George W.'s B-School Days

Lock
This article is for subscribers only.

"Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world," George W. Bush wrote in his 1999 book A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House. He didn't take that line from a Harvard Business School brochure, but he could have. It makes you wonder what really happened at the B-school that Bush writes so, well, methodically about.

A lot has been made of the fact that the new President holds a Master's of Business Administration, rather than the law sheepskin that most national politicians claim. Some pundits have gone so far as to say that the lessons Bush learned in two years of case studies and financial analysis will make him a better leader -- just look at all the stories recently about how Bush is managing the White House as if he were a CEO. Curiously, though, in his 243-page book, Bush dedicates only five paragraphs to the time in his life when he "was fascinated by the case study method that Harvard used to teach."