Hawai‘i needs leaders who can identify our most persistent problems, set clear priorities, and measure whether their decisions are producing results. The Hawai‘i Dashboard is one tool for doing just that: a free and publicly accessible resource my colleagues and I have developed and continually curate.
The dashboard places Hawai‘i in a national context and shows where our state stands on 27 measures of affordability, health, safety, education, and the economy. This tool is driven solely by data — not opinions — and gives public officials, candidates and citizens a common starting point for discussing what deserves attention.
Road quality illustrates how the Dashboard can turn a broad public concern into a measurable policy challenge. The International Roughness Index measures road ride quality, and Hawaiʻi is in the lowest tier nationally (47 of 50), with 15 percent of Hawai‘i’s roads rated in poor condition in 2024 — about 1 in every 6 miles of public roads. This metric has worsened since 2013, when Hawai‘i was ranked 45 out of 50.
Roads are only one example, and it is good to see that Hawai‘i is not below par in every category. While there is room for improvement, we score better than many states on measures such as incidence of violent crime, food security, and household broadband access. Nonetheless, data on the dashboard suggest that Hawai‘i certainly needs to make gains with homelessness, property crime, and the cost of energy. Taken together, the Hawai‘i Dashboard offers a clear list of pertinent issues for leaders to champion and provides a way for the public to track results objectively.
Measurement alone, however, does not identify leadership. A worthy leader must decide which problems deserve priority, build support for difficult choices, manage competing risks, and remain accountable for the results.
Not everyone is cut out to lead others, but if you are an elected or appointed official, run the local canoe club, or manage a sales team in your company, you are a leader — and you often must do contradictory things. You need to champion your organization’s purpose, implement strategies, manage financial risks, handle crises, give life to products and services, and you need to inspire, hire, and fire people.
Steve Jobs put it this way. “If you want to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader. Sell ice cream.”
Good research tells us that America’s top CEOs generally pilot their companies in one of five distinct ways. Some focus on strategy and long-term horizons; others delegate strategy to business-unit heads. Some concentrate on technical expertise and continuous innovation, while still others emphasize financial controls, return on investment, and compliance. A fifth approach shapes turnarounds, often in the face of oblivion but sometimes for transformational expansion.
These approaches offer useful lessons for public institutions, even though government is not a corporation and citizens are not shareholders. Public officials must nonetheless choose priorities, manage risk, navigate crises, build coalitions, and deliver results that the people they serve can examine.
Those are also the standards voters should apply when evaluating candidates and the officials they elect. In Hawai‘i, the Dashboard can help candidates identify priorities and give voters a way to assess whether elected officials are making progress. It offers a common set of indicators for identifying problems, establishing priorities, and asking whether public action is producing measurable improvement.
The point is not to reward officials for choosing fashionable issues or announcing ambitious goals. Leadership success in the public and private sectors alike comes down to tackling big problems, and it is fair to evaluate leaders by how well they address the issues they choose to take on. Whether the concern is tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz or lousy local roads, we voters judge politicians by what they did or did not set out to accomplish, and how well they performed.
Results, however, are not enough; one additional factor is essential: integrity. Honor, reliability, and truthfulness mean doing the right thing for the right reasons, even when no one is watching. In the end, integrity comes down to a simple, three-part test of reasonable consistency: what a leader thinks, what he or she says publicly, and what a leader does.
This test does not demand perfect consistency. Circumstances change, new troubles arise, and leaders must sometimes revise their plans. What matters is whether their thinking, public statements, and actions remain reasonably aligned. Reasonableness is an extremely important expectation since all leadership is political, and no leader is perfect; we need to be tolerant of how challenging leadership really is. Jimmy Carter was a man of great integrity but his downfall arose with the energy, economic, and Iran crises of the late 1970s. That era still echoes, and we now desperately need leaders who can move through the current divisiveness and endless dithering.
There are models for such: Churchill’s great strength in WWII was fervor and boldness; he once opined that leadership is just moving from failure to failure with enthusiasm. Gandhi had a fierce moral fiber developed in South Africa when he was subjected to narrow-minded prejudice, but later applied what he learned to achieve India’s independence. Nelson Mandela emerged from decades in prison, deftly avoided a civil war, and helped end South Africa’s official apartheid policies.
Over the coming months, my colleagues and I will highlight key observations surfaced by the Dashboard and share our analyses with you here. Perhaps this will help make sense of difficult days. With the midterms coming up, we have an opportunity to rethink what we want from our leaders. It’s time to be bold. We are all in it together. And for anyone who wants to see where Hawai‘i stands, how we are changing, and which challenges deserve our attention, the Hawai‘i Dashboard offers a useful place to start.
Peter S. Adler can be reached on peter@guild.im. The Hawai‘i Dashboard presents a new You know Hawaiʻi? question every day.
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