Opinion

B’berg’s Black blunder

After three months of hell, Mayor Bloomberg finally put Cathie Black out of her misery as schools chancellor — a fiendishly difficult and complicated job that he was foolish to have offered her and that she was foolish to have accepted.

The questions that arise from this fiasco are: Why did he offer it in the first place — and why did she accept when she was so obviously unqualified?

The answer: managerial fetishism.

This is the idea that a good manager should be able to manage anything, from a lemonade stand to a publishing business to a $17 billion educational system. After all, or so the thinking goes, a good manager uses good management principles that apply to any and every task involving people, goods and services.

Many Americans, especially those who work in corporations, are management fetishists. They believe they can learn how to be successful by reading books like “The One Minute Manager” (total sales: 13 million) and studying organizational systems like “Six Sigma” (the method by which Jack Welch, probably the most admired CEO of our time, ran GE).

Good management is, of course, key to any successful business — indeed, any successful enterprise. But there is a problem with the notion that you can be a brilliant manager when you know nothing about the task you are managing. That’s what it means to make a fetish out of management. The problem is that it’s a ridiculous notion.

Perhaps Bloomberg was right to think Black was a brilliant private-sector manager (although whether that’s true is a matter of some contention among those who have worked for her).

Where he was disastrously wrong was in believing that someone skilled at selling ad bundles to Madison Avenue for a national newspaper and consumer magazines could bring those skills to bear on raising third-grade reading scores in South Jamaica.

It’s no wonder he’d get that wrong. After all, Bloomberg counted on managerial fetishism to win his elections for New York City mayor.

The particular promise of a businessman politician like Bloomberg, or Mitt Romney when he became governor of Massachusetts, is that he’ll avoid

all the mis-

takes professional politicians make. Give him the reins, and he’ll take a rational managerial approach to the task of governance. He’ll cut through the nonsense, bring people to the table, negotiate terms and so on.

Businesses have to keep their books in balance, have to live within their means, have to provide good service to customers — so shouldn’t government? Shouldn’t the school system?

In hiring Black, Bloomberg was indulging in the conceit, especially popular in times of dysfunction, that government can and should be run “like a business.”

It sounds wonderful, and that’s why people fall for it. But it’s nonsense. Government can’t be run like a business. Government is by definition a collective. It’s run not to earn a profit or produce goods people want but rather to provide services with money it appropriates for the purpose.

The questions that government must address are: What services will it provide? How will it provide them? And at whose expense are they to be provided?

These are practical questions, yes, but they’re also moral ones, because government has the power to take people’s money, to order their children to attend failing schools and to imprison them if they fail to heed the government’s mandate.

The people who run governments aren’t merely supposed to be managers. They’re supposed to be leaders who guide the body politic — while at the very same time serving as the employees of the same body politic they’re supposed to lead. It’s a rather complicated role.

Black, who mishandled almost every public interchange with parents, teachers and principals by acting highhanded and condescending, proved to be spectacularly ill-suited for the role. That should have been predictable; after all, running a department of education is typically not an entry-level job.

Except if you’re a managerial fetishist. And the problem with fetishes is that they’re no substitute for the real thing.

johnpodhoretz@gmail.com