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|  | NOVEMBER 5, 2003
Bush in Iraq: A B-School Case Study [Page 2 of 2] "COMPARISONS ARE POSITIVE." Some Bush classmates see such criticism as too harsh, among them Richard Payne, 55, executive vice-president of National City (NCC ) in Cleveland. "What [Bush] has done in Iraq is textbook decision making," Payne believes. The President is looking at unfiltered data from the front lines, "which is what we were taught to do," Payne adds. "He's asking, what does the data say about schools being open, police being trained, and the electricity being on? How does that compare to 30 days earlier, 90 days earlier, and to before Saddam was taken out? The comparisons are positive." All of them, perhaps, except for the numbers that record the rising toll of U.S. dead. Sooner rather than later, those will shine a light on the President's style of "leadership" -- a word B-schools increasingly use to distinguish today's style of management from the old, top-down variety. On the positive side, from a B-school perspective, Bush "initially had a clear focus and did a lot of delegating," notes Tyson. "That characterized his leadership style." Yet in the view of Tyson and others, the President's leadership skills fell short as he mounted what some experts in international relations have called an elective war. Great leadership, adds Tyson, "is to understand and explain to people, in a complete and realistic way, what the trade-offs are." In retrospect, perhaps no one in the Bush Administration did an adequate job of that. NO "WIN-WIN." The troubling possibility, some B-school profs suggest, is that the President and his advisers didn't lay out the trade-offs because they didn't grasp the full range of potential problems. Certainly, in his last address to the nation before the invasion and in his speech on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln soon after the war, Bush displayed no inkling of what has come to pass. "The most important thing for the guy at the top is intuition," says Elon Kohlberg, a professor at Harvard's B-school. Had Bush's been keener, B-school experts say, he might have dealt with America's invasion-averse allies in a less cocksure manner. "The first thing we teach in a negotiations class is to look for win-win...try to find ways where everyone comes out ahead," says Justin Wolfers, a professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In Bush's pre-war dealings with the U.N., "there was no evidence of creative negotiation," Wolfers adds. Harvard's Raiffa sees a pattern there. The first instance, he says, was Bush's decision to reverse a previous U.S. position and back away from the anti-global-warming Kyoto Protocol in April, 2001, even though more than 100 other nations eventually ratified it. "We summarily, and one-sidedly, decided to keep what we wanted and discard what we didn't," recalls Raiffa. TIME FOR TEAMWORK. He argues that the Administration's negotiating skills reached a low point at the U.N. last spring, just before the U.S. invaded Iraq. "We were disdainful of the United Nations," Raiffa recalls. "And yet at this point, we find that we have to go crawling to them to get their help. That should have been thought about earlier." "We're interdependent," Raiffa notes, adding that were Bush back at Harvard for a refresher course he would "impress upon him the need for collaborative decision making and not going it alone" as the reconstruction of Iraq proceeds. That may become inevitable if the postwar crisis drags on, he argues. "We're going to come out of this one way or another," he predicts, "probably through negotiation with our European allies." Whatever path the President chooses, he should realize that when things go wrong it's often time to try a new approach, adds Barry Nalebuff, professor of economics at the Yale School of Management. Nalebuff adds that one source of Bush's difficulties is "an inability to change his strategy in light of differing circumstances." ABSENT THAT DAY? In response to a call seeking comment about the lessons Bush was taught as a B-school student, Harvard sent an e-mail statement: "Although courses and content in the curriculum change continuously over time," it reads, "the HBS learning model, which is based on analyzing some 500 case studies in which teams of students work together to address the uncertainty and complexity of real-world problems, remains constant and leaves a lasting mark on the thought processes of every student.... The school's focus is on general managers who can see the big strategic picture, establish priorities, and make the most of the functional expertise of those who work with them to make decisions and take action." When it comes to Bush's handling of postwar Iraq, it seems, either Harvard didn't deliver on its goal -- or the future President didn't pay close enough attention.
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