Here's an article from SFGate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle online edition:

What Warren Hellman taught us

Mark Mosher
Friday, December 23, 2011

Like waking to find Coit Tower toppled or Golden Gate Park erased from the map, news of Warren Hellman's passing leaves a disorienting void in San Francisco life.

Once dubbed the "Warren Buffett of the West" by Business Week, Hellman, 77, was a force of nature in the financial world. He became the youngest partner at Lehman Bros. at 28 and went on to found the leveraged buyout and investment banking powerhouse that took Levi Strauss & Co. private. He invested in deals ranging from ad agency Young and Rubicam to Formula One Racing to the Nasdaq stock exchange itself.

But it's Hellman's contributions to San Francisco politics, philanthropy and community that leave an indelible mark on our city.

From cutting-edge research at the University of California to neighborhood schools in the Sunset District, from a newly rebuilt San Francisco General Hospital to the San Francisco Free Clinic run by his daughter and son-in-law, from museums to parks and parking garages - there's hardly a corner of San Francisco that Hellman didn't improve with his money, his time, his intellect and his compassion.

A Republican, he was quirkily unpredictable and unapologetically outspoken in politics. He once wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "If George W. Bush was CEO of a large company, he'd be fired." Yet his endorsement was sought by candidates for supervisor, mayor and governor, from the most business-friendly to the most progressive.

Not since clothing magnate Cyril Magnin - "Mr. San Francisco" - reigned as the city's leading philanthropist, political fundraiser and civic booster in the '50s and '60s has a business leader so personified San Francisco.

I worked for Warren on and off for nearly 20 years as an assistant, adviser and sometimes ghostwriter. He was rightly concerned about whether the next generation of businesspeople would become so focused on increasing profits and amassing personal wealth that they wouldn't set aside the time to help keep the city great.

The good news is that, while they may have broken the mold when they made Hellman, he left behind a good set of blueprints. Here's the advice I think he'd give to the next "Mr. or Ms. San Francisco":

Get rid of the gatekeepers

At a time when many CEOs are hyper-scheduled, over-handled and hidden behind a phalanx of spokespeople and lawyers, Hellman was almost shockingly available. He would meet with anyone who interested him, usually without staff. If the meeting was offsite, he usually drove himself.

Shortly after one of his several campaigns to keep the de Young Museum and Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park by building an underground parking garage, I learned that he met with Pinky Kushner, a local activist whom some had accused of stealing our campaign signs from light poles using a specially modified pickup truck with a stepladder in the back.

"Why did you meet with her?" I asked.

"I collect interesting people," he smiled back.

But it wasn't just entertainment. Hellman's accessibility and willingness to meet people outside his own social stratum gave him a unique perspective and unrivaled intelligence on street-level politics. An avid Sinophile, Warren correctly predicted the ascendance of Chinese American political power in San Francisco. He was the first business leader to organize a meeting between the CEOs of big local firms and the heads of the Chinese family associations - the Six Companies - in Chinatown.

Don't dismantle government, fix it

While many of his contemporaries backed efforts to shrink the role of government - either through antitax campaigns, the Tea Party or anti-public-employee campaigns in Wisconsin and Ohio, Hellman invested more and more of his time on measures to raise money for public parks, hospitals and schools. Hellman, like many of San Francisco's other household-name business leaders (Doug Shorenstein, Don Fisher), was a graduate of San Francisco's public schools and a staunch supporter of public education. He also believed that many wealthy people could afford to pay higher taxes.

This is not to say he wasn't critical of how government operates. He worked on Wall Street during the '70s when New York City almost went bankrupt and had to be taken over temporarily by a committee of bankers. He railed against wasteful spending, poor planning and corruption. Yet he wasn't willing to scapegoat firefighters, police officers and service employees to do it.

Get involved in the nuts and bolts

Ultimately, the secret to Hellman's effectiveness was his ability to bring together San Francisco's most divergent power players to address some of San Francisco's most intractable, politically difficult and intellectually impenetrable problems.

Some days, I felt as if Hellman had a magic touch for seeking out issues that were both fraught with political difficulty and completely unsexy - like his decade-long effort to build an underground garage in Golden Gate Park. In hindsight, it was a brilliant plan: The garage kept two of the city's major museums from leaving the park, paved the way for the popular street closure program and kept the park from slipping into disuse and neglect, like Central Park in the '70s.

But perhaps the greatest example of his ability to work under the hood of city government was his recent campaign to reform the city's employee pension system. He kicked off a meeting of some of the city's top labor and business leaders by joking that "never have so many important people come together to spend so much time on something so boring."

Months later, he emerged with a landslide election victory on a consensus measure that will save the city hundreds of millions of dollars over its lifetime.

Sadly, the job of Mr./Ms. San Francisco is vacant again and the successful applicant has an enormous set of shoes to fill. After all, Warren left his heart here.

Mark Mosher is a partner in Whitehurst Mosher, a local political campaign management firm.