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).
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.
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.
Vacations are not considered the”real world.” But the work of truly living, the responsibility to appreciate life before losing it, both also possible when we leave our daily lives, is the “real world” too.
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.
Every time the national debt increases without a way to pay for it, our taxes pay the interest on that larger debt. Call it the “debt tax.”
It’s the bane of public servants that Americans want statesmen and stateswomen – people with the courage to do the right thing for the country despite the personal consequences – but almost routinely punish them for doing just that.
Distractions cost time, resources, and attention. They leave us confused and uncertain about where to focus. As a nation, we have been distracted too long from serious attention to our problems
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.
America has always prided itself on the fact that we are, as John Adams first put it for us, “a government of laws, and not of men.” Indeed, law is a barrier to widespread abuse against human rights. But, if we are not careful, it can be a smokescreen as well.
What does James Madison, a product of the eighteenth century, have to teach us about the practice of politics in the twenty-first? Simply and profoundly this: he knew how to lose, and he knew how to win.
Good solutions to complex societal problems are rarely quick. Until we lend more patience to understanding them and nurturing the relationships that allow us to act with consensus, we will stay captives to our current frustration.
This is not Lake Wobegon. Not all of our children will be above average (though each can be above average in something). But a society that does not encourage mastery gets mostly average performance. For our children, for ourselves, for our society - we need more.
A child of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson saw a future pregnant with human happiness as long as conscience and reason remained unfettered. America, of course, has not always lived up to Jefferson’s epitaph. This is one of those times.
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.
A balanced life is a mixture of prose and poetry. We all have both in us. We are all writers and poets of life. Some of us - I count myself among them – tend toward the planned life, much as prose is planned. Others live lives that are more poetic.
