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).
It is worth asking if we are meeting the test of civic virtue George Washington set in his Farewell Address. Do we have sufficient centripetal forces in our public life to maintain what he called “union and brotherly affection.”
Those angry at the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin see not just that a man has been set free but that justice cannot be defined by what happens in a courtroom alone.
Why, Americans ask, can’t government be run more like a private sector company? To road-test this idea, let’s think about one of the best run, most admired private sector companies in America: Google.
Americans hold many of their public officials in low esteem. Could the reasons include that they detect a lack of honor in those who serve them?
As in so many things, life ought to be in balance. If planning is good, then so is not planning.
Hindsight is a dangerous mental error. It convinces us of the inevitably of events by no means inevitable. Both political parties should recognize their reality is mentally constructed. It has the same danger as a gambler who finds quick ways to explain his winning (or losing) streak.
Proposals to change the way we elect a president abound. We need a yardstick to measure their value to democracy. That yardstick ought to include whether a change strengthens or diminishes majority rule and trust in government.
We seem to want more freedom and less government, when in fact more freedom may also require more – and better - government.
I lost my mother about eight months ago, but she will be ninety-nine in early February. This is the result of dementia. It is an illness that has crept up on her, and us, in small, almost imperceptible steps, as fog crawls slowly up a hillside.
For many years, I have longed for the perfect day – the one when everything goes right. I have had, perhaps, ten of these. Yet I have had many perfect moments.
Market values, exemplified by the use of money as a key measure and medium of political efficacy, have gained increasing impact on how campaigns are run and on how those who are elected govern. Civic values need to play a larger role.
In less than three weeks, we will be moving from our home of 19 years. We will be exchanging our 1.5 acres for 0.15 acres –an attached home whose garden is but the size of our current garage. This is our choice, and I am in no sense complaining. But it feels like is a loss.
Shortly after being declared the winner, the next president will claim a mandate to govern. His supporters will demand that his mandate be honored. Both misread American politics and the Constitution.
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.
