No one really likes the idea of a CEO president anyway

Most inexperienced MBA’s start off as lowperson on the totem pole if they can get jobs at all. Bush was never a CEO. His daddy’s friends gave him everything he ever got in business. He was a failure in business and not in a good way.
You can’t run a country with a grade B knowledge of some business case histories. You can be sure they never study a Bush business as a model in B-School.

Actually he is running the government very much like some of the businesses that are out there today.

His board of directors (the Supreme Court) is being packed with cronies, who will soon be unable to conduct any checks and balances on power (save for Hamdan, which is the very reason they are trying to fill the court with Scalitos, etc-which will be appealed long enough to get another conservative on court), effectively rubberstamping all sorts of illegal policies.

Loyalty remains priority one and anyone who disagrees with policy will be muzzled or pushed aside, only to complain for years in a wilderness on the outside, only being listened to when it is far too late.

The revolving door congress and lobbying industry are the executive team – the slice of the population who is rapidly becoming super wealthy. They, like the leaders of corporate America, rake in the bucks, while wages for most workers stagnate.

Mid to high level schemers are cooking up all sorts of schemes to defraud people and pare back their rights (Medicare part D recipients, Addington and friends tearing up the constitution in the name of helping us) in the same way energy companies created power shortages and drove up prices, got massive tax breaks by writing their own legislation, etc, while and lied to their staff (the populus) about the stability of the organization and how above board everything is (because we say so).

So it looks to me that our President IS running a very MBA like government – only problem is that the company it resembles most is Enron.

Goddamnit, if only Gore had countered Bush’s “Ah’m a CEO! Ah’ll run the country like a business!” argument by reminding people explicitly how CEOs in the last thirty years have been making their reputations: by laying off workers and sending jobs overseas, slashing health and pensions for the little guy *and* the medium guy, granting themselves ever-larger slices of corporate profits, breaking the law to do what they want because it makes money for them and their pals, and bribing politicians to turn a blind eye to their financial chicanery.

Congratulations, America. You wanted* a CEO? You got a CEO. Why the hell are you so surprised at what’s happened since?

The only people that I can find who like Mitch are the same people who rabidly support Bush (literally…they guy that was lecturing me at the July 4th picnic had little bits of foam in the corners of his mouth as he condemned me as a ‘fruitbat’…my ‘moonbat’ correction was completely lost on him).

Sorry ‘Bagger, but I gotta drag out the soapbox on this MBA thing:

MBA management is predicated on the notion that it is not necessary to know the product or business to run a company. That’s complete bullshit. Executives in this country are rewarded for buying competing companies, dismantling them (usually causing loss of jobs), keeping the little bits that have value and discarding the parts (and people) that are “non-productive”. I’m in academia…no one is going to buy out IU, but I can’t tell you how many of my friends in the private sector have lost jobs because they’re rif’d following an acquisition by some mega corp.

Every time one of the telco’s buys another of the telco’s, or a cable company acquires an ISP, it’s hailed American Business in action. Crap. The American way of live is based on productivity and innovation, not swallowing competitors whole.
What the rail barons of the 19th century did to the Native Americans and their exploitation of the Chinese is not in the least bit laudable, but at least they were building something tangible. When SBC ‘merged’ with AT&T, it was nothing more than a prime example of a corporate shark growing up and eating it’s own mother.

There.
I feel better now.

To echo a point you made CB as well as by iucaffiend above, “My Man Mitch” Daniels has really, really screwed up Indiana through his “CEO” abilities to run state government.

Now in our great Hoosier state:

— An outside consortium of dubvious financing runs the Indiana toll road
— It takes weeks and possibly months to get your first unemployment check (if you’re laid off or your position is terminated) because of that agency’s “reorganization” to modernize/streamline the process
— The Bureau of Motor Vehicles is in the process of “upgrading” to new software, which means you can’t renew your Commercial license for at least a month and must be issued a temporary paper permit until then. No word yet if the “upgraded” software means you’ll wait in line three days instead of the customary 1-3 hours
— And state employees no longer can negotiate through a union as Mitch’s degree states the state will no longer bargain with a union on behalf of said employees

The sooner we get Mitch the hell out of here and back to whatever third-world company he ran, the better!

I was talking about a co-worker about this today. I have worked in the private sector and more recently for a few years in the public sector and have always laughed when republican congressmen and senators talked about running the government like a business. These people don’t know, most have never been in business, not for real at least. Not so they would laugh at Dilbert or at least understand what the strip was even talking about. They only think it is efficient because their rich contributors pains such a rosy picture and because the grass is always greener on the other side. They have no clue that buiness can be stunningly inefficient, political, and wasteful. Heck Enron alone should be the poster child for why the government shouldn’t be run like a business. They just want business to be efficient to provide a counter argument to government which they hate (unless it is earmarks for the constituents and results in money/votes).

Ah, I just love to misspell things while insulting others’ intelligence.

deserver = deserve

“MBA management is predicated on the notion that it is not necessary to know the product or business to run a company.”

Sadly, it’s pathetically true. I think that that is stamped onto their thick skulls as soon as they enter school. Being utter clueless and no experience is a great way to run things which is why MBAs seem to think you can replace experienced folks with technical degrees with average joes off the street and get the same results (and yet they’re shocked when it doesn’t happen.)

The real problem isn’t the MBA itself, but rather a lot of the folks who take it. I’ve found in my own experiece is that an MBA is like a badge that says the holder of this degree has a lot insecurities, neuroses and/or psychotic traits and should be proven incompetent unless otherwise noted.

Clearly, you all are laboring under the impression that one needs knowledge, policy, and execution to run a government. No, you bureaucratic fools. All you need is a slogan: “government should be run like a business.”

It all falls into place after that, don’t you see?

Next thing you know, you’ll be asking a person to define exactly what he means when he says “I am pro-business.” No more needs to be said there, either. The slogan is self-evidentally self-evident.

/ sarcasm

Rhetorical question for rhetorical slingers of “run like a business”: So, you’re saying that government should exist to make a profit?

iucaffiend — You’ve got my vote for the best rant of the day.

Government is supposed to have a level of cunbersom inefficency. I agree 100% with the goal of government as stated above by The senior Mr. Stein (via howard). The best government is the one that meets the needs of its people. I can’t believe that W’s Harvard Legacy MBA was ever counted among his positive attributes. They do seem to be good at providing ROI to the shareholders. We’ll it is more like an increased dividend where he who has the most shares benefits the most.

To further the WalMart-Tiffany-Enron example, I see it mostly as Enron where they gave (took) profits and returns to the shareholders and the managers at the expense of actually delivering a product in return. Bush’s government is more like an energy contract with a wholely owned subsidiary while not actually providing electricity to its customers.

Boy, I hope someone will sieze on this idea and use it to re-rail the neo-con economic BS.

I’m not entirely willing to throw out the notion that someone who’s successful in business can be successful in politics. Michael Bloomberg’s done pretty well in NYC, and in fact I’d be thrilled to see him get a shot at Bush’s current job. That said, Bloomberg got better (and won much higher approval) once he became a bit less high-handed and authoritarian. Salesmanship is a bigger part of the job description for politicians than business executives.

The point, of course, is that Bush was never successful in business. His pre-politics career, such as it was, was two parts cronyism and one part dishonesty. And his lack of salesmanship skills, at least to those who aren’t already in agreement with him, has been shown by his failure to move public opinion on the war, Social Security reform… pretty much everything, in fact.

We really need to compare the so called CEO presidency of Boy George II with the predecessor. Remember the Policy Wonk presidency of Clinton/Gore? Remember the first surpluses of your adult lifetime?

It was the wonkiness of Clinton/Gore that the Republican’ts were running against in 2000. They thought they had a better model. Well, we can see how that turned out, can’t we? Just look at CB’s article on Tucker Carlson’s repudiation of his own ‘solution’ to Al Gore.

[T]he sentiment among Bush’s fiscally conscious critics seems to be that if he had only applied his Harvard Business School training a little better…

does you really think he can remember it?

The MBA president is just the latest iteration of a long-running American love affair with successful businessmen. Thorstein Veblen wrote about this faith in the general competence of businessmen with respect to University governance nearly a century ago in The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men.

The fact remains, the modern civilized community is reluctant to trust its serious interests to others than men of pecuniary substance, who have proved their fitness for the direction of academic affairs by acquiring, or by otherwise being possessed of, considerable wealth.(2*) It is not simply that experienced businessmen are, on mature reflection, judged to be the safest and most competent trustees of the university’s fiscal interests. The preference appears to be almost wholly impulsive, and a matter of habitual bias. It is due for the greater part to the high esteem currently accorded to men of wealth at large, and especially to wealthy men who have succeeded in business, quite apart from any special capacity shown by such success for the guardianship of any institution of learning. Business success is by common consent, and quite uncritically, taken to be conclusive evidence of wisdom even in matters that have no relation to business affairs. So that it stands as a matter of course that businessmen must be preferred for the guardianship and control of that intellectual enterprise for the pursuit of which the university is established, as well as to take care of the pecuniary welfare of the university corporation. And, full of the same naive faith that business success “answereth all things,” these businessmen into whose hands this trust falls are content to accept the responsibility and confident to exercise full discretion in these matters with which they have no special familiarity. Such is the outcome, to the present date, of the recent and current secularization of the governing boards. The final discretion in the affairs of the seats of learning is entrusted to men who have proved their capacity for work that has nothing in common with the higher learning.(3*)

This quite simply is an unfortunate part of our cultural heritage which we will have to battle ad infinitum.

Next time someone says that they want to run the government like a business, the candidate should provide:
1. a detailed mission statement
2. supply metrics for measuring success and failure
3. list of all constituencies to be served

Re: 33

Tosser makes a good point. However, it is not so much that most businesses fail, it is that the purpose of incorporation is to limit risk, i.e. it is to limit the risk of the executives in case the business fails. Bush has taken that very much to heart, as he seems to think being president shields him from just about any consequences to his actions. IMO, this is one of the arguments as to why Bush should be impeaced, so that future presidents understand that being president is not like being CEO.