Presidential Values: Impact on Leadership and Results

By G. James Hoffman

In our rich land of immigrants, sources and traces of American values are more clearly seen within the context of a framework to discern progress or decline. The long, mostly positive journey that Americans have made with values over time now seems to have reached a dangerous negative inflection point in the nation's conduct.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Armin Lear Press LLC
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735169897

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Presidential Values

Impact on Leadership and Results

Copyright 2020 © by G. James Hoffman

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereinafter invented, without written permission of the publisher, Armin Lear Press.

Cover Design by C.S. Fritz

ISBN: 978-1-7351698-9-7

Armin Lear Press

825 Wildlife

Estes Park, CO 80517

Acknowledgments

To Maryann Karinch, my Agent, and the team at Armin Lear—my sincere thanks for your honest and skillful guidance.

My thanks to writing coach, Annalisa Parent, who helped me launch the project.

To my wife Joelle and our four adult children—I thank you all for your patience and support on the home front!

Author’s Notes

In our rich land of immigrants, sources and traces of American values are more clearly seen within the context of a framework to discern progress or decline. The long, mostly positive journey that Americans have made with values over time now seems to have reached a dangerous negative inflection point in the nation’s conduct.

To help understand why American values and the public discourse have dipped into negative territory, I developed a simple American Value System that is directly applicable to leaders in the United States, although the focus in this book is American presidents.

A central thesis of this book frames the question: Do United States presidents who possess and demonstrate superior principles and values deliver the best results during their terms in office?

Introduction

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, paid a visit to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD in 1963. It was exciting for all of us, the Brigade of Midshipmen nearly 4,000 strong, and came shortly after JFK’s self-acknowledged debacle with the U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. This was followed closely by his great victory over the Russians in which he convinced them to remove their threatening missile batteries out of Cuba without any further hostilities.

That is my starting point for this book. Except for two of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who included some of the best thinking of the Age of Enlightenment in formulating our United States Constitution, most of the action in this book takes place with select presidents during the 58 years from JFK’s 1961 inauguration to the fall of 2019.

In this book six of the eight presidents who served during these decades are scored in both their values and results in office. By relying on a value system with five principles supporting seven values, I tried to be methodical and analytical.

We could take mistakes and victories of all six presidents and use them to support criticism or compliments of their values — and that’s what often happens in conversation and editorial commentary. With a value system helping us organize our thoughts and perceptions, however, the hope is that biases will sink well below logic in order of importance.

The central thesis of this book is that presidents’ principles and individual values are good lead indicators of the quality of their performances in office. Along with some best business practices scores, I enter scores for these principles and values in rubrics that enable quantitative comparisons of all values and scores of some close contemporary presidents from both major political parties.

Focusing on six of the modern-day presidents, we can see strong correlations between values and outcomes. The question you will answer for yourself in the book is this: Do high values, according to the scoring system, necessarily correspond to the best outcomes? From an emotional and qualitative perspective, we would probably conclude yes, but in this book, we explore the question from a rational and quantitative perspective.

Early in the industrial part of my career I was chosen by top management of an American multinational corporation to study, become certified in Value Engineering, then implement the program throughout the organization. One small, but important, skill in the process to maximize value in a product or service is to accurately determine and express the principle function, for example, a CUP: Hold/liquid. The format is always a Verb/Noun. So, early into the first value in the book you will find this simple Verb/Noun format applied to the first of our seven values, Inherent Moral Compass – Do/Right. Adapting this Value Engineering tool from industry to identify the principle function of the first of our systems values in the Verb/Noun format gave us Do/Right. The five underlying principles for this value are defined in detail later in this book, but for now, let’s move to a real-life example of a leader, airline pilot Captain Chelsey Sullenberger, who was faced with a life and death situation in which he needed to Do/Right. This will serve to both illustrate the power of Captain Sullenberger’s Inherent Moral Compass value and introduce the nature of the five underlying principles that hold up extraordinarily well in his very dangerous predicament.

Most of us recall the Miracle on the Hudson when Sullenberger’s two jet engines blew out, dead after a disastrous bird strike into the engines air intakes near LaGuardia Airport. This makes a good scoring example on how Sully’s excellent moral compass worked to safely guide him to a cold winter landing on the Hudson river with all crew and passengers rescued alive and well. Supporting the Inherent Moral Compass to Do/Right are the five T.R.A.C.E. Principles below:

TRUTH – Engines show dead, losing altitude, cannot make any airport runway, need to execute emergency water landing on the Hudson River.

RESPECT – All 155 lives onboard are at stake, passengers and crew.

ACTION – Maneuver to and land on the Hudson River, notify Air Traffic Control to alert river traffic and arrange a water rescue.

CONSCIENCE – Consider all loved ones and families affected.

ETHICS – Observe excellent professional duty ethics all around.

His Inherent Moral Compass was at work in Sully’s dramatic landing and subsequent rescue, the product of excellent, quick judgment from a highly skilled, experienced airline captain. If the five principles surfaced anywhere in his consciousness during the flight, they might have been a blur as he worked the problem to swiftly Do/Right and make a great water landing with all hands safely aboard!

Now, as we apply the five principles above to United States presidents and their particular life challenges, both in office and in their private livesones that test their unique Inherent Moral Compasses and additional presidential valueswe have a group of contemporary presidents to compare and score on the principles supporting the assigned values for each. The proximity among John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump makes the judgment job easier in many ways, in part because readers born after World War II can remember something about all of these presidents.

Here is a teaser about JFK that is designed to get you to want to plunge into the substance of the discussion of presidential values and see if you agree with my conclusions. You may not agree, of course, and therein lies fodder for healthy debate worthy of informed voters.

JFK’s Inherent Moral Compass scores on his five principles are off the chart in a good way, and for reasons that both pre-dated his brief presidency and surfaced during it. When a Japanese destroyer rammed his PT boat one night and sliced it in half, killing two crew members, he personally rescued his remaining men. Throughout the night, in the chilling Pacific Ocean, he repeatedly swam to wounded sailors, effecting rescues by clenching their life jacket straps in his teeth during these long and tiring swims to an island. His score on the principles underlying the Inherent Moral Compass value part of the rubric was a perfect 25 based on that heroic behavior.

The imagery that I carry of JFK is the long, heavy swims with his wounded comrades in the Pacific, his inspiring Inaugural Address, and the visionary man who had visited USNA’s Bancroft Hall in early August 1963. A few months later as I was recuperating from an operation in the Naval Academy hospital, our young president was tragically taken from the world in Dallas, Texas, as was his assassin soon after. Both events played out in Kafkaesque scenes on a black and white hospital television set.

In this book, I invite the readers to evaluate presidents along with me—without the admitted sentimentality of my look back at JFK—and see this as a nonpartisan exercise. I made sure to select both Democrats and Republicans. Scoring my values thesis with total scores for each president on a rubric is not the only unique feature. One of the other innovations that I worked on during the writing of this book and would like to share with you is an adaptation of the Value Methodology from industry using the Verb/Noun two-word format to focus quickly on the principal functions of some of the most challenging problems facing our government. Merging the humanity and morality of our new American Value System with the industrial strength of Value Engineering unlocks powerful new tools. 

When used in conjunction with combinations of the Seven Values on a capsule Value Worksheet, this simple tool holds promise for bi-partisan congressional committees and working groups. It can potentially be a useful instrument to dissect information and create fast starts on solving some of the toughest problems facing our government.

Overview through Imagery

The John F. Kennedy imagery earlier in this Introduction included a cheering brigade of midshipmen in our blue and gold uniforms, JFK’S presence and quick wit, and an up-close and personal view of an inspiring man. Complemented by the vision of rescues in wartime, bold speeches about service to country and travel to the moon, the overall imagery of JFK is that of a bold hero. Richard Nixon had also served in the Navy and had certainly made many valuable contributions to the United States, yet his imagery was different: his white winter coat on the TV screen showed Nixon as a solitary figure on that historic trip to China, pictured by the Great Wall of China, to open up trade. He terminated US participation in the Vietnam war, made great progress on nuclear non-proliferation treaties and stood up the Environmental Protection Agency. When threatened with dismissal from office under close impeachment investigation, his final wave to the American people — after his resignation to avoid the prospect of being forced out of office — was part of a sad picture of a highly accomplished president.

In terms of imagery, Ronald Reagan had more in common with JFK than with his fellow Republican, Richard Nixon. Each had a relaxed and confident air about them and a good sense of humor. Reagan’s signature moments were many: Upon winning the Cold War he stood at the Brandenburg Gate and famously called out, on worldwide television, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall. Winning the arms race buildup and the Cold War were Reagan’s top foreign affairs accomplishments. Reagan used the power of imagery at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany to seal these accomplishments. Among the most effective of modern United States presidents, Reagan also had feet of clay as do all our human presidents. The Iran-Contra scandal resulted in numerous Reagan administration indictments, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, all of whom were removed from office. Later, during the George H.W. Bush presidency they were given full pardons. Reagan’s imagery included clever, well-delivered televised speeches leveraging his polished movie-star experience.

Bill Clinton championed the cause of the common man with a passion for delivering real benefits for ordinary people, both as a popular and effective multi-term governor of Arkansas and as president of the United States. His immediate presidential predecessor, George H.W. Bush had paid a bitter price, having to pay down much of the bill for Reagan’s massive defense buildup that enabled the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The defense expenditures incurred during Reagan’s terms grossly bloated the national debt and gave rise to high taxes and inflation for families. Bill Clinton saw his opening during their presidential campaign, and harshly shouted out the campaign one-liner that helped to defeat George H.W. Bush’s re-election bid … It’s the economy, stupid. The Clinton imagery was the epitome of a sincere, clever and likeable politician. Despite the dichotomy in his personal morals, even willingness to obfuscate the truth, Bill Clinton still stands high on the list of respected US presidents for major accomplishments, including important groundwork in setting the stage for national healthcare improvements and the balanced federal budgets during his presidency.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump have little in common as personalities. Barack Obama carries himself in a calm, measured way reflecting his logical approach to the world, its opportunities, and his deliberate thoughtful path to solving life’s problems—Affordable Care Act, recovery from the Great Financial Crisis and governing with a hostile Congress. He carried out all of these with respect for colleagues and supporters, political opponents, international allies and foreign adversaries. Obama’s unflappable image inspired confidence, at least among the majority of Americans who supported him.

In contrast, Donald Trump tends to carry himself in a combative, somewhat boisterous manner, reflecting a shoot-from-the-hip style involving directives—sometimes conflicting—to his staff and hyperbolic threats to his opponents. This president deftly uses communication via Twitter to express those directives and threats, rousing emotional support