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BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
President Bush’s management skills:
a Harvard case study
resident George W Bush is the very first President to hold a
P Masters Degree in Business Administration. Even better (or
worse, depending on your perspective), his MBA is from
Harvard Business School, where postgraduate management train-
ing was invented in the early part of the last century, and which to
many stands as a symbol of the good, the bad, and the ugly faces of
modern management. Harvard MBAs indisputably lead more
major corporations, receive higher starting salaries fresh out of
school, and carry with them more élan and glamour than the grad-
uates of any rival business schools – facts which do not necessarily
lead to admiration and love.
The comparatively small amount of attention paid by the politi-
cal press to the President’s Harvard MBA partially reflects a general-
ized ignorance of, and hostility toward, the degree itself. More impor-
tantly, acknowledging that he learned any valuable intellectual per-
spectives would contradict the storyline that young W was a party
animal, who coasted through his elite education, scarcely cracking a
book. In other words, he is too ‘stupid’ to have picked up any tricks
across the Charles River from Harvard Square.
This is patently incorrect. Having attended Harvard Business
School at the same time as the President, graduating from the two-
year program a year after he did, and then serving on its faculty after
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BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
a year’s interval spent writing a PhD thesis, I am intimately familiar
with the rigors of the program at the time, and the miniscule degree
of slack cut for even the most well-connected students, when their
performance did not make the grade.
There is simply no way on earth that the son of the then-
Ambassador to China (technically, head of the Beijing Liaison
Office), or anyone else, could have coasted through Harvard Business
School with a ‘gentleman’s C’. I never, ever heard of a case of an
incompetent student being allowed to graduate, simply because a cer-
tain family was prominent. On the contrary, I did hear stories of well-
born students having to leave prior to graduation. The academic stan-
dards were a point of considerable pride.
An inability to learn and apply the lessons of the classroom and
the voluminous nightly study materials, from regression analysis to
strategy-formulation to marketing to human behavior in organiza-
tions, was simply not tolerated. Grading took place on a strict curve,
and those who found themselves on the lower range of the curve in
too many subjects hit the dreaded ‘screen’ and had to supply convinc-
ing rationales to the Academic Performance Committee as to why
they should be allowed to attend the second year of the program,
much less graduate. The screen was a vital component of the HBS
quality assurance program, itself an essential method of protecting the
value of the school’s MBA ‘brand’. Harvard Business School would no
sooner voluntarily graduate an incompetent MBA holder than Coca
Cola would ship-out bottles containing dead mice.
Accepting the premise that George W Bush actually learned the
lessons taught him at Harvard Business School, there are a number of
characteristics of his administration which become far more under-
standable. Here are a few of the more important ways in which his
Harvard MBA explains the way he governs.
The very first lesson drummed-into new students, as they file into
the classrooms of Aldrich Hall, is that management consists of deci-
sion-making under conditions of uncertainty. There is never perfect
information, and decisions often have to be made even when you’d
really prefer to know a lot more. Given this reality, students are taught
many techniques for analyzing the data which is available, extracting
the non-obvious facets, learning how to read into it the reasonable
inferences which can be made, while quantifying the risks of doing so,
and learning the costs and value of obtaining additional data.
The job of the executive is to weigh probabilities in evaluating
imperfect information; to assess the costs and benefits of acting or not
acting; and to construct scenarios around the various possible time
frames for taking action, taking into account the probable reactions of
the other vital actors. Sometimes the costs of not acting are simply too
great, and the downside potential of erroneous information are too
low to prefer inaction.
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THREE STRATEGIC GOALS
A second broad and important lesson the President learned at
Harvard Business School is to embrace a finite number of strategic
goals, and to make each one of those goals serve as many desirable
ends as possible. The truism of this lesson is that if everything is a pri-
ority, then nothing is a priority. If you can’t focus on everything, then
you need to be able to focus on those few goals that will have the
broadest impact, leading to a future capacity to attain other desirable
ends. No exact number of goals is the limit, but three is an awfully
good number to aim at. Those goals should be mutually consistent, so
that the step-by-step accomplishment of each one aids in the achieve-
ment of the others.
There is both evidence and logic to suggest that George W Bush
has chosen just a small handful of major goals. His current number
one priority was thrust upon him: winning a complete victory in the
War on Terror. There is no evidence that this was on his initial short
list of priorities. But after 9/11, he made himself very clear, very
quickly, that his priorities had drastically changed. He also set out a
realistic time frame – decades – for this number one goal. From this
broad goal cascade a series of subordinate tasks, from persuading dic-
tators that it is in their interests to eschew support for terror groups,
to strengthening American military, intelligence and domestic law
enforcement capabilities, for example.
I think his second broad goal is to build a long-lasting pattern
of Republican political dominance of government, by forging a
new grand coalition of voting blocs, adding to the existing GOP
stalwart groups (conservatives, low tax lovers, the traditionally reli-
gious and small business owners) a substantial number of lower
income, but upward-mobility-aspiring members of every group,
including ethnic minorities.
The goal is not simply to attract people by serving their interests,
but to convince them to identify themselves with the Republicans, as
the political instrument of their dreams.
President Bush addressed his base directly during the election
campaign, but also made it a priority to reach out to expand his vot-
ing support (for example, by his appeals to what he called ‘discerning
Democrats’) as he did on catering to his base.
A third major goal, closely related, is to get and keep the econo-
my growing at a healthy pace. A healthy economy that creates oppor-
tunities for work and self-advancement generates new members for
President Bush’s Republican coalition. A robust and successful con-
duct of the War on Terror secures domestic safety, encouraging invest-
ment and growth, and brings pride as an American to all groups in
society. All of these factors encourage more people to identify as
Republicans, securing the political goal of the President. The three
goals mutually reinforce one another.
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MANAGEMENT STYLES
Another basic lesson young George W Bush learned in the class-
rooms of Harvard Business School is that different managers have
legitimately different styles of operating as executives. There is no one
right way to manage. Successful executives develop a style which is
true to their own nature, and which builds on their strengths. George
W Bush is a natural delegator, an executive who seeks the best possi-
ble people to work for him, instills loyalty (by practicing it himself ),
and then gives them plenty of room to operate. His ‘sins’ as an exec-
utive have been, and are likely to remain those of a loose leash, allow-
ing ineffective subordinates too much time and too much room. This
is why it has taken him so long to remove certain cabinet officials.
The case study method as practiced at Harvard Business School
features intense discussions of alternative plans for defining and then
BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
resolving the problems described in the B-
school’s famous cases. A well-structured spirited
discussion has the virtue of systematically reveal-
ing the implications of different courses of action,
allowing deeper analysis, and ultimately leading
to better decisions. President Bush’s preference in
his first term for keeping senior advisors of dif-
ferent persuasions, such as Colin Powell and Paul
Wolfowitz, reflects the value he places on hearing
the best case made for alternative courses of
action. Critics who speak of a power struggle
which needs to be resolved in favor of one side or
the other, completely miss the point.
THE POKER-PLAYING
PRESIDENT
One final note on George W Bush’s man-
agement style and his Harvard Business
School background does not derive from the
classroom, per se. One feature of life there is
that a subculture of poker players exists.
Poker is a natural fit with the inclinations,
talents, and skills of many future entrepre-
neurs. A close reading of the odds, combined
with the ability to out-psych the opposition,
leads to capital accumulation in many fields,
aside from the poker table.
By reputation, the President was a very avid
and skillful poker player when he was an MBA
student. One of the secrets of a successful poker
player is to encourage your opponent to bet a
lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern
of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W Bush’s political career.
He is not one to loudly proclaim his strengths at the beginning of a
campaign. Instead, he bides his time, does not respond forcefully, at
least at first, to critiques from his enemies. If anything, this apparent
passivity only goads them into making their case more emphatically –
or, to continue the poker analogy, into betting a lot of their chips on
one side of these questions. ■
Thomas Lifson is the editor and publisher of The American Thinker
www.americanthinker.com, a website featuring daily analysis and commentary on issues of
public importance. A former professor at Harvard Business School and Columbia University’s
Graduate School of International Affairs, Dr Lifson is also a consultant to Western and
Japanese businesses on organizational and strategic issues. He may be contacted at
publisher@Americanthinker.com.
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