Bush as Boss

hen George W. Bush took office as governor of Texas in January 1995, he was flush from lucrative business ventures in oil and Major League Baseball and armed with a Harvard M.B.A. Having pledged to "bring a conservative, business approach to state government," he sought advice from close associates in the private sector to help him choose key members of his new administration.

But when it came time to name a top aide to help control the state's purse strings, Bush's team of headhunters turned not to the business community, but to the institutional knowledge of the government bureaucracy. They recommended Albert Hawkins, deputy director of the state's Legislative Budget Board. Although Bush had never met Hawkins, a career state employee with a predominantly Democratic voting history, he enthusiastically recruited him to join his inner circle.

Now, after handily winning reelection to a second term as governor of the nation's second most populous state, Bush's soaring political stock has rocketed him to the Republican presidential nomination. Once again, he is touting a conservative agenda of cutting taxes, encouraging individual responsibility and limiting the role of government.

For those wondering what things will be like if the Republicans win back the White House this November, the recruitment of Hawkins offers some clues to the management style Bush would bring to the Oval Office:

• He relies heavily upon trusted underlings for quality information and advice and acts decisively after weighing the options they present him. He had been told by an accountant friend, for example, that Hawkins possessed "the brightest budget mind in the state of Texas" and was somebody who knew almost everything worth knowing about state government.
• He's a big booster of involving private-sector interests, including faith-based organizations, in the delivery of many-but not all-public services. "He knows there are techniques and ways of doing things in the private sector that are easily adapted to state business," Hawkins explains. But the veteran fiscal analyst says he was persuaded that Bush also recognizes that government retains an important role in "making sure that needed public services are delivered in the best way."
• He has also demonstrated a pragmatic ability to elicit cooperation-or at the very least establish cordial relations-across partisan and ideological lines. Hawkins discovered just how charming and persuasive the Texas governor can be when the two first met. "Going into that meeting, I didn't think I'd be agreeing to anything," Hawkins recalls. But after receiving reassurances of Bush's respect for his talent and the governor's commitment to public service, Hawkins agreed to join the team. The issue of the budget expert's political leanings never came up.

Circumstances, of course, won't be quite the same if Bush moves to Washington's larger stage in January. In Texas, a low-tax state that trails the nation in per capita revenues, philosophical differences between Democrats and Republicans tend to be narrow and the voice of organized labor-no friend of Bush's-is muted by the state's right-to-work laws.

In the nation's capital, by contrast, the ideological gulf between congressional
Democrats and Republicans has widened dramatically in recent years and public employee unions are more of a factor than Bush is accustomed to. Nonetheless, he has pledged to "restore civility and respect to our nation's politics" if he wins the presidency. Trying to make good on that promise will truly test his managerial skills.

The Big Decisions

In campaign debates, Bush sometimes appears overly cautious and scripted in his disciplined efforts to "stay on message." But those who have worked closely with him say he approaches important decisions with the instinctive self-assurance of a jet fighter pilot, which he was in the late 1960s for Texas' Air National Guard.

"He does not second-guess himself about decisions," says Tom Schieffer, who served as president of the Texas Rangers when Bush was the baseball team's managing general partner. "George is very good at addressing problems as they come across his desk and then moving on to the next one. When he makes mistakes, he doesn't dwell on them, he tries to learn from them. He thinks it's important to be decisive and provide some leadership."

Schieffer describes Bush as "a classic executive," who focuses on strategic decisions and leaves it to others to work out the details. "He very much believes that the chief executive's responsibility is to manage the other executives," the former Rangers associate explained.

Bush, according to Schieffer, resisted the trap that some baseball owners have fallen into of trying to influence decisions on the playing field. "We basically knew enough about baseball to know that we didn't know," the former team president says, and left such decisions to the "guys who spend their whole lives watching baseball games and studying players." The day-to-day business operations of the franchise, including the building of a new stadium, were similarly delegated to Schieffer.

Schieffer adds, however, that the executives working under Bush's "strategic" direction were held accountable for results. "If the day-to-day operations had not gone well, I wouldn't have been president," he says. And during Bush's tenure, the team's top baseball professionals-field manager Bobby Valentine and general manager Tom Grieve-were replaced "because basically we hadn't won," Schieffer notes.

Former Texas Republican Party executive director Karen Hughes, who has worked as Bush's communications director in the governor's office and in the presidential campaign, adds that Bush believes it's his job to keep in touch with his key lieutenants. "The governor really puts a priority on recruiting strong, capable people, and he understands that to recruit and retain such people you have to give them access to the boss," she says.

In Austin, Hughes explains, Bush chose not to have a traditional chief of staff to act as a traffic cop for the governor's office. Instead, he set up a staff structure that included an executive assistant and six division directors, all of whom reported directly to Bush. In his campaign autobiography, A Charge to Keep (William Morrow, 1999), Bush wrote that he did not want "to replicate the environment" of his father's White House, in which key appointees "felt stifled because they had to go through a filter to get information to the President."

Lawrence B. Lindsey, who served in both the Reagan and Bush White Houses and later was a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, says, however, that if the younger Bush becomes President, the White House staff will have to be powerful enough to prevent "every little problem [from] percolating up to the Oval Office."

Lindsey, who has brought together leading economists to advise the Bush campaign, says "the thing that struck me the most about Bush early on was how thoroughly comfortable with himself he was" in the role of decision maker. "He's really a CEO. He asks us for advice and we give it. Of course, if you have six economists, you get seven opinions. And then he calls the shots. That's the way it should be." Lindsey says he knows from personal experience that Bush is not at all shy about rejecting advice he thinks is unsound or demanding more information. "He's very much a Texan, and I was once on the receiving end of a very straight-shooting response that one would not want to see printed," the economic adviser recalls.

Once major decisions about basic goals are made, Lindsey predicts, Bush will give his Cabinet officers and agency heads "a lot of leeway" to figure out how to get the job done. "He would not just delegate responsibility," Lindsey says, "he would also delegate power. If he thinks something is worth doing, he'll make sure that he puts a person in charge who can get it done."

Being More Businesslike

Indianapolis industrialist Allan B. Hubbard, a former business school classmate of Bush's who served in his father's White House, describes the Texas governor as a believer in "free markets and minimalist government" who strongly believes that government performs best when responsibility is "pushed down as close to the people as possible."

Bush spokeswoman Hughes adds that the Texas governor expects his appointees to abide by "clear principles" that include asking whether a decision encourages local control, individual responsibility and limited government and whether what's being proposed is a proper role for government.

Not surprisingly, Bush has turned to a local politician-former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith-to be the chief domestic policy adviser for his campaign. Goldsmith, whose innovative work in the privatization of municipal public services has drawn much acclaim, is crafting a proposal for achieving similar efficiencies within the federal government.

"We have looked at government reform for a substantial period with a group of experts drawn from state and local governments, as well as the federal government," Goldsmith says. A key objective, he says, will be to take better advantage of the Internet and other technologies that can bypass "traditional, bureaucratic methods and allow citizens easier and more direct interaction with their government."

During his two terms as Indianapolis' mayor from 1991 to 1999, Goldsmith famously observed that "if you open up the Yellow Pages and there are four other businesses doing what you do, maybe they could do it better. Conversely, if nobody else is in the business, maybe we should be doing it."

Contracting out services to private firms is just one of a variety of strategic tools that "are simply a means to the end of improving the quality of public services and driving down their costs," Goldsmith says. He notes that greater use of new information technology can lead to both cost savings in procurement transactions and the "enhancement of customer satisfaction" in service delivery. "I've personally been involved in e-commerce stuff for about 15 years and I guess I'm an enthusiast to the point of excess," he says.

As governor, Bush has backed several initiatives aimed at reforming the delivery of state services. Every two years, his office organizes and sponsors "Excellence in Government" conferences, which bring in outside speakers from business and academia to discuss ways that agency managers can achieve higher levels of performance and make better use of technological innovations.

But major controversy erupted over a Bush proposal to invite major corporations to take charge of and modernize the state's screening of applicants for welfare benefits, including Medicaid and food stamps. The scheme drew heavy criticism from organized labor and welfare advocacy groups and was blocked when the Clinton administration declined to issue waivers needed to implement the new approach.

Bush's budget director, Hawkins, argues that critics misrepresented the program by claiming that the state was delegating the authority to determine welfare eligibility to for-profit contractors. "There was no such delegation," Hawkins says. "The idea was to create a more efficient and effective automated support system that would have enabled citizens to enroll for various benefits at a single location." The use of modern technology, he added, would have led to administrative savings as well.

Bush was more successful on another front. Working with legislative leaders, he won approval of the consolidation of nearly a dozen separate employment services and work training programs into a single new entity, the Texas Workforce Commission. Organized labor groups agreed to support the merger proposal on condition that they would be permitted to name one of the new agency's three commissioners. But Bush outraged union leaders, according to Richard Levy, legal director of the Texas AFL-CIO, by ignoring their recommendations in naming the initial "labor" member of the commission.

Getting Along With the Help

Those who have worked closely with Bush insist that his optimism and sunny demeanor--some refer to it Reaganesque-are central to his leadership style. But they also insist that a Bush presidency, unlike Reagan's, would seek to boost the morale of federal workers rather than enter into an adversarial relationship with them.

"Bush is not someone who believes government is evil," argues Lindsey. "He does believe that government is something that should be done well. So I think he will set the right moral and philosophical tone that is needed to rebuild these institutions."

Lindsey says that under Bush, government streamlining measures would primarily focus on the functions "that contribute to most people's image of a bloated bureaucracy, such as the proverbial government office where you have to get seven rubber stamps on a document." But he predicts that Bush would want to strengthen "the other function of the bureaucracy, which is to give timely information and guidance to the executive."

Lindsey says that if a "Cabinet Secretary were to make the case to Bush that it is a national priority to rebuild some of the senior information-gathering functions in the government, Bush would spend the political capital to get it done."

The Bush economic adviser expresses concern that in recent years "the human capital of the government has been run down to a point that is dangerous." He notes, as an example, that "30 years ago, senior positions at the Treasury Department were premier jobs to aspire to, but that is no longer the case for younger people" launching professional careers today.

Bush, according to his campaign advisers, would also be less inclined to "hamstring" senior government officials by exerting excessive White House control over the execution of their missions. Goldsmith says his working group on government efficiency is studying "empowerment strategies for federal employees." The idea, he says, "is to make government more responsive to citizens through a range of techniques that simultaneously increase the discretion and authority of the federal worker."

Goldsmith also indicates, however, that further federal downsizing may be on the way. Asked whether Bush might use reductions in force to reduce the size of the federal workforce, he says: "I would observe that a significant rate of attrition and early retirements will allow an enormous amount of innovation without having to get anywhere near the issue of layoffs."

In Austin, according to Hawkins, Bush has been able to boost the morale of state workers by conveying his appreciation of their values and dedication. "You don't come into the public service expecting to get any stock options," Hawkins says, adding that Bush understands and respects employees who seek the less tangible rewards that come from helping others.

As governor, Hawkins notes, Bush has initiated a "Texas Stars" program to give recognition to employees of programs that excel in meeting targets set under the state's performance-based budgeting system.

In the view of Hawkins and former Texas Rangers partner Schieffer, much of Bush's success has come from his skill at making people feel good about working for him. Hawkins argues that jaded Washingtonians should not underestimate "the optimism that he will bring into the government." And Schieffer remarks on Bush's popularity with everyone connected with the baseball club, from ticket takers to superstars. "He has such a good spirit about him, and he is interested in people."

These are the traits of the man who says his goal is "to change the tone of Washington" so that he can work with reform-minded members of both political parties "to get some problems solved and then gracefully retire to Texas."

Dick Kirschten is a contributing editor for National Journal.