PROFS GRADE OUR PRESIDENT ON MANAGEMENT
ATLANTA — For anyone who has ever contemplated whether a business CEO could run the U.S. government better than a politician, we have Test Case A in the White House.
Donald Trump is six months deep. So I wandered among the people most likely to have insights that could turn into books on Trump’s leadership effectiveness: nearly 10,000 business professors, management researchers and leadership consultants at the Academy of Management’s international annual meeting in downtown Atlanta.
Forget the president’s policies and your own political views. I asked those at the meeting and others I contacted later: Management-wise, how’s our chief executive officer doing?
I saw some faces contort.
For starters, describing Trump as a business CEO gave several business professors pause.
“I don’t see him as a CEO,” said Joseph Lampel, a professor who teaches leadership at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. “He is an entrepreneur. … This is not somebody who ran a larger organization in a business sense.”
Jerry Davis, a University of Michigan professor of management, said Trump’s background heading a family-run enterprise centered on real estate development is different from leading a hierarchical Fortune 500 company with many tens of thousands of employees scattered around the world.
The bigger one — which is the kind of operation run by Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobil’s chief before becoming Trump’s secretary of state — has more in common with government operations, Davis said.
Real estate focuses on negotiating project-by-project on ventures that have a somewhat set timeline, he said. “It gives you a different kind of mindset than running an ongoing organization that was there before you were there and will be there when you leave.”
“You don’t have the same incentives to take a long-term orientation,” he said.
Trump’s pedigree is as a dealmaker, really rich guy, media star and unabashed ego machine. So whether he gave you hope, delight or the willies during the campaign, we all knew to expect something different.
For one thing “he airs a lot of dirty laundry in the public,” Peter Klein, a Baylor University professor who is part of a center for entrepreneurship and free enterprise, said. Also, the president berates his subordinates publicly, which, Klein informed me “is certainly not what the leadership and management textbooks would tell you.”
But I kept asking professors: What has Trump done well from a management researcher’s point of view?
They told me he showed leadership traits during the campaign by successfully articulating a vision of a problem and communicating ways to fix it, which helped him win the White House.
“He is a great salesman,” Lampel, the professor from the UK, said.
But he said Trump hasn’t yet made a crucial transition: “When you run for election, you are a salesmen. But when you are a president, you are a persuader.”
I think every professor I spoke with also pummelled the idea that running government like a business is generally a good idea.
The two aren’t measured the same way. Government’s focus is not to make a financial profit.
“I understand the wish to make agencies more efficient,” said Klein, the Baylor professor. “But at the end of the day, government organizations are not like businesses.”
I wonder if our president might agree, at least in one sense, based on what he said in an Associated Press interview earlier this year.
“Here, everything, pretty much everything you do in government, involves heart, whereas in business, most things don’t involve heart,” Trump said.
He added this jarring conclusion: “In fact, in business, you’re actually better off without it.”
Is he right?
Matt Kempner writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.