BUSH THE FAILED CEO

Steven Pearlstein:

...over the years I've noticed that companies that get into trouble, or lose their edge, have many of the same characteristics at the top: an overemphasis on hierarchy and orderliness; a penchant for secrecy and keeping decisions closely held; an instinct to discount information or dismiss views that don't comport with the company line; a habit of pronouncing rather than engaging intellectually with those outside the inner circle; an unhealthy arrogance and sense of entitlement.

When something goes wrong, the all-too-typical corporate response is to downplay its importance or bury it in bureaucratic processes. And if that doesn't work, the next line of defense is to pin it all on a few "bad apples" and move aggressively to "put the issue behind us," without ever really admitting serious error.

That should sound familiar to anyone who has watched Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Snow on C-SPAN, or read Paul O'Neill's account of his ill-fated attempts to warn of the budgetary fallout from a second tax cut, or heard what Richard Clarke told the 9/11 commission about warnings of terrorist attacks that fell on deaf ears. It also describes to a T the process by which the administration has dealt with Iraq, from the original decision to go to war to the handling of the prison scandal.

Here's a little test: You are president of the United States and revelations about abuse of Iraqi prisoners has created the biggest crisis since Sept. 11, inflaming the Arab world, undercutting support at home and undermining our moral authority in the world. How do you spend the weekend?

If you answered "spend it at Camp David as planned, then drop in at the Pentagon on Monday to praise the defense secretary for doing a superb job," you just flunked, along with George W. Bush.
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The Bush team likes to crow that it brought disciplined, private-sector management to government. But as Joshua Marshall wrote last year in the Washington Monthly, theirs turns out to be a largely discredited, old-economy management style -- one better suited for the cartel-like oil, drug and railroad industries they came from than the messy, fast-changing realities facing the government of the United States.

As I wrote on May 4, "As director of corporate marketing and strategic communications for a Fortune 250 company, I have worked with three different highly effective and successful CEOs over the past 15 years. I can tell you, they weren't passive and they READ every report they could get their hands on. They were always the MOST knowledgeable people in the company. Can you imagine a top-level CEO of a publicly held company making his quarterly conference call to financial analysts and NOT knowing the answer to any of their questions? The Board of Directors would have serious questions about their ability to lead the company, especially after the analysts lowered their stock price expectations on that basis. And believe me, the quality of company leadership has a great deal to do with the confidence the market has in the company. There may not be a lot of checks and balances in corporate America today, but there is still one that is effective -- the market's rating of the company. In Bush's case, I think the rating would have to be "sell" or at least "underperform."