My father spent his early years working multiple jobs simultaneously. He picked fruit at the grocery store, delivered newspapers, worked on a General Motors assembly line, and preached on Sunday mornings. Over time, it slowed down. On his 85th birthday, he stepped down as pastor of our hometown church, but kept his job as a greeter at Chick-fil-A. He often says that his work as a preacher and a clockworker have more in common than people imagine. Both require appearing before sunrise. Both require belief in something bigger than a paycheck. Both require telling people the truth about who they are and who they can still become.
The same applies to nations.
At 250 years old, USA is the most ambitious brand ever. Like every great organization, it lives or dies by how well it practices what it preaches.
Fifteen years ago, leadership scholars Doug Ready and Emily Truelove described the motivating spirit of strong brands “Collective ambition” In an important article in the Harvard Business Review. They depict how great leaders inspire divided people to unite for the common good through a seven-element model that stands the test of time: purpose, vision, promise, values, goals, priorities, and daily behavior of the people who bear the name. What makes great companies great can make great countries even greater. Alignment lasts. Alignment rot.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, in Philadelphia, imperfect men drafted the outline of a more perfect union. They called the promise: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. They invoked the god of nature. They committed themselves to values worth dying for. They acknowledged that the nation was imperfect from day one, but they expected that it would achieve the perfection they had been unable to achieve.
Perfection is a verb, not an adjective. The founders trusted us to keep building.
We did this in fits and starts, sometimes one step back before two steps forward. In Sunday school, I learned that Job sat in ashes before he sat in abundance. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego entered the fiery furnace before they came out unharmed. Esther approached the king uninvited before saving her people. America has sat in ashes, walked through fire, and risked her life for freedom. And we’re still rising.
Like a wedding anniversary, America’s 250th anniversary is not a time to pretend we were perfect, but to celebrate our journey through trials and tribulations together, and to renew our vows to continue to be perfect.
America’s history of renewal is an inspiration to the world.
In 1787, the Articles of Confederation were collapsing. Shays’ Rebellion exposed a government that could not pay its soldiers or rein in its farmers. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay He wrote 85 articles Under the pseudonym Publius, it was published in New York newspapers over a period of six months. They brought the country into a new constitution. “We the People” was a narrative vision before it was a written reality.
In 1933, a quarter of Americans were unemployed, as banks and corporations fell like dominoes. President Franklin Roosevelt moved quickly on policy, then sat down at a microphone and spoke to people in their living rooms. That grandpa Fireplace talks He restored faith in the possibility of making government and capitalism able to serve ordinary people again. Eleanor Roosevelt He traveled the country Like his eyes, ears, and conscience.
In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. refused to fight based on the country’s deteriorating conditions. He read America its promissory note and demanded its respect. Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, and dozens of others Women organized the land Stop on. President Lyndon Johnson found the courage to sign the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, knowing that it would cost his party the South for a generation. Women provided the institution, King provided the voice, and Johnson provided the votes. All of them were heroes of renewal.
History also reminds us that progress is fragile. President Abraham Lincoln’s renewal in the 1860s is both a story of triumph and warning. He gave the country the Gettysburg Address, the Thirteenth Amendment and unity over division. Then came the collapse of the Reconstruction movement, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and decades of old and new Jim Crow rule.
Two renewal steps forward can take you one or two steps back. Each new generation inherits unfinished business. Nations are not renewed by chance. They are renewed when they deliver on their brand promise.
The American brand promise, engraved on our currency, is E polyunum. Out of many, one. Every immigrant, every descendant of slaves, every farm child, and every Pell Grant recipient like me has been told that this country belongs to them. When we break this promise, we pay for it in trust, productivity, etc Half a trillion dollars Disengaged workers are drained from the American economy every year.
Which brings us back to Redi and Truelove’s model of collective ambition. Our goal is unity, not division. Our vision is freedom, justice and prosperity for all. Our values are honesty, hard work, compassion and service. Our goals are good jobs, schools that teach how to read and think, neighbors who know each other’s names, and a planet that our grandchildren can breathe on. Our priorities are choices. Every dollar spent, every rent spent, every child raised, every tax dollar paid, and every act of kindness is a step toward a more perfect union. The last element is behavior. Under democracy, this is the case for all of us. No spectators.
The late businessman and philanthropist Charlie Munger He said once A group of students at Stanford Law School You can’t blame or shame people for doing the right thing. “Appeal to their sense of grandeur,” he said. Maybe he was talking about the people of the nation. Patriotism is the daily work of renewal, of perfection toward that greatness. It is the belief that America’s ideals remain worth pursuing. We can all be patriots.
I wanted to become a doctor so I could get money to help others. Instead, nature’s God sent me to law school, and eventually to the Ford Foundation. And along the way, I came to see this financing, guided by Adam Smith Neutral spectatorIt is also medicine. National capitalism is a system of investing capital in ways that enhance the masses of people who make capitalism possible.
I refuse to accept the proposition that America is incapable of renewing the covenants of its founders. The God of nature continues to write the same future. Pain precedes prosperity. Captivity precedes freedom. The crucifixion precedes the resurrection.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the brand is still running. The promise still stands, and Neuroscience now proves it What the Founding Fathers Knew: Our brains evolved to cooperate as much as compete. Lifting each other uplifts everyone.
Collective ambition built the brand. Collective ambition will renew it. We moved.
