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Samadhi · Inscrit le: 05 Juin 2007 Messages: 26

Here is a puzzle: effectiveness in senior leadership positions in
government does not seem to be well correlated with intelligence.
Washington was a better President than Jefferson, though less able
intellectually. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and
Ronald Reagan were not as bright as Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon,
Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton. Lincoln, a brilliant lawyer, is an exception;
Theodore Roosevelt perhaps another exception; and doubtless there are
others. But overall the correlation between intelligence and effectiveness
in the Presidency may actually be negative. Even more striking are the
failures of Kennedy and Johnson's national security team in Vietnam and
George W. Bush's national security team in Iraq. McNamara and his whiz
kids (such as Daniel Ellsberg, Harold Brown, and Alan Enthoven), the
Bundies, Walt Rostow, George Ball—these were extremely able people,
many of them (like McNamara and McGeorge Bundy) truly brilliant. And
Bush assembled an outstanding national security team--Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Rice, Tenet (appointed by Clinton but held
over by Bush). Two members of the team--Cheney and Rumsfeld--were
former secretaries of defense! And Powell was a former chairman of the
joint chiefs of staff.

It could just be bad luck, but I think not. Economists distinguish
between general and specific human capital, the first created by IQ and
education and the second by training and experience in a particular job.
A person who has a large amount of general human capital is likely to
find a job in which that capital, augmented by on the job training and
experience, is highly productive. The resulting success will make him an
attractive candidate for a high-level government job. The high-level jobs
are filled generally by lateral entries from quite different jobs, rather than
by civil servants. Some of these high-level jobs are technical; an example
is the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board. Such jobs are
relatively easy to fill with persons who can be predicted with reasonable
confidence to do a good job.

But there is a tendency to exaggerate the versatility of the combined
general-specific human capital that a lateral entrant brings to a
high-level government job of a managerial or advisory rather than
technical character. There are several characteristics of such a job that
actually militate against the prospects for the success of an extremely
intelligent person. First, these are "ensemble" jobs in the sense that many
different skills or aptitudes are necessary to successful performance; if
one of these, such as intelligence, is very highly developed, a person may
neglect the others.

Second, it may not be possible to use step-by-step, logical reasoning to
solve the problems laid at the feet of the occupant of a job like secretary
of defense or secretary of state or national security adviser. Such
questions as what to do in Vietnam or what to do in Iraq do not lend
themselves to rigorous analysis because there is not enough information
to analyze. Intelligence is not designed for coping with situations that are
not complex, but rather are profoundly uncertain. Having great
information-processing skills is not worth a lot if you have no reliable
information.

Third, leaders or managers should be more intelligent than their
followers or subordinates, but not too much more intelligent. If they
are too much more intelligent, they will have difficulty assessing the
capacities and limitations of their underlings and they will be tempted to
substitute their intelligence for their underlings' knowledge. Analysis and
knowledge are, to an extent, substitutes. You can multiply two numbers
rapidly if you have good computational skills or if, though your
computational skills are mediocre, you have memorized the multiplication
table. Knowledge in government resides in civil servants, and they tend on
average to be less intelligent (also of course less powerful) than brilliant
laterals. So the latter are tempted to think that they can make decisions
with minimal assistance from the civil servants.

The temptation is reinforced by a failure to distinguish between intuition
and step-by-step reasoning. Cognitive psychologists explain that the
human unconscious contains more information than we can access at a
conscious level. As Herbert Simon (an economist and psychologist)
explained, conscious attention is a severely limited faculty and must be
carefully rationed. Through intuition, however, we can access the larger
repository of unconscious information. Hence we speak of a person as
having "experience" or "good judgment" or "common sense," as
distinguished from being brilliant in the sense of being quick or having a
good (conscious) memory. So now imagine a confrontation between a
brilliant person who has no knowledge about Vietnam or Iraq, and a
career State Department officer who has spent his whole career working
on conditions in one of those countries, who knows the language, has lived
there, and is steeped in the country's history, culture, and politics.
Suppose he offers some advice to the brilliant senior official, and the latter
asks him to explain and justify the advice. He may be unable to do so
because he may be drawing on a repository of information below the
conscious level. The brilliant official may be irritated at his inability to
extract much more than a conclusion from the expert.

What is required at the top levels of government is not brilliance, but
managerial skill, which is a different thing, and includes knowing when
to defer to the superior knowledge of a more experienced but less
mentally agile subordinate. Moreover, so specialized is management as a
job that success in managing a business may not translate at all into
success in managing a government agency. The firm-specific human
capital that a person acquired in a career of management in a business
firm may have no value for the management of a government agency, or
for that matter a university, a private foundation, or an international
organization. Indeed, an experienced manager of a firm may falter and
have to be fired if a change in the firm's environment requires a different
type of management skill.

A striking example of the specialized character of leadership human
capital is Larry Summers. A truly brilliant person and successful secretary
of the treasury, he failed as president of Harvard University though he
seemed to many people (myself included) to be an outstanding choice. I
have the highest personal and professional regard for Summers and
blame the failure of his presidency not on him but on the Harvard faculty
of arts and sciences. But the fact is that he failed, because he was not able
to port his very considerable suite of intellectual and managerial assets to
the management of an organization critically different from the Treasury
Department.

Source : http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

ralafontant

Mon intervention sera breve faute de temps mais je me demande si le modele d'une ecole d'administration publique pour preparer les gestionnaires a la maniere de l'ENA en France ne possede pas des elements de reponse a ce probleme.
_________________
Ann brase lide

Samadhi · Inscrit le: 05 Juin 2007 Messages: 26