Choosing a leader for a massive administrative apparatus requires balancing specialized domain knowledge with proven executive experience. A nomination like the one below raises a general question: how much should a leader of a specialized body know about its subject, and how much about running large organizations?

Wikipedia's current events portal for October 31, 2007, recorded that the President of the United States George W. Bush nominates Fmr. Governor of North Dakota Ed Schafer for United States Secretary of Agriculture.

The Executive Generalist

One way to think about such a choice is as a bet that general executive experience transfers to a specialized department. Whether it does is an open question, and the log entry does not say why this nominee was chosen.

Managing Complex Systems

Agriculture represents a vast network encompassing trade, rural development, and resource management. Organizations that lead large, specialized systems can weigh deep knowledge of the field against experience coordinating many groups at once. A leader with mostly the latter would need to rely on specialists for the former.

Effective leadership in complex systems relies less on knowing every detail of the operation and more on the proven capacity to govern the whole.

Sources

  • Decision Making
  • Systems Thinking

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