It’s odd to find yourself in management, assigning tasks, keeping an eye on the work of others, work you can probably no longer do, and judging them – scolding the careless, encouraging the hapless (even if that seldom makes them less hapless), and of course rewarding the competent, as best you can, because money is always tight and cooking up non-monetary rewards leads to your best worker smiling at you as if you’re some sort of trapped and hopeless fool. You are, but luckily those good workers are usually self-motivated, as they say. In systems work they just get a kick out of clever coding, or elegant solutions involving relationships between systems objects no one ever imagined – they like pulling the rabbit out of the hat and everyone sitting back in their chairs, stunned at how easily thorny problems can evaporate in a single instance of ultra-lucid thinking. They aren’t stuck in the everydayness of the work – they float above it, pretty much toying with it. Unfortunately these happy few also have their résumé floating throughout the industry – so the careless and the hapless are the core of your workforce. It’s not much fun.
Then there’s the other stuff that’s even less fun – setting goals, or having them set for you, resource allocation and all the intricacies of planning, balancing demands for changes as customers realize they forget they now actually need this or that feature that they didn’t think was important but, gosh, really is important. Then there’s budgeting. And there’s the unexpected, the personal stuff – Joe doesn’t like Jeff and won’t work with him, Sally thinks Janice is a stuck-up snob and wants you to do something about it, and then Mary sits down and tells you, in tears, that your own boss has been hitting on her. At the end of each day you just want to drink, heavily, and alone.
Perhaps parents with three or four children and those who have taught junior high make the best managers – they’ve faced all this in one way or another. But there are bad parents – the aloof or the overly protective, or the panicked or the indifferent. And you might remember junior high – those who taught you were not there because they were stunningly competent at life. There were the sadistic, who finally found a trapped audience they could bully, and be paid for it. And there were the befuddled, and those who decided they’d rather not grow up and found the company of thirteen-year-olds quite pleasant. The stunningly competent at life left – those who can’t do, teach, as they say. Parenting and teaching are not where you look for those who are management material.
Management, then, offers a puzzle. Who is good at it? Who is a natural? Is competent management a skill set one can learn, or a matter of some innate temperament – a gift for forgetting yourself and an array of what they call people skills, empathy mixed with focus on the task at hand, and a high tolerance of chaos and ambiguity? No one knows. It’s good to be retired from it.
But even in retirement you find yourself think about management issues. You look at the news. You understand that the executive branch of our government is the management branch – Congress passes the laws and approves the budget, the judiciary rules on who is playing fair and who isn’t, but the executive branch is there to manage the operation of the nation.
So you follow the news, using that model we all agree on – and you are amazed. Who are these clowns? Who put them in a management position? Oops – we did. What were we thinking?
Well, Bush has been called the CEO President, and he does have that management degree, that MBA from Harvard. That doesn’t count for much. Maura Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2004, reviewed a number of books on Bush’s management style and comes up with this (link no longer available):
President Bush styles himself as the first CEO President, applying the rigor and authority of his MBA education to the job of chief executive of the nation. But that’s not the picture that emerges from three recent insider accounts of the workings of the Bush administration, experts in decision-making and presidential management say. On the contrary, they say, the president appears to have a highly personal working style, with little emphasis on systematic analysis of major decisions.
“There seems to be almost an absence of any analytical or deliberative process for mapping the problem or exploring alternatives or estimating consequences,” said Graham Allison, a professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
And Bush appears to give greater weight to his own instincts than to experts or other sources of advice and information. The president has a “bias for action,” said Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “I’ve been struck by [how] Bush’s sense of personal identity as a leader shapes his decisions,” he said.
And now we’re where we are. Anyone who tells him that he’s really a great guy, and actually heroic, gets his ear, and he does what they want, feeling he’s being bold and heroic. The problem is the neoconservatives and the Project for the New America Century – PNAC – got to him and played him like a fiddle, and we’re in this war where we just cannot leave and we surely cannot stay. The first would result in chaos, and the second in our own ruin. It’s one hell of a way to run a country, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Those who are impulsive shouldn’t be in management, perhaps.
And as with all managers in over their heads all you can do is claim things are going just fine, even if your subordinates just shrug in resignation – the boss is just like that. What are you going to do?
Andrew Sullivan captures the problem with the foolish boss here:
The gulf between the continued complacency of the neocons and the reality of America’s position in the world is staggering. And that is a core divider in this election: do you believe that the US is in a crisis - economically, diplomatically, militarily and in terms of soft power? I do. If you think things are basically fine - that a massive unending war (now more expensive than Vietnam and financed by borrowing) is no big deal, that the unprecedented levels of public and private debt are trivial, that politics revolves around professional Rove-Morris tactics rather than any serious engagement with public policy - then a vote for Obama makes little sense.
Ah yes – this isn’t like it is at work. We can vote in a new boss.
Of course, one of those who would like the job is John McCain, the fellow who had no problem with us being in Iraq for one hundred years – as long as none of our folks gets killed.
This seems more of the same and Josh Marshall here notes that even the Republicans are uneasy with this:
Here’s why Republicans are scared to death of this. No one wants to be in Iraq 100 years from now, even if McCain stipulates to the fantasy that Iraqis will be happy having us occupy their country forever and that the place will become like Finland. And none of our soldiers will ever get killed there and it won’t cost any money. If that’s the explanation for why we shouldn’t be concerned that he’s happy to stay in Iraq for a century then that just tells people that McCain is living in a fantasy world.
No one wants a boss who fantasizes about such things. That’s what got us where we are.
But McCain says he isn’t proposing a hundred years of war, and he isn’t. We should cut him some slack there.
Over at the magazine Reason (of course) David Wiegel suggests we don’t:
The wiggle room comes when McCain says he’s okay with the 100 years “as long as our soldiers are not being wounded or maimed or killed.” And that’s where McCain’s defenders have chosen to stand and fight. See, McCain doesn’t want to fight a hot war for 100 years. He wants to have a base there until the Middle East stops producing threats to the U.S. To say otherwise is “an attack on McCain’s character,” as Michael Goldfarb puts it …
That’s a dodge, though. It assumes that 1) there is nothing controversial about building permanent bases in Iraq, 2) that maintaining those bases would be completely positive effects on the region, and that 3) there’s nothing wrong with a potential president telling the world we’ll be in Iraq forever. Not much room for realpolitik there, eh? It’s unfair to distort what McCain says, but it’s wrong to portray this as harmless straight talk.
Andrew Sullivan suggests McCain just isn’t management material:
My own view is that McCain’s comment, in its most benign formulation, misses the key element here: Islam. One reader helpfully pointed out that occupied Japan also had a fiercely proud populace revolted by foreign troops. Sure: but it had been defeated as a unitary state and its Emperor (which we wisely retained) gave the occupiers sanction. No such unitary state exists in Iraq; and Islam forbids the rule of infidels in its own heartlands - and Iraq has central religious importance for its various shrines and religious centers in the Muslim mind. Secularism has been in decline for a couple of decades. There is no way an Arab Muslim country will tolerate Western troops permanently based on their land - without constant war and threat of war. To believe otherwise is to engage in a “holiday from reality.” We’ve done enough of that.
You do want a manager connected to reality, to the basic facts. And you might want one who looks to the experience of others in similar situations. That sort of comes with the job, and that leads Sullivan to add this:
The future of a permanently occupied Iraq is less likely to be Japan than the West Bank. And the deeper we are stuck there, the more our predicament will become the awful, morally corrosive, soul-sapping experience of the occupying Israelis.
But then we’ve all had bosses who say things will work out – that everyone is just being so negative. Perhaps all of us have had that boss who snaps that he or she doesn’t want to hear about what might go wrong, that what-if contingency planning destroys moral or whatever. In that view, logic is defeatism. So you shrug and do your best.
You don’t apply logic, as Matthew Yglesias does here:
A further thought on John McCain’s “as long as our soldiers are not being wounded or maimed or killed” proviso to his Iraq forever policy. If we’re so sure the soldiers aren’t going to be in harm’s way, then what’s the base for? We’re all very glad that our troops in South Korea aren’t engaged in combat, but the point of having them there is that they might have to engage in combat. The hope is that they deter war with North Korea, but the risk is that they won’t.
In McCain’s world our troops need to continue fighting, killing, and dying in Iraq indefinitely in order to create a situation where, at some point, it becomes safe for them to stay in Iraq for no reason? It doesn’t seem like he’s genuinely thought this idea through. Maybe instead of lashing out at his critics, McCain should take some time to consider the issue and come up with a new position.
He won’t – he’s a leader, he scoffs at doubters. That must mean he’s management material. God help us all.
Well, there is Hillary Clinton. Would she be a good manager? In the Washington Post, here, Peter Beinart argues that how you campaign shows whether you would be a highly effective president:
Presidents tend to govern the way they campaigned. Jimmy Carter ran as a moralistic outsider in 1976, and he governed that way as well, refusing to compromise with a Washington establishment that he distrusted (and that distrusted him). Ronald Reagan’s campaign looked harsh on paper but warm and fuzzy on TV, as did his presidency. The 1992 Clinton campaign was like the Clinton administration: brilliant and chaotic, with a penchant for near-death experiences. And the 2000 Bush campaign presaged the Bush presidency: disciplined, hierarchical, loyal and ruthless.
Ross Douthat says don’t be fooled:
Except that to establish this supposed “pattern,” Beinart is comparing oranges to apples to pears: Carter gets judged on his persona, both on the campaign trail and in office; Reagan gets judged half on persona, half on policy; Clinton and Bush, meanwhile, get judged on their approach to management and organization. To see how weak this sort of argument is, consider that one need only rearrange the qualities that are being judged to reach precisely the opposite conclusion - that Presidents’ campaigns are a poor guide to how they’ll govern. After all, Reagan’s ‘80 campaign was badly mismanaged - he fired nearly all his senior staff after losing the Iowa caucuses, remember - yet once in office he was able to run circles around the Congressional Democrats, and match the canny Gorbachev at brinksmanship. George H. W. Bush won the Presidency by playing the hard-nosed partisan on the campaign trail, but he ended up alienating GOP true believers by cutting deals with Democrats from the White House. Bill Clinton ran as a centrist New Democrat in 1992 but tried to govern as a liberal (gays in the military, Hillarycare), before the ‘94 debacle forced him back to the middle. And George W. Bush ran two campaigns that were notable for their ruthless competence - yet competence of any sort has been strikingly absent from his administration’s governance.
So maybe you just cannot tell who seems to be management material by looking at the campaign they run. But at Politico, there’s this, a bit of a hint:
Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling - if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.
Some are starting to agree there’s a problem here. See this text and video clip at Media Matters:
After noting the title of Dee Dee Myers’ book Why Women Should Rule the World while discussing with Myers the resignation of Mark Penn as Sen. Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asserted: “I don’t know - this campaign, right now, is not the greatest example of why women should rule the world.”
See that old Maggie Thatcher fan Andrew Sullivan:
I would dearly love to see a woman president. I hope to see one soon. And Clinton has many qualities - extraordinary intelligence, remarkable stamina, policy mastery and the kind of ambition men and women need to succeed in politics. But she lost her soul somewhere along the way, has become consumed with process rather than principle, and has forgotten the difference between truth and falsehood. If she were the only option, I still couldn’t bring myself to back the Clintons. But I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who did. But when you have a transformative option with the talent and timing of Obama, you go with the best candidate. Here’s hoping for an American Thatcher - a woman who wins the presidency whose husband did not precede her and who has forged her own path in her own way.
But not this woman. Not now.
Yeah, but Sullivan is gay. On the other hand, so is Elton John. Ben Smith at Politico was at Elton John’s fundraiser for Clinton at Radio City Music Hall on Wednesday, April 9, 2008, and offers this report:
There’s a real crowd at Radio City, complete with scalpers, and lines around the block for Elton John and the Clintons.
Toward the back of one line: Frank Luntz, Lanny Davis, and Doug Schoen. (”I used to be in business with Mark Penn,” Schoen joked.)
Inside, Bill Clinton introduced his wife, thanked the packed house for contributions to keep the race going, and asked for more, to shouts of “We miss you, Bill.”
Elton John was a bit edgier: “I never cease to be amazed at the misogynist attitude of some of the people in this country,” he said. “I say to hell with them.”
What about thinking about managerial competence, not gender?
And you want someone connected to reality. The joke going around the same day was at the site End Politics as Usual. If you follow college basketball, it was way cool:
In a move that’s sure to be seen as controversial, Hillary has contacted the NCAA Board of Directors to argue that Memphis is actually better qualified to be National Champion.
Ms. Clinton stated that Memphis, while losing the game, had actually shown more ability to act like a National Champion on Day One. She argued that Memphis had passed every test during the game, including scoring more points than Kansas for 38 minutes. For 38 minutes they had shown the experience necessary to be National Champion. “Just because some team comes along in the last minute and scores more points than the other guy doesn’t mean they’re necessarily able to be National Champion on Day One.”
It’s all become a joke. Only Obama is left standing – and why would he want the job? Management is quite awful, actually.
