President Bush styles himself as the first CEO president, applying the rigor and authority of his MBA education to the job of chief executive of the nation.

But that's not the picture that emerges from three recent insider accounts of the workings of the Bush administration, experts in decision-making and presidential management say. On the contrary, they say, the president appears to have a highly personal working style, with little emphasis on systematic analysis of major decisions.

"There seems to be almost an absence of any analytical or deliberative process for mapping the problem or exploring alternatives or estimating consequences," said Graham Allison, a professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

And Bush appears to give greater weight to his own instincts than to experts or other sources of advice and information. The president has a "bias for action," said Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. "I've been struck by [how] Bush's sense of personal identity as a leader shapes his decisions," he said.

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Greenstein said that one striking thing about all three books was what they don't show. There are few examples, for instance, of Bush presiding over meetings in which subordinates presented problems, weighed evidence and aired differing views.

"I think a lot of policy is made on the fly," he said. "It isn't a process in which people assemble and go back and forth in a rigorous way."

Another thing largely missing from the books was any indication that documents or memos weighing policy alternatives are circulated and discussed. Harvard's Allison said one of the few documents the administration did prepare in advance of the Iraq war — the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq probably had weapons of mass destruction — was quickly compiled and not very well done.

"The more it's examined, it seems quite sloppy," he said. "At this point, if there had been some good analysis of the issues on paper, we would have seen some evidence of it.

"The contrast with the textbook conception of informed decision making is distressing," he said.

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Stanford's Kramer said though Bush showed little interest in the kind of number-crunching analysis taught in business school, his style of management does conform to the popular image of chief executives as forceful and "decisive." "There seems to be a lot of value attached to showing resolve and demonstrating resolve," he said.

But Jay Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of "Decision Making at the Top," said the decision-making techniques taught at that school — from which Bush received an MBA — focus on understanding the nature of decisions, not simplifying them.

"What we teach around here is that you've got to understand the complexity of the territory you're trying to affect," he said. "You don't make a decision until you've surveyed all the possible ramifications. The binary idea that you're either right or wrong is just foolishness."

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"He doesn't like long meetings. He likes truncated meetings. That means you're not going to have the kinds of sessions … that are going to bring in lots of different kinds of information," Kumar said.


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"The decisiveness part is certainly there," he said. "The imperviousness to facts and analysis is also there. So what we have is someone who is going on raw instinct."

A corollary, Rockman said, is that though Bush likes making decisions, his organizational style is not very good at implementation or follow-up.

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"Bush appears to rest his confidence in a few people whose judgment corresponds to his gut instincts" he said. "He seems to be obsessive about being decisive, but willing to make hard and fast decisions on the basis of ideology more than evidence."