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Get Four
|  | NOVEMBER 5, 2003
Bush in Iraq: A B-School Case Study The MBA President receives sub-par marks from many professors, who cite the mishandled aftermath as a huge management failure It's a conversation heard more and more around the halls of Harvard Business School these days: One of President George W. Bush's unique qualifications for office was his Harvard MBA. Yet the mess in postwar Iraq has revealed a lack of the careful planning that Harvard teaches its elite clientele. And a related problem -- the ballooning federal budget deficit -- hints at much less financial discipline than B-school alums are supposed to have. "Because George is a graduate of the school, there's lots of casual discussion about what he learned, or didn't learn, while he was here," says David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor of international business administration. Granted, leading a country is a bit more demanding than managing the Huggies diapers brand or running a BusinessWeek 50 company -- the sort of jobs Harvard MBAs typically hold. That goes double for trying to simultaneously manage an effort as unpredictable as invading, then rebuilding, another country. "FUMBLING AROUND." Still, much has been made of Bush's status as the first MBA President, with a degree from a school that placed No. 3 in BusinessWeek's latest B-school rankings and that's one of top five schools in the world in teaching both management and finance. So, the President's performance thus far raises some fair questions: Where was Bush's MBA training when he planned -- or seemingly, failed to plan -- the post-conquest management of Iraq? And now that his Administration's lack of foresight has been amply illustrated, what's the best way, according to B-school dogma, for Bush to successfully recover? Certainly, postwar Iraq could be a Harvard case study of crisis management gone wrong. Five months after the President proclaimed the U.S. invasion a victory and declared a cessation of hostilities, basic services such as electricity and water remain subpar, public safety in Iraq is lacking (especially for friends of the U.S.), deposed dictator Saddam Hussein remains on the loose -- and the continued loss of American soldiers, including 16 killed in one attack on Nov. 1, threatens to turn U.S. public opinion against the Bush Administration and its war. Most often, the President blames "terrorists" for the U.S. military's inability to control the situation. Yet professor emeritus Howard Raiffa, who taught at Harvard Business School and Harvard's Kennedy School in the 1970s, offers a different theory. "I see a lot of fumbling around," he says, which leads him to conclude that the Bush team's own postwar "actions have fostered this reaction" by an Iraqi rear guard. Raiffa adds that he's "anti-Bush, so I come with that prejudice." MISSING BRANCHES. It requires no prejudice, however, to spot the contrast between the disorganization in postwar Iraq and the precision of the invasion itself -- or the principles that Harvard taught MBAs during Bush's 1973-75 stay and still holds today. Basic strategy courses continue to train students in the use of "decision trees to assess the probability of outcomes, and how each decision could branch into other decisions," says Yoffie. "If there's a lesson from Iraq," he adds, "it's to think thoughtfully about alternative situations, as in a multi-move game. You have to think of the implications for the fourth, fifth, and sixth moves...and of contingencies if the plan doesn't go as expected." No one but the President and his aides know for sure if he used this approach. But if he did, say B-school Brahmans, his decision tree seems to be missing some branches. The White House and Pentagon have said they gave requisite attention to warnings from the State Dept. and the CIA that the post-conquest cleanup could be difficult. Yet, "the only thing I've heard floated as a Plan B was to declare victory and leave it up to the Iraqis to figure out," says Edward Snyder, dean of the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. "I don't think that most strategy professors would say that's a Plan B." Observes Laura D'Andrea Tyson, dean of the London Business School and former national economic adviser to President Bill Clinton: "They didn't even have a scenario for if things went well."
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