Seven Habits of Highly Effective Oligarchs

Image via Axiomatica.

Most David Brooks columns are about romantic love, or at least sex. But today's piece, "A Unifying Leader", is more about the relationship between a CEO and his 535-odd vice presidents, so you don't get the charged romance you get in normal columns, where a teenage girl is trying to decide whether she should finish high school and go to Yale or sign up for food stamps and her Obamaphone. Instead, there are slightly different kinds of love, probably involving quantum mechanics, in a rhythm of forgiving your partners or sending them into exile depending on which paragraph you wander into, or the relationship between a part-time writer with a full-time salary and a vast right-wing conspiracy with which he is either engaged in a torrid affair or back on the payroll he left a few years back. Just kidding.

David Brooks columns I didn't finish reading:

Over the past two weeks, President Obama and Republicans in Congress have taken their conflicts to another level. I’m not here to apportion blame, but it would be nice if, in the future, we evaluated presidential candidates on the basis of whether they are skilled at the art of collaboration.

So instead of apportioning blame he's going to let Obama have the whole thing—congressional candidates don't need to be collaborative at all—in a list of eight or nine points (he loses count down toward the bottom).

Like

Third, a collaborative president would offer specific goals to each team, but he would not come up with clear visions. He might say the goal of the education team, say, was to reduce high school dropouts by 10 percent. But he would not tell the team how to get there.

Right, anything but a clear vision, for God's sake! Much better to pull a number out of your ass for an arbitrary and context-free production quota, like Mao Zedong or Arne Duncan (unfortunately that is pretty much how Obama runs the education department; glad he's a little more vision-y at some of the other shops).

Or

The collaborative leader is willing to step back from the war posture of politics and be vulnerable. Trust is built when one leader is vulnerable to another and the opposing leader doesn’t take advantage of it to enhance his own power. Then that opposing leader is vulnerable back and the favor is returned.

That is so going to work on John Boehner. They could have a good cry together, and Boehner will put the knife away. (Brooks has amnesia, of course, here and elsewhere, as Driftglass will tell you in some detail [go read it]; using the vulnerability technique over the past six years, Obama has gotten enough stony silence to build that wall on the Mexican border).

And I don't want to be a snob, but the self-help book he's hinting he's read (four paragraphs later, we find that what he's really read is a Linked-In post, or as he says an "essay") is by a professional board member and amateur student of something called Stakeholder Analysis (maybe Brooks met him on the upper deck of a cruise ship: "Say, not the David Brooks?! I do a little writing myself, in fact, mostly management stuff, probably nothing you'd be interested in..." and into the prompts file it goes).

Stakeholder analysis asks executives to consider the views of people who are affected by their decisions, meaning Obama should consider the feelings of McConnell and Boehner as opposed to, say, the American people, who are not really stakeholders in that sense as far as the theory is concerned—it's about how to make all the members of an oligarchy feel good. But I'm telling you, they already feel a lot better than they deserve.