Would You Choose George W. Bush As Your CEO?

Leadership is the crucial issue as we face great threats to our economic security and our personal security. But leadership is more than picking a course and staying with it. As John Kerry said in the first presidential debate, leadership means picking the right course and staying with it, and as President Bush said in the same debate, leadership means hard work and making hard decisions. To make hard decisions and choose the right course, a leader must get good reliable information and have the experience and intelligence to evaluate it.

What kind of leadership has President Bush provided? His first term as president has been beset with problems - evidence of lies, ethical violations, law-breaking, whistleblowers, conflicts with employees and allies, and plans gone awry. Sounds like Enron and Worldcom, doesn’t it? In his defense, George W. Bush has argued that he has been let down by rogue employees - CIA intelligence staff in the case of erroneous allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and lowly soldiers in the case of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. But this is the same defense offered by Kenneth Lay of Enron and Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom for the frauds and illegal activities of their former companies. Isolated instances can be explained away as the product of rogue employees. But the number and nature of the problems being encountered by the Bush administration are not the result of a few employees. They are far more widespread, just as they were at Enron and Worldcom. Employees do not operate in a vacuum. Where there are widespread problems at a corporation, the first place to look is the executive offices. The CEO sets the standard for the corporation.

President Bush has touted himself as the first president who holds a Harvard M.B.A. and he prides himself on his CEO-style of management. But being a CEO doesn’t mean that you can simply pick a bright group of trusted advisers, delegate as the president is fond of doing, and then walk away. It means you are in charge and you are ultimately responsible for the actions of your administration. After Enron and Worldcom, Congress and the Securities and Exchange Administration (SEC) do not allow CEOs to delegate and to absolve themselves of responsibilty.

Can President Bush meet the standards set for corporate CEOs by Congress and the SEC? Would You Choose George W. Bush as Your CEO? analyzes George W. Bush’s leadership against the corporate standard. Written by an experienced corporate lawyer, Would You Choose George W. Bush as Your CEO? looks at President Bush’s leadership traits revealed in published insider revelations regarding the inner workings of the Bush Administration and shows how such leadership traits could have led to current situations in Iraq and at home.

George W. Bush entered the White House without experience for the job. Since his election, he has shown a profound lack of curiosity and unwillingness to immerse himself in issues to make up for deficiencies in his background. He relies without question on a small circle of advisers, many of whom were unknown to him prior to his election, and he favors those who provide clear, unambiguous options. Kenneth Lay of Enron showed a similar lack of curiousity and relied heavily on Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow, and look where that led him.

George W. Bush is notoriously impatient with process and detail and his staff knows it. He is a CEO who wants results and doesn’t show a lot of interest in how they are achieved. His faith and decisiveness persuade some employees of the rightness of his course and they will move heaven and earth to achieve his goals, even if it means lying and engaging in ethical violations and worse. Bush’s competitiveness and narrow definition of loyalty that discourages internal dissent lead other employees to lie out of fear. He has created an environment where he is bound to get slanted, biased information that supports his goals and fails to identify the downsides. Others, feeling powerless to voice conflicting views or alter the course of the administration, become whistleblowers like Sherron Watkins of Enron.

Decisions are made and courses are established by President Bush without a full airing of the issues, and, once established, do not vary, even as facts and circumstances prove initial assumptions to be wrong. President Bush reacted passionately to 9/11 and was unable or unwilling to temper his passion with the dispassionate logic of a seasoned CEO. He set bold, unprecedented new goals for our nation within days and weeks after the tragedy and has not reconsidered them with the calmness time provides. Our country’s CEO has sent us into unknown and uncharted territory with our allies and our enemies. As success becomes less and less likely, employees become more desperate, sliding further down the slippery slope to lies, deceit and ethical violations. Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebbers showed the same unwillingness to alter course when their strategies began to falter, and look at the lengths their employees went to in order to stay the course.

Would You Choose George W. Bush as Your CEO? provides a new perspective on political leadership and shows how the same traits that have led companies like Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossings, Adelphia and others to defraud shareholders and stumble, could profoundly affect our nation’s security and prosperity. It summarizes existing revelations regarding George W. Bush’s leadership and offers the reader his own opportunity to judge whether he would choose to invest in a corporation headed by CEO George W. Bush.