They say people don’t quit jobs, they quit bad managers. When you have a bad manager, you know it. You know it because you can’t get out of bed in the morning. You can’t speak your mind because you don’t trust you’ll be listened to. You can’t get good results because there are roadblocks in your way and no one to help clear them.

A good manager, on the other hand, can see the mechanics of their team like a doctor studying an X-Ray, collapsing inefficiencies, lightening workloads, and nipping bad dynamics in the bud. Tim Cook and Lisa Su are transformational leaders who got there by being world class operators. 

We’ve endorsed Mark Farrell for mayor because he’s a leader who is also a good manager. Our CEO Kanishka Cheng was a legislative aide to Mark when he was a supervisor—she was one of only four aides who ever worked for Mark, because unlike many other politicians, he had so little staff turnover. She remembers quarterly staff off-sites to define and measure goals. She remembers Mark actually reading department heads’ budgets and policy proposals in their entirety before meeting with them—and no, this is not common practice among all of our elected officials. She also remembers the way he valued a spirit of cooperation across the aisle.

All the candidates have big plans to fix San Francisco, but Mark is the only one talking about the factor that makes or breaks what gets done: what kind of manager they would be. Mark has said it’s important to him that his team comes to work in-person five days a week to ensure maximum clarity and cooperation: “I want to work and govern our city the right way, and that means holding every department head accountable.”

With less than a month until Election Day, rumors are flying. Mark Farrell (our top pick for mayor), current Mayor London Breed, and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie are all vying for similar voters’ hearts. 

This is San Francisco politics, so campaign mailers and the press aren’t talking about efficacy. Instead, they’re hurling insults and playing dirty politics, forcing everyone else to follow suit or die. One of Mark Farrell’s opponents is the incumbent facing the fact that 59 percent of voters say their city is on the wrong track; the other is using more than $7 million of his own money to run a campaign that spends a significant amount against Mark. Thanks to his inherited wealth, Lurie’s campaign budget is bigger than all the other candidates’ combined and is breaking spending records in San Francisco politics.

This is not how we’d like the world to be, but here we are. And because this is where we are, we must address some of the swirling rumors, because they matter to voters—and rightfully so. Voters want to vote for a trustworthy and transparent mayor.

San Francisco needs a reboot. Yes, we all love the parks and the beautiful views and our sports teams. But the city averaged over two drug overdose deaths per day last year. Homelessness is up seven percent since 2022, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the problem. Residents who interact with city government find dysfunction and corruption atypical of a city famous for its innovative spirit. While San Francisco is finally moving up from dead last on the list of US city economies recovering from the pandemic, the slow pace has been painful for downtown. And we have yet to feel the effects of the impending $800 million city budget deficit.

We need a mayor who can deliver that reboot. A good mayor will have the right combination of management experience, political experience, past policy wins, and great future policy proposals. They will be a firm leader, decisive manager, and a savvy politician. After conducting interviews with the candidates and deep research on their records, as well as collecting our community’s input, we’re pleased to endorse Mark Farrell as our top pick. We’re also encouraging you to use ranked choice voting (more on that below).

A lawsuit could potentially force San Francisco’s school board to radically change the way it elects school board members just months before the next election. In this guest editorial, John Trasviña lays out why this baseless change will have terrible consequences for SFUSD and San Francisco’s public schools, and what you can do to stop it.

San Franciscans have become accustomed to seeing evidence of our city’s drug epidemic on our city’s streets. But recently, the crisis spilled over into Moscone Park playground when a 10-month old boy accidentally ingested fentanyl while playing there with his nanny…