Bashing Bush?

I just love it when insiders go public. This is exactly what David Frum - a former White House speech-writer - did today (see the FT's Comment page).

The case for President Bush has never been that he was a master of detail. The case is the opposite: that he is a leader who dares greatly and accepts risks from which most politicians would flinch.

says Mr Frum.

While I agree that bold leadership is generally a pre-requisite in business as much as in politics, truly great leaders don't just take risks at any costs. Greatness, in leadership, lies with acknowledging truth; thorough understanding of context is key to effective risk management. Balancing risks and reward is what tells, eventually, a leader from a manager.

Then, once a leader gauged risks and sold a credible assessment of a project's expected costs to his board, comes the pricing. How heavy the toll should be to bridge public expectations to political actions? Take this: "at a price, it is almost always possible to offload the risks you know about, trough multiple layers of hedging and insurance" (Greg Brown, Kenan-Flager Business School).

Mr. Bush, I reckon, failed short of gauging risks effectively because of his inability to focus on details. By the same token, his pricing proposals were erroneously based on wrong cost estimates.

Mr. Frum, the author, goes on saying that

In a 2003 book about Mr Bush, I offered this assessment of his personality: Mr Bush is “a good man who is not a weak man. He is impatient, quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious, and as a result ill-informed...[but] outweighing the faults are his virtues: decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity”.

I won’t dwell into Mr. Bush’s splashing virtues to an audience overfed with Hollywood role-models. One last thing, though: Mr. Bush seems to resemble, now more than ever, the sad figure of a lonely, luck-deserted cowboy.

But, time will tell.