In November 2001, the then-White House Press secretary Ari Fleischer, called me to say, “The president was not happy with your article yesterday.” Fleischer was referring to my “tale of the tape” chart in a New York Times op-ed comparing George W. Bush with his fellow Harvard MBA, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Fleischer said the president objected to my characterization of his management style as “hands off” and asked him to tell me how “hands on” he had been in the weeks since Sept. 11. Somewhat non-plussed, I countered that Bush himself had described himself as a delegator, although I acknowledged that he seemed more hands-on since the attacks.
Even though Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack portrays Bush as continuing that hands-on approach in dealing with Iraq, the problems the United States has encountered there indicate that Bush may be forgetting some lessons he should have learned at Harvard Business School.
As a fellow alum of the same MBA program, I know that Harvard wants its graduates to leave with a clear understanding of their own managerial strengths and weaknesses, as well as the circumstances that will allow them to lead their organizations most effectively. The key self-assessment lesson for George W. Bush ’75 is that he thrived in large part because he worked hard every night and came to class fully prepared.
Bush entered office espousing a highly delegative, big-picture managerial philosophy. After the Sept. 11 attacks, as Fleischer pointed out, the president altered his decisionmaking style. Yet, if he is going to take a more hands-on role in how policy is formulated and implemented, he must take a similarly hands-on approach to information and knowledge.
Bush has been dubbed the “CEO President” by the media. It is largely a misnomer.
Obviously, there is not only one type of corporate CEO, yet most are far more immersed in the details of their operations than Bush. That level of immersion may have been fine when he was delegating management, but not when he is as deeply involved in decisionmaking as he has been with Iraq.
At Harvard, Bush was taught to learn enough to be able to evaluate the advice of his subordinates and ask them the right questions. To take one example from Woodward’s book, shouldn’t Bush have asked whether there was an adequate postwar plan in case, as his secretary of state warned, the United States broke the pottery?
As the administration’s management of the Iraq war has come under increasing criticism, comparisons have been drawn between Bush and another government official with a Harvard MBA, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Ironically, their management styles couldn’t be more different. McNamara’s highly quantitative, highly analytic approach is almost opposite of Bush’s.
What they do have in common is that both are self-confident men who were made even more self-confident by their time at the West Point of capitalism. And that self-confidence can be dangerous for both, in different ways. McNamara’s undoing may have been that he relied too much on his own analysis; Bush’s vulnerability is when he doesn’t do enough of his own analysis.
It is often overlooked, even by Bush himself, that he has succeeded most in situations when he knows his material best. His greatest business triumph came with the Texas Rangers in baseball, something he understood as well as any of his fellow owners.
Bush is also far more articulate and persuasive as a speaker when he’s well-prepared.
He learned that, too, on the banks of the Charles River. In fact, oral presentation is central to the Harvard MBA training. Every night, Bush had to analyze several of the school’s vaunted case studies — in-depth, 20-page narratives of actual management situations — to prepare a 10-minute decision plan.
The president needs to spend more time with the briefing books. He is not always the fully prepared Bush of the Harvard classroom. This is important, since the election may come down to whether he is able to explain clearly to the electorate where he wants to take us. Not in rehearsed, black-and-white sound bites but in give-and-take, nuanced paragraphs.
His ability to do so may well determine whether Bush will be discussing plans for his second term with his former Harvard Business School classmates when their 30th reunion comes around next year, or visiting the career-placement center to look for a new job.
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