Sudden Impact

Because Wearing had come up through the ranks, his appointment didn't trigger widespread internal panic. But after a few months of watching his staff perform, he began to make his moves, firing one captain who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and removing another whose skills fell short of Wearing's higher standards. And he began a rigorous effort to increase the department's diversity. By 2002, women and minorities made up 51% of New Haven's sworn personnel, up from 24% in 1990.

Perhaps Wearing's most far-reaching legacy will be his focus on quality-of-life crimes -- the so-called broken-windows approach to policing. Just as Rudy Giuliani cracked down on New York's squeegee men, Wearing declared war on New Haven's vagrants and hookers, street-corner dealers and boom-box blasters. By nipping misdemeanors in the bud, Wearing argues, police may deter more-serious crimes.

His approach seems to be working. In 1997, New Haven logged 13,950 major crimes; in 2001, the city had a total of 9,322. In the past four years, the department has earned four national and international awards for community policing. But along with the diminished crime rate comes a host of raised expectations. "Ten years ago, if you got the drug dealer off the corner, people were fine with that," says chief of detectives Norwood. "Now they want the drug deal off the corner, the lights on, the streets cleaned, and the traffic flowing. That's a lot, but when we tackle all of those issues instead of just the drug deal, it makes the whole neighborhood safe."

Chief Wearing understands that he has to keep making an impact: "The real challenge for me is to sustain this over a long period of time."

The Whiz Kid
Jim Berra, VP of loyalty marketing, Starwood Hotels & Resorts
On a standard-issue filing cabinet outside Jim Berra's office, 12 sparkling Freddies sprout like stalagmites in a fabulous crystal cave. On the windowsill inside his office sit 9 more. Freddies, obelisk-shaped totems made of Tiffany glass, are the hospitality industry's version of the Oscars, awarded to the best hotel and airline frequent-traveler programs. That would make Starwood Hotels & Resorts the Lord of the Rings of its business and Berra, the company's 30-year-old vice president of loyalty marketing, best director.

Winning a dozen awards in any year would be impressive. But winning 12 out of 16 this year -- the annus horribilis, of the hotel business -- was right out of a Hollywood script. Berra, a genial law-school dropout with a passion for golf, faced a tougher-than-usual transition when he was promoted to head of the Starwood Preferred Guest program in July 2001. He had just lost 20 of his 24 staff members when his unit moved from Boston to headquarters in White Plains, New York. But that loss paled in comparison to the disaster of September 11.

"September was pretty crazy," Berra says. "I had been trying to make a transition from Boston to New York, but then everything became much more confused. We had crises to deal with, worrying about how we would care for our members and how we should change our marketing strategy."

Starwood's immediate response was to protect its best customers, assuring its Platinum members (those who log at least 20 visits and spend $15,000 at company hotels annually) that their elite status would be preserved, even if they couldn't meet the program's requirements.

The medium-term challenge was to figure out what the company, which operates the St. Regis, Sheraton, W, and Westin brands, could do to stimulate business, which, among frequent guests, had fallen by 20% in the aftermath of the attacks. There were two main considerations, says Berra: weighing what would work tactically, given the level of uncertainty affecting travel in those first months after the attacks, and what would be appropriate given the country's mood. Berra's response was the "1K per Day" promotion from October to January, which rewarded members with 1,000 frequent-traveler points per night at any of the company's U.S. hotels.

Meanwhile, back at headquarters, Berra was grappling with his own problems as he tried to figure out how to reorganize his depleted team. While he was desperate for help, he couldn't afford to hire outsiders who would need training before they could be useful. So he put the word out that he was looking for rising stars from within the company. "Utilizing that internal talent helped us ramp up quicker," Berra says, "even though I had to warn them that they were signing up for some short-term chaos."

As a member of the group that launched Starwood's Preferred Guest program back in 1998, Berra had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do. "I understood the lay of the land," he says, "and had a good sense of where we needed to take the program strategically." And, like any newcomer to a job, Berra was keen to have a few big wins to energize his new team. "I didn't want to solve world hunger in the first three months, but I was looking for a couple of things that would pay immediate dividends," he says.