Jingkan Blog

In the months after September 11, Team Bush seemed to struggle to find its voice—and to reshape its strategy. Policy battles raged and new, unexpected issues surged to the forefront. The president either had little to say about them or, when he did speak, did not convey a clear sense of the administration’s policy. Aides [...]

Generals know that war plans become obsolete at the first shot. Similarly, Bush and his aides knew they would have to adapt their strategy to shifting events. All presidents face unanticipated crises. In large measure, their ultimate success lies not in their ability to fulfill campaign promises, but in their skill in coping with the [...]

After the inauguration, Team Bush faced cross-pressures on what to do first—and how much to try to do. Democrats wanted the president to focus on health care, especially since reform of health maintenance organizations had been one of the major pieces of unfinished business in the previous Congress. John McCain, who had been Bush’s strongest [...]

To make matters worse, Bush had only a narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate was divided 50-50, with Vice President Cheney, presiding officer in the Senate, permitted to break ties. A pall hung over Bush’s claim to power, and he couldn’t count on much help from Republicans on Capitol Hill. Cannon [...]

The electoral turmoil not only provided endless weeks of political theater. It also robbed Bush of the most important asset a new president has: a honeymoon with Congress, the press, and the American people. From the November 7 election, it took the courts 36 days to sort out the issues, and Gore conceded on day [...]

“They can say what they want about me, but at least I know who I am and who my friends are.”
—George W. Bush, speaking to NBC’s Alexandra Pelosi, 2002
“ … people should do what they say they are going do to, particularly in politics. … I think that is probably the single most [...]

Create the right structure. Bush arrived at the Oval Office knowing that he would not put a gatekeeper between him and his closest advisers. Instead, he employed a flat model built on personal relationships, to make sure that his inner circle had access to him and that he had access to them.
Make sure to [...]

Team Bush would not have worked, however, without Bush’s knack for nurturing his personal links with his team members. As mentioned previously, there’s no better sign of that knack than his habit of bestowing nicknames on friends, staffers, government leaders, and journalists. Virtually anyone could be a fair target. One high-ranking Bush aide, known as [...]

Bush decided to run his Oval Office so that his five closest White House aides could see him at any point, without having to go through anyone first. The five insider players were:
Andrew H. Card, Jr., chief of staff. Card served Bush 41 as secretary of transportation and, before that, as deputy chief of [...]

Bush wanted to avoid his father’s mistakes. First as governor, and then as president, he decided to avoid the hierarchical chief-of-staff model. Instead, he created a system that gave key aides easy access, without having to go through an all-powerful chief of staff. His Texas policy adviser, Vance McMahan, recalled Bush saying:
I want a [...]

“I’m not afraid to surround myself with strong and competent people.”
—George W. Bush, on naming his cabinet
“Individual commitment to a team effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
—Vince Lombardi
Even more than most executives, the American president must rely on a strong team. [...]

Don’t start without a plan. Bush began crafting his plan before the vote count in Florida was finished. This helped him to hit the ground running when the dust settled. The lesson is clear: Establish a plan, and implement it early. That might mean the difference between success and failure.
Make the organization fit your [...]

George W. Bush unquestionably has a clear style. Unlike Kennedy’s, it is not built on blazing intellect, and unlike Johnson’s, it is not built on unrelenting personal pressure. It shares some of the same amiable qualities of Reagan’s approach to government, but it also has surprising elements of the shrewd style that Eisenhower brought to [...]

The scope of the job a president confronts is far larger than anything in the private sector. The risk of failure is great and the consequences enormous. Presidents have tight limits on deciding which markets to enter or which products to develop. If a war in Bosnia or a battle against inflation goes badly, the [...]

Bush is the very model of a modern MBA president. He builds his approach to the presidency on teamwork, especially in his West Wing staff. He builds a clear strategy and a business plan for implementing it. Unlike Bill Clinton, he has remained focused on a small agenda. He keeps his message sharp and focused. [...]

If the nicknames mark Bush’s informal side, he has a tough, formal, disciplined side as well. Soon after taking office, he imposed a set of White House rules. The contrast with the Clinton years could not have been more stark. Chief of Staff Card laid them out:

Attire: suit and tie required. Gone was the [...]

Beyond the business plan was a set of basic rules to guide how the White House staff worked and behaved. “This is the only bureaucracy in Washington that can change to fit the personality of the president,” chief of staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. told a reporter. “This president is the first ever to have [...]

Bush got busy running the country by crafting a business plan for the transition and his initial months in the White House even while the outcome of the election was still in doubt. During the interminable vote-counting in Florida, Gore often seemed the senior partner in the team of lawyers fighting the case. Bush, on [...]

“Every man who takes office in Washington either grows or swells, and when I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is growing or swelling.”
—President Woodrow Wilson
“ … he does have a strong belief in providence, and in the necessity of gathering information, making good choices, doing [...]

With his MBA, Bush’s style blossomed. But it took some time to put it to work. After earning his degree, he returned to Midland, Texas, where his father had prospered in the oil business—and where he had lived an earlier life as a partying bachelor. He formed his own oil company and christened it “Arbusto,” [...]

Though Bush distinguished himself for his easygoing ways, he did not set himself apart as one of the business school’s top scholars. Howard Stevenson, one of his professors recalled that Bush “wrote a decent essay.” Another professor, Michael E. Porter—who later became an economic policy adviser to the Bush campaign—agreed that Bush “was not a [...]

The taxi driver who first dropped him off at the school told him, “Here you are at the West Point of capitalism.” Bush in fact treated Harvard Business School as a serious cadet would, and that marked a big change from his college days. As an undergraduate, he took his partying seriously and quickly developed [...]

George W. Bush, a middling C-average college student at Yale, had failed to be admitted to the University of Texas law school, and that failure embarrassed him. Page Keeton, the law school dean, wrote to one of those who had recommended Bush for admission, “I am sure your Mr. Bush has all the amiable qualities [...]

“I wanted to be my own boss.”
—George W. Bush on applying to business school
“George spent a lot of time learning from other people … Those who were book-oriented would think he wasn’t a serious student, but he was a serious student of people.”
—Robert McCallum, Bush’s friend at Harvard Business School
Leo Ccorbett [...]

There’s no question. Channels will be different. Commerce will be different. People will communicate differently.
Convinced that yet another business revolution was underway, Jack Welch moved aggressively toward the Internet in 1999.
Welch wanted every senior executive at GE to share his passion for this new form of commerce, and he took steps to make [...]

E-business . . . is already so big and transformational that it has almost outgrown the bounds of the word “initiative.”
Jack Welch acknowledges that GE may have been intimidated by the Internet in its early days:
Why wasn’t the e-revolution launched by big, highly resourced, high-technology companies, rather than the small start-ups that led [...]

While we are already generating billions in Web-based revenues, the contribution of e-business to GE has been so much more. It is changing this company to its core. Jack Welch viewed tackling the Internet as the fourth major initiative of his tenure at the helm of GE, after Work-Out, globalization, and Six Sigma quality.
During [...]

The market is bigger than we ever dreamt.
In 1980, the year before Welch took over, GE was almost entirely a manufacturing enterprise, with 85 percent of revenues coming from manufacturing and only 15 percent from services.
The company had always been involved in services, but the service sector was regarded as something of an [...]

It’s really gone from a quality program to a productivity program to a customer satisfaction program to changing the fundamental DNA of the company.
In his 1999 letter to shareholders, Jack Welch proudly explained the program’s impact on the company.
During the initial 2 years, he noted, GE had invested some $500 million in training [...]

Quality is the next act of productivity.
Following Motorola’s lead, General Electric designed a Six Sigma quality program comprising four steps to be applied to every process and transaction:

Measure. Identify the key internal process that influences “critical-to-quality” issues (CTQs) and measure the defects generated relative to identified CTQs. Defects are defined as out-of-tolerance CTQs. [...]

By 2000, we want to be not just better in quality, but a company 10,000 times better than its competitors.
In January 1996, at the annual gathering of GE’s 500 top managers, Jack Welch formally launched the Six Sigma initiative. GE aimed to become a Six Sigma quality company by the year 2000, producing nearly [...]