Passing the Buck
VIEWPOINT
by Judy B. Rosener
Much has been made of the fact that George W. Bush is our first MBA president, and that his ability to delegate, and make those to whom he delegates accountable, is the sign of a good leader.
Yet delegation takes many forms, including passing the buck. Similarly, the issue of accountability takes many forms based on how performance is measured, evaluated and rewarded. While delegation, combined with engagement, is a positive leadership trait, it also can mean not wanting to be involved in addressing complex issues.
Thus looking at the recent actions of the President and his National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is instructive.
Howard Fineman, Newsweek columnist says Bush “likes his stories upbeat, his plotlines simple and his villains clearly marked.” Perhaps this in part explains the testimony of Security Advisor Rice before the 9/11 Commission.
She repeatedly said there was no “silver bullet” in the Al-Qaeda memo; the real problem was one of structure; and it was the FBI, CIA and previous administrations whose actions should be scrutinized,a simple plotline, villains clearly marked, and she and the President were not culpable.
Advisor Rice’s testimony would not pass a leadership test.
Was it not her responsibility to collect, coordinate, analyze and communicate security information to the President? Was it not her responsibility to understand structural problems and address them? Was it not her responsibility to distinguish between good and poor advice, and synthesize information coming from various governmental agencies?
The fact she seemed confident, poised and self-assured says nothing about the accuracy or quality of her comments.
The media focus on form over substance when it came to Rice’s appearance is interesting.
One might wonder if because she was a woman, it was thought she would be jangled by tough questions. In contrast, it was primarily the comments, not the demeanor, of the men who testified that received media attention.
Let’s not forget that Rice was trained as a young child to be a performer on the piano, and later as a professor, which is in part performance art. So one could say that rather than providing insights into the complexity of the 9/11 issue, and how to fix the structural issues to which she constantly referred, Rice accomplished what her performance was supposed to accomplish,justify the lack of administrative action.
I suspect Advisor Rice has not read James O’Toole’s book , “The Executive Compass,” in which he refers to the “other side of complexity.” By this, O’Toole means being able to see a problem in all its complexity before deciding on a simple way to think about and/or communicate it to others.
Seeing the “other side of complexity” before moving to “this side of complexity” involves analyzing problems from a variety of perspectives, understanding and taking into consideration a myriad issues, constituents, competitors, and possible partners when analyzing problems, and deciding how to act so as not to alienate those with whom future interaction is required.
Getting to the “other side of complexity” is the essence of “issues management” as contrasted with the more familiar “crisis management.”
Issues management is a process used to prevent,rather than react to,issues before they become major problems, since most crises don’t arise out of thin air. Issues management involves ongoing scanning to identify potential problems, pulling bits and pieces of information from various sources together, determining the probability something will happen, and then developing strategies to address the problem. The process includes looking at the cost and resources needed to prevent a crisis. It is a proactive process.
Crisis management, on the other hand, involves making decisions after a crisis has occurred. It is a reactive process. Clearly Security Advisor Rice’s approach to the 9/11 Commission testimony reflects a crisis management approach. She criticized Dick Clark and others who tried to give her a “heads up, ” saying there was no specific date, time and place of a possible attack in his communications to her. It was only after 9/11 that Advisor Rice began to focus on terrorism.
It would seem that the function of a national security advisor (the delegated “anti-terrorism leader”) should be proactive rather than reactive. The reactive creation of the Homeland Security Agency, perhaps the biggest and most unmanageable agency in the country, hardly is a solution to the structure problem to which Rice referred so often.
Too bad her self-assured comments to the 9/11 Commission did little to address the structure and lack of a silver bullet problems she repeatedly pointed out as the core of the country’s security problem. The buck stops at the top, and pointing fingers rather than taking responsibility for connecting the dots suggests that Advisor Rice needs a course in “issues management.”
President Bush, our MBA president, should follow the lead of Donald Trump and tell his national security advisor, “You’re fired!”
Rosener is a professor in the Graduate School of Management at UC Irvine and a noted author and speaker.
