It looks like Obama's management style has won the big prize

How did Obama defeat first Hillary Clinton and then John McCain supported by the Republican National Committee? Consider this description of Obama's management from Newsweek.

Obama wants people to talk, but he doesn't want to intimidate them. "If you haven't said anything, he'll call on you," says Strautmanis. "He's never said it, but he usually thinks if somebody is very quiet it's because they disagree with what everybody is saying … so Barack will call on you and say, 'You've been awfully quiet'." There are no screamers on Team Obama; one senior Obama aide says he's heard him yell only twice in four years. Obama was explicit from the beginning: there was to be "no drama," he told his aides. "I don't want elbowing or finger-pointing. We're going to rise or fall together." Obama wanted steady, calm, focused leadership; he wanted to keep out the grandstanders and make sure the quiet dissenters spoke up. A good formula for running a campaign—or a presidency.

How effective was this management style? Of the three major campaigns - Clinton's, Obama's and McCain's, which is described as disciplined and close to flawless? Obama's. Consider a few examples.

When everyone was complaining to Obama that McCain was gaining ground on him around the time of the Republican national Convention and were asking - demanding - that he respond somehow he stuck it out and prevailed.

When the McCain camp fielded Sarah Palin and was gaining major ground in the media, the Obama camp was quiet. The desperation at the base of the Palin decision soon became obvious as Palin herself became a major liability to McCain.

Consider the period when the financial markets fell out of bed. After a short time McCain decided to "suspend his campaign and fly back to Washington to deal with the problems." Then he got to Washington and accomplished -- nothing. It was a publicity stunt, one adopted by the losing campaign in a fit of desperation. Obama did whatever he did behind the scenes. It was like Aikido. Obama used McCain's own moves to defeat him.

As the last three weeks leading to the election passed it became clear that the Obama campaign was increasing the pressure. The McCain camp had no effective response and the polls shifted towards Obama. The election confirmed the polls.

Then the first Press conference by Barack Obama after the election demonstrated Obama's discipline and preparation.

The three major campaigns demonstrated the difference in their management by their willingness to leak to the Press. Both the Clinton Campaign and the McCain campaign began to leak like sieves during the final weeks before Obama was chosen as the winner. Obama's campaign has yet to suffer frequent leaks of information that is intended to be kept close. Those leaks are a symptom of both the recognition that the campaign is losing together with weaker management. Was the fact that Obama was winning the key to the few leaks, or was it the better management? That is not clear, because the better management very clearly led to the winning campaign.

It's going to be interesting to see if this winning management carries over into the White House. It probably will. It is a result to a large extent of Obama's personality. The problems in the White House involved in maintaining the same level of control will be greater, but the experience from the campaign should carry over to a great extent.

This Presidential campaign is an interesting study for students of management.

Obama has proven to be a superior executive to McCain

Pundits have, at last, decided that something called "executive experience" might be important in deciding who should be the next President of the US. I wonder what their first clue [cough**the George Bush disaster**cough] might have been? The right-wing noise machine has suddenly started talking up the beauty queen Sarah Palin's experience as mayor of a village of 5,000 to 6,000 people (staff of what? 25 or so?) and comparing it to the resumes of the two different Senators. Gimme a break. She left the village with a money losing sports complex, a massive debt and unnecessary legal bills caused by the poorly managed project.

But wait! If we want to look at management abilities, both Obama and McCain have created and operated sizable organizations to obtain the Presidential nominations of their respective parties. They both have a recent and very relevant history of executive experience that we can look at.

Hilzoy has a post on the CBS site that describes Obama's executive experience. Of the various candidates for President who started out about a year and a half ago, Obama has built and run an amazing organization almost from scratch, outlasting most of the Democrats and Republicans running for the office and effectively defeating the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton.

When this campaign started, one of my biggest questions about Barack Obama was whether he would be any good at managing things. The President is, after all, the head of a very large organization, and he had better either have good management skills or hire a chief of staff who does. The fact that I didn't know whether Obama had them didn't prevent me from voting for him -- none of the other candidates I might have supported had a track record in management either -- but I would have been happier had I known whether Obama was any good at running things.

I don't have that problem any more. Obama has spent the past year and a half running a large organization -- as of last December, it had "about 500 employees and a budget of $100 million" -- and running it very well. It's not just that he and his team beat the Clinton campaign, which started out with enormous advantages. It's not even that he often did so by building effective political machines from scratch in states in which Clinton had locked down the political establishment. It's that every account of the Obama campaign that I've read makes it clear that he has done an outstanding job of constructing and running a political organization. For instance, this account of Obama's campaign is very much worth reading, if you want to get a sense of how he runs things:

"The story of how Obama assembled his top advisers — and how he got them to work together as a team — offers a glimpse into his approach as a chief executive who manages an organization of nearly 1,000 employees. Obama has built "an amazingly strong machine," says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management. "People expected a more ad hoc, impromptu, entrepreneurial feel to it. It has been more of a well-orchestrated symphony than the jazz combo we expected."

Indeed, in merging the talents of powerful Washington insiders and outside-the-Beltway insurgents, Obama has succeeded at a task that has traditionally eluded Democratic candidates: forging an experienced inner circle who set aside their differences and put the candidate first. "The whole point is that it's not about any of these guys," says longtime GOP strategist Frank Luntz. "They feel blessed. They see it as how lucky they are to be working for this man, at this time, in this election. This is the dream team for the dream candidate. I waited all my life for a Republican Barack Obama. Now he shows up, and he's a Democrat."

You can find more good descriptions of the Obama campaign here and here.

I recognized the well-managed organization that Obama has put together last May. Obama is clearly a much superior manager than his opponent, the highly erratic John McCain. I'm glad to see Hilzoy confirm my observation.

Anyone who thinks that Obama has not demonstrated executive experience is overlooking the superb job he has already done as he captured the Democratic nomination for President. Compare that to McCain who went bankrupt in the Summer of 2007 and had to have his campaign bailed out and restructured. Obama is clearly the much better executive of the two running for President.

Cheney's plausible deniability explains Bush's incompetence as President

In the excerpts of Ron Suskind’s new book Mike Allen at Politico quotes a very interesting observation by Suskind, one that explains much of the incoherence and poor management that has characterized the Bush White House since day one. Allen quotes Suskind as saying about Dick Cheney:

“After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know – things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

“They key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he'd authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”

--Suskind is acidly derisive of Bush, saying that he initially lost his “nerve” on 9/11, regaining it when he grabbed the Ground Zero bullhorn. Suskind says Bush’s 9 p.m. Oval Office address on the fifth anniversary was “well along in petulance, seasoned by a touch of self-defensiveness.”

Bush has frequently seemed lost and out of touch with reality. An excellent example was his videotaped reaction on 9/11 as he was notified that the second hijacked aircraft hit the World Trade Center.

Anyone who has watched that video of Bush reading "My Pet Goat" to school children when he was notified is aware the Bush lost his nerve. It was all over his face. He was also very confused. He didn’t know which way to turn.

Upon leaving the school Bush retreated to his plane to fly to some safe location. According to an essay posted on History Commons:

"A journalist who said Bush was “flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother’s bed after having a nightmare” and another who said Bush “skedaddled” were fired. [Washington Post, 9/29/01 (B)]"

The almost random flight out of Florida headed anywhere besides Washington, D.C. confirms those characterizations. They were threatening to the White House exactly because they were such accurate characterizations of Bush's indecisive behavior.

Bush left Sarasota, FL and headed first for Louisiana, then Nebraska as they tried to find the safest place for him to hide out. He had not only lost his nerve, he couldn't make a coherent decision regarding where to go or what to do. That indecisiveness is not surprising for a Chief Executive who is being protected from accountability by being kept in ignorance.

If Cheney was making the decisions and protecting Bush to give him "plausible deniability" it would mean that Bush wouldn’t dare to make a decision because the process of plausible deniability would mean Cheney was holding holding back critical relevant information from Bush. Bush would never know enough to make decisions! If Bush were to make an independent decision on his own, he could never be sure he wasn’t screwing up plans Cheney hadn’t told him about. The result is that only Dick Cheney could make decisions for Bush and for the nation.

So plausible deniability would protect Bush from accountability for the actions of his administration, but it would also mean that Bush himself would never have enough information about what was being done in his name to create a coherent administration policy.

Each of Bush’s subordinates would be left to operate on their own without the guidance and coordination that an overall strategy conducted by a knowledgeable and accountable strategic manager should have provided. Instead of focusing on their assigned jobs, each subordinate finds it necessary to build his own base of power and protect it from those around him. Only after establishing his individual base of power will Bush’s subordinates be in a position to try to accomplish his task.

While the idea of plausible deniability to protect the chief executive from being held accountable for the criminal actions of his subordinates sounds neat to someone with a Machiavellian attitude (like Cheney or Rumsfeld), withholding critical information from the chief executive means the CEO is not competent to perform his job. Instead of managing, Bush merely presides over a fiefdom of independent Barons in which each has his own base of power and has to fight with the others to protect or extend his personal power.

Another severe weakness of giving the Chief Executive plausible deniability is that it guts the separation of powers in the Constitution and shreds the Rule of Law.

This is not something that was done to Bush. It is something he has approved of. Bush clearly wants to imagine that by holding the office of President he is automatically a leader and can conduct his leadership by delegating the work to subordinates, it means he cannot hold subordinates responsible for what they each individually decide to do. Bush has never liked the hard work of administration and has no interest in it. So Cheney's plan to protect him through plausible deniability met a willing figurehead leader who was happy to cooperate.

Suskind's description of Cheney's decision to protect Bush from impeachment by "plausible deniability" really explains one major mechanism that has created the utterly incompetent Bush administration. It has happened because a lazy President chose a paranoid Machiavellian Vice President to guide him and to direct the functioning of the Federal Government while protecting Bush from accountability.

Rumsfeld's poorly managed Department of Defense

Any student of management in large organizations will be shocked at this. Here is a portion of Gen. Shinseki's letter to Donald Rumsfeld, sent just before Shinseki retired:

[On the workings of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or OSD, under Rumsfeld:] I am greatly concerned that OSD processes have often become ad hoc and long established conventional processes are atrophying. Specifically, there are areas that need your attention as the ad hoc processes often do not adequately consider professional military judgment and advice. . . . . Second, there is a lack of strategic review to frame our day-to-day issues . . . . Third, there has been a lack of explicit discussion on risk in most decisions. . . . Finally, I find it unhelpful to participate in senior level decision-making meetings without structured agendas, objectives, pending decisions and other traditional means of time management.

No large organization with numerous responsibilities can be expected to operate efficiently if the Commander/CEO tries to manage it in an ad hoc manner. Too much is overlooked - like possibly planning for the post-war occupation.

Donald Rumsfeld was a naval aviator. His job - like that of all combat pilots - was to fly a complex machine, with managing people a secondary mission. Management of a large organization is a very different set of skills, one that most of the members of the Bush administration seem to consider unimportant along side knowledge of conservative ideology. Still, that Rumsfeld did not know how to run effective meetings that used the skills of those attending surprises me.

The rest of Gen. Shinseki's letter to Donald Rumsfeld is also very much worth reading.

Question for Gonzales; Who decided? Does anyone know?

Gonzales' answer; It was consensus, aggregated by Kyle Sampson and approved by me. I was responsible.

As I wrote previously, what Gonzales established clearly in his Senate testimony was that he couldn't effectively manage a dog fight, let alone the Department of Justice with over 100,000 employees. Dahlia Lithwick at Slate very neatly describes what
Gonzales told the Senate:

The other unfortunate trope of the morning is the attorney general's incessant invocation of the "consensus judgment of the senior leadership" and the "collective concerns of the senior leadership" as the basis for all these U.S. attorney firings. Every time he's asked who made the ultimate decision here, Gonzales trots back to the fuzzy gray oracle of "senior leadership." That fits almost perfectly with Kyle Sampson's repeated claim last month that he never made a decision; he was merely the "aggregator" of everyone else's recommendations and say-sos. How gloriously mechanical: The "consensus judgments of the senior leadership" are fed to the "aggregator," who in turn passes them along to the AG who, as he claims, made a final decision without reviewing any criteria for the firing or any written document. It seems that at no point in this "process" or "project" did any human brain fire an actual neuron that triggered the message to terminate an actual U.S. attorney. Sen. Dianne Feinstein picks up on this theme toward the end of the day when she notes, "We still don't know who selected the individuals on that list. Somebody had to. A human being had to." [Emphasis is mine - Editor.]

The short version: When asked who made the decision to fire each U.S. attorney, Gonzales replied "It was a consensus decision of all of us." Then when asked if he would resign, Gonzales replied: "No. I have a lot more that I am working on that needs to be finished."

The only decision he has made for which responsibility can clearly be assigned to him is to use a political consensus decision-making process that makes no one except the top manager responsible. It also means that he does not and cannot know the criteria or the details of the decisions being made, so he denies blame for the bad decisions. He takes responsibility for the decisions to fire the U.S. Attorneys, but he can't be blamed for those decisions. They were consensus decisions.

Message to Alberto: Sorry Fredo. It doesn't work that way. You are responsible for what you failed to do as well as what (if anything) you intended to do or think you did. You established the process of consensus decisions. If they were bad decisions, you are directly responsible for them. That's true even if you are unaware that the decisions were being made and don't know who made them.

So Alberto (Fredo) Gonzales succeeded very clearly in establishing his own incompetence and unfitness to hold the job of U.S. Attorney General. The one other thing he succeeded at was totally avoiding any discussion of the role of the White House in the mess he has made of the Department of Justice. (Gee. Maybe he deserves the "Medal of Freedom." Like Tenet, Franks and Bremer, Gonzales hasn't blamed failures at and guidance from the White House for the problems he faced either.)

Senator Whitehouse stepped into this latter void, and presented his chart of who at the White House is allowed to make direct contact with the Department of Justice and inquire about on-going cases. Ms. Lithwick reproduces the chart at the end of her column.

Since the Bush White House permits 417 individuals to directly contact individuals in the DoJ, as opposed to four in the Clinton White House, it looks like the Bush administration isn't able to tell who to hold responsible for specific decisions either.