The Power of Giving Away Power

How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

Matthew Barzun

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008471712
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Leadership

1

THE LOST CONSTELLATION

ON JULY 4, 1776, the founders made not one but two declarations. They had spent so much time deliberating over independence that they hadn’t done much thinking about the basics of putting themselves on the world map as a new country. They now realized it wasn’t going to be enough to put this new experiment into words, even the immortal ones of the Declaration of Independence. To be taken seriously, they had to project a national image. And so, in a move familiar to startups everywhere, the second official declaration that day was: we need a logo.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a “logo.” They wanted an official “Great Seal” that would serve as a symbol of this new collection of now-independent colonies. It would be stamped in wax to adorn every foreign treaty and domestic proclamation. It would replace the despised imprint of the crown of King George. It would project strength and unity to supporters and skeptics alike, whether in foreign capitals or at home in the thirteen colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia.

As we’ll see, it took longer to design this logo than it did to win the war. And the story of the seal’s coming to be is the story of overcoming a challenge that many of us are reckoning with now. Namely, how to have order—within our companies, committees, and communities—without hierarchy and strict authority, and how to have freedom without inefficiency or even chaos. The founders soon recognized that independence was the easy part and learned to give expression to something harder but much better: interdependence. And in so doing, they handed down a powerful symbol for the mindset needed to attain it. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

In 1776, the Continental Congress was a slapdash collection of delegates from the colonies and there was no reliable process for getting things done. Instead, there was Charles Thomson, Secretary of Congress. Thomson’s obscurity to us now is an odd blind spot of history (the publisher of his biography is called Forgotten Books) because he was among that generation’s rising stars. Only two signatures appear on the first-printed Declaration of Independence: John Hancock’s and Charles Thomson’s.

As the Secretary of Congress, Thomson handed the logo assignment over to the A-team—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. These three giants of Enlightenment thinking had managed to capture their most sacred abstract principles in the concrete words of the Declaration, which are memorized in grade-school classes to this day. How did they fare at turning those words into a powerful image that would inspire a newborn nation?

Well …

When the team got together, Franklin went first. He advocated high drama—a biblical scene with Moses parting the waters as he escaped Pharaoh. Franklin’s own notes capture his pitch to his colleagues: “Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses.”

The seal, it should be noted, would be only two inches in diameter.

Jefferson went next. He suggested that the Great Seal ought to have two sides, like a coin. For the front, he stuck with biblical sources, but he thought it should depict the wandering children of Israel. For the back, perhaps revealing his own racialist flip side, Jefferson proposed Hengist and Horsa, obscure brothers of legend who established Anglo-Saxons in England.

Adams went classical. Inspired by a famous Italian painting, he proposed the towering figure of Hercules, who is forced to choose between the flowery road of ease and indulgence or the difficult uphill road of duty to others.

To sum up, the three choices for America’s foremost symbol at this point were a drowning Egyptian, lost children backed by white nationalism, and an indecisive giant.

Like so many confused committees that have followed, they hired a consultant, who explained that there was a formula for making a seal. It had to have four elements: a shield, something to support that shield, a motto, and finally an element above the shield that serves as the essence of the overall thing, called a crest. They acquiesced to his formulaic suggestion for the design. It was boring, but safe. But they perked up when he suggested a potential motto: “E Pluribus Unum” (out of many, one). Enthusiastic nods to that.

The committee presented its compromise design to Congress. Despite the marquee names involved, Charles Thomson and his colleagues didn’t like it. Not at all. Thomson didn’t reject it outright but rather called for a vote so that it could, in the committee-speak of those times, “lie on the table.” With a war on, the logo project stalled for the next three and a half years.

In 1780, Thomson handed the materials over to a second committee, which struggled for a few weeks and (yep) hired a consultant named Francis Hopkinson, a fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence who had arranged the 1777 version of the US flag. Hopkinson reworked the elements from the first committee, but his major innovation was the crest on the front of the seal, which became the prominent feature.

The design looked like this:

More expressive than the orderly rows of stars on his flag, the collection of stars not only represented the thirteen states but also their simultaneous independence and unity—their interdependence. Deliberately asymmetrical, the layout of stars expressed the essence of a new American way. Big states like Virginia and small ones like Rhode Island were each distinct but connected into a greater whole.

He called it a “radiant constellation.”

The design was striking and beautiful, and it reflected the nation’s originality and ambition. But it was also … different. It was not a lion or an eagle or a sword. It struck the delegates as a little too … bold. The wartime Continental Congress of 1780 wasn’t ready for it. After all, Hopkinson may have signed the Declaration, but he was also an eccentric who had asked to be paid in wine. Thomson had the project “referred back to committee,” where it languished again, but it stuck with him. His official minutes, preserved at the Library of Congress, show his doodles of versions of the seal in the margins.

Two years later, peace talks to end the American Revolution were underway in Paris, and now the pressure was ratcheting up. The founders would need the new Great Seal to stamp on the peace treaty. Thomson and the Continental Congress formed yet another committee to bring it home.

The third time was not the charm. Yet another consultant was brought in; he reverted to something traditional: an imperial eagle, a standard of old-world heraldry. They were more daring with the back, though, borrowing a symbol from the continental currency that had been devised by none other than Mr. Wine-for-Work himself, Francis Hopkinson. It was a thirteen-stepped pyramid signifying “Strength and Duration,” unfinished at the top to symbolize the never-ending work of striving toward perfection. But the committee wanted to fill the empty space at the top with … something. Someone suggested a palm tree, but the committee preferred the all-seeing Eye of Providence in a triangle, a scrap from the first committee’s efforts.

Even under the gun, Congress knew it wasn’t right. With the clock running down, Thomson had to face the reality that this just wasn’t working. He understood the opportunity and the stakes. The world was watching.

He was a true believer in freedom—and he was certain that people could be free together without a king or any rigid hierarchy. He had proved that belief earlier in his career when he was asked to work through disputes with Native Americans and earned honorary membership in the Delaware tribe and was given a name meaning “man who tells the truth.” He proved that belief as a lifelong opponent of slavery, who would tell Jefferson it “must be wiped out” and that it was “a cancer we must get rid of.”

He had seen that interdependence has its own character. This was his core insight that couldn’t be outsourced to a consultant. His job now was to let each committee’s voice be heard, so to speak, and to let them form something bigger than any one of them had done individually. He laid out all the designs, brought in a young local artist, and began mixing and matching elements with his own ideas.

In a nod to the first committee’s wish for originality, he got rid of the human figures and moved the eagle down from the crest to be the lone supporter of the shield. He made it distinctively an American bald eagle and much more prominent in the design. From the A-team of wordsmiths, he took exactly zero of their design ideas but kept 100 percent of their words, choosing their motto, E Pluribus Unum—“out of many, one.”

That left only one element to choose for the front—the crest, the essence of the whole thing.

He decided boldness had been earned. Congress was now ready for Hopkinson’s wonderfully beautiful and different “radiant constellation.” For Hopkinson, the constellation had partly symbolized the thirteen colonies. For Thomson, now it also partly symbolized the United States taking its rightful place among other nations for trade and treaties. For both, it was most importantly a symbol of the animating idea of this new country: independent bodies freely choosing to behave in concert to accomplish something bigger than each could alone. One could stand out on one’s own—a star—but at the same time be part of a larger unit—a constellation. And the image was open-ended, offering room for more stars and, just as important, room for new and varying connections between them.

He thought the third committee’s back of the seal (the pyramid and the all-seeing eye on top) was worth keeping, and it provided space for two more mottoes, Novus Ordo Seclorum (a new order of the ages) and Annuit Coeptis (providence has favored our undertakings). Even though the pyramid was a symbol of consolidated, concentrated power, the likes of which the founders were always suspicious, Thomson liked it for what it conveyed about “strength and duration.” After all, the country might need that kind of top-down solidarity in certain times of crisis. It had its place—the back. Here is Thomson’s sketch:

On June 20, 1782, after six years, the Congress approved the design of the Great Seal of the United States. Immediately and unanimously. They promptly cut the front of the seal into brass (but didn’t bother doing the same for the back).

It hasn’t changed all that m...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• A Letter From Simon Sinek
• Introduction
• 1. The Lost Constellation
• 2. Constellation Makers
• 3. Making the Mindset
• 4. Letting It Go
• 5. Letting It Grow
• 6. Daylight Between Us
• 7. A Different Kind of Might
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Sources
• About the Author
• About the Publisher