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.
The second, "Against All Enemies," was written by career bureaucrat and former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, who thought the administration was inattentive to the dangers of terrorism. And the third, "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, is a journalist's account of the war on Iraq based on interviews with the president and his advisors.
In addition, two books by Bush loyalists -- advisor Karen Hughes' "Ten Minutes from Normal" and former speechwriter David Frum's "The Right Man" -- are also insider accounts, though they shed less light on the White House decision-making process. Frum left the White House early in the administration, and Hughes, a longtime supporter, offers only a few, unfailingly flattering glimpses of her boss in action.
The O'Neill, Clarke and Woodward accounts have strengths and weaknesses, reflecting the experience, access or bias of the authors, scholars say. But by looking at all the books, they say they can begin to overcome the inadequacies of any single account.
"Triangulate is an excellent image," said Fred I. Greenstein, a presidential historian at Princeton University. "These books certainly tell you things."
Greenstein said that one striking thing about all three books was what they don't show. There are few examples, for instance, of Bush presiding over meetings in which subordinates presented problems, weighed evidence and aired differing views.
"I think a lot of policy is made on the fly," he said. "It isn't a process in which people assemble and go back and forth in a rigorous way."
Another thing largely missing from the books was any indication that documents or memos weighing policy alternatives are circulated and discussed. Harvard's Allison said one of the few documents the administration did prepare in advance of the Iraq war -- the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq probably had weapons of mass destruction -- was quickly compiled and not very well done.
"The more it's examined, it seems quite sloppy," he said. "At this point, if there had been some good analysis of the issues on paper, we would have seen some evidence of it.
"The contrast with the textbook conception of informed decision making is distressing," he said.
Without a framework for analysis, many important policy discussions appeared to have been disorganized at best, the management specialists say.
