We’ve long been believers that corporate leaders can draw important lessons from decision-making at the highest levels of government.  That’s because corporate decision-making is often poorly documented; companies tend to move on as quickly as possible. By contrast, while important political decisions are initially opaque, they tend to be the object of dogged reporting and multiple memoirs. Thus, learning can actually happen.

In that vein, Bob Woodward has offered an interesting set of management lessons that President Obama can draw from the Bush presidency.  Woodward’s lessons are very consistent with our recommendations in Billion-Dollar Lessons and worthwhile for corporate leaders to ponder.  We list the lessons below, and point you to Woodward’s Washington Post article for a fuller treatment.  We’ve also snapped several clips from Woodward’s recent appearance on the Charlie Rose show, which adds some color to his article.

Woodward sets the stage for his observations in this way:

“There’s actually a lot that President-elect Barack Obama can learn from the troubled presidency of George W. Bush. Over the past eight years, I have interviewed President Bush for nearly 11 hours, spent hundreds of hours with his administration’s key players and reviewed thousands of pages of documents and notes. That produced four books, totaling 1,727 pages, that amount to a very long case study in presidential decision-making, and there are plenty of morals to the story. Presidents live in the unfinished business of their predecessors, and Bush casts a giant shadow on the Obama presidency with two incomplete wars and a monumental financial and economic crisis.”

Here are 10 management lessons that, in Bob Woodward’s view, President Obama and his team should take away from the Bush experience.  Just substitute “CEOs” for “Presidents,” and the list is entirely applicable.

1. Presidents set the tone. Don’t be passive or tolerate virulent divisions.

2. The president must insist that everyone speak out loud in front of the others, even — or especially — when there are vehement disagreements.

3. A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and concepts behind his policies.

4. Presidents need to draw people out and make sure that bad news makes it to the Oval Office.

5. Presidents need to foster a culture of skepticism and doubt.

6. Presidents get contradictory data, and they need a rigorous way to sort it out.

7. Presidents must tell the public the hard truth, even if that means delivering very bad news.

8. Righteous motives are not enough for effective policy.

9. Presidents must insist on strategic thinking.

10. The president should embrace transparency. Some version of the behind-the-scenes story of what happened in his White House will always make it out to the public — and everyone will be better off if that version is as accurate as possible.

In the Charlie Rose interview, Woodward highlights several egregious examples of management problems in the Bush presidency.  One had to do with Vice President Cheney’s private discussions with President Bush, delivering recommendations that were kept secret and never tested in larger groups.  Woodward’s bottom line: “You can’t have somebody whispering offline in the leader’s ear because — particularly when it’s somebody who had the influence that Cheney did–without testing some of those ideas.”

Another example had to do with the meeting that never happened.  That was, namely, a “last-chance review” (in the parlance that we used in “Billion-Dollar Lessons”) on the decision to go to war in Iraq.  In Woodward’s words:  “There was a momentum, there was a sense of inevitability, there was a sense that it was going to be easy.  And no meeting, no discussion.”