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36 An important precedent would be set in 1628 and 1629, when Winthrop and his colleagues planned the Puritan migration in enormous detail, not just before they emigrated to Massachusetts, but before they made the decision whether or not to migrate. It was followed implicitly by Hamilton and his friends when they laid the foundations of the republic. Since 1970, by way of contrast, Americans have tended to adopt the more relaxed European approach, with unfortunate consequences for the quality of decision-making in all walks of life.

The rationale for this approach is easy to state: since no one person ever knows all the answers or possesses all the skills, good policies are likely to emerge out of a thoughtful debate covering all relevant issues amongst competent, dedicated and knowledgeable colleagues. Complementarity and its close relative, collegiality, would be recurring features of American management teams for the next two hundred years. They would be eclipsed, in the late twentieth century, by the disastrous regime of the ‘imperial’ chief executive, alone deemed to know all the answers, of which much more later.

They interacted regularly with suppliers, merchants, lawyers and bankers . . They were known for both honesty and shrewdness. Outsiders continued to hold many of their products in high esteem . . and frequently solicited the Shakers’ judgment on business matters. Important new marketing practices, such as establishing salesrooms to display products and distributing catalogs and products by mail, which are now in universal use, appear to have originated in the movement. Eastern Shakers were at one time the largest producers and distributors of seeds and medicinal herbs in the United States, their salesmen traveling as far south as Louisiana in the 1830s; Western communities were well regarded for the production of cattle.