I know the Wall Street Journal’s site is registration only, but there’s a really good item today concerning new questions about Bush’s leadership style and management abilities. As the piece explains, they create a White House environment that somehow manages to be efficient and dysfunctional at the same time.
Bush’s style — delegate, express confidence, ignore details — has been analyzed by many. After all, he admittedly characterizes himself as a “CEO president.” But the WSJ piece by Jackie Calmes puts some of the broader concerns in an interesting context.
[T]he unfolding Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal is giving new life to questions that critics — and even some Bush admirers — have harbored about whether the first president with a master’s in business administration relies too much on like-minded advisers, too readily equates dissent with disloyalty and is too averse to admitting mistakes.
[…]
Officials who have worked with Mr. Bush as governor and president say his administration is striking for its internal discipline. There is little debate at cabinet meetings or other private councils, which mainly serve as forums that let Mr. Bush restate his goals and hear each official’s report, according to past participants. Leaks and public disagreements aren’t tolerated. His circle of advisers is small, and he isn’t a “walk around” manager who tries to canvass opinions from a variety of officials.
If controlling petty squabbling and media leaks is one’s top priority, then I suppose Bush’s leadership style is effective (unless the leak is about undercover CIA agents). But when a president surrounds himself with sycophants who share an identical worldview — or, at a minimum, won’t challenge the boss’ worldview — it’s a recipe for failure.
Bush is confident in his decisions, even when he’s wrong. He then finds aides who place loyalty above all else, and they remind him of how great his decisions are. No one tells him what he needs to hear, and since Bush serves as his own “yes man,” the White House doesn’t change directions when it needs to.
In a number of interviews, Bush watchers, including many Republicans, cite other problems the administration has weathered that reflect some of the same management shortcomings. Among them are the use of bad intelligence to detail the case on Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction and Mr. Bush’s subsequent resistance to calls for an independent investigation of prewar intelligence. The list also includes the administration’s withholding from Congress an analyst’s projection that the Medicare prescription-drug benefit would cost far more than the $400 billion over 10 years that Mr. Bush had cited during debate on the benefit.
“A continuing problem for the administration is that they fail to adapt after their initial policy assumptions turn out to be false,” says Roger Cressey, who served on the National Security Council staff under the current administration and President Clinton. “There is a stubbornness not to admit mistakes or show weakness, which is a clear reflection of the president’s management style.”
Kevin Drum had a terrific take on the tragic shortcomings of Bush’s leadership style a couple of weeks ago.
Bush styles himself a “CEO president,” but the world is full to bursting with CEOs who have goals they would dearly love to attain but who lack either the skill or the fortitude to make them happen. They assign tasks to subordinates without making sure the subordinates are capable of doing them — but then consider the job done anyway because they’ve “delegated” it. They insist they want a realistic plan, but they’re unwilling to do the hard work of creating one — all those market research reports are just a bunch of ivory tower nonsense anyway. They work hard — but only on subjects in their comfort zone. If they like dealing with people, they can’t bring themselves to read all those tedious analyst’s reports, and if they like numbers, they can’t bring themselves to spend time chattering with distributors about their latest prospect.
And most important of all, weak CEOs are unwilling to recognize bad news and perform unpleasant tasks to fix it — tasks like like confronting poorly performing subordinates or firing people. Good CEOs suck in their guts and do it anyway.
George Bush is, fundamentally, a mediocre CEO, the kind of insulated leader who’s convinced that his instincts are all he needs. Unfortunately, like many failed CEOs before him, he’s about to learn that being sure you’re right isn’t the same thing as actually being right.
So sure: George Bush is genuinely committed to winning in Iraq. He just doesn’t know how to do it and doesn’t have the skills, experience, or personality to look beyond his own instincts in order to figure it out. America is about to pay a heavy price for that.