July 2023

“Do Whatcha Gotta Do”

by Alan Culler | Jul 30, 2023 | Leading

“OK, Alan. If you’re interested in us, I’d be interested in you. I’ll need to talk to Sam, my partner. He may want to meet you.”

I had been a booking agent selling engagements for celebrity speakers on college campuses for six years. I was twenty-six years old. I was attending the national conference of the National Entertainment Conference, (NEC) a trade association of Directors of Student Activities and college lecture and entertainment committee chair people at the Shoreham Hotel. In Washington, D.C.

It was a rough conference for me. I had worked very hard to build relationships with NEC leadership, which helped me get referrals and increased my sales. My boss disliked the NEC intensely. My boss wasn’t the most ethical person in the business and the NEC had used its watchdog role to publicly reprimand him. In fact I had worked very hard to overcome a blackball order in my territory and had been invited to join the national board. My boss did not approve.

At the conference I learned that my boss had made several decisions, which the board disagreed with and which completely undermined all the relationship building I had done. It was a very stressful three days.

A friend had joined Lordly & Dame, a competing agency. Phil asked me if I’d be interested in joining L&D and arranged a meeting with David Lacamera..

Big Dave

“There’ll be a lawsuit, but that won’t bother us. He’s sued us before and we’ve won before. So I’ll talk to Sam on Monday and call you after,” smiled Big Dave.

David Lacamera was a year older than me, a little taller and weighed in at about two hundred fifty pounds. His manner was friendly and “gentle;” he spoke slowly and quietly in a field characterized by loud motor-mouths.”

I met Sam Dame within a week, who let me know, this was a formality insisted on by David. “If David wants to hire you then that’s OK with me. Lectures is his business and he runs it.”

There was a law suit and we settled. As part of the settlement I would have to work the West Coast territory rather than the New York, New Jersey territory I had been working. It was a startup territory for L&D. There were no established customer lists with phone numbers. I also came to find that Lordly & Dame had no direct mail program like my previous agency.

I made phone calls, lots of phone calls, something Big Dave described as “burning the phones,” but I longed to have some incoming phone calls. I asked Dave if I could start a simple direct mail program. “It won’t cost much. I’ll get the addresses and stuff envelopes. I’ll print mimeo sheets for the mailers and I’ve found a template we can use for the addresses so Kate’ll only have to type ’em once.”

“Do whatcha gotta do.”

“Really? I can give you an accounting of all expenses. . “

“Alan, do whatcha gotta do. You try it out. If it works, great. If not, try something else.”

It worked. I mailed. The phones rang. The West Coast territory grew up quickly. My sales didn’t rival New York, but they were quite respectable, sooner than expected.

I suggested that we might produce a brochure and mail nationally.

There were some agents who objected. “I don’t think people respond to direct mail. I think they want to have a personal phone call,” said Bill, who mostly sold poets and authors to English departs and other staff.

“I’m not so sure that’s true, Bill, said Dave. “I see the results Alan is having out West and I think we should try it for the rest of the country.” I thanked David for backing my suggestion.

“Alan, I didn’t hire you to do things the way we always have done. Of course I want your ideas, and this one seems like a no-brainer. I mean it’s already working.”

We tried a national mailing. Phones rang. Sales went up.

Over the next three years, I came up with ideas and David encouraged me to try them. His answer was al3ays the same.

“Alan, do whatcha gotta do.”

On one of the little start-up enterprises I attempted, I challenged him. “David this is likely to require more money than anything else I’ve tried. Lordly & Dame has never done anything like this. You’ve never done anything like this. ‘Do whatcha gotta do’ doesn’t seem appropriate.”

Dave scowled. He didn’t look angry often, but he was clearly frustrated with me.

“Alan. Why would I hire you to do stuff we’ve always done? I didn’t hire you to implement my ideas. I’m not the only one who has ideas. So far, you haven’t done anything stupid, so why wouldn’t I trust you to take a shot at something you think will work? I appreciate you asking and like that you think things through before you ask, but don’t give me a hard time about letting you do what you think it important to grow this business. Do whatcha gotta do.”

I’ve worked many places since L&D. There have been a few times when a leader gave me the kind of autonomy that Big Dave Lacamera did, but it definitely wasn’t the norm. I went to work for myself twice seeking autonomy and in fact of the thirty-seven years I spent in consulting, twenty-three were spent working for myself.

Autonomy

I am motivated by autonomy. Perhaps Dave knew that instinctively or perhaps that was just the kind of leader he was. He ran a fun place to work and we all felt part of a team, but we were in sales so the only collective work product we had was the growth and reputation of the firm. Somehow we shared that.

I often differentiate between leaders and managers in terms of the environment they work in. Managers get the work done and develop people in a steady state. Leaders communicate direction and attract followers in abnormal circumstances like change or emergencies. By this definition Dave Lacamera was demonstrating his management skill developing me to think for myself to come up with new ways to get the work done.

The autonomy he gave the whole team created a willingness to follow him. The differentiation leader or manager is not so clear.

Lessons:

Managers are accountable for developing their people, not just to get today’s work done, but developing them for the future. That requires giving autonomy, which attracts followers – an accountability of leadership.
Autonomy is key
- Hire people as capable or more capable than you but different.
- Evaluate their ability to operate autonomously.
- Give them as much autonomy as they can handle (or more).

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about leadership:

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, people say, we did it ourselves” Lao Tzu

Consulting Career Choices

by Alan Culler | Jul 22, 2023 | Consulting

Two roads diverged . . .

Perhaps you read “The Road Not Taken” in school. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I — I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference.” My English teacher told me this was about Robert Frost’s choice to become a poet, which he felt, in retrospect, was a good choice for him.

I don ‘t remember a “two roads diverged” moment, but I chose the consulting road. I think it was a good choice for me. After all, I travelled the consulting road for thirty-seven years.

I just wish I’d had a map.

So this is a map of sorts, an outline of career choices in consulting. Most of us make career choices serendipitously. Someone gives us advice; someone offers an opportunity at the right time – happy accidents. Consulting careers happen that way too. Mine did. Maybe yours will too, but if you were the kind of kid who learned Excel pivot tables at ten or collected baseball or Pokémon cards and kept them in pristine condition in little wax paper envelops rather than tossing them ten feet into a bucket or clipping them to your bicycle to make motorcycle sounds, then maybe you could plan out an entire consulting career before you graduate middle school.

For the rest of us, wherever we are in our career, here are some of the career choices points involved in consulting:

To be or not to be. Choosing to be a consultant will always involve the questions of why, when, what and how.
Up or out or Grow or Go. Most large firms evaluate consultants at promotion points analyst to associate, associate to manager, manager to partner. The job changes from doing the work to doing and managing to doing, managing and selling. If firm managers can see you in the next level you are promoted, if not you are invited to leave. The more levels there are the more opportunities to “get on with the value-added part of your career ̶ somewhere else.” Smaller firms may be less rigid, but still manage staff this way.
Rainmaker or Thought Leader – the choice between whether a partner brings in clients through direct selling or research and service offering development may start earlier than the partner transition point. A few rare partners do both paths.

Why?

You’ll probably be asked this in your first interview and you’ll say that you “like to solve problems in a fast-paced team environment,” or words to that effect. This article isn’t intended as interview training. It is intended for you to ask yourself why do you want to be a consultant.

Some good reasons to become a consultant:

You like business and you like immersion in different types of businesses.
Learning: You are good at absorbing a lot of data and quickly seeing patterns.
Solving complex problems.
You like to be helpful and don’t crave credit (It’s the client’s business.)
Work with teams of smart people.
The money ̶ you need to pay off student loans. (Obviously you don’t say this in an interview, but it is a reason many people enter a field where starting salaries are relatively high.)

Some bad reasons to become a consultant:

The money. Yeah, starting salaries are high, but they level out and you will work very hard for what you earn.. If you want to be rich become a tech entrepreneur, or an investment banker.
The prestige. OK, the Tumi rolling suitcase and computer bag are cool and telling “client disguised” war stories at parties is fun, but it wears thin quickly, for you and your friends.
The travel. When you realize that you are working in Paris or Bangkok, but only see the inside of office buildings, hotels, rental cars and airports, the magic of travel wears off. Sure you can stay over for personal travel, but most weeks you just want to go home.
Easy respect from senior managers. Consultants get opportunity to talk with executives, but respect comes from the analysis they do, and the knowledge and skill they acquire over time.
Be a star. Consultants don’t get credit for results; clients do.. Standing ovations are so rare as to be non-existent.
Learn people management skills. I saw some great people managers in consulting, but I can count them on my fingers. Constantly changing project teams, speed of delivery, and consultant egos don’t create fertile ground to grow people managers.

When?

Consultants typically enter the field at four times:

From undergraduate school. Undergrad hires are often analysts. In some firms they stay in the office and analyze data; in other firms they go to the client site. Most leave to go to graduate school or other jobs in two to three years. A very few stay with the firm or are sponsored to graduate school.
From graduate school. This used to be mostly MBAs and lawyers, but has expanded to other graduate degrees. These newbies enter as analysts, but are usually staffed on client project teams. They will usually face a promotion or depart choice in two to three years.
After 5-10 years in industry or academia. This group is usually hired for industry or discipline expertise (marketing, operations, etc.). They may face a grow or go choice in three to five years.
After 10-15 years in industry or academia. This group may be hired for industry or discipline experience, but is usually hired for their contacts and is used in client acquisition (selling) or advanced service offering development.

What kind of firm?

One could write a book on this choice. There are firms that specialize in all disciplines (strategy, marketing, operations, human resources, technology, etc.) and industries. Of course, candidates should consider the specialties that interest them. I also encourage you to consider firm size and whether the firm has a content or process focus.

Large firms offer more training, broader project variety, a more generalist orientation, but they are often more rigid in promotion criteria for up or out or grow or go choice points. Large firms have more prestige and are good places to be from as you move into industry.

Smaller firms often offer more opportunity quicker. They may be less rigid in up or out, but they are also more susceptible to changes in the business cycle.

Firms with a content orientation, expert firms tend write reports and make recommendations as an end product. Project length is often three to six months. Process oriented firms tend to stay longer with the client during orientation. Content consultants sell answers; process firms sell the process.

Some disciplines (strategy, marketing, certain types of financial analysis) lend themselves to content orientation. Process improvement, organization development, and management accounting lend themselves to a process orientation.

How?

How the firm works is sometimes explained on websites and recruiting materials. Sometimes you’ll have to read evaluations on sites like Glass Door or Indeed.

Elements to consider:

Staffing. Is staffing done by partners as a group or are you assigned to one partner? Is there a central staffing group? What is the expectation of application rate? (the percentage of time you must be applied to client billed work.) Is staffing local, global or in-between?
Training. There is likely to be induction training, methodology training that will happen on a project and there may be training when the job changes, e.g. management training as analysts move to managers, or sales training as managers move to partner.
Outplacement process. Some firms have a very active alumni network and use it to place those who leave the firm. Some firms offer outside outplacement services at transition points.

Unanticipated consequences of a consulting career.

Like lawyers, consultants must put up with the jokes about their profession. One joke says a lot about the career.

“If you introduce yourself to your neighbor three times, you might be a consultant.”

Constant travel, meeting new people all the time, can be quite disorienting. The lifestyle is a challenge. There are no mid-week book clubs, yoga classes, or PTA meetings. Finding a spouse, if you’re interested, is hard and maintaining relationships is harder. Some firms have programs to reduce this strain now, reduced travel, family leave, etc. It is worth planning how you’ll manage these issues.

I had to pay attention to staying in shape. For me that meant early morning workouts in the hotel fitness room. It wasn’t my ideal workout time, but the end of the day was too unpredictable and the inevitable Thursday night team event –“Big Food” – made it absolutely necessary.

If I’d had this map, would I have still chosen a consulting career? I think so. I loved the variety of work, the people (clients and colleagues), and the learning. I adapted. Maybe this map will be helpful to others to minimize some of the challenges I didn’t anticipate when I began my career.

Learning from Bugs

by Alan Culler | Jul 12, 2023 | Living

Eeeyou!

That is how many people react to bugs. They’re disgusting, disease-spreading, creepy-crawly creatures. Perhaps the feeling is mutual; there is little reliable data about how insects react to humans. They may be conflicted; we are both food source and predator to them.

Insects may be completely indifferent to humans. Fact is there are a lot more of them than us. At any given time there are approximately ten quintillion, that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000, ten million, million bugs on Earth. (That’s according to entomologists estimates reported on NPR; I don’t think anyone actually counted them.) 1, 2, Eeeyou!

Insects and me

No, I wasn’t one of those kids who fried ants with a magnifying glass or pulled the wings off flies. Nor did I practice ahimsa, the Hindu practice of non-harm to any living thing, which caused devotees to walk with a soft broom to sweep insects from their path lest they be unintentionally trod upon. I’ve used a fly swatter and smacked biting mosquitoes as much as anyone.

But I have had some unusual encounters with bugs that have caused me to respect them.

In Boy Scouts I earned a merit badge studying the butterfly life cycle. I wasn’t bug crazy. I chose which merit badges to pursue on aesthetic criteria. The monarch butterfly patch was cool. (So was the viper head for snake study. I know, Eeeyou!).

I always thought spider webs were gorgeous little engineering projects and watched a spider build one more than once. I remember discouraging fellow campers from breaking a big web sparkling with morning dew at Y camp. I was almost successful until our cabin counselor said “get rid of that cobweb and if you see the spider – Kill It.”

Spiders are among the bugs I like. I have been known to scoop them up and put them outside rather than smash them. These are insects that eat less agreeable insects, but I still don’t want to live with them. I have never been bitten by a spider, except maybe those little red chiggers, but I don’t want to start. I would give a Black Widow or a Wolf Spider wide berth.

Mosquitoes love me. Most anyone should love hiking with me, because my O-positive blood and ample sweat glands attract mosquitoes. I get bites and no one else gets any. I know DEET and OFF are bad for the environment, but I still use them in self-defense.

I used to think that mosquitoes had ‘no positive purpose on the Earth.” Then I learned that a single mosquito larvae purifies a pint of water a day.

I am allergic to hornet and wasp stings. Honey bees don’t seem to bother me as much, but I’m still not likely to build an apiary. When I was eleven I was trying out my new hatchet on a small scrub oak when an inch-long black and yellow hornet emerged from the base of the tree and stung me on my upper lip, right when the little indentation is. That is called the philtrum, which is a weird word to know at eleven, but when my upper lip was an inch thick and extended two inches from my face, the word kind of stuck.

The same year, a mud-dauber wasp stung me in my left shoulder and I looked like a weightlifter who only worked one arm. The wasp sting felt like someone had hit me with a ballpeen hammer.

My parents were Christian Scientists so no doctor diagnosed this allergy until I was nineteen in summer stock in Helena Montana and a cast member threw rocks at a yellow-jacket nest. This doc took one look at the five stings on my right hand and forearm and the eight inch swelling moving rapidly up my bicep and gave me a bone marrow cortisone shot through my elbow. “Stay away from those things. The venom is cumulative so each sting gets more dangerous. You don’t want the swelling to go to your heart”

I haven’t been stung since. I leave hornets and wasps alone. Occasionally one will get in the house and I will encourage him to leave. . . from a distance. As I said, Respect.

Humans are always getting rid of bugs. I visited my mother at Raytheon her first computer programming job. Her boss took me on a tour of the three story old brick shoe factory filled with hundreds of vacuum tubes. “Let’s go looking for bugs,” he said. Huge roaches still looking for shoe glue were attracted by the heat of the tubes. They crawled across contact points self-immolating, but shutting down the program. Programmers still talk about debugging.

I respect insects, even like some, but generally I don’t want to live with them. I’ve lived in cities for much of my life and have fought some epic roach battles. Victories were always short lived. Even moving wasn’t the answer as roaches lay eggs in cardboard boxes and hatch in your brand new space. Yuck. Roaches didn’t survive the Ice Age by being bashful.

I once stooped nose to nose with a millipede on my countertop in a basement apartment. “I don’t care if you live here,” I bellowed, “I just never want to see you again.” He left and didn’t come back. I don’t think he understood my words, probably just hated beer-breath.

We now have a summer war with tiny ants. My wife Billie is a merciless warrior. We wash the counters after every meal and put out those little white Combat traps the ants enter and carry poison to their nest. I am happy with the result, but tell the story of a neighbor also named Billie.

This Billie was soft hearted. “The ants work so hard.” she said. She put out sugar for the ants in little trails leading to ever larger little piles, leading away from the house. Hers was the only house on the street that didn’t have ants inside. My Billie who reminds me that “we don’t have ants either.”

What can we learn from bugs

Humans work hard not to live with insects. We learned that fleas on rats caused the Bubonic Plague. Mosquitoes carry malaria, yellow fever, and now West Nile virus. Deer ticks carry Lyme disease. Clearly, some bugs we humans should avoid.

Still the insect world has some lessons for us.

Not just hornets hurt nor do only ticks make you sick. Insects outnumber us in the world. When one leaves its ancestral home like the Japanese Beetle in the 1960s or the Emerald Ash Borer and Spotted Lantern fly today, its natural predators aren’t there to keep it in check and it causes damage.

Nature is a system. We are finding that killing bugs may not be best as crop pesticides are killing bees and other pollinators required for other crops to bear fruit. Humans call ourselves problem-solvers, but we find a solution and fail to think through the unintended consequences. Kill mosquito larvae, standing water grows more stagnant attracting worse “bugs.”

Life is short. Humans say this all the time, but it is much truer for insects. Houseflies live for twenty-eight days; Mosquitoes live for fifty. A mayfly, after hibernating at the bottom of a stream in the aqua nymph stage for a year, bursts into the sun. Males live for two days, females live till they lay eggs, five minutes to a day, unless there are trout around. There’s a reason fly-fishermen love their mayfly flies. Remember the mayfly and do what you have to do, today

Long lived bugs are often destructive. The longest lived insects eat stuff we don’t want them to eat. Termite queens live 25-100 years leading wood-house-feasts. Cicadas live17 years in the ground sucking roots of trees only to burst forth and eat everything. Buprestidae, or jewel beetles like the Emerald Ash Borer or the Japanese beetle (Chrysochroa fulgidissima) kill trees and plants for fifty years. Hopefully we humans can learn to be less destructive as we age.

Be open to wonder. My daughter and her children raise Monarch butterflies from pupa and release them into the world. The girls excitement is contagious. I feel the same excitement when I see the jewel tone dragonflies helo-hover by a summer stream. At dusk a green light flashes in my peripheral vision, then another, and I feel joy – fireflies!

Invest in watching a bug. It is a meditation to watch an ant carry a crumb through the grass, or a spider painstakingly swing on silk threads till an octagon appears. Once at a Bangkok Wat I was drawn to movement in a luminescent blue-purple lotus flower poking through the stones. I bent at the waist putting my face closer. Sparkling in the sunny school bus yellow center of this neon purple ring were two honeybees wrestling, splashing each other with pollen, which rose making the air dance with golden light. They tumbled over and over. . . I watched. . . time lost meaning. . . . When I raised my head – twenty minutes later – I had drawn a crowd, a circle of other humans watching me watch nature. “Bees,” I smiled and left the circle. Over my shoulder I saw some look inside the lotus. Most just walked away smiling. My wonder was the show.

Nature teaches us. If we let it. Even bugs. Eeyou!

Learn to Follow?

by Alan Culler | Jul 9, 2023 | Leading

“Oh, Man! I can’t believe I did that.”

I’m reviewing my life (so far). I suppose that might be expected for someone my age. After all, looking back is easier than looking forward, reflecting is easier than planning to change and at seventy-five there’s a lot to review.

The presenting cause for all this historical navel-gazing is my new “career” as a writer.(Can I call work for which I am not paid a career? Dunno.) I am writing three books, Traveling the Consulting Road, Change Leader? Who Me?, and Wisdom from Unusual Places.

The first book could be called, “My Mistakes as a Consultant.” The second might be titled “My Mistakes Leading Change,” and the third “My Mistakes in Life, plus some interesting people who tried to set me straight.” Are you sensing a theme?

Truth be told, for much of my life, I was a terrible follower. In cleaning out my parents’ house I came upon my fourth grade report card – My grades were still As and Bs, but Mrs. Keshan had written a note to my folks.

“Alan is bright, catches on very quickly, but if he doesn’t get over his problem with authority, it will limit him in his life.”

I don’t feel particularly limited, but for most of my life, I battled anyone who had the slightest bit of power over me. I used to joke as an independent consultant, “I work for myself because I discovered I’m a lot nicer to clients than I am to bosses.”

And I taught Leadership

This is perhaps a slight exaggeration. I designed and ran multiple workshops about leading change for corporate managers. I came to simplify the difference between managers and leaders. “managers get the work done in a (relatively) steady state and develop people: leaders work in abnormal circumstances (emergencies, war, change) and are accountable for direction and attracting followers.”

I emphasized attracting followers, by joking “If you think you’re a leader, look over your shoulder, if there’s no one there, you might just be delusional.” There was more to my practice than jokes, but I don’t think I spent enough time on followership.

Following can be an act of Leadership

I wasn’t always a poor follower. Several times in my life, I was committed to an idea, a leader’s vision, the purpose of an organization. I worked hard to get stuff done, not just stuff I was assigned to do, but stuff that aligned with the vision that I saw needed to be done. I built my own competency and asked for help when I needed it. I encouraged peers to have the same spirit and confronted anyone who veered away from the vision.

I experienced good followership in many contexts, Boy Scouts, the theatre, Habitat for Humanity house building, and at various points in every job I had, factory worker, waiter, booking agent, trainer, and consultant.

Recently, I read an Psychology Today blog post by Dr. Ronald Riggio, professor of n Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College, entitled “In Praise of Followership.” Dr Riggio referenced an Harvard Business Review article “In Praise of Followers,” written by Dr. Robert Kelley of Carnegie Mellon University, which I had read when I lived in Pittsburgh in the late 80s. I reread that article.

Here are some points from each:

Dr Riggio:

“Research on leadership has paid little attention to the critical role of followers.
Leaders and followers co-create leadership in a specific context. There is no leadership without followers.
It is imperative that followers support the leader when the mission is a good one or stand up to the leader when the path and goals are wrong.”

Dr. Kelley

A good follower has active behavior and independent critical thinking
Good followers self-manage well
Good followers commit to the vision, the organization, the purpose or the mission.
Good followers build the competencies they need to deliver.
Good followers, are courageous, honest, and credible.

No where does either professor recommend sucking up to a leader, nor blind loyalty, nor only delivering news the leader wants to hear, nor putting up with a toxic environment.

Learning to become an effective follower

Dr. Kelley uses a matrix to evaluate follower behavior.

The upper right, effective follower quadrant shows independent, critical thinkers with active behavior patterns.

Followers Kelley calls “sheep” are too willing to accept whatever the Leader thinks or says.

Those he calls “Yes people” operate from fear or seek approval, betraying the requirement for courage and honesty, and losing all credibility as a result.

When I failed as an effective follower, my particular failure mode too often fell into the alienated follower quadrant with passive-aggressive behavior I might have described as “righteous indignation.” Over time I learned how to “disagree agreeably,” as Kelley recommends, but it took me far too long.

According to Kelley effective followers confront leaders constructively. I have done more than my share of confronting, some more constructive than others. Perhaps my best follower behavior though was in getting stuff done. I learned early to deliver on what I was assigned and to look for things that needed to be done and just doing them. That trait increased my workload, but it bought me some forgiveness for my “disagreeable disagreement.”

Some my best follower behavior I honed in leaderless groups, or teams where the leadership role rotated according to the skills and knowledge needed. I also learned a great deal from facilitating groups and keeping my own opinions to myself.

I’m still working on the “problem with authority,” counter-dependent behavior thing. I’m helped in that struggle by the fact that as a retiree I have fewer bosses and as an old man others seem to just shake their heads and smile when I get obstreperous.

I’ve also learned that “do as I say not as I do doesn’t work with children and grandchildren,” so they’re lousy followers too, but. . .

. . . maybe some of you, dear readers, can learn from my mistakes.

Learn to follow.

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July 4th, 2023 – Celebrate these United States of America!

by Alan Culler | Jul 3, 2023 | Living

July 4th – US Independence Day

Amid the fireworks and cookouts, Ferris wheels, cotton candy and win-a-stuffie pellet-gun booths at Lion’s Club sponsored carnivals, amid the politicians’ speechifying, “hooray-for-our-side-doncha ever-vote-for-them-evil-bastards-agin,” amid apple pie and chit’lins, samosas, spring rolls, and empanadas, thick-steaks and veggie burgers, Let Us Remember.

Remember that 247 years ago today a group of men published a letter to a king declaring it had become “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”

These particular men, who happened to be wealthy and white, wrote some powerful words:

“all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Forget for the minute, those not included in the contemporary vision of these men; the vision is broader than their eighteenth century eyes could see.

These men stated a philosophy of government

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,”

And they go on –“Tyranny. . . Despotism. . .repeated injuries.” They list all the reasons for this earth-shattering declaration:

“You’re-not-the-boss of us no more! Nanny-nanny boo hoo! If you don’t like it, go to War. Nanny-nanny boo boo!”

You can imagine the crazy Hessian King George III and his advisors reading this letter out loud with a snide toddler mocking voice:

“Oh no! He didn’t let us pass laws. . . he dissolved our Houses of Representatives. . .He taxed us too much and he didn’t even ask our permission. . . and when we complained he put troops in our houses. . .oh No!”

“Just what part of KING didn’t you understand.”

And so we went to war.

I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. We learned that the war started a year before the Declaration, April 19^th, 1775. Paul Revere galloped out to warn folks in Lexington and Concord “The British are coming.” He was stopped by a redcoat patrol near where a Buttrick’s Ice Cream grew up in my youth only to fade into Minuteman Park today. William Dawes got away and delivered the warning to the “embattled farmers” of Concord, who kicked some redcoat ass.

So I was steeped in the story of the founding of this country, the battles of the Revolutionary War, Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown and the tortuous process that lead finally to our US Constitution, which begins “We the People.”

These rich land-owning white men created a pretty good government for rich land-owning white men of the eighteenth century. Then a funny thing happened. The broad expansive vision they described was taken seriously.

Oh, we’re still a very young nation. We’re a work-in-progress, for sure. The founders couldn’t agree, didn’t proscribe, just how much government we want or need. They didn’t create a blueprint for whether the locus of that government should be local or central, They identified “justice. . .domestic tranquility. . .common defense. . .general welfare. . .and blessings of liberty” as goals, but they didn’t prioritize them for us. We’re still arguing about trade-offs.

A work-in-progress.

Still, let us celebrate.

Celebrate the beginning of a grand experiment, which is, in Ben Franklin’s words,

“A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Happy Fourth of July!

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