The Civic Bargain with Brook Manville

Lindsay Chervinsky: How does leadership work in a democracy? That question is one that today's guest has grappled with, both in his work as a historian and his long and storied career as a strategy and organizational consultant. From the ancient democracies to the 21st century's pressing political questions, he guides us through the civic bargain and what it means for our democracy today.

Welcome to Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library. I'm Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. In this podcast series, we talk with leaders from across the nation about their growth, challenges, and innovative approaches that made them the leaders that they are today.

The first six conversations, which took place between August 2023 and March 2024, were led by our former Executive Director, Dr. Patrick Spero. In the spirit of George Washington's leadership, this series will feature the perspective of leaders from across industries and fields. As such, the thoughts expressed in this podcast are solely the views of our guests and do not reflect the opinions of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. 

Lindsay Chervinsky: We welcome Brook Manville, author of The Civic Bargain, How Democracy Survives. Starting out as a university history professor, Manville made the switch to Silicon Valley leadership during the dot com boom. In this engaging conversation, we dive deep into the core definition of leadership and its practical implications.

Brook shares his perspective on how leadership goes beyond personal attributes, emphasizing the role of an organization and its people in achieving significant positive impact. He also highlights key practices for effective leadership and reflects on historical and contemporary examples that shape our understanding of what it means to lead.

Brook Manville: You know, that in a democracy, you have to figure out how to get things done without a single boss. That does not mean there's no leadership, right? Leadership is not the same as a boss. The core idea of the book is that democracy is fundamentally a bargain. 

Lindsay Chervinsky: And now our host, Dr. Patrick Spero, former executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.
 
Pat Spero: Brook, it's so great to have you here today. Thanks for making the trip. So I always like to start these conversations with something that sounds like a very simple question. It's just the definition of a word. So if the Oxford English Dictionary called you and said, we're trying to revise our definition of leadership and we'd like you to write the new definition of leadership. What would you say?

Brook Manville: Yeah, I actually think the simple question is always the most important. You know, it goes back to Socrates, the what is it question. Because unless you understand some version of both fundamentals, but also kind of the assumptions that go into looking at it, understanding it, and trying to do it.
 
You know, you could end up in the wrong theater and the wrong time. Or people will clash and disagree about, well, I don't call that leadership. I mean, who said you should do that? Or why didn't you do this other thing? In this earlier book that I wrote with another business consultant we wrestled with this question because leadership is thrown around in the business context all the time as sort of a good thing.
 
You know, we need more leadership. We need better leaders. And often the question of what it is, is not even paused and reflected upon. And so we tried to do that, and I'll just take what we put in the book as a starting point. As a matter of fact, I might even tweak it a little bit, a few years after having read the book. But we said it was achieving leadership is achieving significant positive impact by building an organization of people working together to achieve a common goal.
 
And I think there's kind of two pieces of that that are often underappreciated or need some unpacking. The first one, the first word that I want to come to is positive impact. The second concept is that it's about ultimately building an organization of people.
 
Now we say organization, that might be you know a network kind of organization, or series of partnerships, some aligned aggregation of people who have enough in common that they are trying to reach a specific goal. And so there's a performance notion to it.
 
In order to be a good leader, you have to be signed up for creating some higher performance of some sort, and performance can take many forms, but the sort of generic term that we wrap around it is that you have some kind of impact, that you've moved the needle, that you've changed how things are working to a better form.

You've created some kind of progress, that is, if not measurable, certainly recognizable. So let me therefore then talk about why these two pieces of this, this notion of positive impact and the organization are so important. A lot of leadership you pick up you know, leadership books off the shelf, or you go to a lecture or whatnot.
 
A lot of it tends to be about what you have to do, how you have to behave, how you have to think, what kind of values you need to have, what you need to do with people, what you need to not do with people, so on and so forth. But it tends to be very much focused about you, the leader, which is not surprising. The market for leadership is the would-be leader. And the problem with that is it tends to put into the periphery what actually creates the value that leaders create, which is all the other people who you work with or who work for you or, in different kinds of organizations.
 
And that tends to get neglected almost as like a footnote. Like it's so important that you meditate or it's so important that you, really wake up in the morning and understand, what your goals are for the day and all those things. Which are not bad things to do, but it tends to say, well, all the rest is sort of a detail.

Well, it's not a detail because leadership is not separable from the entity that you are working with to create some kind of impact, some kind of a difference. So, we wrote our leadership book. We said, look, let's really put a much brighter light on that penumbra around the leader. The other people, the organization. Because there are known practices, there are known things that you have to do to make an organization perform. I mean, there's tons of business books about that.

And we were, channeling a lot of the traditional understanding about those things. But they tend to not be part of a lot of the leadership literature or the leadership discussions. So just to tick them off when you have an organization that you are trying to enable or lead or get to perform you know, we say there's at least five practices and we end up with six, which I'll explain in a moment.
 
But firstly, there's always has to be some kind of a vision. A lot of what leadership is about is creating some kind of a picture, some kind of a motivating image for people about, you know, if we are successful, this is what it will look like. This is what it's going to feel like in terms of how we do our work or the independence that we enjoy as a state, or, you know, the profit that we are going to gain if we re a business. Or the mission that we will have succeeded at if we re a non-profit organization.
 
So vision cuts across lots of sectors and it's not just a business thing it's just a notion of how do you create some kind of a almost dreamlike state that is realizable, that motivates people and helps align them so that the common goal that's necessary to bring them together in some kind of performance is actually grounded or anchored in some kind of an end state.

So getting to a vision is and building a vision, how you do that. And there's a whole bench of practices about how do you build a vision, and you know, that's a separate, you know, next level down discussion. 
 
The second thing is the much ballyhooed word strategy, you know, just to keep it simple for today. You need some kind of a plan that will, in some way, differentiate your effort and create effort that delivers performance. I mean, there's lots of different things you can do to achieve a goal, or you can potentially do. Some are going to be better than others. Sometimes you have to change a strategy into a different strategy, but you need a strategy, you need a plan.
 
And crafting strategy is, again, its own special practice. There s reams of books written about strategy, but, you know, let us not neglect it because there needs to be some kind of a plan, some kind of operational sequencing of what we will do when, as well as what we will not do, in order to achieve the vision.

So those are two, you know, upfront pieces. Then you get increasingly, operational after that. You've got to enroll, attract, inspire, talent people, you've got to make this something that lots of people feel like is their own or feel is important or that they're really to put their shoulder to the wheel for.
 
And you know, there's a whole, again, reams of business books and other books written about how do you attract and retain talent. It's a non-trivial set of discussions particularly in the way the world is working today. Finding talent that is the best that you can find that is going to hopefully develop and perform the best possible. That s going to work together. That's going to get aligned with the vision. There may be some kind of filter about certain kinds of people, so on and so forth. It's going to depend very much on your situation. And sometimes it's just like finding warm bodies because things are urgent and there's not time to go recruit, you know, in a traditional way.

You need people with some kind of skills, knowledge, and orientation towards the performance that's going to be required. The next thing after, after talent is you've got to attract these people, but then you've got to figure out how to make them perform.

You've got to get to some coherent plan and set of protocols about getting to performance, getting to results. So you can have lots of brilliant people, Ivy League degree this, Ivy League degree that, or, you know, I ve done this for 28 years, but you've got to nonetheless, figure out how to get the results that you need, and it may not be based on credentials, it may not be based on experience, it may not be based on one team working in a certain way versus another team working in a different way.
 
You know, those are the things you've got to work through, but you've got to get results. So there's an outcome orientation to being a leader that, you know, again, everybody says, well, yeah, of course. But there are practices, there are techniques, there are tools that the best leaders develop in order to get results out of the people they've attracted.
 
The next of our six practices is one that is not thought about a lot, particularly when you get into the political realm. But I think it's important for all leaders in all organizations, which is you got to be thinking about the future in parallel with the present. You have to keep your eye on the ball to make sure that you make enough money to stay in business, get enough donors to keep your non-profit afloat. Enough help that you're going to win the election so you can become, you know, president the way you want to be president.
 
But you've got to be thinking about once we do that and as we're doing that, what is the next kind of rodeo going to be? Because the world is constantly changing and part of creating impact at scale, part of our definition is that, you know, you've got some longevity, there's some run behind what you're doing that you can look ahead and keep going.
 
And anybody who's run an organization or business for any length of time will always say, five years later looking back, I can't believe how different the world was when we first started this. And that's a reality. So the question is, you know, you can't just be buffeted around like a piece of flotsam or jetsam on the waves.

You've got to be planning as best as you can. You know, the famous quote about Gretzky, he skated to where the puck is going to be. Well, so where is the puck going to be? It's not just something where you sit in your study and think about it and draw on a whiteboard with a couple of friends, you got to be doing experiments. You ve got to be visiting competitors, you ve got to be visiting new ideas that are popping up in some factory in Japan or wherever. You've got to be looking ahead and constantly figuring out how can this trend, help us, where we think we want to go with our vision. 
 
A lot of this is about technology. So right now, of course, in business, the business world, in fact, many different domains, people are running around trying to figure out AI. What is AI going to do? Is it going to destroy this business? Is it going to make it go 10 times faster? And the companies that are really going to succeed are the ones who are really looking into it now and experimenting. And beginning to understand what it means for what they're doing, and the ones who don't will have to play catch up and may well vanish off the map before the wave finishes. 
 
So, you know, it's that kind of thinking that is tough for leaders because it means that you can't constantly just think about, today, you've got to be thinking about tomorrow and tomorrow after tomorrow and find the right balance.

Sometimes you just can't afford to look way down the line if things are really collapsing and you've got to do a lot of remediation. But sooner or later you've got to get to it. The other end of the spectrum is also dangerous. Certain leaders are visionaries that all they want to do is go to, AI meetings in Arizona and places like that, and they lose focus on the day to day.

And suddenly they're facing a huge budget deficit or, you know, the floor is collapsing in some other part of what they're trying to oversee. So again, finding the balance. So in our book, we talked about six practices. I've given you the five that are primarily about building and keeping the organization going and alive and then ultimately flourishing.

We did return to what I'll call a traditional leadership book topic as our sixth one, which is you've got to lead yourself. So yes, you do have to worry about yourself. It's not just about all the other people, and there are certain things that you've got to do. But we tried to present it in the lens of, about yourself for the good of the organization, not just about yourself for the good of yourself.
 
And unfortunately, a lot of leadership books end up getting read, not necessarily messaging, but read as, well, this is all about me. Too many leaders, I think fall into that trap, but you do need to worry about yourself, you know, as an instrumental part of this ecosystem that you're trying to build, right? So it's about taking care of yourself. It's about growing, and it starts with knowing yourself. What are you good at? What are you not good at? What do you have to compensate for? How do you grow yourself where you can have more impact in the most effective way?
 
How do you help other people? And then how do you just literally sometimes at the physical level, how do you take care of yourself and how do you make sure that you leaders don't survive [unintelligible]. So, you know, we do, we do consider that a practice as well.
 
[BREAK]

Pat Spero: I have to say, I've learned so much just listening now and thinking about my own practices and ideas for the future, but also aware of what's going on today. And I especially liked how you're talking about leadership isn't just about the individual, but it's about the organization as a whole.
 
And I have to say that's something that came through in your book, The Civic Bargain which I do want to get to in a little bit because there's some fascinating and I think really revealing historical examples that you study, case studies as you describe them, that really show how leaders and individuals can make a difference, but how it's also, democracy is not about great bosses.

Brook Manville: Well, actually, let me just use that as a segue and come back to and dive into Civic Bargain much more. And I want to pick up the other piece which I intriguingly raised and then move beyond this notion, the word positive. Leadership is about achieving significant positive impact.
 
The reason I think this is so difficult, and I think it's very timely now, Patrick, because I think we're in a moment now at least here in the United States, where we're sort of confused about what is good? I mean, just to be very blunt about it. I mean, a lot of the polarization and fighting that goes on amongst ourselves now is because we don't agree, you know, what is the higher good?
 
What is the common good? And so, you know, just to make this very real, if you study leadership and not to mention trying to do it yourself, you know, the traditional list of who are the great leaders you know, and they will be, we're, you know, we're sitting in the cathedral of George Washington here.
You know, I think George Washington was a great leader. Why? Because he was fundamental in founding this great nation. You know, I think that Abraham Lincoln was, one of our great presidents. He held the union together and he had an unusual capacity to see the future and bring a sort of a moral component to understanding that in a way that infused a lot of what America still, I think, stands for.
 
But, as you well know, there are people who say George Washington was this huge problem. He was a slave owner and he was just one more, oppressive, white patriarch whose statues must be pulled down. Lincoln, if you grew up in Texas or Georgia, he was Satan, for many years, whereas Robert E. Lee I learned the other day, that as recently as 20 years ago, school children used to say a pledge of allegiance to Robert E. Lee in places like Virginia. Okay. He was a really good general and he cared a lot about his home state, but he chose the wrong cause. And so, he's admirable as a leader, but he's flawed in certain aspects of his judgment. 
 
And then to their more extreme versions, I mean, there's some people who say, that this particular person who's running for president is Satan himself, yes, he has millions of followers, but how could you call him a leader. Or, Mussolini or Hitler, created huge amounts of impact, got all sorts of people riled up about achieving a certain goal.
 
And, you know, unfortunately, they actually got far on some of those goals, like eliminating Jews, you know, but we don't want to, we don't want to study him because, you know, that kind of impact is bad. That's not a leader. So, I mean, these are, these are, almost cartoonish contrasts, but in the more gray areas, it's really interesting when you say, well, you know, I think that, you know, our vision about what we want to achieve as an organization is such, such, and such. And someone says, wait a minute, you know, I don't agree with that, you know, I don't think we should do that. 

And I was thinking about Jeff Bezos, you know, I happen to be a customer of Amazon. I think Amazon is an amazing company, does amazing things. I have lots of friends who think that Jeff Bezos and Amazon is almost single handedly destroying the fabric of Western society because, he's so rich, he's putting small businesses out of business, he's commoditizing all sorts of things that ought to be sold, in the old craftsman artisanal way, which was when, our nation was great and so on and so forth.
 
So, it's a debate, some people just think capitalism in general is bad. And so how can there ever be a leader who's a capitalist, there's a philosophical argument, but again, if you're leading some kind of an organization, you have to come to terms about what do we believe is the good? Why do we believe that the end game, that the end state that we want to get to is progress? And do we think that the costs that will be incurred, not just personally, but the societal costs that will come along with us, drilling an oil well or putting up a new house where, you know, people of lesser income will be dispossessed or, you know, whatever it is you're doing you have to get comfortable with that what you're doing is progress and you've got, to intrigue and align and inspire others with that same vision or collect them and find them where they are.
 
Pat Spero: Yes. So that brings me to actually a question I've asked others do you, especially with this, the six elements you just outlined, is leadership universal? And by that, I mean are attributes between a non-profit, between a corporate world, between you know, higher education, are the skills that somebody needs the same across those sectors?
 
Brook Manville: I think our six practices and just talking more generically about skills and knowledge, I mean, at some level they are generic. I mean, you know, that if you want to create some kind of change at scale, you got to have good people working on it. If you want to create that change at scale, you've got to have some kind of a picture of where we're trying to get to.
 
You have to get results. You got to think about changes in the technology and other relevant domains that are going to affect what the future looks like. So I think they are relatively universal. It's this moral component, which is, I think becomes the differentiator. So, you know, a lot of people say, well, the non-profit is very different than the for profit.
 
Well, okay, one level, yes, because in for profit, they are trying to make a profit in order to stay in business. But, you know, the non-profit people, they still need to find enough resources to stay in business too. 

Now, you know. Getting a grant from the Gates Foundation may not be considered a profit seeking enterprise, but you're still bringing in resources that you need to survive, so that you can do your work. I think the differences between sectors are governmental too. Government agencies, you know, they have missions. They have people who have to have talent in order to get results. But, you know, they are funded by you know, government budgets or whatnot, but they still have to survive. 
 
So I think the sort of the practices of mobilizing people are pretty much the same. I think where the more important differentiation is this thing we were talking about.
 
It's like, okay, I'm trying not to be heavily partisan here, but then a lot of people who dislike Trump, but you got to acknowledge that Trump has been very good at inspiring people, building an organization, getting results, you know? And so the difference between that, and another organization, for many people would be, yeah, but I don't but I think he's bad. He's going to be a terrible president. So I think the differences come down often to the moral judgment of those who are observing and/or working. 

Pat Spero: That's great. So your own career has absolutely fascinating background. You were a college professor at Northwestern. You were then, the CEO of a, early kind of digital publisher?

Brook Manville: No, I wasn't a CEO. I was one of the leadership group. I left Northwestern, I got a job at CBS, the media company, sort of a middle management job. I ended up in a startup that they were funding just about the time the PC was invented.

CBS owned all sorts of medical journals and textbooks, it was a conglomerate in those days. They had the idea that they would start to figure out how to put this stuff in electronic form, put it on computers, this new invention, and start making it available to doctors and hospitals.

It was very way ahead of its time, as it were, but I was part of the group that basically figured out how to start to market this and build this into the mindset of doctors and hospitals. 

Pat Spero: Yeah, and like you said, it's ahead of its time. And then you went to McKinsey as a consultant, and then you went to another startup that was in online education, and then you went into development for a non-profit.
 
Absolutely fascinating twist and turns. And so for people that are thinking about their own careers and you've had leadership positions in all these places. What was your thinking about your career? 

Brook Manville: My thinking was, I like to tell people, I can always explain it looking in the rear-view mirror, but at the time looking through the windshield, it was never completely clear where I was headed.
 
But I would get into situations where I had some kind of sense of identification with the work in some way. And I was looking for new opportunity. I mean, I think what drove me is I'm very intellectually curious. And so, as I got into, this or that, profession, or business, I would often find, well, this is fine.
 
I can see where this is going. I'm not sure long term that this is where I want to be. And so, I said, you know, can I figure out some other place where I'm also inspired or working with good people. Am I making enough money here to raise a family, which was important to me?
 
And the answer is no. Well, how am I going to find something that pays me a little bit more and also geography, you know? So it was a lot of different things, but it was mostly led by my intellectual curiosity and what made me able to do it first of all, you have to have a thick skin because, you know, you go to places and people say like, I don't even understand why you're knocking on the door for a job, let alone why you think you would belong.
 
You know, there were some missteps and some failures and I had some bad bosses and some bad experiences, but I kept learning. The key thing was to learn how this new business or this new sector or this new realm worked. And once you started to learn how the game was played, then you could start to say, well, I think I can make a contribution on this little piece.
 
Right. When I guessed right and worked hard and advanced, I would then get, moved up a little bit in the organization. There were times when I tried and it didn't work. And I had to say, this is not me. And so the real choices are less, although the aspirational choices are infinite.
 
And so a lot of it was learning about myself, you know, like I came to learn that I really am not great at finance. I had to learn enough to do what I was doing. But, you know, if there was a finance heavy responsibility, that was not me. I learned I was good at other things like around communication or about, you know, problem solving.

And so I would end up more and more in those kinds of roles. But many of those roles are found in different sectors. You know, I mean, if you're an academic, you've got to do all sorts of problem solving to come up with interesting ideas about, you know, history, if you're working on that. 
If you're a consultant, you got to figure out how to solve the problem of an organization, you know, and a lot of that comes from talking and studying and researching and talking to people and so on. So a lot of it carries over. It's just, it's, you can't be scared off by the content completely because a lot of it is transferable.
 
Pat Spero: Yeah. So I always like to ask people about failures. Are you willing to share one of yours? 

Brook Manville: Of course. The electronic publishing was a job I got fired from eventually because the company was struggling because it was ahead of its time.

It was not richly funded. It was minimally funded. And our sponsors sort of wanted to get out of the business cause we weren't returning, you know, profit fast enough to them. So we got bought by another company. The other company came in and just said, well, you know. You guys didn't make it.
 
We're just going to put our own people in. We're just going to fire you. And so, you know, I had worked hard. We had made progress. But you know, that was just the business world. Somebody thought they could, could make it work better. As a matter of fact, they didn't because it was still too early for them too.
 
But, you know, I consider it in a way that it wasn't really a failure, but it was a downturn. I didn't know what I was going to do. When I worked at United Way, I was hired with a huge opportunity. I mean, I was supposed to, they were trying to transition their strategy from one of primarily fundraising to actually being a leader of community change.
 
And they wanted to sort of flip their business model from you know, we're just going to raise all sorts of money for good causes, to, we want to be the sort of the broker.
 
People doing problem solving around things like better health, education, and welfare in the communities across America. And, you know, that was tremendously exciting and I thought, boy, this is going to be really hard, but it's a morally good thing to do.
 
I should jump in and try to do this because they really had wanted me to join them. Well, when I got into the company, it was just a political rat s nest. There were lots of people who were very jealous that I had been hired, they thought they should have been hired, there was a tradition of just kind of people undercutting each other, and the CEO kind of backed away from everything he had promised me.

And so I was just kind of left floundering with, a shadow of what I was asked to do and was in my job description. And it was just, it was awful. It was terrible. But that was, I didn't see clearly enough what I was stepping into. And so that was, that was on me.

Pat Spero: So that health company, did it just fade into obsolescence or does it still exist? 

Brook Manville: No, no. I mean, I think, some of the software and the material that we developed got picked up by other companies. There were other competitors that were beginning to rise. And of course, the idea.
 
Yeah. I mean, now it's like a standard thing. So I feel like, it was just, an early flash in the pan whose embers set fires, down the line.

Pat Spero: And then you're in at a dot com startup later in your career. 

Brook Manville: Right. 
 
Pat Spero: How did that feel? 

Brook Manville: Well, again, there's another success and failure story there. It was exhilarating because it was Silicon Valley in the dot com era when the internet was really becoming like big and, you know, all sorts of money was pouring into this, that, and the other company on the off chance that, you know, there would be yet another Facebook discovery or whatever.

And of course, you know, there's only a handful that really become the great, household names, the Googles. So we were in at the front end, lots of money coming in. It was very exciting. I had been doing all this work helping to organize the knowledge at McKinsey. And so the idea was, how could we get sort of, you know, we create software that helps organizations develop their knowledge and then also develop their human talent, which is the source of a lot of the knowledge, which then kind of got slowly made more operational as training, which was a lesser piece of the big vision, but there was a market for some training related software.

We were doing very well at first, but then there was a stock market crash, a dot com crash, and everybody was scrambling for funding, and we too started to struggle, although we endured the first couple of years, but then the founder of the company got very greedy.

And he wanted to sell the company and selling the company was okay, but he got too greedy, he was holding out for a very unreasonable share price to sell the company because, you know, he stood to become a billionaire if he got that level of money. The company I knew was not worth that much, and I thought, look, we could all do very well if we sell ourselves to this other company who's not going to pay us nearly that amount, but they're a better fit, they know what they're doing in the domain where we're working.
 
It would be a happy home for us, but more important, our dream would live on in better hands. But he wouldn't go for it. And then finally you know, he couldn't sell it at the price he wanted. And then the market got worse and a competitor took over and we missed the window basically.
And that was that leader's, in my view, that leader's greed. It wrecked it, and I was stuck in the afterwash 
 
Pat Spero: Was it publicly traded? 

Brook Manville: Yes. Those of us who are in on the bottom, we made some money and we established a brand and in fact, our software got incorporated into somebody else s. I mean, so, in some sense, the word, the dream lives on in somebody else's code. 

Pat Spero: Right. So I want to transition now from thinking about leadership and your own experience and journey and talk a little bit more about this book which is called The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives.
 
Leadership both is and is not a part of this book. In it, you study democracy, how democracies function, the seven core elements or pillars or tenets that really allow democracies to not only survive but thrive. And the first one, the very first one, is that there's no boss. 
 
Brook Manville: Right. 

Pat Spero: So, that leads to my first question, and I recommend this book to everybody, it's a study of Athens, of Rome, of Great Britain, and finally the United States, and the comparative nature is just so revealing and fascinating, I learned so much.
But in a democracy in which you say having no boss is an essential element, probably the core foundational element, how does leadership work in a democracy? 

Brook Manville: Right. So, so you're very observant but I'm gonna add one thing in most of the book we actually say, as a deliberate part of our list no boss hyphen except one another.

And the idea is that we're trying to define democracy in a very simple to understand way. So there's millions of, often very nuanced discussions of what democracy is. We said, it's basically, people living and working together with no boss except one another, i.e. there's no single monarch, there's no single tyrant, there's no single autocrat sitting over them who always has the last say.
 
Many people say, you know, that no one is above the rule, above the law is another kind of definition. It's that there is no single person that can, derail action or force people to do something. But as a democracy of essentially citizens governing themselves, each other is the boss.

That we have to learn to respect one another to the degree that we can find some compromise, some common ground to work together to, thrive and survive. So we, you know, the book does not have, heroic portraits of James Madison or George Washington or whatnot, but those people who are lionized at some level understood the same ideas that we were writing about. 

You know, that in a democracy, you have to figure out how to get things done without a single boss. That does not mean there's no leadership, right? Leadership is not the same as a boss. We use boss meaning a single autocrat. The core idea of the book is that democracy is fundamentally a bargain, an understanding amongst people who want to govern themselves that there are certain things that they have to make happen and maintain and there's certain ways to do that. And it all comes down to being willing to set the right priorities, you know, that we will make sure that there is security and that there is welfare.
 
We will maintain the notion that we will have freedom in the sense of we will not have a single boss that we have to pay attention to. We will not have a king after we just fought this revolution. We don't want to have a king. And that we will also deal with one another in our bargain in a way that allows the bargain to work and over time grow to fit what's needed.
 
So that means we have to be willing to compromise. And bring good faith to the compromise process. And we have to be willing to treat each other, we use the phrase, civic friends. You know, Aristotle famously said the democratic citizen must be know how to both rule and be ruled.
 
The basic idea, no boss but one another. And so you have to, also borrowed from Aristotle, is you have to maintain some level of civic friendship. Civic friendship is just something, does not mean personal pals with everybody, nor does it mean you all agree on the same things all the time. It just means that you treat each other with enough respect that you can come back and try again if yesterday's negotiation or bargaining about what are we going to do about China? What are we going to do about abortion? What are we going to, you know, fill in the blank, that we disagreed, but, you know, we're still on the same team and, you know, that's a notion that I saw in my business career.

And you know, you never, want to like obliterate somebody because you never know, you might need to depend on them as a partner the day after, right? It's the same idea in our democracy will fall apart if we are constantly at real war with one another, personal vindictive war, doesn't mean no disagreement.
 
But if we can't get beyond the kind of, you know, turning political opponents into enemies the way it's now beginning to be, unfortunately more and more the norm, we won't survive. And so we held that up as one of the characteristics. And there's enough in the historical cases where you can see when the democracies were formed, that the founders or the leaders at the time came to understand.

Pat Spero: Yeah. And one of the fascinating things when I read the book was how you talk about Great Britain and the United States, how infrequently you talk about single individuals, which I took at reading it really got at this idea that it's about the people themselves making decisions, negotiating with each other.
 
Brook Manville: Yes. 

Pat Spero: But earlier in the book there are some figures that appear and I thought It might be fun to talk about some of these individuals who shape the world who might not be well known today, but nonetheless either show great leadership attributes or undermine their society and ideas of democracy.
 
So the first is going back to Athens, Solon. 

Brook Manville: Yes. So Solon is, is, is in many ways the patron saint of democracy. He didn't really, you know, most historians, us included, don't say that he created democracy, but he sort of started the ball rolling in Athens, which arguably started democracy, at least in the, in the Western tradition at scale.
 
There was a huge civil war going on in Athens in the early sixth century. I mean, it's all part of the economic evolution of Greece during that time. And there was, you know, land was beginning to be bought and sold because of money coming into the society.
 
And a tradition of debt slavery grew up because some people had more land and to work it they brought people in, and when the people couldn't keep up with the payments that the overlord wanted, in some cases they would be turned into debt slaves. And it got very bad for reasons we don't really understand in the early sixth century.
 
And there was civil war and all these lesser people, starting to say, you know, basically we're going to revolt. We can't take this anymore. We need you to cancel all the debts, and while you're at it, redistribute the land so that we have fairness for everybody, sort of like a Bernie Sanders approach to solving a problem.

Anyway, I'm joking. But you know, it was a very severe threat. And you know, there was a lot of jostling going on amongst the different city states at that time, and there was a real chance that in their moment of civil war, they would also perhaps be overtaken by another city state that had its eye on.
 
So there was this mysterious statesman who arose, who was actually known among other things for his poetry, named Solon. He had the personality and the charisma to be seen as a neutral broker of an agreement to avoid the continuance of the civil war.
 
And so he brought them together and he crafted certain things that gave, you know, the poor people some things, and the rich people, some things. He ended debt slavery he said, so no matter what, you're not going to be able to enslave a fellow Athenian anymore because they're one of us.
Now, if you want to have slaves from other parts of Greece or from Persia, be my guest. That's fine. but who are we? We are a community and we're going to have at least enough dignity that we're not going to enslave one another. However, we are going to respect hard work and some degree of legacy of how things work.
 
So we're, we're not going to redistribute the land. We're going to respect private property. But we understand you've been in a hard situation, so we're going to reduce some of the debts. So, it was this give and take. And then they set up a sort of a primitive form of constitution where people of greater means essentially had more privileges in the government. People of lesser means, had lesser privileges, but they had some, for example, there was probably the first, if not the first, one of the first assemblies where everybody could come together and basically say, are we going to go to war or not? Simple votes on major things like war.
 
So that's the beginning of a political right, if you like. And there was a the beginning of a concept of citizenship and the beginning of a concept of community. So, all this was sort of, you know, ascribed to the great compromise of this man Solon. And in many ways, a lot of what I just laid out for you, you know, you can do sort of point trajectory into what became later a, a full you know, self-governing polis of citizens.

So he was an early founder of many of the democratic ideas. There was a period of tyranny that followed after Solon, but even this tyrant which did not have as charged a meaning as it does in English today, but it was a one man rule that kind of took over.

This one-man ruler, the guy's name is Pisistratus. He created this huge and very celebrated festival celebrating the origins of Athens. It was called the panathenaea and they had games like super athletic games and that kind of thing. So in many ways, it was like, he kind of created the 4th of July for Athens.
 
And so that, you know, even though it was one-man rule, he made a contribution saying, look, you know, let's celebrate who we are, you know I'm in charge, but we can still all feel good about being part of Athens, right? And so that was another piece of the development. So, you know, what I'm taking you through is part of the paradigm of our book.
 
If you look at these democracies that we looked at, you know, Athens, Republican Rome, Britain and America, there's always a kind of a longer prelude before the democratic moment. And a lot of the values and understandings of what democracy came to mean, you see kind of like point flashes of light and early elements.

And our argument is that a lot of, a lot of that pre-democratic thinking took the form of some kind of bargain. You know, go back to Solon, you know, look, look, guys, we're gonna stop the civil war, okay? In exchange, you'll get this, and you other folks are gonna get that. That s a bargain.

And we're gonna start living together with that kind of an understanding that, you know, not everybody gets everything, we're gonna make some compromises, but we're not gonna kill each other anymore. But we're gonna be stronger for it, and that's what happened. So our argument is that that's the kernel of what democracy is about, and it gets more, you know, systematized and polished and integrated. But that's kind of at the core of what democracy is. 

Pat Spero: Yeah. Now moving ahead. You've got the poet who introduced democracy in Athens, and then you have the philosopher in Rome, Cicero, who does not seem to have the same skills as Solon. Can you situate the Cicero into the story and how it relates to Caesar?

Brook Manville: Yeah, the Roman story starts way before Cicero, but Cicero, you know, like Thucydides, you know, has a lot of air time because he was so learned in what he wrote about and so charming in many ways. 
 
So the Roman story was that, Rome was originally ruled by kings. The kings got thrown out. A bunch of essentially aristocrats took over, and that eventually became sort of a, well, became eventually the senate, a kind of, the elders, and they were ruling more or less as an oligarchy for a while. And they were beginning to be more and more ambitious about spreading out into Italy.
 
And also some of their neighbors were getting ambitious against them. So, there was a series of wars in the fifth, fourth, third century and those continued. And the survival of Rome depended on, the foot soldiers, basically, the lower classes, plebeians, going out and fighting to protect or advance the goals.
At a certain point the foot soldiers basically went on strike. The plebeians went on strike. And they said, you know, we're not doing this anymore. We don't care if Rome becomes owned by somebody else. Our life is not going to be any more miserable.

And so the patricians the elite basically said, okay, let's make a compromise, and so you see a series of compromises through this period that, and I mentioned kind of 200, 300 years, each time there was essentially the army went on strike.
 
And they said, okay, well, we'll give you a couple of, we'll set up a certain kind of assembly and you'll actually get to choose some of the leaders, you'll get to vote for them. Or we'll create another kind of assembly and you'll be able to propose certain kinds of legislation. Only certain, but still you get something.

So there are all these kind of incremental additions to sort of a civic process that grow up. And along with that, there starts to be this ethos that's developed about, you know, the res publica is, is the most important thing that we all share, common value, and that must be protected and we must all, celebrate heroes who died for the res publica or made sacrifice for the res publica and then that got built into civic education.

So that was kind of the Roman story in the middle Republic. And with that kind of engine that they built, they started to move out and conquer more and more surrounding territory, and they started to build the beginning of an empire. 
 
Well, that was all fine until about the second century B.C., where once again, like in the Solon story, land starts to become more and more precious, and you get people building these big plots, and people are losing their family farms, and there's a rich versus poor split going on, and then there starts to creep in more and more violence of people trying to overthrow the elite and the elite fighting back and, killing the leaders of the people and it gets more and more violent. And then that continues into the first century B.C., which is, the famous end of the Roman Republic. And it's in that period that Cicero is writing.
 
And what Cicero is so interesting about is when you read his letters, he is basically seeing the rise of Caesar and other strong men, which has become the new way that politics is working. It's basically becoming gang war, gang tribal warfare, right?
 
Rich versus poor and one leader versus another leader. And he is bewailing this and saying, everything I know about what made us great, the Republic, is falling apart. We gotta do something. So he wrote all sorts of speeches and letters, hoping that somebody would bring back the Republic.

And then, of course, he became part of that network of people who finally decided that Caesar had to go, and so on. But he was a voice of saving the traditional Republic. And, you know, he was more of a writer and a politician. He was a lawyer as well, but you know, he wasn't a terrific soldier or anything.
 
Pat Spero: Exactly. So moving ahead then Great Britain or England, Henry II plays a large role in that story. Somebody that many people probably are not familiar with. But I was also struck, with your chronology on the rise of democracy in Great Britain you describe it as kind of a hybrid until about 1916, which is really pretty late.

So I don't know if you could tell us first about Henry II, who I think people are just unfamiliar with and might find an interesting figure, but more generally the development of democracy in Great Britain, which looks very different in your book from what people may assume. 

Brook Manville: Firstly, the sweep of democracy. Britain emerged out of the post Roman rule of conference when, a series of basically warlords were fighting one another. The Angles, the Anglo Saxons and different kings fighting against one another. 

At some point, in the first millennium, power consolidated around one king and there was a kind of a hybrid that started to form in the sense that there was one king ruling over a large part of England what we would call England in those days. But his power was shored up with two kind of foundational supports.
 
One is the Catholic church that basically made a deal and said, you know, we will respect you as the leader. We will anoint you. You can have all the ceremony of God is behind the King. As long as you make sure that we have, you know, churches and lands, we have certain privileges. 
 
And then of course there were nobles, because sort of the, their version of the feudal system started to be invented in that early era where they would depend on local lords. They would put them in and say, you know, you can rule over these lands, but you've got to be loyal to me. You can have people, you know, working for you, working for your lands paying you rent.
 
But if I want to go to war, you've got to bring everybody over and you've also got to send me some money, you know, just because I'm the king. So they were depend you know, the king was dependent on them and every once in a while they would say, you know, we're not doing this anymore. We don't think you're the real king or, you know, we like you, but we don't like your son who's supposed to be king.

So it was tentative. The monarch was never completely absolute. He had to defend it was mostly he, there was occasionally queens. He had to depend on the goodwill and support of these people who were, quote, subservient to him, but if enough subservients rose up, you know, he was in trouble.
 
And there's several cases of where they were overthrown. And this, body of nobles eventually became an advisory group, which eventually became a parliament. Parliament eventually started to push back on the king and, you know, they said, look, you're collecting a lot of money from people who work on our lands. That's fine, but we want to start having some say on how you spend the money. And as soon as they started to, you know, pull the strings of the power of the purse, then there started to be more tension between King and Parliament, which would occasionally erupt and there'd be civil war and whatnot. 

So Henry II in this, in this, in this in this round of discussion. Henry II pops up because there's one of these furious civil wars going on. There's a there's always a problem of succession. After a king dies, it's always like, who's going to be the king? Because there's often pretenders or two different kings say, I'm in the line. So there was another, you know, problem of succession.
 
And there's a, there's a civil war going on. And this is this is in the I think it's in the late, it's in the early 14th century, I guess it is. Anyway and, and he is able to, like Solon, create some kind of a compromise to end the civil war. And thanks to his, his Solonic ability to create a compromise it's decided that he should be the king.
 
And he's apparently very clever and, and able, able leader. So becomes king but it's very clear from the, from the very start that what he really wants to do is go off to France and recover some family lands and make that part of a larger empire. 
 
So it looks like he has this idea that in order for him to go off and lead these campaigns in France, he's got to make sure that civil war doesn't break up, you know, break out and, and cause the same kind of trouble that he had, you know, solved before. And because of how land and the economy had evolved, a lot of the fights that were going on were about land and, and, and the way the disputes were being handled was all over the map and often very unsatisfying.
 
So again, oversimplifying the story, he basically starts to put in place a system of what became known as the common law. You know, he reorganizes the courts, the monarchic group around him starts to play a more active role in settling certain kinds of disputes. So it's basically, we're going to create a kind of a, legal system that can kind of run on itself when I'm away.
 
And he does, and this takes place over a long time and then lots of other people get involved and, there's lots of local responsibility. It's not all done by the king. But over time, a system to govern according to law starts to be part of of the English, you know, governance landscape.
 
And that's very important because, you know, it starts to be a more democratic thing as opposed to it's only going to be about violence to settle disputes. If you look back at the, at the well-known Magna Carta, you see the first start of that, where these lords come and go to the king King John and say it's back in 1216 or 17 and he goes, oh, they say, look, you know, you keep farming us for money and it's getting out of hand.
 
It's really ridiculous. You know, we want a different deal. We can't bear this anymore. And so they meet at Runnymede and there's this famous discussion, they all sign the Magna Carta, which again has certain principles that we would call democratic. You know, essentially there's language that looks pretty much like trial by jury.

That no man will be convicted without having some say of his peers and so on. And then there's other things about making sure that there's equality amongst not just the nobles, but also the people who are answering to the nobles in terms of how law will be applied and so on and so forth. So again, if you contrast that, as primitive as it is, with a pure dictatorship where it's like, you know, you either do what I say or you're going to be killed.

This is a leader saying, you know, we can get along, I can stay in power, but we can get along if I give you certain rights and protections and you respect those and then you keep, you know, and so that, that starts to be again, this process of bargaining. So Henry II is another part of, you know, the bargain of law that if you obey the laws, you know, we don't have to lean on you like some ruthless dictator all the time, right? 
 
So why does democracy take so long after that? That's its own good question. But basically the reason we, we, we, we put it all the way in the 20th century is that Parliament becomes a very established organization. It is basically after the famous revolution of 1688, clearly that the sovereign power where the King is still important, but, you know, has much more checks and balances built in than ever before. And most historians say that's kind of when, you know, England is no longer a monarchy. And people sometimes jump to say, oh, well, that means it's a democracy.
 
Well, we say, well, not really, because the Parliament, although it's being elected, still it's like only 18 percent of the people are voting for these parliament guys. So by our definition, self-governance by citizens. You know, there are plenty of English citizens who have nothing to do with who's in the Parliament, so we don't count it.
 
So we say it's not until the 20th century when, during World War I, they actually grant essentially universal franchise to, well, at first all males and then 10 years later. But unless the, unless the citizens, unless a large number of citizens have a vote, we don't count. 
 
Pat Spero: And so that brings us now to the United States and you do an analysis of the constitution and constitution making, which I'll encourage everybody to get this book to hear that story because you also then move into the final section talking about American society today.
 
And what's working, what's not, areas for improvement, and one of the things that you mentioned is that it seems like American society is relying more on I think you used the phrase bossiness. And so what does that mean to you that you know, democracy is a no boss system, the United States has adhered to that, maybe created the first model, if Great Britain isn t until 1916, in the modern era. And now we seem to be reverting to bossiness out of our own choice. 
 
Brook Manville: Right. Well, and that's, what's very frightening. You're exactly right. I mean, you know, bossiness is just, you know, that's just our clever way of saying, you know, that back to our definition, that if you want to have democracy, you have to buy into that you won't have one single boss, you know, that that's like a sort of a keystone principle, again, except one another as citizens. And so you know, we think that as long as the citizens of country or any country basically subscribe to that, that democracy has a chance. One of the very and disagreement, you know, is, you know, is, is, is always part of democracy.
 
Even our, as you know better than me, even our treasured, you know, founders, you know, were often killing each other later not killing each other very, very harsh to one another. So, you know, disagreement is built into the system, right? But, but bossiness is not, because as you know, the founders worked very hard to make sure that the president was not going to be a king, although it was vetted for a while. And of course, luckily they shouted that down. 
 
So what's disturbing now is that because democracy is always generically hard to make work, you know, because humans tend to disagree, the easy way to solve a problem is to put somebody in charge.
 
Right? I mean, it, you know, it just works more smoothly, even though it may be wretched for the people who are living as subjects to the king, but it works smoothly. And that's why through history, monarchy has tended to be the default governance system. So, it works more difficult, and then the other factor which is in our book is that democracies inevitably struggle with what we call the challenge of scale.
And this is just, you know a human dynamic. I saw it in business. It's an organizational dynamic, which is the more people you have trying to govern themselves, the harder it gets. But, in a harsh, cruel world full of big, nasty autocracies you've got to be big enough to protect yourself. And so you got to get bigger.
 
You can't just be like Switzerland, you know, I mean, Switzerland gets away with it because of its mountains. But most people, you have to, you have to have some scale to, to defend yourself and you have to have some scale also to create enough economic prosperity over time. So it's a dilemma, you know, but as you get bigger, it gets more complicated.
 
And in this country, I believe that one of our challenges, I mean, there's lots of people, all of us have challenges. One of our challenges is that we are dealing with scale. We have a much more big and complex and diverse society than ever before, and it's going to get more diverse. We've got more and more people wanting to come here, and we have more and more complexity in all of the stuff going on with government policy and so on.

So, not surprisingly, a lot of people are saying, I can't take this anymore. I can't take all the fighting. I can't take, I can't take the stuff not getting done. Let's just have a boss. But you know, our point is, our point is only that, that you can go there. But you, you're leaving the land of democracy as soon as you vote for that, as soon as you want that. And a lot of people don't understand that. And that's one of the reasons that we, we put so much emphasis on civic education. Unless people understand what democracy really is, where it came will slip into just get me out of here.
 
But they don't know what they're, what they're signing up for because history shows that one man rule is always destroying liberty. 

Lindsay Chervinsky: As we navigate through complex leadership challenges, Brooke Manville's reflections remind us that leadership is as much about understanding and influencing the collective as it is about personal growth and self-awareness. We learned that true leadership involves not just guiding individuals, but also building and sustaining an organization that collectively strives toward a common goal. As always, he reminds us of the significance of looking to the past when understanding our modern responsibilities as leaders and as members of a democracy. 
 
Thank you for joining us for this season of Leadership and Legacy, Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library. Next season, which will launch early next year, we're excited to introduce you to a new cohort of leaders from all industries. 
 
Leadership and Legacy, Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. This podcast is hosted by Dr. Patrick Spero and Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky. Our executive producers are Dr. Anne Fertig and Heather Soubra. 
 
To learn more about Washington's Leadership example or to find out how you can bring your team to the George Washington Presidential Library, go to www.gwleadershipinstitute.org. Or to find more great podcasts from Mount Vernon, go to www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.