WASHINGTON — President Bush styles himself as the first CEO president, applying the rigor and authority of his MBA education to the job of chief executive of the nation.
But that's not the picture that emerges from three recent insider accounts of the workings of the Bush administration, experts in decision-making and presidential management say. On the contrary, they say, the president appears to have a highly personal working style, with little emphasis on systematic analysis of major decisions.
"There seems to be almost an absence of any analytical or deliberative process for mapping the problem or exploring alternatives or estimating consequences," said Graham Allison, a professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
And Bush appears to give greater weight to his own instincts than to experts or other sources of advice and information. The president has a "bias for action," said Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. "I've been struck by [how] Bush's sense of personal identity as a leader shapes his decisions," he said.
For the last three years, experts on the presidency have largely withheld judgment about how the Bush White House -- considered the most secretive since Richard Nixon's -- makes major decisions. The experts thought they had inadequate information to reach general conclusions.
That has changed. Scholars of management and government have begun to pore through this spring's crop of insider books and draw preliminary assessments of how Bush operates as president. And their main conclusion is that he makes decisions primarily on instinct, not analysis.
Kramer, for example, said: "I would contrast his style to someone like [Nixon's former Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger, who looked at decisions more in terms of a balance of power and what is realistic to achieve, thinking about how the rest of the world will respond."
For Bush, by contrast, "emotion and vision and instinct are his view of the world." That can be a good thing, Kramer added. "He bases his decisions on a few principles, but if those principles are good principles, that can lead to good decisions."
The three insider books are as different as the insiders who wrote them. The first, "The Price of Loyalty," reflects the experience of former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, the former Alcoa chief executive who was forced out for dissenting over economic policy.
