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Harry Truman didn't think his successor had the right training to be president. "Poor Ike—it won't be a bit like the Army," he said. "He'll sit there all day saying” do this, do that', and nothing will happen." Truman was wrong about Ike. Dwight Eisenhower had led a fractious alliance—you didn't tell Winston Churchill what to do—in a massive, chaotic war. He was used to politics. But Truman's insight could well be applied to another, even more venerated Washington figure: the CEO-turned cabinet secretary.
A 20-year bull market has convinced us all that CEOs are geniuses, so watch with astonishment the troubles of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul O'Neill. Here are two highly regarded businessmen, obviously intelligent and well-informed, foundering in their jobs.
Actually, we shouldn't be surprised. Rumsfeld and O'Neill are not doing badly despite having been successful CEOs but because of it. The record of senior businessmen in government is one of almost unrelieved disappointment. In fact, with the exception of Robert Rubin, it is difficult to think of a CEO who had a successful career in government.
Why is this？ Well, first the CEO has to recognize that he is no longer the CEO. He is at best an adviser to the CEO, the president. But even the president is not really the CEO. No one is. Power in a corporation is concentrated and vertically Structured. Power in Washington is diffuse and horizontally spread out. The secretary might think he's in charge of his agency. But the chairman of the congressional committee funding that agency feels the same. In his famous study "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents", Richard Neustadt explains how little power the president actually has and concludes that the only lasting presidential power is "the power to persuade".
Take Rumsfeld's attempt to transform. the cold-war military into one geared for the future. It's innovative but deeply threatening to almost everyone in Washington. The Defense Secretary did not try to sell it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress, the budget office or the White House. As a result, the idea is collapsing.
Second, what power you have, you must use carefully. For example, O'Neill's position as Treasury Secretary is one with little formal authority. Unlike Finance Ministers around the world, Treasury does not control the budget. But it has symbolic power. The secretary is seen as the chief economic spokesman for the administration and, if he plays it right, the chief economic adviser for the president.
O'Neill has been publicly critical of the IMF's bailout packages for developing countries while at the same time approving such packages for Turkey, Argentina and Brazil. As a result, he has gotten the worst of both worlds. The bailouts continue, but their effect in bolstering investor confidence is limited because the markets are rattled by his skepticism.
Perhaps the government doesn't do bailouts well. But that leads to a third role: you can't just quit. Jack Welch's famous law for re-engineering General Electric was to be first or second in any given product category, or else get out of that business. But if the government isn't doing a particular job at peak level, it doesn't always have the option of relieving itself of that function. The Pentagon probably wastes a lot of money. But it can't get out of the national-security business.
The key to former Treasury Secretary Rubin's success may have been that he fully understood that business and government are, in his words, "necessarily and properly very different". In a recent speech he explained, "Business functions around one predominate organizing principle, profitability… Government, on the other hand, deals with a vast number of equally legitimate and often potentially competing objectives—for example, energy production versus environmental protection, or safety regulations versus productivity."
Rubin's example
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Section A
Directions: In this section, you will read 5 short incomplete dialogues between two speakers, each followed by 4 choices marked A, B, C, and D. Choose the answer that best suits the situation to complete the dialogue by marking the corresponding letter with a single bar across the square brackets on your machine-scoring ANSWER SHEET.
A: Helen isn't here yet. Did you forget to invite her？ B: ______.
Which of the following is true about the American future-mindedness？
What links cognitive development to the needs of society？
These issues are at the heart of the study, the 10th in a series of environmental reports published jointly by the United Nations, the World Bank and the Washington-based World Resources Institute, a private environmental research group.
Jonathan Lash, the Institute's president, says the new report is about strengthening what he calls "environmental democracy" around the world.
"Who gets to play a role？ Who has information？ Who has power to influence those decisions？ When there is a proposal to log a forest, do the people whose livelihoods depend on that forest have a chance to have some say in what happens？ When a new mine is proposed, do the local villages have a chance to participate in the decision of about where the roads should be built, what kind of conditions should be imposed to protect the environment, whether the spoils can be discharged into the local river？" he says.
The study also looks at the progress made since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 11 years ago toward improving citizen access to environmental information, decision-making and environmental justice. All nine countries studied—Chile, Hungary, Italy, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda and the United States—have strong laws providing access to information. But their implementation is weak and, according to the new report, much remains to be done.
Even so, more than 500,000 people in Thailand used the Official Information Act in its first three years of existence. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act continues to grow, with 2 million requests made in 1999.
Jonathan Lash says one of the most striking trends over the last decade has been the globalization of communications and civil society. By the mid-1990s one million NGOs were operating in India; 210,000 in Brazil and 96,000 in the Philippines.
"There are now tens of thousands of non-governmental organizations who have access to the Internet and the capacity to become part of a network that communicates very rapidly about environmental problems. It means that their voices are amplified in a very significant way and their opportunity to obtain information is hugely enhanced," he says. "The consequence is that the entire process by which problems are identified and addressed is changed because there are so many more voices who are capable of expressing views on these decisions."
Jonathan Lash says citizens, governments and businesses are more aware than ever before of what needs to be done and are taking action to implement change. That is a very significant addition to the progress of the implementation of official rights of participation, he said.
The report says poor communities are particularly vulnerable and less likely to have control over resources on which they depend. But, Jonathan Lash says, they are more willing to engage their governments on decisions that bear directly on health and well being.
When poor people have a seat at the table, he says, they are more likely to resolve environmental problems and social justice. He gives an example of a South African tribe that lost their ancestral rights to harvest mussels when the coastal area was turned into a nature reserve.
"The issue was resolved when they were included as equal partners in the management of the reserve. They worked out a sustainable harvest arrangement and not only became part of the park, but they became part of the mechanism for protecting the park, simply continuing doing what they had done for hundreds of years," he says. "It is a clas
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