Reification as an Act of Leadership: How Coming from A Small State Could Enhance Biden's Presidency

Biden is the first president from Delaware. I had a client there and had to fly into Philadelphia, Pennsylvania or Baltimore, Maryland and then drive to Wilmington. Delaware is apparently too small to fit a runway long enough for anything more than a Cessna.

On one of my first trips driving from Philadelphia to Wilmington, I not only missed my exit but drove straight through the state and into Maryland before I realized what was happening. It only takes about 20 minutes to drive through the state on the 95.

Here in California, we have two senators and 53 members of the House. Delaware's population is so small that they have two senators and only one House member. It's actually easier to get elected to the Senate than the House in Delaware.

I imagine that knowing nearly one percent of the state's population by first name would make a difference in your style of leadership.

Someone used the word reify the other day. I had to look it up. It refers to the act of making something abstract more concrete. I suspect that seeing his state's population as real people will help Biden to reify policies, helping him to think about how this policy might affect that life. This might even be one way to define good management: the ability to zoom into individual lives and back out to large communities, to at turns get abstract and then personal, reification as important to leadership as vision and execution.