Top companies such as Goldman Sachs, BP and Toyota all are enduring worst-in-their-history crises. Yet, this backdrop of multi-industry failure didn’t prevent a pair of former chief executives-turned-California politicians from emerging Wednesday as the latest signs of a voter backlash against politics as usual.
Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who wants to be California’s governor, and ex-Hewlett-Packard boss Carly Fiorina, chosen to contest a U.S. Senate seat, both won their Republican primaries late Tuesday. They became the latest candidates hoping to parlay corner-office savvy into political success.
“Confidence in business may be very low, but confidence in government above the local level is even lower,” says Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.
In the modern era, at least since Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential bid, CEO candidates have appealed to voters craving decisive leadership, accountability and a record of tangible accomplishment. California’s fiscal train wreck has only made bottom-line brio more attractive.
But the track record of such candidates in office has been mixed. For every New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who’s spruced up the Big Apple, there’s a Jon Corzine, the ex-Goldman Sachs billionaire who failed in his re-election bid for New Jersey governor.
Business leaders can bring to public office financial acumen. But executives accustomed to giving orders and having them executed often get frustrated by the political world’s imperative for consultation and consensus. “The skills needed are definitely different, because you don’t have the ability to act fairly unilaterally in government that you do in business,” Kanter says.
The transition can be even more bracing for executives who become one among many lawmakers. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who founded the cellular phone company that became Nextel before becoming Virginia’s governor in 2002, says it took him about a year to get comfortable with the different demands and slower…