Chapter 1
AmericaâThe Change Makers
America today is still the world's most powerful country, both in terms of the size of its economy and its military muscle. Even more important than this, however, is the soft power that the country exercises. In particular, after America and its allies won the Cold War, there was an implicit sense in many parts of the world that American values and ideals would become the global norm. It was this sense that persuaded the political economist Francis Fukuyama to prematurely call out the End of History, on the basis that fundamental debates about values were over and we were all marching toward an American future whether we recognized it or not.1
The American model also seemed to have triumphed in business. The idea that free markets should create the champions of the future through Darwinian selection became widely embedded. Other notions took hold, too: push relentlessly for ever higher targets and differentiate aggressively on the basis of performance; never rest from change; let companies outsource to the lowest cost providers around the world. American executives who went abroad did so on the front foot and led predominantly through American leadership values. The country's business schools were also teaching leaders from around the world how to manage their companies and American heroes, such as Jack Welch and Louis Gerstner, were the doyens of the global business community.
Just a few decades later, however, the world looks very different. American business values are no longer the default setting for executives around the world. The global financial crisis that struck in 2007 has had a particularly significant impact on the credibility of the American business model. A short while ago, America's banks, ratings agencies and insurance companies were seen as highly sophisticated operators in complex markets. Now many believe they had either no idea of what they were doing or were malevolently self-servingâneither judgment is flattering. While the American reward culture has created enormous wealth for some, many feel senior leaders have been excessively rewarded, often for indifferent performance. The model is also under question internally. Decades of economic growth have barely touched the living standards of the bulk of the American population and there is a sense of weariness and latent resentment among many in the workforce. Outsourcing may have benefited company profitsâbut whole sectors of American society have lost out or live on the precipice of insecurity.
American leaders wrestling with lower economic growth at home must think globally, now more than ever before. However, they can no longer go around the world simply teaching other people how to sing the American business tune. They have to adjust to a multipolar business world with all its complexities and contradictions. This requires American leaders to understand other cultures and flex their own approach as never before. On a day-to-day level, an American executive has to deal with a bewildering range of nationalities either within a firm or in global markets. Increasingly there is a good chance your boss will be from a culture with which you have had only fleeting experience before.
More generally, America has lost its sense of omnipotence. People around the world instinctively recognize that other ideologies and values for how life should be organized are now on offer. In America itself, this has created a sense of ambivalence and uncertainty. American exceptionalism has always been deeply rooted in the national psyche; as such, the idea that others could genuinely overtake the countryârather than pretend to and then fade away, as did the Soviet Union or Japanâcauses disquiet. America is in an uncertain mood where, psychologically, a lot of things are up in the air. The rest of the world is equally uncertain as to how Americans will adjust to a new multipolar world. Which of the myriad of potentially conflicting values that constitute its cultural soup will get stronger and which will get weaker?
Founder Effects
Understanding America's psychological DNA provides some clues to answering the above questions. This DNA arises chiefly, but not only, from the fact that the early history of America was created by distinct groups of people who migrated there for very particular reasons. To understand American cultural DNA one has to understand the psychology of the myriad groups that founded the country.
The importance of founder effects can be illustrated by a simple story. Recently, researchers led by Deborah Neklason, of the Cancer Research Institute in Utah, achieved a breakthrough in their understanding of one cause of colon cancer in the United States.2 The team studied an extended community in Utah where 5,000 people were stricken with an unfortunately high rate of colon cancer. Whereas the chances of developing the disease is something like 4 percent by the time one reaches 80 in the general population, close to two thirds of people in this particular community were found to be at risk. A specific genetic mutation was identified as being responsible for this heightened vulnerability.
Fortunately for the researchers, Utahâby virtue of its Mormon heritageâkeeps quite detailed genealogical records. The researchers were therefore able to trace the source of the mutation back across a number of generationsâwhich caused them to make an extraordinary discovery. There is another extended community in upstate New York that also has exceptionally high rates of colon cancer and the same genetic mutation. Tracing back the records of both, they found the inheritance paths began to converge. Eventually, they led to a common ancestral couple, Mr. and Mrs. George Fry, who had arrived in the New World onboard the William & Mary around 1630. The Frys had four children, of whom one was the source of the extended community in Utah and another for the one in upstate New York. The authors concluded that the elevated risks of colon cancer in both these extended communities emanated from a single founder genetic mutation that Mr. and Mrs. Fry had brought with themâalong with their hopesâto the New World. The authors also speculated that there were almost certainly many other extended communities across the nation who could be related to Mr. and Mrs. Fry, for whom the risks of colon cancer would be similarly elevated.
What this story illustrates is the powerful way that the exponential mathematics of procreation can lead to founder effects being amplified within a population. Quite simply, when a population has arisen from a clear founding group, there is a strong chance that many biological and psychological characteristics will be passed on to later generations, thus leading to differentiation from other populations that have different founders.
The Peopling of America
The peopling of the Americas is essentially a two-part volume with a short prologue and a longer and more complicated main story. The prologue concerns the original peopling of the American continent by modern humans some 10 to 15 thousand years ago. These modern humans settled, populated and established ecological footholds that remained in place for thousands of years on the American continent. Unfortunately, these original human settlers were decimated by the arrival of European migrants over 500 years ago. To understand modern American cultural DNA one must therefore understand who settled there and why in the recent past. Unlike the settlement accounts for other regions, this is a story around which there is a lot of detailed information.
Although various parts of North America were populated by small colonies of Spanish, French and Dutch settlers, substantial settlement of the Americas early on involved various migrations out of Great Britain and Ireland. This is well documented in David Hackett Fischer's book, Albion's Seed and I rely extensively on the research described there for the early part of the story.3 According to Hackett Fischer, four significant communities were driven by political developments or economic necessity to seek their fortunes in a vague and undefined land that lay at the other end of a forbidding journey across the cold, grey waters of the Atlantic.
The first significant community was that of the Puritans, who formed a strong movement in Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army. Unsurprisingly, the Puritans' stern and unyielding belief in a simple life and rejection of all pomp and ceremony did not endear them to the English aristocracy. Not unnaturally, as the fortunes of the different parties in the civil war fluctuatedâwhen Charles I was in the ascendencyâthere were aggressive and wildly popular purges of Puritans. Many of those who were unwilling to quietly shed their beliefs and melt into the background decided to migrate to North America and set up base in the Boston area. By 1640, there were 20,000 people predominantly from a Puritan background in the area, which expanded by 1700 to 100,000, and to a million by 1800. This initial population was the root community from which Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, upstate New York and northern Ohio were eventually populated.
The early Puritans believed they had found a simple and ordered universal model for how the world should be organized. They were vehemently committed to a disciplined, pious, simple and ordered way of life as a means of keeping man's sinful nature in check and for establishing a compact with God. As will be illustrated later, the aspirations around creating a moral âcity upon a hill,â utilitarian instincts, commitment to the idea of salvation through work and attachment to a simple and ordered moralistic society had, and continues to have today, a significant impact on American cultural DNA.
A second, significant religious order that settled in the North American continent early on were the Quakers. The Friends, as they called themselves, believed in seeing the best in people and in extending the hand of friendship to others. Unfortunately, they found many responded to their well-meaning overtures with an iron glove. In particular, powerful sections of English society rapidly took against this new order once they learned that the Quakers were not enthusiastic about paying tithes to the established church. Perhaps also their peacefulness and reluctance to fight back elicited, through some paradoxical psychological process, unusual levels of animosity.
William Penn, an early convert to the Quakers, had been granted by the Crown an area that was subsequently to be called Pennsylvania, in payment of a debt that had been owed to his father. Weary of the hostility and difficulties that his peaceful and tolerant order attracted in England, William Penn decided to set up a kind of human experiment in his newly acquired land, creating a community of Friends that was free from the many forces that buffeted the religion in his homeland. The vision was radical and fortunately for William Penn, the early Quaker settlers found the Native Indians were relatively peaceful and welcoming. William Penn's experiment attracted considerable attention in England and, between 1675 and 1725, something like 25,000 Quakers flocked to the colony, principally from the North Midlands, but also from Wales.
Like the Puritans, the Quakers had a strong work ethic and a belief in âserving God with one's talent.â Their belief in wealth creation, not for its own sake, but as a service to the community, seeing possibility in people and a desire to place all people under a universal umbrella of harmonious coexistence are all important strands of influence with respect to American cultural DNA. Eventually, Quaker communities were a significant source of the populations of the eastern parts of Virginia, large parts of the Delaware valley and the state of Maryland, as well as Ohio.
The Puritans and Quakers constituted the first significant European populations to settle the northern part of the United States. Hackett Fischer describes the first significant southern community as the Distressed Cavaliers. Like the Puritan migration, their movement was driven by the ups and downs of the English Civil War. Just as conditions improved for the Puritans in England with the victory of Oliver Cromwell, so they deteriorated for members of the landed aristocracy who had supported the Royalist cause. This class of people suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the line that granted authority, power and patronage in Great Britain. The dimming of privileges proved particularly challenging for the second sons of such families. Many went to the Caribbean and a host of other places but a number ended up in Virginia. They brought with them their servants and indentured labor. Between 1642 and 1676, 40,000 decided to seek their fortunes in America and this community was responsible for populating significant parts of Virginia, Southern Maryland, South Delaware, and coastal North Carolina.
The Distressed Cavaliers were in some senses the polar opposite of the Puritans and Quakers. Simplicity of lifestyle was not for them and they hankered after the trappings of privilege and the good life. As a community, though, they were bounded by a strong sense of honor and a commitment to supporting others of their class. However, they were inherently hierarchical and saw themselves as a class apart from the servants and indentured laborers that they brought with them. An interest in the good life made tobacco farming a natural area of economic activity for these settlers. They also had no compunction around importing vast numbers of slaves from Africa to help them support a somewhat leisurely but priv...
