Turning the Key: Why the Best Public Service Goes Unnoticed

By Bryan Suddith 
Mayor, Kettering, Ohio 

Adapted from his speech at the 2026 Glenn College Public Leadership Academy graduation ceremony. 

At the turn of the century, starting a car was no easy task. You had to turn a big steel arm. Really had to crank it. Sometimes that worked, but occasionally, that crank would kick back, and when it did, it could cause serious injuries.  

There had to be a better way.  

And in 1911, a group of guys working out of a backyard barn in Dayton decided they were going to find one. They were engineers who worked for National Cash Register for their 9-to-5. But this barn? This was their 5-to-9. This was where they tinkered, experimented, asked hard questions and argued. Led by Charles Kettering, they tried something, failed, tried again and kept going.   

And in that barn, they created something that would change the world: the electric automobile starter. In 1912, Cadillac began putting that technology into every car that rolled off its assembly line in Detroit. And just like that, the car had no crank.  

Something that had been dangerous and difficult suddenly became simple: You got in, you turned a key, and the car started.  

Today, nobody gets in a car and says, “Thank goodness for Charles Kettering.” We just turn the key. And I think that’s the rub, isn’t it? People forget the inventions that made life easier. We forget the people who made the hard things simple. We forget the decisions that changed the direction of a community because, over time, the results just become part of everyday life.  

Public service work is the same way.  

Future generations may not know our names. They may not remember the meetings we attended, the votes we took or the arguments we had. But if we do this work well, if we have the courage to make the right decisions, if we are willing to tackle the hard problems instead of passing them along —  life will be better. For a whole lot of folks.  

In 1956, John F. Kennedy wrote: “Today the challenge of political courage looms larger than ever before. For our everyday life is becoming so saturated with the tremendous power of mass communications that any unpopular or unorthodox course arouses a storm of protests….”  

Decades later, every public sector leader can understand that pressure. We live in a time when complex decisions are reduced to headlines, compromise is labeled as betrayal, and public criticism is instant.  

But here’s the thing about political courage: It doesn’t mean we are always right. It doesn’t mean we never listen. And it certainly doesn’t mean we have all the answers. Political courage means: 

• Having the willingness to listen to people who disagree with us and then having the courage to make a decision. 
• Being willing to say, “I don’t know.”  
• Changing our minds when the facts change. 
• Recognizing that compromise is not weakness. Sometimes compromise is the very thing that allows progress to happen.  
• Standing alone for a little while, trusting that what you are doing today will make life better for someone you may never meet.  

In 1996 Sen. John Glenn wrote to Ohio State with a vision to build a place here in Ohio that could rival the Kennedy School at Harvard. A place where public leaders could turn for support and come for instruction, encouragement, learning. Thus was born the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. 

Glenn and Kennedy both knew that the challenge of political courage wasn’t fading. They understood that decades later, people like us would still face it. Different issues. Different communities. Different technology.  

But the same fundamental challenges: How do we lead when it would be easier not to? How do we make a decision that is right for our community, even when that decision isn’t the easiest to explain? How do we keep moving forward when the people we serve don’t always agree on which direction we should go?  

I think the answer is that we remember our why: We didn’t run for office because we thought it would be easy. We ran because we believed our communities could be better. We believed we could make a difference.  

Somewhere along the way, it becomes easy to forget that. The meetings get longer. The emails become uncountable. The criticism gets louder. And sometimes the problems seem to grow bigger than our ability to solve them.  

That’s when we need to remember the barn.  

Remember those engineers in Dayton who worked their regular jobs during the day, then went into a backyard barn at night and tried to solve a problem that everyone else had simply learned to live with. They didn’t know that generations of people would benefit from their work. They just knew there was a better way, and they were willing to work for it.  

That’s our job, too. We are the barn gang. We are the people who have been entrusted with the responsibility to look at our communities and say, “There has to be a better way.” A better way to educate our children, care for our neighbors, build our communities and solve the problems that have been passed from one generation to the next.  

When we find that better way, we must be willing to do something about it.  

The challenge of political courage still looms larger than ever before, but so does the opportunity to make life a little easier, a little better, for the people we serve.  

And maybe someday, long after we’ve left these offices, someone will benefit from something we did.  

They’ll just turn the key and the car will start, and they’ll never have to think about how hard it once was.  

Maybe that’s the greatest measure of public service: Not whether they remember us, but whether the world we leave behind is a little better because we were here.