Exceptional Leadership: Lessons from the Founding Leaders

Abstract

In the early years of the United States, John Jay reputedly stated: “those who own the country ought to govern it.” Gilbert Fairholm has a take on this dictum in Exceptional Leadership: Lessons from the Founding Leaders. On one hand, he does not think that structural inequality exists in America. On the other hand, he supports the notion of authoritarian leadership.Fairholm validates his theories of organizational management and his views on the proper relationship between the workplace and political participation. His general argument is that America's “founding leaders” instituted the principles of American exceptionalism that thrive in modern-day work settings (3). But, he argues, the core values of natural rights, equality, opportunity, happiness, freedom, and fairness must be reinforced. Fairholm examines “founding documents” produced between 1754 and 1831 (8). Each chapter is composed of a particular primary document and an analysis of its managerial significance. Among them, the federal Constitution incorporated both fundamental core principles and many provisions of the Albany Plan of Union and the Virginia Bill of Rights. The lesson posed by the doctrine of judicial review, as introduced in Marbury v. Madison, is that bosses should be just in their dealings with employees. Fairholm declares that multiculturalism undermines a community's cohesion, but that successful managers adopt democratic principles, giving workers some freedom of action as long as it does not hurt the bottom line. Fairholm includes three songs in his inventory of founding documents. He argues that “The Star Spangled Banner,” in particular, contains “beautiful and insightful ideas” (218).Other than treatment of Benjamin Franklin and the Constitutional Convention, Exceptional Leadership does not deal with Pennsylvania history. However, the author's biographical sketch claims that he was a consultant in Philadelphia. But this and his experience advising public and private agencies at the state and local levels in the United States and Nigeria begs an observation: Fairholm must be aware that life is not as simplistic as he portrays it in this book.What about those 900-pound gorillas in US history, namely slavery and imperialism? In his discussion of the 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, Fairholm argues that slavery troubled the founding leaders. However, the preservation of this institution (i.e., compromise with Southern elites) was essential to securing the new United States. Imperialism does not seem to exist. The United States was created out of a “vast and largely unknown wilderness” and was a matter of “eventual expansion to encompass everything between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts” (45, 109). He does concede that the treatment of indigenous people was “checkered at best” (262).Exceptional Leadership reads like a Cold War civics text. Its author portrays the United States as a color-blind and classless “success story”; “meritocratic fairness” is its guiding theme (11, 26). However, Fairholm makes whopping generalizations. He claims that a feature of American exceptionalism is a “leadership philosophy of caring for workers” (35). But if managers and workers are “coworkers,” what does Fairholm mean when he holds that labor unions run the risk of challenging the “authority of the nominal leader” (36, 148)? He asserts that Americans should strive for perfection, but he also feels that some things in society should not be changed. Nor does Fairholm devote enough energy to convincing the reader why his core values are essential to the smooth working of an organization. He does not substantiate his interpretations in depth.To his credit, Fairholm includes documents that receive comparatively less attention, such as the 1787 Northwest Ordinance and the 1789 Judiciary Act. But his analysis is not comprehensive. For instance, he passes over the reference to “merciless Indian Savages” in the “magnificent” Declaration of Independence without comment (70, 73). There is no coverage of the Three-fifths and Slave Trade Clauses, or of the Electoral College, in the Constitution. Fairholm devotes a chapter to Federalist No. 10, but deeper perspective on James Madison would have been afforded by adding a selection from Robert Yates's minutes of the Constitutional Convention (“Our government … ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”). Other useful additions could have been policy statements by the New York Workingman's Party (1829) and the Women's Rights Convention (1848) as well as public notices of slave auctions (Progressive Era legislation regulating money in politics and President Franklin Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights are also relevant). Fairholm ignores questions about US society recognized in many historical studies, notable recent examples being Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), Sophia Z. Lee's The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), and William O. Walker's National Security and Core Values in American History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).There are a few editorial problems. Brief discussions of Madison's War Message and the Hartford Resolutions are left out of the introduction to part 3. The former is not fully cited in the index; the latter is not cited at all (the takeaway about the Hartford Resolutions is that leaders must always be open to compromise with national groups, even those committed to states' rights). In terms of copyediting, some of Fairholm's phrases are awkward (“A distinguishing pattern of the great civilizations anciently is that they have risen, prospered, and then failed,” 10).In Fairholm's defense, he makes it clear at the outset that he did not intend to write a work of critical history. While the target audience of Exceptional Leadership is not clearly identified, frequent references to management theory—to say nothing of the book's cursory nature—suggest that Fairholm intended to write a guide for service-sector managers. There is one other matter to consider. If anyone harbors doubts about the weight of Fairholm's ideas, the current US political scene need only be taken into account.