George W. Bush is the first MBA President of the United States (Harvard Business School, ’75).
“Presidential legacies are often defined by the economic conditions of their tenure, and MBA-in-chief George W. Bush will probably carry much of the historical blame for this recession.”
— Erik Hart, “MBAs in Crisis — Who Makes the Grade?,” Economic Policy Review.
For a man who came into office as the nation’s first M.B.A. president, Mr. Bush has sometimes seemed invisible during the housing and credit crunch.
— Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “In Economic Drama, Bush Is Largely Offstage,” New York Times
“…politics has to reconcile multiple goals – consent, security, liberty, prosperity, justice, virtue – in the presence of continuing disagreements about both means and ends. These inherent differences frustrate, eventually, all businesslike schemes of government. Too bad they don’t teach that in business school.”
— Charles R. Kesler, “Why politics isn’t business as usual,” Los Angeles Times
“Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. …. Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA). Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education.”
— Yoshi Tsurumi, “Hail to the Robber Baron?” The Harvard Crimson
“Bush was also the first US President to hold an MBA (from Harvard). He was a believer in Peter Drucker’s “management by objectives” (MBO) approach. I am not sure that his record in office has done a great deal for the reputation of either management education or management gurus.”
— Stefan Stern, “George Bush, the MBA President,” ft.com/managementblog
“Even James W. Ware, … co-author of The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush, has misgivings. Ware no longer mentions the book on his website, even though the site prominently quotes Richard Nixon. ‘I have separated myself from Bush’s administration,’ he wrote in response to my inquiry, declining to comment any further.”
— Geoffrey James, “George W. Bush,MBA.” bNet Sales Machine
Image: “Another Business School Turkey,” by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.
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January 19, 2009 at 5:47 am
[…] At 11 AM citizens from all over the country will gather at Washington’s Dupont Circle to enumerate the accomplishments of the departing President, then walk to a location near the White House and throw shoes in Mr. Bush’s honor, in the fashion of Iraqi reporter Muntader Al-Zaidi. Serviceable shoes will then be donated to the families of local folks who lost jobs thanks to the economic stewardship of the MBA President. […]
January 23, 2009 at 6:53 am
[…] exercise in international destination tourism. Like every other business venture initiated by the MBA President, it was a dismal failure. Mr. Obama he has lived in Hawaii and Indonesia and knows about […]
January 15, 2011 at 12:36 pm
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August 26, 2012 at 6:50 pm
[…] elected, Mitt Romney would be the second Harvard MBA to serve as U.S. President. The first: George W. Bush, the man who crashed the U.S. […]
November 3, 2012 at 2:21 pm
[…] our last Republican president, George W. Bush who, like Mitt Romney, has a Harvard MBA but couldn’t manage his way out of a paper […]
November 12, 2012 at 12:33 am
[…] GOP tried to solve problems with trickle-down math before, most recently under our MBA President, George W. Bush. That Republican Math added up to The Great Recession, and America can’t recover from it […]