I remember the first time that I heard someone refer to the “American Experiment.” It was around 1995, and Sir Christopher Hogg, CEO of Reuters, who had both the bearing and clipped British accent that comes with a ‘Sir’, was visiting my office at the Ford Foundation.
Chris was a Trustee of the Foundation and sat on the committee that oversaw our impact investing team where a conversation about the role of corporations had begun to take shape. He shared with us what it was like as a foreigner to oversee Reuters’ operations in the US, with its shifting norms about labor-community-shareholders and more.
His question: How do you make the right decisions—essentially, honor the license to operate in America? He referred to the “American experiment,” our (then) 220-year-old quest to build a nation based on a set of common values (not yet applied to all) but with citizens who hailed from every possible corner of the globe.
The American Experiment?
I didn’t know this was an experiment. I grew up in Southern California in the 1950s and 1960s and took it all for granted. The American Revolution happened a long time ago. We had survived the Civil War, outlasted the Great Depression, helped defeat the enemy in two World Wars, lived through the war in Vietnam, and secured civil rights through protests in the streets.
American Experiment? What didn’t he get?
There are lots of ways to look at this phrase. George Washington apparently thought the “experiment” was republican government. Others point to the true experiment being whether a multiracial democracy could function and endure. Or that we are a nation built around a set of ideas rather than a common geographic, ethnic, or religious identity.
As we lean into our 250th birthday, the connection Chris was making is now clearer to me. He was considering how, or whether, the decisions and priorities of the firm could, or should, contribute to the health of the America in all its complexity. He was trying to figure out what this start-up nation expected of his enterprise. To him, it was still soft clay: a constitutional republic; state rights vs. federal jurisdictions; a polyglot citizenry; searching for the appropriate balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility, and yes, built around ideals.
America is indeed an experiment, and today, all of that is very much under the microscope. I can now see the US in this light, even with modest enthusiasm. After all, we can still shape the outcome. But from where I sit, these ‘outcomes’ depend as much on the mindset and priorities of corporate leaders and the style of capitalism they embrace as it does on the ballot box.
Nick Hanauer nails it in this piece: “Which capitalism are we defending?” He writes:
“The quicker [that] people of good faith — investors, founders, civic leaders, Democrats and Republicans who genuinely believe in markets and in America — recognize that the form of capitalism we’ve chosen isn’t working for the majority of our fellow citizens and get serious about changing it, the less likely it becomes that those citizens will conclude capitalism itself is the problem.”
But capitalism isn’t stuck. (It’s always evolving.) We are.
Hanauer reminds us that WE get to decide. Business leaders have real agency and make many decisions that illuminate which version of capitalism we will embrace. We are not on a good path; current norms are not serving us well, and there is no national organization of executives that will hit the reset button and save us.
It will be individual business leaders who take risks and stand up for American ideals who will help us reframe the conversation about capitalism. It’s time for something new.
There’s no turning back the clock. The American experiment is playing out in real time. Our work at the Aspen Institute to support managers leading from inside corporations is important. But we also need fresh thinking about enterprise value. A focus on the profits in one corporation, and singular focus on stock price or ROI, is already lacking.
Executives and boards are called to raise their sights to the system that connects the people, places and resources that make capitalism possible. And that is unquestionably hard in America, where culture now divides us.
Where are these leaders?
“This Land is Our Land”—The Importance of Place.
Last week, I had the extraordinary opportunity to engage with about 30 scholars and thinkers and entrepreneurial leaders who contributed greatly to the domain of “corporate responsibility” and “responsible investment”, building important institutions that challenged what capitalism could mean, even as early as the 1960s and 70s. We were generously hosted by Columbia University’s Sustainable Investing Research Initiative and the High Meadows Institute led by Chris Pinney, which are setting up an archive to preserve this early architecture.
What became clearer to me through our time together, both listening to others and testing my own views, is that building on those core American values and assuring that the Experiment isn’t a failure is a lot more straightforward when executives meet face to face, regularly.
Generative conversations about infrastructure, human capabilities, economic mobility, and also regulatory overreach that slows progress (Ezra Klein’s Abundance)—are easier to engage when organized around place. This conversation will not emerge out of Washington. The complex questions about market conduct, what has to change, and what’s needed to make those changes stick, start more easily in a coffeeshop in St. Paul or a bank building in Austin.
The stock market has no “place” to hold business leaders to account and guide them to look to the future, not the quarter.
Hanauer takes us back to decisions that are in our control. It’s not about the stock price, rather, it’s about who gets what, and if they are fairly compensated for their contribution to the enterprise. That’s the glue. That’s the society we can become.
Fairness is an American ideal. So is equity.
French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s and published a book about what he observed, namely, the presence of community and morality and the institutions that uphold both. He wrote:
“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
The norms and priorities we choose for capitalism, and the actions we take, will determine how, or whether, our citizens continue to believe in either capitalism or America, and also, our brand of democracy. Will it prosper as we begin the next 250 years?
This blog post was originally published on LinkedIn. Follow Judy Samuelson for more insights on business and society.
