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).
All in Governing Ourselves
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.
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.
The anchor effect suggests that we tend to “anchor” or rely too heavily in our decision making on a single piece of data to the exclusion of other information. Once the anchor is set, it dominates our thinking and moves us in the direction of the anchor.
Einstein said that if he had a minute to live and only one question he could answer, he'd spend 59 seconds framing the question. He knew the power of a well-framed question. Asking the right question is worthy of a greater investment than we usually give it.
Our problems and possibilities are too many and too complex for one human being to understand and address. Leadership in a republic demands something other than a “Lone Ranger” on a white horse.
Government is inherently a matter of trade-offs, in values and policies. How to make those trade-offs is, in fact, one of the chief functions of government and one of the chief sources of contention in a free society.
In our lives, the political differences that separated Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton still survive. Though both their philosophies shape how we govern ourselves, they exist as uneasy, conjoined twins. We should be thankful.
