Earl Wallace

Politicians tend to appoint to government’s most influential decision-making positions their family members, friends, paramours, significant others, chief donors and key supporters. These people often see that their main mission is to help their politicians gain the name recognition they need to continue to get elected to office every two to four years.  Consequently, many appointees use their positions to dream up costly, politically motivated initiatives designed to make a headline or photo opportunity for them and their politicians. The initiatives make great sound bites, but in reality often lack not only a working knowledge of available resources but also the contextual awareness and detail to coordinate the various operational elements to make programs effective. 

As a former statewide government program administrator, I improved underperforming government services by instilling pride and focussing employees on performance and productivity processes.  The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context explains that government has challenges with efficiency often because its leaders only function within two of the three MRC essentials necessary to achieve effective operations.  

Even simple things are overlooked like coordinating the job titles and partner relationships that are necessary to provide services in ways that deliver meaningful outcomes to the public.  While many appointees can recite a government agency’s mission statement, their behaviors painfully demonstrate to gifted and skilled civil servants that they have no actual experience in what they are tasked to manage or oversee. 

The new initiatives often are out of synch with why the program was established, and how it was set up to operate.  The heavy handed way appointees tend to go about implementing them demonstrates the lack of people skills and leadership abilities necessary to effectively coordinate large numbers of people across multiple departments.  Many a civil servant has been idled as a result. 

The Solyndra bankruptcy shows how one and two-dimensional leadership decisions miss the mark for the Obama administration, the company and the nation.  One-Dimensional leadership is all about “me” not the mission.  Two-dimensional leadership sets up “us vs. them” dynamics, and three-dimensional leadership focuses on “we,” as in “we the people.”  

The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context (MRC) focuses leaders on behavioral and character traits necessary to achieve the three essentials that contribute to organizational success.  Three-dimensional leaders consistently focus on the mission and get people at all levels of the organization to do likewise. Properly focused leaders negotiate the context appropriately to deploy resources and continually align them so employees can succeed at their jobs. Thus their organizations have a high potential to succeed. 

The federal government should see the big picture context of “we the people.”  By investing in a private enterprise, everyone concerned looses sight of the mission.  Solyndra should have focused on the mission of designing a business whose products and pricing would appeal to customers.  Instead it focused on lobbying the government for money.  The government should not be creating “us vs. them” situations by pitting one private company against the others. The mission of government is to do what is in the best interest of “we, the people.”  It should not be betting on winers and losers in the marketplace.   

When governments and private companies put their individual interests, above our collective interest, it’s “we the people” who lose. The Obama administration’s Solyndra scandal is a self-centered solicitous affair that is two-dimensional at best. Since the company head was a fund raiser for Obama, however, it appears the funding was a quid pro quo that benefitted them at the expense of US.   

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embodied the synthesis of mission, vision, and values into a strategic plan.  Here is an excerpt from chapter two of The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context: 

• Dr. King’s mission was equality. 
• His vision was expressed beautifully in his “I Have a Dream” speech.  
• And his values were nonviolence. 

A strategic plan says, “We will use these resources to accomplish this mission that will get us to our vision as we pursue it with these values.”  

As a leader, Dr. King successfully rallied people to the mission of equality. The values of nonviolence fueled the operational engine that propelled the people of his organization to persevere by focusing on achieving the vision of nonviolent revolution.  Once volunteers rallied to the cause, Dr. King focused them on the organization’s values—so much so that his marchers faced violent and murderous opposition in the most hostile environments, yet they persevered in carrying out the organization’s mission with the values of nonviolence.   

Dr. King embodied three-dimensional leadership.  He keenly understood the mission, and passionately articulated a vision to achieve it. King stated his mission and vision so clearly that it was easy for people to follow him, to see what he was talking about, and to believe that if he could do it, they also could.  He organized people and resources around a set of values that they consistently lived and applied.  King helped his followers negotiate the hostile context as a team that often locked arms together and sang “We Shall Overcome!”  The America we live in today is in large part the fruition of the vision—the Dream, which was the focus of Dr. King’s life. 

Are you following Dr. King’s example and embodying the mission, vision, and values of your organization?

America is organized around the our Constitution’s value system that empowers us to be “one nation under God.” The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context advocates achieving goals by rallying people to the mission that matters most. 3-D Leaders never loose sight of the main thing, cause, or reason why the organization exists.  

On May 5, 2010, Morgan Hill, California’s Live Oak High School Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez, lost sight of the American mission, when he sent five students home for wearing clothing displaying the American flag on Cinco de Mayo, stating the garments were “incendiary.”  One-gimensional leaders ignore the main mission to pursue agendas that undermine it. Mr. Rodriguez meeds to understand that everyday in the USA is American Flag Day! 

As an American, I welcome to this nation anyone who wants to participate in the value system that has made us a healthy, stable and prosperous society. That value system is rooted in the Bible’s Ten Commandments, and “Turn the other cheek.”  Love your neighbor as you love yourself, and “Do not others as you want others to do unto you.”

The school superintendent intervened and said. “No one will be punished for wearing patriotic clothing.” A federal judge, however, just ruled the students violated the Mexican students constitutional rights.  People who advocate celebrating alternative heritages by denigrating America’s needlessly are setting up two-dimensional “us vs. them” dynamics. American values enable one to exercise free speech to support almost any cause, but only shall be able to do so as long as our Constitutional values remain the main thing. Manipulating diversity issues to bash the symbols of America’s values only serve one-dimensional, “It's all about me” agendas, and not the mission of America as “We the people, one nation under God.” 

The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context gives us a scalable reference for understanding good and poor leadership.  Here’s how the template or paradigm applies to rating and assessing leaders in government.  

When government in America operates from a three-dimensional perspective: it sees its mission is to facilitate a set of circumstances that make it favorable for our nation’s chief resource, which is “We the People,” to use our talents, gifts and abilities to innovate goods and services that others find useful and beneficial and are willing to pay us a profitable price to obtain and enjoy.  The context that good government must keep in focus is the U.S. Constitution, which is based upon Biblical values.

A three-dimensional government leader keeps a long term focus on this mission, resources and context, or these MRC’s.  When government leaders operate from a two-dimensional perspective they only get a bearing on just one or two of these MRC concepts. Worse yet, one-dimensional government leaders think that everything that takes place within the American economy has to include them, their “input and/or control. One-dimensional leadership is all about “me” – not the mission of enabling “we the people.”  

One and Two-Dimensional leaders set up “us vs. them” dynamics. They appeal for votes separating us into individual groups of hyphenated-Americans, divided by race, ethnicity and behaviors.  They promise us “African-Americans” rights we already have  as Americans, and which undermine “we the people” seeing ourselves as “one nation under God.”  For instance, I do not need a special law saying you can’t hit me because I am black, because we already have laws that say you can’t assault me.  

Responsible and astute government leaders and citizens keep the big picture MRC’s in focus.

A cultural war is being waged in America against the Bible using a misinterpretation of the concept of “Separation of Church and State.”  The misinterpretation lies in the fact that the Bible is not a church or a religion.  The Bible is a historical record of God reaching out to us to give us “peace on earth and good will to men,” and other benefits.  The Old Testament records the history of God reaching out through Abraham, and promising to bless the world through his lineage.  The Bible informs us that this was accomplished through the birth of Christ, through whom we receive forgiveness for our sins by his substitutionary death on the cross.  The New Testament records the ministry of Jesus Christ, his death, burial and resurrection, and the early history of how He and God reach out to the world through the earliest Christian disciples and churches. 

Religions and their “churches,” mosques, temples etc...are institutions organized around expressing worship based upon the interpretation of historical writings, like the Bible. The phrase “separation of church and state” is being misused to ban the Bible. "Separation of church and state" is common usage for the phrase "wall of separation between the church and the state" which Thomas Jefferson originally penned in a letter to the Baptist Association at Danbury, Connecticut on January 1, 1802. His purpose was to assure them that the American Constitution establishes a wall to protect them from the government favoring one religion or Christian sect or denomination over another, to their detriment.  Founding Father’s like Jefferson and Madison intended to keep the state from manipulating religion for political purposes.  It was not designed to keep Biblical values from influencing matters of the state and public life.  

Many journalists, educators and social scientists have thrown out objectively reporting information to espouse opinions that support the writers’ views. They are particularly invested in denigrating America’s Founding Fathers.  

Most material passed off as educational about the “scandalous” lives of America’s Founding Fathers is built on innuendo and conjecture from vague and dubious sources, and is the shoddy wishful thinking and prevarication on behalf of those, who desire to recast the Founding Fathers after their own perverted ideals.  Such is the case with One Nation Under Sex, by pornographer, Larry Flint. But don’t waste your money on it; read the reviews on Amazon.  

America’s Founding Fathers were not perfect, but they did know right from wrong. They established a government system based upon the the Ten Commandments as the code of ethics, under which people should self-govern to participate in a  Constitutional Republic where everyone from the president, government and law enforcement officials, to corporate executives and working class people, to teenagers and youths are expected to obey the same laws.  

If indeed the Founding Fathers were as bad as today’s pundits say they were, then they had enough decency not to parade in public what they knew are sins. This is why their alleged behaviors (most of which did not take place) is said to have been so well hidden. If these made up stories (like those about Shakespeare’s homosexuality) were true, the fact that the Founding Fathers hid them is an acknowledgment that they knew they were wrong. Just as most people today still consider them wrong and know we should not be doing them.  

People want to disparage the Founding Fathers so they can discourage people from listening to what they really had to say, especially what they clearly stated in the U.S. Constitution.  

The purpose of the process of American citizenship is to acclimate people to the American value system that underlies the behaviors that have led to the social stability that allows us to pursue the life, liberty and happiness that has generated our prosperity.  When people are willing to violate our American laws by coming here illegally, they show a disregard for the value system that underlies them.  People act on their values.  The danger of illegal immigration is that it provides for people who perhaps have lawless values to be amongst us.  

If everyone obeys the traffic lights there are fewer accidents. If everyone in America follows American law, and the values of how the culture works, then there are fewer social mishaps like crimes.   

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) web site, states its new naturalization test places “an emphasis on the fundamental concepts of American democracy and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, will help encourage citizenship applicants to learn and identify with the basic values we all share as Americans.”  (Brochure “Pathway To U.S. Citizenship M-685 (rev. 04/09), page 1) 

There are 100 questions on the civic portion of the test.  The answer to question number 53 is citizens promise to “defend the Constitution and laws of the United States.”  What is a person promising to defend when he/she enters the U.S. illegally?  Such a person is less likely to learn anything about the U.S. Constitution, which makes our way of life possible. 

Some say they don’t want to call any person “illegal,” yet America is a Constitutional Republic, meaning everyone from the President to minimum wage workers must follow the “law.”  The process of citizenship explains the values that matter most to the stability and perpetuation of America.