Six Rules for Presidents

In recognition of our new president, I will take a short break from the book notes.

In 1993, Peter Drucker wrote an interesting article titled, “Six Rules for Presidents.” Not only is it fun to hear predictions, I think most of the six rules apply to each of our lives.

In four or eight years we will know if President Trump (or Professor Drucker) got anything wrong. Here is the article in its entirety:

It's hard to imagine a more diverse group than Bill Clinton's predecessors in the American presidency – in abilities, personalities, values, styles, and achievements. But even the weakest of them had considerable effectiveness as long as they observed six management rules. And even the most powerful lost effectiveness as soon as they violated these rules.

What needs to be done? is the first thing the president must ask. He must not stubbornly do what he wants to do, even if it was the focus of his campaign.

Harry Truman came to the presidency in April 1945 convinced – as were most Americans – that with the end of the war in sight, the country could and should focus again on domestic problems. He was passionately committed to reviving the New Deal. What made him an effective president was his accepting within a few weeks that international affairs, especially the containment of Stalin's worldwide aggression, had to be given priority whether he liked it or not (and he didn't). There seems to be a law of American politics that the world always changes between Election Day and Inauguration Day. To refuse to accept this – as Jimmy Carter tried to do – is not to be “principled.” It is to deny reality and condemn oneself to being ineffectual.

Concentrate, don't splinter yourself is the second rule. There usually are a half a dozen right answers to “What needs to be done?” Yet unless a president makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.

Franklin Roosevelt snubbed the outside world during his first five years in office, despite the rise of Hitler in Europe and the Japanese invasion of China. By early 1938 we were still in deepest Depression, and the country was highly isolationist in mood. But practically overnight, FDR switched his priority to international affairs, all but neglecting domestic issues. Lyndon Johnson, thirty years later, tried to fight the war in Vietnam and the War on Poverty simultaneously. We lost both.

The president's top priority has to be something that truly needs to be done. If it is not highly controversial, it is likely to be the wrong priority. It has to be doable – and doable fairly fast – which means that it has to be a limited objective. But it also has to be important enough to make a difference if done successfully.

Ronald Reagan applied these guidelines when he decided in 1981 to make stopping inflation his first priority and to do so by raising interest rates sky-high. Any second-year economics student could have told Mr. Reagan that this would cause a massive recession – and indeed unemployment jumped within a few months from an already high 7 ½ percent to 10 percent, a rate not seen since the Depression. Yet stopping inflation was surely something that needed to be done. It was quickly doable, and it did make a difference.

Mr. Reagan's action laid the foundation for the subsequent expansion in employment – the greatest in U.S. history. And it earned Mr. Reagan the public's trust, which he enjoyed to the end of his tenure. Mr. Clinton might have gained similar success if he had made insuring the 37 million Americans who lack health coverage his first priority. Instead he shrank from the likely political battle, miring this limited (and doable) objective in the morass of comprehensive health-care reform.

Don't ever bet on a sure thing is rule three. It always misfires. If any president since George Washington ever had a popular mandate it was FDR at his second inauguration in 1937 – reelected with the largest majority in U.S. history and in full control of Congress.

President Roosevelt had every reason to believe that his plan to “pack” the Supreme Court and thereby to remove the last obstacle to the New Deal reforms would be a sure thing. He never even tested the plan before announcing it. It immediately blew up in his face – so much so that he never regained control of Congress. Mr. Clinton too must have thought that removing the ban on gays in the military would be a sure thing – he too never tested the proposal before announcing it. It immediately led to the sharpest drop in public opinion ratings ever suffered by a new president.

Packing the Supreme Court was not perceived by the American public as a way to promote the highly popular New Deal but as a subversion of the Founders' America. President Clinton's proposal was perceived to have far less to do with gay rights than with the combat readiness of the armed forces. Such differences in perception are always “obvious” in retrospect, but only in retrospect. An effective president knows, therefore, that there is no risk-free politics.

An effective president does not micromanage is rule four. The tasks that a U.S. President must do himself are already well beyond what any but the best-organized and most energetic person can possibly accomplish. Whatever the president does not have to do he therefore must not do.

Presidents are much too far away from the scene of action, much too dependent on what other people tell them or choose not to tell them, and much too busy to study the fine print to micromanage successfully – and in carrying out the work of government, “God is in the details.” As Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter have proved, there is no quicker way for a president to discredit himself than to be his own chief operation officer.

Yet in the American system the president, and no one else, is ultimately accountable for the government's performance. An effective president has to say no to the temptation to micromanage but make sure operations are being taken care of. A president needs a small team of highly disciplined people, each with clear operating responsibility for one area.

The model might be FDR's cabinet. Nine of its ten members (all but the secretary of state) were what we now would call technocrats – competent specialists in one area. “I make the decision,” Roosevelt said, “and then turn the job over to a cabinet member and leave him or her alone.” That the operating team delivered an exceptional performance – not one financial scandal, for instance, despite unprecedented governmental spending – explains in large measure Roosevelt's own unprecedented hold on power and office.

Later presidents tried to get the same effectiveness by having one chief of staff, a chief operating officer. It has never worked. But the alternative, the one Mr. Clinton has chosen – to have dozens and dozens of deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, special assistants and so on – only converts government into a perpetual mass meeting.

A president has no friends in the administration was Lincoln's maxim and rule five. Any president who has disregarded it has lived to regret it.

No one can trust “friends of the president.” Whom do they work for? Whom do they speak for? To whom do they really report? At best, they are suspected of running around their official superiors and to the Great Friend; at worst, they are known as the president's spies. Above all, they are always tempted to abuse their position as a friend and the power that goes with it. If they do so by taking a bribe or otherwise enriching themselves or their families, the resulting “financial scandal” makes the headlines. Nonfinancial abuses (e.g., obtaining special treatment for this or that interest group) are usually hushed up. Yet such abuses can do even more damage than the financial misdeeds to the president's effectiveness, his policies, his reputation.

Presidents are human beings, and their job is a lonely one. Being politicians, they tend to be gregarious people who crave company, companionship, sympathy. This explains both why presidents are so prone to bring friends into their administrations and why they are usually extremely reluctant to get rid of a friend who has proved incompetent or betrayed their trust. But effective presidents should emulate the most gregarious man to ever occupy the White House: Teddy Roosevelt. Even as president he led a hectic social life, but not one of his half-dozen “intimates” worked in his administration.

Many presidents' wives, the prime example being Bess Truman, were their husbands' main advisers and confidantes. But prior to Hillary Rodham Clinton not one held a position in an administration.

And the sixth rule? It is the advice Harry Truman gave the newly elected John F. Kennedy: “Once you're elected you stop campaigning.”