My father spent his early years working multiple jobs at once. He picked fruit at the grocery store, delivered newspapers, worked on a General Motors assembly line and preached on Sunday mornings. Over time, he slowed down. On his 85th birthday, he resigned as pastor of our hometown church, but continued his job as a greeter at Chick-fil-A. He often says that his work as a preacher and hourly worker have more in common than people imagine. Both require submission before sunrise. Both require believing in something greater than pay. Both seek to show people the truth of who they are and who they may yet become.
The same goes for nations.
At 250 years old, the United States of America is the most ambitious brand ever conceived. Like any great institution, it lives or dies by how well it practices what it preaches.
Fifteen years ago, leadership scholars Doug ready AND Emily Truelove it is called the animating spirit of powerful brands “collective ambition” in an important Harvard Business Review article. They captured how great leaders inspire divided people to come together for the common good through a seven-element model that stands the test of time: purpose, vision, promise, values, objectives, priorities, and the daily behavior of the people who carry the name. What makes big companies big can make big nations bigger. The lineup lasts. Distortion decays.
Two hundred and fifty years ago in Philadelphia, imperfect men drew up the plan for a more perfect union. They named one promise: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They called upon the God of Nature. They committed themselves to values worth dying for. They admitted that the nation was imperfect on the first day, but they expected it to reach the perfection they could not give.
Perfection is a verb, not an adjective. The founders trusted us to keep building.
We have done this in matches 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 a fiery furnace before emerging unburnt. Esther approached the king uninvited before saving her people. America has sat in ashes, walked through fire, and risked her life for freedom. And still we rise.
Like a wedding anniversary, America’s 250th is not a time to pretend we’ve been perfect, but to celebrate our journey together through trials and tribulations and renew our vows to pursue excellence.
America’s story of renewal is an inspiration to the world.
In 1787, the Articles of Confederation are crumbling. Shays’ Rebellion had revealed a government that could not pay its soldiers or restrain its farmers. Madison, Hamilton and Jay wrote 85 essays under the pen name Publius that were published in New York newspapers over six months. They talked 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 out of work as banks and businesses collapsed like dominoes. President Franklin Roosevelt moved quickly into politics, then sat down at a microphone and spoke to people in their living rooms. Grandparents fireside chats restored faith that government and capitalism could be made to serve ordinary people again. Eleanor Roosevelt traveled the country as his eyes, ears and conscience.
In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. refused to fight under the country’s degraded conditions. He read America his pledge and asked that it be honored. Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash and dozens more women organized the field he stood up. President Lyndon Johnson found the courage to sign the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, knowing it would cost his party the South for a generation. Women provided the foundation, King provided the voice, and Johnson provided the votes. All were heroes of the renewal.
History also reminds us that progress is fragile. President Abraham LincolnThe revival of the 1860s is a triumphant and cautionary tale. He gave the country the Gettysburg Address, the Thirteenth Amendment, and unity over segregation. Then came the collapse of Reconstruction, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the decades of Jim Crow Old and New.
Two steps forward in renewal may cause a step or two back. Each new generation inherits unfinished business. Nations are not renewed by chance. They are renewed when they stick to their brand promise.
America’s brand promise, engraved on our currency, is One of many. Out of many, one. Every immigrant, every grandchild of the enslaved, every farm kid and every Pell Grant recipient like me has been told that this country belongs to them. When we break that promise, we pay for it with confidence, productivity, and approx half a trillion dollars that disengaged workers leave the American economy every year.
Which brings us back to Ready 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 quality jobs, schools that teach reading and thinking, neighbors who know each other’s names, and a planet where our grandchildren can breathe. Our priorities are elections. Every dollar spent, every job made, every child raised, every tax dollar paid, every act of kindness is a step toward a more perfect union. The last element is behavior. In a democracy, it’s all us. No spectators.
The late businessman and philanthropist Charlie Munger said once a group of students at Stanford Law School that you can’t blame or shame people into doing the right thing. “Appeal to their sense of grandeur,” he said. He could have spoken of the people of a nation. Patriotism is the daily work of renewal, of refinement towards that greatness. It is the belief that America’s highest ideals remain worth pursuing. We can all be patriots.
I wanted to become a doctor so I could get paid to help others. The Lord of Nature guided me to law school and eventually to the Ford Foundation. On the way, I came to see that finance, led by Adam SmithS ‘ impartial spectatorit is also medicine. Patriotic capitalism is the discipline of investing capital in ways that strengthen the masses of people who make capitalism possible.
I refuse to accept the proposition that America cannot renew the vows of its founders. Nature’s God 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 going strong. The promise still continues, and neuroscience now proves what the Founding Fathers knew: our brains evolved for cooperation as much as competition. Lifting each other up lifts the whole.
Collective ambition built the brand. Collective ambition will renew it. Our movement.
