At least as far back as the Roaring Twenties, when President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed "the business of America is business," infatuation with commerce and the leadership prowess of its captains has been an enduring feature of American public life.
George W. Bush, elected in 2000 as the nation's first president with a master's degree in business administration, was commended for personifying a mindset that prized leadership over management. Leading meant articulating values and delegating; managing meant shuffling papers in the bureaucracy.
But the idea of "transformational" or "values-based" leader ship, which has long been a foundation of business schools and is thought to have influenced Bush, may be falling out of favor. In a new book, titled "Hail to the CEO," a professor of business ethics at Babson College in Wellesley argues that it's time to reassess the notion.
"The leadership cult endangers executives not only morally but also practically by encouraging them to devalue competence and knowledge," wrote James Hoopes. "Operation Iraqi Freedom and Hurricane Katrina have brought home all too clearly that putatively moral leadership cannot replace managerial competence and know-how."
With the disapproval rating of Bush - Harvard Business School, Class of 1975 - now hovering around 60 percent as he nears the end of his second term, there are signs the American populace might be souring on the model of a top-down, CEO-style presidency. (Bush, an indifferent student in his Yale undergraduate years, recalled in his 1999 autobiography that "Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world.")
But the temptation to tap a chief executive for the Oval Office hasn't evaporated. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a Bush classmate at Harvard Business School, is making a credible run at the Republican nomination. Still another Harvard MBA, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is said to be waiting in the wings for a potential independent candidacy. In contrast to Bush, who reached the pinnacle of his business career as part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Romney and Bloomberg built large and successful companies, and both stress management skills and competence over ideology.
Even presidential candidates with law degrees rather than MBAs embrace the notion of the president as "chief executive officer," as New York Senator Hillary Clinton put it at a Democratic debate in Las Vegas last week. At the same forum, her rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, endorsed the concept of a leadership heavy on vision. "Being president is not making sure that schedules are being run properly or the paperwork is being shuffled effectively," he said. Both, of course, distanced themselves from the MBA style of President Bush.
"I don't think Bush has been a great advertisement for the MBA," suggested business author Nicholas Carr of Carlisle, a former executive editor of Harvard Business Review. "His failings have been fundamentally management failings: failure to listen to diverse points of view, failure to look at information that contradicts your biases, and surrounding himself with yes men who don't challenge his thinking."
Still, admiration of business leaders - and the belief they are more worthy than glad-handing politicians - runs deep in American culture. In the earliest days of the republic, entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Franklin were revered even as political partisans were vilified. And long before the MBA heyday, Americans elected presidents with business credentials, from mining consultant Herbert Hoover to haberdasher Harry S. Truman to oil man George H.W. Bush.
More recently, with the lionizing of business chiefs such as Lee Iacocca of Chrysler Corp. and Jack Welch of General Electric Co., the cult of the CEO has taken hold in the popular imagination. CEOs, unlike administrators, middle managers, or clock-punching bureaucrats, are celebrated for their supposed ability to grasp the big picture, cut through red tape, and not get tripped up by details.
This sentiment has its analogue in business academia. One of its most influential leadership authorities, presidential historian James MacGregor Burns, in the late 1970s advanced the concept of "transformational leadership," whereby leaders have the ability and obligation to share an overarching vision with their followers. This was superseded by the notion of "values-based leadership," in which values and beliefs become decision-making instruments.
Hoopes, the Babson professor, views such concepts as dangerous, an invitation to self-righteousness and self-deception. "The idea of values-based leadership is very popular in business schools," he said. "My argument is that values are not managerial tools. You use competence to achieve values. You don't substitute values for competence. You have to get your hands dirty to some extent."
On the cover of Hoopes's book is the famous image of Bush speaking on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 2, 2003, beneath a banner reading "Mission Accomplished." For Hoopes, the image symbolizes the bankruptcy of a leadership style employed by a president who was driven by values and ideology but had little patience for learning about Iraq or planning a postwar strategy.
Carr, for his part, notes that even business leaders with a track record of building, growing, or turning around companies would face a vastly different set of challenges running the US government.
"A business executive has it easier than a president does," Carr said. "Your typical CEO can make decisions unilaterally and get them implemented, while a president has to negotiate with many other players who are involved. Presidents have to work through the Congress and work through a bureaucracy that's not there in business."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.
By Robert Weisman
Globe Staff
At least as far back as the Roaring Twenties, when President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed "the business of America is business," infatuation with commerce and the leadership prowess of its captains has been an enduring feature of American public life.
George W. Bush, elected in 2000 as the nation's first president with a masters in business administration degree, was commended for personifying a mindset that prized leadership over management. Leading meant articulating values and delegating; managing meant shuffling papers in the bureaucracy.
But the idea of "transformational" or "values-based" leadership that has long been a foundation of business schools and is thought to have influenced Bush, may be falling out of favor. In a new book, titled "Hail to the CEO," a professor of business ethics at Babson College in Wellesley, argues that it's time to reassess the notion.
"The leadership cult endangers executives not only morally but also practically by encouraging them to devalue competence and knowledge," wrote James Hoopes. "Operation Iraqi Freedom and Hurricane Katrina have brought home all too clearly that putatively moral leadership cannot replace managerial competence and know-how."
With the disapproval rating of Bush - Harvard Business School, Class of 1975 - now hovering around 60 percent as he nears the end of his second term, there are signs the American populace may be souring on the model of a top-down, CEO-style presidency. (Bush, an indifferent student in his Yale undergraduate years, recalled in his 1999 autobiography that "Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world.")
But the temptation to tap a chief executive for the Oval Office hasn't evaporated. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Bush classmate at Harvard Business School, is making a credible run at the Republican nomination. Still another Harvard MBA, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is said to be waiting in the wings for a potential independent candidacy. In contrast to Bush, who reached the pinnacle of his business career as part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Romney and Bloomberg built large and successful companies, and both stress management skills and competence over ideology.
Even presidential candidates with law degrees rather than MBAs embrace the notion of the president as "chief executive officer," as New York Sen. Hillary Clinton put it at a Democratic debate in Las Vegas last week. At the same forum, her rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, endorsed the concept of a leadership heavy on vision. Being president is not making sure that schedules are being run properly or the paperwork is being shuffled effectively," he said. Both, of course, distanced themselves from the MBA style of President Bush.
"I don't think Bush has been a great advertisement for the MBA," suggested business author Nicholas Carr of Carlisle, a former executive editor of Harvard Business Review. "His failings have been fundamentally management failings: failure to listen to diverse points of view, failure to look at information that contradicts your biases, and surrounding himself with yes men who don't challenge his thinking."
Still, admiration of business leaders - and the belief they are more worthy than glad-handing politicians - runs deep in American culture. In the earliest days of the republic, entrepreneurs like Benjamin Franklin were revered even as political partisans were vilified. And long before the MBA heyday, Americans elected presidents with business credentials, from mining consultant Herbert Hoover to haberdasher Harry S. Truman to oil man George H.W. Bush.
More recently, with the lionizing of business chiefs such as Lee Iacocca of Chrysler Corp. and Jack Welch of General Electric Co., the cult of the CEO has taken hold in the popular imagination. CEOs, unlike administrators, middle managers, or clock-punching bureaucrats, are celebrated for their supposed ability to grasp the big picture, cut through red tape, and not get tripped up by details.
This sentiment has its analogue in business academia. One of its most influential leadership authorities, presidential historian James MacGregor Burns, in the late 1970s advanced the concept of "transformational leadership," whereby leaders have the ability and obligation to share an overarching vision with their followers. This was later superseded by the notion of "values-based leadership," in which values and beliefs become decision-making instruments.
Hoopes, the Babson professor, views such concepts as dangerous, an invitation to self-righteousness and self-deception. "The idea of values-based leadership is very popular in business schools," he said. "My argument is that values are not managerial tools. You use competence to achieve values. You don't substitute values for competence. You have to get your hands dirty to some extent."
On the cover of Hoopes's book is the famous image of Bush speaking on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 2, 2003, beneath a banner reading "Mission Accomplished." For Hoopes, the image symbolizes the bankruptcy of a leadership style employed by a president who was driven by values and ideology but had little patience for learning about Iraq or planning a postwar strategy.
Carr, for his part, notes that even business leaders with a track record of building, growing, or turning around companies would face a vastly different set of challenges running the US government.
"A business executive has it easier than a president does," Carr said. "Your typical CEO can make decisions unilaterally and get them implemented, while a president has to negotiate with many other players who are involved. Presidents have to work through the Congress and work through a bureaucracy that's not there in business."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.
