Hey, You! Mr. M.B.A. President!

What happened, Dude?

You who prided yourself so much on being the first M.B.A. president!

If the stock price of the U.S. were valued at, say, $100 when you began your term in 2001, how would you peg it today? What about linking the price to your popularity rating of 27%? Too high. A value of $20 is more realistic meaning a loss of 80% of value which, when inflation is added, is more than 80%.

The fall in value of 401Ks could be another measure.

A Washington Post story on the front page January 12, 2009 says you realized the lowest percentage of job growth over a two year presidential term in 70 years! And the lowest annualized job growth since Truman! Good night, man!

Goal setting is an important part of what they teach you in B-school.

In early 2007 James Pfiffner writing in Public Administration Review praised you for many of your policy security goal “achievements,” (!) namely:

1. The war in Iraq (?),
2. The war against terrorism (??)
3. The treatment of detainees (!!!!).
4. The use of intelligence leading up to war (I kid you not; this is all in the abstract), however (whoa, buster, there really is an “however”):

Bush’s deficiencies as an administrator have undermined his policy successes.

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(Mr. Phiffner, a teacher at George Mason University, must be a undercover comedian, kind of a reverse Al Franken.)

On the other hand Warren Hellman , a Harvard M.B.A. graduate like you, writing for Salon.com at the same time (February, 2007) said a superlative Board of Directors (ahem) would likely fry you real fast.

A characteristic of many failing CEOs when losses are mounting is to hide or obfuscate the real deficits. This president, in addition to incurring massive deficits, has managed to hide the magnitude of the losses by special (otherwise known as "off balance sheet") allocations of billions of dollars that do not appear in the annual budget.

The most important strategic decision made by CEO Bush was to minimize the importance of stabilizing Afghanistan, while at the same time choosing to invade Iraq. …Bush also had no business plan for his new endeavor, failing to take into account what the war would cost in lives and treasure …ready to reject any evidence that did not support the decision to invade

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Dude! You did not even execute your own decisions, Hellman says, with inadequate troops, insufficient equipment and dissatisfactory research.
Why would a Board of Directors keep somebody like you?

Hellman continues (my paraphrasing):

Rather than replacing wornout, stale employees with fresh insights and new directions offered by a different crew, you kept the “yessiree, boss” people who only reinforced your old, tired programs and ideas.

Because you mismanaged revenues and spent it on strategic mistakes (Iraq), there is nothing left for R+D which is critical to the future success of any company.

The Board of Directors (the Congress) should have fired you to satisfy the shareholders (we, the people), but they neglected their fiduciary responsibilities to us and let you ride out into the tumbleweeds.

Methinks the Board of Directors needs to be wiped out, and we need a new one!

One of your classmates at Harvard’s Business School, Thomas Lifson writing in the American Thinker which he edits, vigorously defended you in an article in February 2004, and “the small handful of major goals” you defined for your presidency:

1. Winning the war on terrorism
2. Building Republican dominance in government
3. Keeping the economy growing “at a healthy pace”

How do you think you did, Mr. M.B.A. President?

From Harvard’s B-school comes a reply to a question posed by Business Week in its Nov. 5, 2003 edition: What did you learn in B-school and when did you learn it?

The school's focus is on general managers who can see the big strategic picture, establish priorities, and make the most of the functional expertise of those who work with them to make decisions and take action

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The same article observes you went for “win-lose” results rather than “win-win” which is what Stanford teaches, according to Justin Wolfers, then at Stanford, now at Wharton. “My way or the highway” has always been your mantra!

Hey, Dude, you’re almost off of our cloud! Thanks to Time, and not the weak-willed, ineffective Board of Directors we have, you are almost done. And so are we.