We've heard that some of Alberto Gonzales' Harvard Law classmates think he's done a pretty lousy job as Attorney General.
Now, what exactly does George W. Bush’s alma mater think of the first MBA President? They think that BushCo is a case study in "failed leadership", and the President and his friends in the mass media threaten national security. Fire Bush and his management team before The Decider and Fox News destroy what’s left of the country.
That’s the judgment of Harvard Business School professor D. Quinn Mills and coauthor Steven Rosefielde in their new book, Masters of Illusion: American Leadership in the Media Age (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
D. Quinn Mills is the Alfred J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
MORE below . . .
George W. Bush is a "conservative" who turned the biggest federal surplus in history into the world's largest national debt. He's "the uniter" who polarized American politics as no President has before. And, Dubya is the "War President" who wrecked the U.S. Army and the CIA in Iraq, causing his own appointees on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to mutiny.
No wonder, then, that even at that bastion of the American Establishment, the Harvard Business School, professors use the terms "failure", "naive", "self-defeating", "dangerously optimistic" to describe Bush and the corporate media that continues to prop him up.
This from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, "Learning from Failed Political Leadership",
Q&A with: D. Quinn Mills
Published: March 26, 2007
Author: Martha Lagace
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/...
Professor Mills’ book is "a historically significant case study on how the American President deals with foreign policy. [Mills and Rosefielde] are highly critical of much presidential leadership in the past, asking not just whether what happened was good or bad, but whether or not much better results could have been achieved with better leadership. This is a very important question to be addressed to business leadership also."
Mills says in an interview:
We conclude that America has not had very good presidential leadership. Our country has survived, prospered, and often prevailed not because of our political leadership, but in spite of it.
So, what are the lessons that these Harvard dons say a Failed President has for American business leaders?
"The Decider" Was Doomed to Fail, and Threatens to Drag America Down With Him
LESSON 1: FIRE THE DECIDER, IMMEDIATELY, ALONG WITH HIS ENABLERS IN THE CORPORATE MEDIA
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/...
A successful leader must be able to persuade people to follow a certain path, which inevitably requires the ability to change people's minds. In order to do this, he or she must be a good persuader (part salesperson, part teacher), skills that some business leaders ignore as unimportant. Being decisive is ineffective if employees can't be convinced to follow the new strategy—this is one important lesson from the difficult situation in which President George W. Bush finds himself today. In the book we examine the President's missteps that turned tremendous widespread support into overwhelming opposition for his Iraq war.
- PIG RANCHERS MAKE POOR GLOBAL EXECUTIVES
http://www.box13.org/...
Our presidential candidates have little or no international experience going into the job, a huge handicap that leads to poor foreign policy. Our leaders assume that the U.S. model of business and governance is ideal, with some small adjustments, for all countries and that our job is to go forth and remake the world in our image. This approach is naive and self-defeating.
- FIRE THE PEOPLE THE DECIDER HIRED – THE ONE’S WITH BLOOD-STAINED SUITS – CALL SECURITY, NOW.
http://www.nalinimalani.com/...
The success or failure of American foreign policy directly impacts the success or failure of American companies abroad. For example, wars currently impede ordinary business in the Mideast and Africa. Anti-Americanism is curtailing the flow of students from Europe to American universities and American companies. Negative attitudes toward American companies, brands, and products are growing stronger in much of the world.
- KILL YOUR TV, AND PINK-SLIP THE NETWORK NEWS EXECUTIVES
http://img253.imageshack.us/...
Yet the U.S. mass media continues to paint a dangerously optimistic picture of the global business environment for American companies. Companies who remove their rose-colored glasses will be much better positioned to profit from both positive and negative global developments.
- FOX NEWS IS A GREATER THREAT THAN OSAMA BIN LADEN – NUKE RUPERT MURDOCH IN HIS CAVE BEFORE HE CAN STRIKE AGAIN
http://susanmernit.blogspot.com/...
American political debate is increasingly dominated by hype, exaggeration, and the demonization of our opponents. When complex events transpire, the media instantaneously supplies a convenient explanation, even as the players conceal the real facts. When the true story emerges the originals are never corrected, particularly on television. One consequence is that our minds contain decades of misinformation that now forms the foundation for faulty decision making.
- WALMART, LUKOIL, AND BP, TOO
http://www.nationalterroralert.com/...
The most important threats to America in the decade ahead are from major powers, not terrorists per se. Much of what we treat as dangers from terrorists and rogue states are in fact actions conceived of, supported, and protected by our major rivals (i.e., Russia, China, and the European Union).
- THE ACTUAL COST OF BUSH’S WARS IS EVEN HIGHER THAN YOU THINK
http://www.ka.net/...
Utilize American military power sparingly.
(c) Avoid large-scale police actions (such as are now occurring in Iraq), especially where our military is diverted from their primary mission to perform police work.
(d) Minimize the perceived danger that we present to other countries through continuous consultations and through self-imposed limitations on our ambitions.
(e) Master the illusions offered to our public by the mass media, and avoid quixotic efforts to reshape the world into our own image.
SNIP
The most significant core concept is strategic independence, described above. The second is critical leadership assessment—the notion that a leader should not be evaluated solely on the basis of what was accomplished, but also on the opportunity cost of what could have been accomplished, such as avoiding war or fighting a shorter war, and wasn't.
- OBJECTS IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
http://www.naturescornermagazine.com...
In business, two top executives can have good relations—be civil to one another, even compliment one another, smiling before television cameras during joint appearances—but not be partners at all, but instead bitter rivals, competing and betraying one another. Relations, good or bad, tell us nothing about the underlying situation. Relations are matters of press releases; of statements made by leaders at press conferences. The underlying situation may be deteriorating very quickly, but leaders are all smiles for the camera.
Superficial issues of trade or cultural relations may be cordial, whereas underneath all is fury. For example, when President Bush visited Russia in May 2005, he took a spin in President Vladimir Putin's classic Volga. Whether the pair enjoyed their road trip is not going to help us understand the geopolitical rivalry between the two nations and where it is taking us.
Journalists, commentators, and editors ordinarily cannot determine the strategy of leaders of our own or other countries (some wouldn't recognize a strategy if they encountered it), and without a sense of strategy, they can't comprehend tactics, so they focus on the most useful superficial, undependable, and misleading of all factors—relationships.
***
Should we be surprised by Prof. Mills conclusions?
Is Mills some sort of radical, out-of-step with his colleagues in his judgment of Bush as a paragon of management disaster and corporate media as an enemy of America? I don’t think so. In fact, the wreck of the ship of state under a "Unitary Executive" was entirely predictable from the research of Professor Quy Nguyen Huy, published in the issue of Harvard Business Review, coincidentally, that appeared in September, 2001.
In fact, according to Huy’s insights into organizational behavior, the only hope the Bush Administration had once it got rolling into a post-9/11 Police State was that whistleblowers and responsible Middle Managers in federal agencies – people like Valerie Plame, Ambassador Wilson, Sibel Edmonds, James Comey, Patrick Fitzgerald, and Jack Goldsmith – would rescue the organization from the mistakes and unchecked power plays of top executives.
The idea being put forward here goes to something fundamental about all human organizations, not just for-profit business.
Leaders who try to run things as a top-down "Decider", according to Prof. Huy, fail about eighty percent of the time. That applies to nation-states, as well as companies. As Prof. Mills also concludes, authoritarian leaders -- particularly one that's as cut off from the world, uncurious, and inarticulate as Dubya -- are likely to fail.
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.ha...
Quy Nguyen Huy
The very phrase "middle managers" evokes mediocrity: a person who stubbornly defends the status quo because he’s too unimaginative to dream up anything better—or, worse, someone who sabotages others’ attempts to change the organization for the better.
The popular press and a couple generations’ worth of change-management consultants have reinforced this stereotype. Introducing a major change initiative? Watch out for the middle managers—that’s where you’ll find the most resistance. Reengineering your business processes? Start by sweeping out the middle managers—they’re just intermediaries; they don’t add value. Until very recently, anyone who spent time reading about management practices, as opposed to watching real managers at work, might have concluded that middle managers are doomed to extinction or should be.
Does that approach of gutting the middle ranks to enable change sound familiar?
Think about what Donald Rumsfeld did to Generals who questioned his Iraq invasion plans. Recall, also, the number that Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby did at CIA Counter-Proliferation Division, and the purge of the U.S. Attorneys in Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department.
No one should be surprised that the Bush-Cheney Administration failed once they started forcing out and destroying their critics. Anyone who is familiar with organizational theory -- or the principles of democratic government -- would know that John Yoo's theory of Unitary Government was likely to have disastrous consequences in application. Professor Huy cautions:
But don’t pull out the pink slips just yet. I recently completed a six-year study of middle managers — in particular, their role during periods of radical organizational change . . . My findings may surprise you.
Middle managers, it turns out, make valuable contributions to the realization of radical change at a company—contributions that go largely unrecognized by most senior executives. . . they manage the tension between continuity and change—they keep the organization from falling into extreme inertia, on the one hand, or extreme chaos, on the other.
SNIP
Taken as a group, middle managers are more diverse than their senior counterparts are in, for instance, functional area, work experience, geography, gender, and ethnic background. As a result, their insights are more diverse. Middle management is thus fertile ground for creative ideas about how to grow and change a business. In fact, middle managers’ ideas are often better than their bosses’ ideas.
Consider a large telecommunications company that I studied. When it initiated a radical change program a few years ago, 117 separate projects were funded. Of the projects that senior executives had proposed, 80% fell short of expectations or failed outright. Meanwhile, 80% of the projects that middle managers had initiated succeeded, bringing in at least $300 million in annual profits
SNIP
So, what's the lesson here. Obviously, smart people don't fire or muzzle the experienced commanders and intelligence officers who warn them not to start wars of aggression. However, the Bush-Cheney Administration didn't just fail because Dubya and Dick are incompetent and evil. Well, they are, and they did, but their failure points to a fatal fundamental flaw in authoritarian organizations, in general.
In broader terms, those who try to bully or deceive their way to absolute power are likely to fail. And, their failures can cause the entire organization to fall in the face of aggressive competitors, with ruinous results for everyone. Sometimes, the competent middle can save things, but there is no guarantee that they can or they will take the risks to try, or that they will receive the support they need to succeed in their rescue mission.
CONCLUSION: IMPEACH, INNOVATE OR PERISH
Senior executives who attempt radical changes screw up about 80% of the time, which is why they should never be allowed to remain in power once their failures are manifest, particularly if they resist correction from below. The 2006 elections should have been Bush's cue for a speedy withdrawal from Iraq, and a thousand other changes in direction. Organizations that can not innovate to remove failed executives in time have little chance of survival.
The Establishment has concluded that removing Bush-Cheney is a matter of national security. If Impeachment is not a practical political means to that end, then innovation becomes necessary.