Business, Politics Require Different Skills, Experts Say

If Northwest Airlines sent you to Minneapolis and your bags to Detroit, you’d probably fume. But would that be any reason to vote against gubernatorial hopeful Al Checchi?

Or say your Viper car alarm keeps some bad guy from messing with your Maserati. Should you thank Darrell Issa by supporting his bid for U.S. Senate? How about your neighbors, who might be less grateful for that unscheduled 3 a.m. wake-up call?

California is experiencing a bull market in business bigwigs hoping to parlay corporate backgrounds into elective office. Democrat Checchi, the former co-chairman of Northwest Airlines, and Republican Issa, who made his fortune foiling car thieves, are two of the most prominent examples.

Republicans also have Noel Irwin-Hentschel, a candidate for lieutenant governor, who founded a multimillion-dollar Los Angeles travel business. Democrat Phil Angelides, a Sacramento developer, is making his second try for state treasurer.

All are political newcomers, except for Angelides, a former state Democratic Party chairman. So their corporate track records, which each proudly (and sometimes selectively) promotes, are among the few means that the average voter has to assess the candidates’ promises and gauge their potential--giving new meaning to the concept of “brand loyalty.”

Thus, a question: Does business acumen necessarily portend political success? Are the skills needed to prosper in corporate America necessarily those required to accomplish things in elected office? In other words, if you build a better mousetrap, should voters beat a path to your door?

The short answer, it seems, is: not necessarily. Indeed, interviews with more than a dozen business school experts, management consultants and former business leaders elected to various political posts suggest that anyone who thinks differently faces a big surprise once they take office.

“Business experience is better than no experience,” said Warren Bennis, a widely published USC business professor who specializes in leadership skills. But “there is zero correlation between being an effective business leader and being effective in the political arena.” Succeeding in high political office “is really complex, much more complex even than running General Motors,” Bennis said.

Others don’t go quite that far.

Mark Krueger, a vice president of the Hackett Group, a Cleveland-area consulting firm, says that the corporate skills involved in hiring and successfully managing talented employees could easily be applied to the political arena. But “most executives would have to further refine their skill sets around collaboration, negotiating and compromise,” Krueger said, as well as “developing a sound-bite capability in their communications style.”

The relatively few business leaders who have successfully made the transition from running a major business to serving in political office say much the same thing.

*

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) recalls the “culture shock” he experienced going from the corporate world to Capitol Hill, where he quickly learned that “the rules of business don’t necessarily apply.”

“The typical CEO does some of the listening, a lot of talking and almost all the decision-making,” said Lautenberg, who started Automatic Data Processing, a nationwide payroll concern, before being elected to the Senate in 1982. “You get [to Capitol Hill] and find out that lots of people compete to do all the talking, you do a helluva lot of listening and very little decision-making.”

Rep. Amo Houghton (R-N.Y.), the only corporate executive to go from the Fortune 500 to Congress, compares the “circular process” of decision-making in elected office with the ease of action inside a corporation’s “semi-totalitarian state.”

“When you’re in politics, it’s different from business because you’re a personal target every single hour of every day,” said Houghton, who came to Congress in 1986 from Owens Corning Glass Works, his family’s concern. “Somebody on the other side or a different philosophy is always trying to undercut you, and you have to be willing to take that.”

To be sure, there have been Kennedys (three), a Rockefeller and a Heinz in the U.S. Senate. But it may be no accident that all were beneficiaries of their vast family fortunes, and not the ones who created the wealth.

The tough hide that elected office requires, the high quotient of public humility and the patience necessary may explain why “so few people have crossed over” from the upper ranks of corporate management, said David Vogel, a political scientist who teaches business and public policy at UC Berkeley.

George Romney, for instance, went from head of American Motors to governor of Michigan, only to watch his presidential prospects evaporate after a single blooper: his 1967 profession that he was “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam War. As Romney’s experience suggests, public office brings a vastly different level of scrutiny than many corporate executives are used to facing.

“It’s more of a fishbowl,” Vogel said. “In business, the constituencies are much narrower and more sharply defined. . . . In politics you’re much more vulnerable, open, visible.”

Indeed, Bob Lanier, a Texas builder and financier who served three terms as Houston mayor, discovered a big difference in what might be loosely described as the research and development phase of policymaking.

“In business, I would get a roughly formed idea, trot it to associates and get their input on how to make it work,” said Lanier, who is back in private business.

“In the political process, if you drop an idea and don’t have it pretty well thought out, what the impact will be and how to defend it, that idea gets slaughtered before it even reaches puberty,” he said.

Moreover, Lanier said, the concept of long-range planning is a relative one in politics, when the next election--if not the next highest office--always looms on the horizon.

“In political office, you can let the sewer system deteriorate because in six to eight years, you’ll have moved on,” Lanier said. “When you’re running a business, while there’s pressure to look good in the short term--particularly in a publicly owned company--you still have to think longer term.”

Although a business background is no guarantor of success, it hardly precludes political achievement. Witness Lanier, who was hugely popular throughout his terms as Houston mayor, as well as Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who won reelection last year.

The secret, Riordan suggested, is being smart enough to know what you don’t know.

“If you’re somebody who’s intelligent and has enough self-confidence to take advice from other people, you surround yourself with people who have the political skills you lack,” Riordan said. “Then, when you’ve been in office awhile, you learn some of the political stuff.”

Jean Lipman-Blumen, a professor of public policy and organizational behavior at Claremont Graduate University, says that willingness to defer to others’ strengths is a common ingredient of success in business as well as politics. “The problem all leaders face is how to pull people together . . . to collaborate and work on a common vision,” she said.

*

Although the authoritarian approach may sometimes be necessary in a corporate setting, Lipman-Blumen added, long-term success requires establishing clear-cut goals and “turning people on to the cause,” in much the way political coalitions are built.

Most experts agree that the area of customer service and consumer satisfaction is another where corporate and political sensibilities intersect. Many, in fact, use the words “customer” and “constituent” interchangeably.

“As a businessman, my accountability was really to my customers,” said Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos), who helped build California’s multimillion-dollar Central Coast wine industry from scratch. “Stores, restaurants, different states, export markets--it was not all that different, really, than serving different constituent groups in a district.”

Tom Koulopoulos, a management expert who teaches at Boston College, said the corporate mantra of the ‘90s--”cutting through the blubber” and making businesses leaner and more responsive--could well apply to government.

“If you find individuals who led organizations where people are clearly focused on issues like customer satisfaction, customer responsiveness, intimacy and loyalty, that sort of a person might help create a government that is more customer-service-oriented,” Koulopoulos said.

Basing a vote for governor or senator on “whether Northwest is a good place to get a seat, or Viper is your car alarm is probably a little too simplistic,” said Republican Senate hopeful Issa (who nevertheless hastened to mention the many built-in safeguards his products feature to prevent false alarms).

Checchi agrees. Voters, the gubernatorial candidate said, have to make three judgments: “Do I want to go where he’s taking me, do I want to get there the way he’s described, and do I believe he has the will and commitment, based on what he’s done in the past, to make this actually happen?”

Both professed utter confidence that their business-building backgrounds make them perfectly trained to hit the ground running from Day 1, once in office.

Good luck, said Riordan. “Going from business to politics is like a whole other world,” he said. “It’s a little bit like going to Mars.”