C.E.O.: Niall Ferguson "really ought to know better" than to think that business experience matters for presidency

Ian Pryde is founder and C.E.O. of Eurasia Strategy & Communications in Moscow.

...Niall Ferguson, for instance, the noted presenter and pundit, said last week on Bloomberg TV, where he is a contributing editor, that Romney’s experience with start-ups and turnarounds was exactly what American needed.

As a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School with conservative leanings, Ferguson might be expected to say that, but in his other capacity as professor of history at Harvard, he really ought to know better. Business education or success hardly guarantees success in politics: Running a country requires far broader skills than managing a business.

In his Bloomberg appearance, for instance, Ferguson made no mention of the last Republican president, George W. Bush, who, despite his Harvard MBA and business experience, blundered into the Iraq war and ratcheted up America’s already huge debt. And it was of course “business types” at financial institutions who facilitated the huge amount of sovereign and personal borrowing that got the West into its current mess. Indeed, there is a strong argument that the narrow case-study approach to business education pioneered by Harvard Business School actually works against the broad strategic thinking necessary in politics, and indeed in business. After all, precious few in business and finance noted the impending financial crisis until just a few years before it broke – despite steadily rising debt levels in the West....