Profiles 10.4

Kip Harkness: Gathering Innovators

Written by Tad Malone | Photography by Daniel Garcia

Instagram: kipthinks

You wouldn’t expect your local civil servant to also be a candidate for the most interesting person in the world, but San Jose’s deputy city manager, Kip Harkness, is definitely a contender. Raised all over as a military brat—including on a remote island off of southern Florida—Harkness considers San Jose his 19th adopted home city. His first career was in international development in Frenchspeaking Africa, before he returned to San Jose to do public sector work. He moved into the tech world for a few years, only to find himself back in San Jose’s public sector, this time as the deputy city manager. In that position, Harkness oversees budgetary and efficiency problems plaguing the city as well as emergency services, which includes increasing the efficiency of city police car use by officers and speeding up the city’s hiring process. In addition, he is collaborating with telecom companies to increase cellphone coverage and connectivity in San Jose. As for the future, Harkness hopes to continue his service for the city in any way that he can and also work on his side career as a fine artist (he fences too).

“I’m looking to gather a tribe of innovators to transform San Jose. In the last two years, I’ve seen that there are a lot of talented people inside and out of city hall that want to lend a hand and change how we do business. In turn, we’ve seen the implementation of design thinking, data analysis, to rethink how we do things. The bottom line is that people in the building are really hungry to change and innovate the way we do services. All I’m doing is tapping into that energy and creating a space for people to lead and innovate.”