If in our country power is, ultimately, vested in us, the people, the President of The United States works for us. Think of it this way. We hired two search firms, the Democratic and Republican Parties, to find us a couple of candidates that we intend to interview for the position of CEO of our country.
I am an instructor in the Business Leadership Center of the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University where I teach a seminar entitled “The Five Roles of the Chief Executive Officer.” My students constantly ask me, “What are the characteristics of a good CEO?” The slide below is taken directly from material I present to them. Not a word has been altered.
Let’s say we gave these criteria to the search firm. We think they’re fairly self-explanatory, but we elaborated on them. The first bullet point means, for example, the successful candidate doesn’t need to know as much about the economy as the Fed Chairman, but he needs to know enough to understand the implications of the Fed’s monetary policy. By “Courageous” we mean he has to be willing to tell us things we know to be true but don’t want to hear. That’s because he will need to inspire us to do something that may not be in our own self-interest so our entire country can prosper. He’s certainly going to have to lead by influence and collaboration because there are 100 senators and 435 house members, the majority of which he must persuade to his point of view to get anything done at all. He’s got to be almost clairvoyant in that he must see the country’s needs years from now.
There is an interview technique known as behavioral interviewing, and that’s the one we’ll be using. The technique stipulates that past behavior is the best predictor of future performance in similar situations. So we’ll ask our candidates to relate what they did in past jobs or life situations that are relevant to the job of President of the United States.
Questions We'll Ask the Candidates:
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Tell me about a time when you were the head of an organization that was taking in less money than it spent and had more debt than revenue. What did you do to fix the situation, and how did it turn out?
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Describe a situation in which you were able to persuade two large groups of independent-minded, self-possessed individuals from various backgrounds and geographical regions, all with separate agendas, some of whom have diametrically opposite views from your own, to see things your way.
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Give me an example of a situation in which you had to determine the core competencies of an extremely large organization to meet the demands you perceived would confront that organization ten to twenty years in the future. What were the organization’s core competencies; what were the demands you perceived it would face; and how did you change the organization to meet those demands?
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Tell me about a time when you were leading a global organization that had a severe crisis in one of its strategic, overseas areas of influence that had major ramifications on its constituencies here in the United States. What was the crisis; what were the ramifications in the United States; and how did you handle it?
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Explain to me a situation in which there was a disruption in the supply chain for which you were responsible and there was a drastic reduction in the supply of an extremely scarce commodity vital to the organization’s ability to function. What did you do to avert disaster, and how did you position the organization so it would not reoccur?
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Give me a situation in which you made some important promises to people for whom you were responsible, and you had to tell them you weren’t going to be able to live up to your promises. What were the promises? How did you tell the people of your intentions to act contrary to your promises? What was their reaction, and what was the outcome?
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Tell me about a time when a group of people for whom you were responsible came to you to complain they weren’t being treated equitably. How did you verify their complaints were both reasonable and accurate? What, if anything, did you do to rectify the situation? How was your solution perceived by others, and how did things turn out?
Well, you get the picture. We’re sure there are many other questions we could ask our candidates. The only criteria we’d stipulate are they should be framed in terms of relating the question to a past experience the candidates had encountered, and how they reacted during that experience.
Afterward
In 2008 our nation’s voter turnout was the second lowest as compared to the average turnout from 1945 to 2007 of nine other established democracies. The following chart shows that at 62%, the only other nation with a lower turnout is India, and it isn’t but one percentage point behind us.
The number in parentheses after the name of each country is the number of national elections the country has held during the 1947-2007 period.
More than 130 million American citizens cast their vote in the 2008 election. On election night November 4, 2008 more than 70 million people watched the election results on the three traditional networks and six cable networks. It was the most watched event since the Super Bowl of the previous January, which drew 97.5 million viewers on a single traditional network. The election night returns show was also the highest-rated election night since 1980.
As we said way early on, we didn’t write this piece to influence your vote or to persuade you to a particular position or point of view. We didn’t even write this piece to urge you to vote, as, thankfully, in our nation you have every right not to vote. That is why we have, to this point, drawn no conclusions whatsoever. We will, however, now draw but one conclusion, and it will be the closest to controversy we wish to get. Given the evidence contained in the first and second paragraphs of Chapter 1 and the paragraph immediately preceding this one, it would appear we Americans prefer football to elections.
Sources: taxfoundation.org; irs.gov; americanprogress.org; bea.gov; CNN Money; Wikipedia.com; US Bureau of Economic Analysis; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; U.S. Bureau of the Census; tradingeconomics.com; whitehouse.gov; scribd.com; elections.gmu.edu; trace.tennessee.edu/.
