Hard Times: Leadership in America - Hardcover

Kellerman, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804792356 ISBN 13: 9780804792356

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Leadership has never played a more prominent role in America's national discourse, and yet our opinions of leaders are at all-time lows. Private sector leaders are widely seen as greedy to the point of being corrupt. Public sector leaders are viewed as incompetent to the point of being inept. And, levels of trust in government have plummeted. As the title of this book conveys, leaders in America are experiencing hard times.

Barbara Kellerman argues that we focus on leaders, and even on followers, while ignoring an essential element of leadership: context. This book is a corrective. It enables leaders to track the terrain that they must navigate in order to create change. Rather than a handy-dandy manual on what to do and how to do it, Hard Times is structured as a checklist. Twenty-four brief sections cover key aspects of the American landscape. They trace evolutions and revolutions that have revised our norms, transformed our populations and institutions, and shifted our culture.

Kellerman's crash course on context reveals how significant it is to leadership. Clearer still is the fact that leadership is more difficult than it has ever been. It is context that explains why leadership is so fraught with frustration. And, it is context that makes evident why leadership will be better exercised if it is better understood. Calling out patterns that emerge from the checklist, Kellerman challenges leaders to do better. This fascinating read will change the way that all of us think about leadership, while compelling us to consider what it means for our future.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is author or editor of 14 books, including The End of Leadership, Followership, and Bad Leadership. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association and has been ranked among Forbes.com's Top 50 Business Thinkers, and also among "top thought leaders in management and leadership" by Leadership Excellence. She has appeared often on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, Reuters and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review. She speaks to audiences all over the world and blogs at www.barbarakellerman.com/.

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Hard Times

Leadership in America

By Barbara Kellerman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Barbara Kellerman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9235-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Prologue. What's Been Lost?, 
PART I. FOUNDATIONS, 
1. History, 
2. Ideology, 
PART II. EVOLUTIONS, 
3. Religion, 
4. Politics, 
5. Economics, 
6. Institutions, 
7. Organizations, 
8. Law, 
9. Business, 
PART III. REVOLUTIONS, 
10. Technology, 
11. Media, 
12. Money, 
13. Innovation, 
14. Competition, 
PART IV. POPULATIONS, 
15. Class, 
16. Culture, 
17. Divisions, 
18. Interests, 
PART V: FUTURES, 
19. Environment, 
20. Risks, 
21. Trends, 
PART VI. INVERSIONS, 
22. Leaders, 
23. Followers, 
24. Outsiders, 
Epilogue. What's Been Found?, 
The Author, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

HISTORY

EVERY NATION has its founding myths, myths about its genesis that not only endure but that set the stage for whatever is subsequent. In the case of leadership in America, it matters that our founders were revolutionists, leaders who first were followers, subjects of the British Crown, until they successfully seized power and ultimately authority by force. It matters to leadership in America that many of these founders, including General George Washington, were ready and willing to put their lives at risk for the principles they held dear. And it matters to leadership in America that they refused to suffer a system that they had come to detest, to deem not only tyrannical but illegitimate. War wrenched the American colonies from the British Empire and secured the United States of America. To this day this war, the American Revolution, has an impact on how leadership in America is exercised.

History matters. It matters that American history is different from, say, Canadian or Mexican history, or for that matter from British history. The United States is singular in that it was the first to boast a band of revolutionists that declared the old authoritarian order dead, and a new democratic order begun. It was the first among nations to put into practice or, better, to try to, the humanistic ideas that distinguished the ideals of the Western Enlightenment.

The American Revolution was not the first of the American rebellions. By the time independence was declared in 1776, the colonies had a history of resistance, a history in which those who ostensibly were powerless took on those who obviously were powerful. In 1676 in Virginia, for example, there was Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising of white frontiersmen joined by slaves and servants that so threatened the British governor he was forced to flee the capital, Jamestown. England's response was to send a thousand British soldiers to pacify the forty thousand American colonists and, after order was restored, to hang the leader of the insurrectionists, Nathanial Bacon. But Bacon's Rebellion was just one among many revolts against the English, all up and down the eastern seaboard, in colonies from Massachusetts to Virginia. In New York there were strikes of coopers, butchers, bakers, and porters. In New Jersey there were demonstrations by farmers against landowners. And years before the Boston Tea Party, in Massachusetts there were protests and petitions and pamphlets, all signs and symbols of growing hostility to the English Crown. In truth, while the colonists lived in a monarchy and were monarchical subjects, they never did much respect royalty. From the beginning they were "the most republican of people in the English-speaking world. Every visitor to the New World sensed it."

In the decade or so before 1776, resistance against the British came to a head, especially, again, in Massachusetts. In 1767, riots in Boston broke out, against the Stamp Act. Three years later came a fight since known as the Boston Massacre. (Ten thousand Bostonians, over two-thirds the total population, took part in the funerals.) And in 1773 there was the Boston Tea Party—a protest against the English government and the English-owned East India Company—that led to the imposition by the British of martial law.

As historian Edmund Morgan has vividly detailed, there was from the start a striking inconsistency, a stunning hypocrisy. Here is a case in point: two Virginians, both leaders, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. On the one hand both led the fight for freedom. On the other hand both owned slaves. It was not that every single white man was a slave owner. Rather, it was that the men who came together to found the United States of America, which was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, either did own slaves or were "willing to join hands with those who did." This striking contradiction characterized American history not merely briefly, but for nearly two hundred years, from before the revolution straight through to emancipation. Still, it never precluded a conglomeration of republican ideas and ideals from dominating politics. In colonial America a slave labor force was isolated from the rest of society, while the rest of society—a body of large planters and a larger body of small planters—was increasingly committed to freedom and equality. In fact, (white) Virginians remained throughout the colonial period at the forefront of opposition to England, and took leading roles in creating the American republic.

The American Revolution was, then, the culmination of decades of resistance and rebellion, which in time hardened to righteous rage at royalty thousands of miles and an ocean away. As Thomas Paine put it in his iconic, incendiary booklet Common Sense, intended to persuade the public to support independence from Great Britain, "This new World hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother [country], but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home pursues their descendents still."

Above all, the freshly minted governors of the United States of America determined to protect against tyranny. The Constitution was to be crafted with this in mind, structured to preclude the possibility of too much power held by a single individual or institution. Put on notice by yet another revolt—Shays' Rebellion, in 1786, again in Massachusetts—the framers viewed their task as a balancing act. They wanted a system of representation that would respond to the legitimate needs of the people, but they also wanted to curb the peoples' passions and greed. Similarly, they thought to gain safety and security by creating a stronger and broader union, but they did not intend for this union to be so broad or so strong as to tip toward tyranny. It was James Madison who proposed the solution that ultimately prevailed—the Constitution of the United States. It was he who perhaps best understood that in order to preclude populism and factionalism from destroying the Revolution's hard-won gains, it was necessary to secure the new nation, in its entirety. It "alone could be thought to stand superior to the people of any single state."

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Constitutional Convention. For if the intention of the revolution was utopian, no less than the destruction of the old monarchical society, the reality the morning after was different. It is, as we have...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804792356
• ISBN 13: 9780804792356
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland