Jes Salacuse, A Paradoxical Institution Builder
Jes Salacuse was, to me, a lovable and paradoxical friend.
On the one hand, as a prominent leadership and negotiations scholar, Jes was intellectually acquainted with the psychological dark arts. He studied what made people tick and how leaders get people to move. One of his last books (Real Leaders Negotiate!) cracked open the window to that knowledge. Its subtitle was “How to Gain, Use, and Keep the Power to Lead through Negotiation.” As was noted when he presented the book in the faculty research seminar, some of its insights seemed Machiavellian. Jes pointed out that this was description, not prescription, but he was no ingenue. He was canny and worldly-wise in identifying peoples’ underlying wants and needs. He understood that successful leaders appeal more to their followers’ collective self-interest then to any claimed commitment to some overarching categorical imperative. His insights into the concealed motives and unspoken stratagems of political leaders were as shrewd as those of the highest-priced political consultants.
Yet on the other hand, unlike many leaders possessed of such knowledge, Jes was not manipulative. He was not devious or cunning. It was almost as though Jes had learned the psychological gambits of leadership and negotiation to indulge an academic curiosity, not to deploy that knowledge tactically. Quite the contrary: Jes accomplished what he did, in my experience, with open, authentic personal warmth and affection. Jes was instinctively kind and caring, benevolent almost to a fault. And he was known to be benevolent: his “methods,” if they could be called that, were warm-heartedness and a largeness of spirit that flowed from good will toward everyone he dealt with. He genuinely liked people; he was interested in their lives. If he could do something that would make those lives easier, he did it. Unsurprisingly, his friendships were legion. I ate lunch regularly with Jes over the quarter-century we taught together at Fletcher, I never heard him say an ill word about anyone (presidential candidates excepted). Machiavelli he was not.
No paradox obscured Jes’s ends, however. His life’s work was to build institutions. He began as a Peace Corps volunteer right after Harvard Law School. With his wife Donna as his companion “on a journey in five continents and six decades” (as he put it in a memoir published weeks before his death), Jes brick by brick cobbled together institutions that reformed legal education, researched public administration, managed development programs, attracted foreign investment, revised corporate governance laws, established graduate schools, trained lawyers, and settled disputes between governments and investors in Nigeria, Lebanon, Sudan, Laos, Jordan, Indonesia, Argentina and elsewhere around the world. Tufts’ own faculty Senate and the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, of which Fletcher is a charter member, each bear Jes’s mark: he was the founding father of both. Faculty members old enough to remember would probably unanimously acclaim that Fletcher never had a more beloved dean than Jes Salacuse.
In June, at our final lunch together, Jes and I discussed the rapid disintegration of American institutions. I lamented the great difficulty that will be encountered in building new institutions. Jes suggested that the reason for that difficulty had been identified long ago by Machiavelli, and he quickly pulled out this apt quote from The Prince:
There is nothing more difficult to plan, more uncertain of success, or more dangerous to manage than the establishment of a new order… For he who introduces it makes enemies of all those who derived benefits from the old order and finds but lukewarm defenders among those who stand to gain from the new one.
Jes Salacuse helped create small but real “new orders” around the world, year after year, throughout his life, but I suspect he made few enemies in doing that. For Jes knew, as he wrote in his memoir, that these new orders are not built over conference tables with clever lawyers’ words in carefully drawn legal instruments, essential those might be. No: The secret to building effective institutions lies in genuine human relationships—in friendships—that hold those institutions together. And for Jes, those friendships rested, in the end, on kindness and good cheer, on “laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, in hearts at peace.”
Rest in peace, Jes.