Not all women are alike-not even Republicans

by YankeeJim | June 11, 2010 at 03:31 am

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Meg Whitam is a spectacularly successful business woman and entrepreneur. Carla Fiorina is a failed CEO of a mature blue-chip company that she almost ruined. So, you see, CEO experience is just a category.

Both are Republican women, and that's just a category too.

What matters is whether or not they can muster a team and manage in government enterprise that performs with very different aims and metrics than private enterprise.

CEOs of both government and private enterprise have on goal in common, and that is to optimize enterprise performance. Both serve constituents that include the public.

Executives who are also team builders are winners. In these two women, one is a success and the other a failure.

“Politics can be risky business for a CEO
By Karen Tumulty

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 11, 2010

As Meg Whitman, California's new Republican gubernatorial nominee, puts it, she and GOP Senate pick Carly Fiorina are the "worst nightmare" of career politicians: "two businesswomen from the real world who know how to create jobs, balance budgets and get things done."

Is she right? There is a long history of executives attempting to make the leap into public office, going at least as far back as industrialist Wendell Wilkie's bid to unseat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. And there is much about the political environment in 2010 that would seem to make this election year a bull market for CEOs: Voters are eager to turn out officeholders; state and federal budgets are soaked in red ink; unemployment tops the list of public concerns in just about every poll. If only the government worked like a business, the executives-turned-candidates are fond of telling us, we'd all be better off.

The trouble is, by and large, CEOs have turned out to be pretty mediocre politicians.