Management experts knock Obama

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Politico:

After the HealthCare.gov debacle first exploded three months ago, President Barack Obama pleaded for people to cut him a little slack: “I wanted to go in and fix it myself, but I don’t write code.”

 

At his year-end news conference recently, he struck a different tone: “Since I’m in charge, obviously, we screwed it up.”

 

“We screwed it up” is not exactly the same thing as “I screwed it up.” Even so, those two quotes are mileposts on one of 2013’s biggest stories: Obama’s bumpy graduate-level education in management theory.

 

(Also on POLITICO: Full health care policy coverage)

 

A glitchy website and a wave of canceled plans gave Obama the worst headlines of his presidency in 2013, but at year’s end a range of management experts interviewed by POLITICO said a central question tended to get lost in the partisan firefight: To what extent do Obamacare’s early problems reflect the limitations, in experience and intellectual interest, of its namesake?

 

The heart of the issue, many of these people say, is that Obama and his inner circle had scant executive experience prior to arriving in the West Wing, and dim appreciation of the myriad ways the federal bureaucracy can frustrate an ambitious president. And above all, they had little apparent interest in the kind of organizational and motivational concepts that typically are the preoccupation of the most celebrated modern managers.

 

“No one asked you to write code or be a technical expert, but the expectation is you can set up a process,” said Kellogg School of Management professor Daniel Diermeier. “Companies do it every day.”

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Incompetence starts at the top.