something. “I took some shots for this.”

He did not have a degree when he was hired. That came well after.

He had started an IT consulting business in Canada at 21. Then he married an American, moved to the States in his thirties, and arrived without a plan. “I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he says. “I didn’t really have any idea.”

Ask how someone with no degree and no American résumé lands a CIO job and he says one word four times. “Luck. Luck, luck, luck.” Then, a beat later, a different answer slips out: “I was determined to make them fall in love with me, and they did.”

He stayed about eight years, moved to a small business college, and then to Michigan State, running technology for the side of the university where students actually live. “I love Michigan State. Anyone who works at those places will tell you it’s one of the most gratifying things they can do as a career.” Not only for being around young people, though he liked that. For the energy, and for the habit of inquiry. He says he would still be there today.

What he took away from Michigan State was two words.

His boss there almost never gave direct instruction. Most of what Dawisha learned came from proximity: watching how the man absorbed a challenge, what language he reached for, how he moved a large organization through change without breaking it. But early on, Dawisha brought him a list. Here is everything that needs fixing. Here is how we’ll do it.

“Mike, be humble,” his boss said.

“Boy, I always thought I was humble,” Dawisha says. “What do you mean?”

What his boss meant was that there were people in that building who had done the work for twenty and thirty years, and there is nowhere on earth you can go where you will not find people who are proud of what they’ve built. However smart you are, however plainly you can see what ought to be improved, you cannot walk in holding it without insulting someone by assuming they never thought of it first.

Dawisha now watches his own new hires do exactly what he did. They come back a few weeks in, lit up: my God, I can fix this.

“Are you the first person you think thought of that? Really? And everybody thinks they are.”

Michael Dawisha, Genesee County

So the job changed shape. Before prescribing the change you know is right, find out why things are the way they are. Find out who already tried, what it cost them, and how much appetite is left. “There are reasons,” he says. “Find that out.”

He meant it about staying. What moved him was something he had no hand in and no control over.

Michigan State was engulfed by the abuse scandal around a university doctor, and Dawisha watched from inside what it did to the place. “The waterfall effect that had on the institution was so dramatic,” he says. “I will say to this day that the institute has not recovered. They’re still suffering because of that.”

He measures it by who is left. “Anyone I knew there, they’ve all gone.” Including him. “I couldn’t take it there anymore.”

He is not precious about what to draw from it. Companies get acquired. Sales decline. Industries get disrupted. Something entirely outside your control can reach you while you are doing everything right, and pretending otherwise does not help. Sometimes, he says, you have got to roll with the punches.

Today he is CIO of Genesee County, the fifth largest county in Michigan. It contains Flint. Plenty of people are working to make the place worth staying in, and he counts himself with them without pretending to be a local. “I don’t live in this area, I live pretty far away,” he says. “But I commute here and I’m committed.”

The project he launched there is universal fiber. Not better coverage. Every single address in the county. He hopes to break ground early next year.

The case he makes is a utility case. When a company picks a site, nobody asks whether the building will have electricity. “You just assume it’s going to be there.” Internet comes with no such promise. You pay to run it yourself, or you find out who serves the area and hope they serve it well.

He is careful about where he puts the blame. The large providers, he says, are doing precisely what they were built to do. “They have one particular mission, and that is their shareholders. They will invest in areas they think they can get a return, and that shouldn’t be surprising. That’s the design of the system. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.” Then the catch. “The problem is if you’re a community that wants to raise the entire community up, that doesn’t work.”

Everyone got a look at what that costs during the pandemic, when school moved online and children sat in a Taco Bell parking lot to do their homework because there was no connection at home. “That kind of breaks your heart,” he says.

His real argument, though, is about the things nobody has invented yet. Telehealth was not a thing ten years ago. “So what’s going to happen in 10 years?”

Genesee County was built by the auto industry and hollowed out when the auto industry left. Dawisha looks at what remains and sees an offer he can make: land that costs very little, electrical capacity sized for factories that are no longer standing, and, if this works, fiber already in the ground before anyone asks. “Bring them jobs,” he says.

Fiber is the one project where he barely needs the humility lesson. That one, he says, sells itself. Hold a town hall and people show up already angry. “You’re going to get a whole bunch of people stand up with pitchforks and axes saying, I’m tired of this. I want my community fiber.”

His advice for anyone a few years behind him opens by granting them the point.

“I know you’re smart. You got here by being smart. You succeeded by being smart. Great. We know you’re smart. Now put that in one of your pockets, because that’s one of the tools you’ll use. You have a whole bunch of other pockets you can draw out of.”

Michael Dawisha, Genesee County

What’s in the other pockets is harder to put on a résumé. His old boss called it wisdom. “Wisdom is not often a value that people say I want to see on your resume,” Dawisha says. “But it’s a character you recognize.” It shows up as knowing when not to say the true thing because saying it helps nobody. It shows up as watching someone insist on failing, letting them, and being there when they land.

Ask what else is in those pockets and he names the same three things every time. Be humble. Be generous. Learn to love people. He hears how the last one lands. “I use the word love loosely,” he says.

“When you learn to love people, you learn to be generous to them, to give to them,” he says. “If you’re sincere about it, people know it.”

This has been a DoGood Member Spotlight.