IN A GENRE best known for acts of MBA ventriloquism -- putting words in the mouths of such business leaders as Atilla the Hun and the Son of God -- we should not be surprised to find a management bible that presumes to give guidance to the President of the United States. Blurbed as a chance for readers to "eavesdrop in the corridors of power," Memos to the President allows "the nation's top CEOs" to "apply their knowledge of managing complex organizations to the monumental challenges facing the federal government." As it turns out, their advice is bone-shatteringly pedestrian (as one business figure puts it, "Communication, communication, communication!"). But this should not surprise us, either, as the preferred medium for CEOs who give advice to presidents is the checkbook, not the hardcover. Perhaps something was lost in the translation.
It is tempting to write off Memos to the President. And surely, had George W. Bush failed to gain the only five-ninths of the vote that mattered, this book would be as irrelevant as, say, the will of the electorate. But if there is any incoming president who needs help finding his cheese, it's Dubya.
The fields represented in Memos span the gamut from the very old economy (H. J. Heinz) to the ultra new (Esther Dyson contributes a little non sequitur of Internet instruction). But there is very little contradiction among the memos, which could be because these missives are less outlines of real ideas than they are a kind of corporate astrology, advice so general as to apply to anyone. (The directive to have "vision" runs through the book like a faith healer's applause line.) And obviously, that is the real motive behind Memos to the President: However badly George W. Bush may need the help, the book is actually aimed at much more powerful group (in practice) the of corporate presidents and would-be presidents who make up the large and worrisomely tasteless management-book-buying audience.
Management books bear the same relationship to management as pornography does to sex: They are not instruction manuals, they are fantasies -- and that's even presuming the authors have something titillating to say. The whitewashed examples these CEOs unearth are the executive-speak equivalent of the high school virgin's "girlfriend in Canada." Joseph Neubauer, the CEO of ARAMARK, paints a picture of his corporation that is as heartwarming, and as realistic, as a Care Bears cartoon, a place where employees in a "no-limits culture" hammer out a generic fiction completely constructed, it would seem, from the platitudes of other management books. "We work to create innovative and practical solutions that customized to particular needs," Neubauer writes. "Often this means doing things never done before. So we do them -- without limits." Someone buy that man a Successories mug.
The rhetorical drag these managers use to cloak their wishbooks in political policy is disturbing. Leonard D. Schaeffer of the WellPoint opines that presidents are "symbolic leaders who embody and symbolize a set of beliefs," not "individuals who manage a group of followers through logical and persuasive communication of facts and ideas." Bush couldn't help but set some store in this judgment, but that sets the bar uncomfortably low -- even for the presidency. And the second-person solicitations that address Bush as the "CEO of the largest 'service' organization in the world'" and the "executive in chief" in the end only serve to remind us all that, as James J. Schiro of PricewaterhouseCoopers puts it, "citizens are rightly coming to see themselves as consumers."
That brand identification has supplanted nationality as a defining trait is evident -- in this sense, we are all casualties of the Cola Wars. This mass confusion of taste with belief does not, however, make true the idea that our government is a business. There are simply too many places where the corporate suit simply refuses to ride smoothly over the federal body, most prominently the fact that there is not, aside from a few notable exceptions (Canada during the Vietnam war, the Confederacy), much competition. People don't switch to another brand; if we insist on staying with the metaphor, they simply fire the board -- which makes clear the fundamental logical flaw at the heart of Memos to the President: Americans aren't the customers of the government; they, more aptly, are its owners.
There's still a big caveat here: Just because it is well-nigh impossible to run a government like a business (what passes for a profit -- the budget surplus -- is, after all, wasted many times over just as soon as its earned) doesn't mean that we should dismiss the kind of thinking that produces a book like Memos to the President. Bush's proposals to privatize Social Security and his touching faith in faith-based charity show that all this really means is that we should stop worrying about the government becoming a corporation and turn our concern to the areas where corporations are simply replacing it.

Ana Marie Cox knows that there's no "I" in "team." She is a senior editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Other articles by Ana Marie Cox

Back to Article