Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. His work focuses on values-based leadership, ethics, and decision making. A former Air Force officer, Terry also previously served as Director of the Horace Mann Learning Center, the training arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and as Dean of Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. Terry is co-editor and author of The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships That Make Government Work (CQ Press, 2011). He also wrote Statesmanship, Character and Leadership in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government (Loftlands Press 2015).
We need to find ways to lay personal responsibility and societal accountability on corporate leaders who willingly do societal damage and treat the resulting fines as just a cost of business.
Much of our discourse as a nation seems to be the language of not falling, in a dangerous world without a safety net. But we may find that trying to prevent disaster may serve us less well than trying to imagine success.
Politics without good role models is like a home without good parents. The former leaves the next generation at a loss to see how to behave in public life just as the latter leaves them floundering on how to behave in family life.
We have filled our lives with sound, yet our love affair with sounds can become a weakness. We should not fear the empty space that silence creates, for in it we may find something invaluable, the sound of ourselves.
Is FedEx Field, where the Washington Redskins play, as meaningful a symbol of civic culture as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium where the team formerly played? Outsourcing citizenship, while saving money, can weaken social bonds essential for effective governance.
Unlike corporate boards, which can often act in secret, the leaders of public institutions must meet demands for transparency and consultation. The Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia learned this hard lesson when it tried to fire the institution’s president. But she had a lesson to learn as well.
We need to question what we see in cyberspace. We need to remember that passionate belief must not override reasoned analysis. We need to understand that what we “know” is colored by our assumptions and prejudices.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln fashioned a story to help the nation see where it had been and where it needed to go. The best leaders tell stories that guide America forward.
We often employ simplistic mental strategies to deal with our own mental exhaustion.We are endangering democracy by doing so.
Money’s influence in politics seems here to stay, but for those who feel we need to change that, there is a solution. It’s called voting. It might seem naive to say it, but democracy can actually solve this problem with democracy.
Every candidate insists that he or she “represents the people.” Why, then, is there such a disconnect between what elected representatives do and what Americans who are polled say they expect of government?
If we let the land enter our hearts and surround us with its smells, sounds and scenes, it becomes more than a surveyor’s plat, more than a mortgage, more than an address. The land, experienced emotionally, has a hold on us.
As impermanent as we are, as fleeting as are our creations, our stories are permanent enough to help us know that our lives meant something. Nothing in life lasts. But our stories remain
When we look for reasons to explain poor student achievement, there is one we seem reluctant to cite: the students themselves. If we were to make a list of who’s responsible for ensuring they do well in school, the first group on the list should be students.
The notion of geographically isolated election districts, each with its own interests and a representative chosen freely by the people, was central to the republican model created by the Constitution. It is worth asking if some of the core assumptions of that model, especially the idea that large concentrations of wealth could not control public policy, still hold.
The Tea Party is on to something in America, and that this something is important to understand. The Tea Party may just be the canary in the coal mine, the harbinger of a looming explosion.
Our legacy is not just our work accomplishments. It is also the way we make people feel. People will remember us less for how much work we crammed into our days than for how much caring we brought into their lives.
If America is the land of opportunity and optimism, why, from one area to another, do we seem driven not by the soaring rhetoric of hope and promise but by the sinking call to lower our expectations?
In the contract society, “citizens” have become government’s “customers,” and they judge government by how satisfied they are with what they get. That’s not a prescription for healthy governance.
In our times, we seem so cynical about our leaders and our institutions. Moral exemplars, great Americans, can remind us of both who we have been and what we can still become.
