Why I can’t stop thinking about Mitt Romney

The failure of Management Consultancy

It is now a year since the 2012 US Presidential election and, despite being separated by a year and an ocean, I still can’t get Mitt Romney off my mind.

It is partly the unforgiving nature of history and politics, that now throws Romney’s weaknesses and failings into such harsh relief, that it becomes easy to forget quite how impressive he is. Looking at his business career, his Harvard MBA, his time at Boston Consulting Group and Bain, his leadership of Bain capital, it is clear that he is a leader with real vision and huge wide-ranging knowledge. In my career I have worked with some very impressive people but no-one who comes close to the level of Romney, I hope I get to one day.

Mitt Romney is the uber-management consultant, with all the discipline and strengths that that should imply. Which is why I continually cannot understand, not that he failed but that he failed in the way he did.

One of the features of the election campaign, right up to Karl Rove’s meltdown on Fox news, was that the GOP, including the Romney campaign up to the candidate himself, thought they were winning. The rest of us were logging onto 538 and reading Nate Silver’s analysis and knew that the key polls and the electoral maths were pointing to an Obama victory.

For Romney to believe on the morning of the election, as he has said he did, that he was going to win must mean that he was seeing numbers from his team that were reflecting what they wanted to be true rather than what was actually happening. A management consultant in this situation should be questioning and testing the numbers that they are being given, asking difficult questions, challenging, playing devil’s advocate. In all I’ve read I have seen no reference to Romney ever asking his team why the numbers he was being given were different to the headline column in the New York Times, let alone them giving him an answer that should satisfy someone with his career in business leadership.

Romney’s style and personality lead itself to various, and much discussed, political failings, but what I cannot escape, and cannot get off my mind, is how much of his failure was a management consultancy failure.

How is it that, at the most vital juncture in someone’s career, they manage to fail in a way that should have been a strength? And this is the danger that lies in wait for all of us, even if we don’t run for president; that at the key moment we will be too busy talking about what our strengths are to remember that we need to be using those very strengths.