Relatively speaking, it is only recently that corporate leaders of business and finance have become public figures. At the time of Jefferson and Adams, the reality for both businessmen and politicians was quite different from what it is today. Cities like New York had by the early 1800s developed a highly complex economy, but the industrialization was still in an early stage. Some investors, as for example John Jacob Astor, became fabulously wealthy, yet Jefferson and Adams must be said to have had much more power and influence than politicians do today. Business magnates like Astor, on the other hand, did not have to release any financial information to the public, and BusinessWeek was not around to comment on his financial decisions. In some ways, it can seem like current corporate CEOs have to accept more public scrutiny and speculation than even presidential figures had to at the time of Jefferson. The reason for this is twofold. First, the importance and influence the corporate leaders’ decision making plays in society has increased. Second, the pressure from the media is not only much more intense than it used to be, but also the resources and information available to journalists and investigators are on a different scale than what has been the case historically.

Although Thomas Jefferson was a transformational president, it can be argued that almost any public policy he could have adopted at this early stage in the republic’s history would have seemed transformational. He argued for a limited government, a political philosophy that had its origin in a revolutionary distrust of the English colonial government. When becoming president in 1801, he quickly dismantled the embryonic federal government, the navy and the army in addition to all federal taxation programs. Jefferson’s rather reactionary ideology has since influenced and inspired presidents like Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan, showing that leaders can influence decision making well beyond their own time. An important cause of the civil war was exactly the conflict between the republic and the market revolution that started already at the time of Jefferson, this evidently in addition to the issue of slavery.

John Quincy Adams was the son of America’s second president, John Adams, for whom Thomas Jefferson served as vice president from 1787-1801. Though they served together as the two most influential men in America, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams would drift apart politically and have severe disagreements on important policy issues. John Adams lost the presidential election against Thomas Jefferson in 1801, but the political battle between the two sides was to intensify as John Quincy Adams got elected in 1824. In a similar fashion to the 2000 Presidential Election, the result of the 1824 election was heavily disputed, and John Quincy Adams was elected without having the most electoral votes. It soon became clear that the newly elected President’s power would be severely limited due to what his critics considered to be a "corrupt bargain" in congress. Thomas Jefferson also became president after one of the tightest races and most disputed elections in American history, but in contrast to John Quincy Adams, he had the management skills to become an effective and cohesive leader. He understood that the cooperation of congress and the confidence of his subordinates were needed if he was to have success as President, and the fact that Jefferson succeeded getting reelected in 1805 shows that he had achieved more than a theoretical understanding of just this.

Rick Thoman, who left IBM in 1997, experienced similar difficulties when becoming president and COO of Xerox. First, his succession was disputed as several coworkers meant that Xerox’s next leader should be found internally. Just as John Quincy Adams and current president George W. Bush, he entered his position in a severely weakened condition. Paul A. Allaire, whom Rick Thoman replaced, wanted to retire from the company, but according to Businessweek the board would not let him. Nicholas J. Nicholas, a longtime Xerox director, says, "A number of people wanted him to stay because Rick (Thoman) was an outsider. The thinking was, ‘we like what we see so far with Rick, but we’d like you to be here, just in case’." The result was that Allaire stayed on as chairman, and continued to attend board meetings, thereby undermining the decision making power of the new president and COO. Thoman could, consequently, only make partial attempts at reform, and a former senior Xerox executive comments that "there was always a huge gap between the visionary aspirations the company nominally was pursuing and what it actually drove employees to do."

Hewlett Packard is another technological company that has found itself having serious economic difficulties the last couple of years, but when hiring Carleton S. Fiorina in mid-1999, the new CEO did not make the same mistake as Thoman, but assumed full responsibility. Refusing to share any power, she says, "I am running the business the way I think it ought to be run." The two former presidents have in common with Fiorina and Thoman that their appointments were heavily disputed, but only two of the four leaders managed to seize the challenge and successfully take command of power. Thoman might have been formally in charge of Xerox in the same way as John Quincy Adams formally was the elected president, yet the informal organizations they were to lead did not accept their leadership. History put aside, these were the mistakes that set the two apart from Fiorina and Jefferson.

A former Xerox executive comments, "If you bring in a change agent, then let him make change – or don’t even start." Xerox had to let Thoman go, as he was not able to lead efficiently, while Allaire remains as the company’s COO. John Quincy Adams was in some ways different though. He became president after what many considered to have been a "corrupt bargain" in congress, and stood no chance of getting reelected in 1828. The Republican Convention of Albany County, New York, cheered Andrew Jackson into the office by promising he would "bring back the republic to the purity and simplicity of the democratic days." In other words, they felt that John Quincy Adams had brought disgrace to the presidential office. In some ways, this episode reminds a lot of the arguments for electing George W. Bush in 2000, but many will again argue that the disputed election of the latter did not bring more purity and simplicity to the office than what did the election of John Quincy Adams.

Thomas Jefferson once said, "It is not wisdom alone but public confidence in that wisdom which can support an administration." The logic in his argument certainly translates to the world of business, and Rick Thoman should by now have learnt the lesson that full dedication and support from one’s subordinates is needed if ideas are to be successfully implemented. Fiorina has already started implementing wide-reaching and radical reform at Hewlett Packard, but it is still too early to tell if the restructuring will be successful. She certainly has proven, though, that she has the power to implement her ideas. In that sense, she has already shown herself to be an effective leader. As long as she is able to keep the confidence of her employees, the team she is hired to lead will have a much greater chance of reaching success than Thoman’s subordinates ever had.