Eisenhower's approach, as both a general and president, was to assemble a very good staff and delegate, while monitoring how things were going. Staff, not line. Line managers in the military are unit commanders at various levels. Staff officers, derided though they tend to be, are extensions of the commander for whom they work. They have to be very competent but less ambitious than line commanders.
"The Hidden-Hand Presidency" (1982) is the best overview of how Eisenhower got things done. Eisenhower was probably the only person ever to be overqualified for the US presidency. Holding the Allied coalition together while winning WWII in Europe was a tougher job. As president, he was fairly relaxed and not overworked, while accomplishing an incredible amount.
He wasn't as laid back as people thought at the time. He wrote clear, incisive directives for his staff and Cabinet. It took a long time before Eisenhower's work was properly analyzed, partly because the Eisenhower Library is in Abilene, Kansas, and few historians wanted to spend a few years there going through the files.
I'd like to submit Leslie Groves as another extremely gifted administrator who got big things done inside big organizations. There need to be more studies about his "methods".
There are. He himself wrote "Now it can be Told". The 1998 "The General and the Bomb: A Biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project" is hard to get, but good. Groves, at peak, had quite an empire - not just the bomb project, but his own air force and his own State Department.
The head of the USSR's atomic bomb project was Lavrentiy Beria. Yes, that Beria, head of the secret police and responsible for various purges and genocides. Yet he successfully ran the atomic bomb program. After the bomb worked, the people who would have been executed if it failed got Hero of the Soviet Union medals. The people who merely would have been sent to gulags got the next medal below that.
Actually no it was not. It's more that power was distributed differently. The speaker of the house, the master of the Senate had real power. Power that now rests with interest groups.
If you are interested read Robert Caro's Master of the Senate.
Best productivity story from this book: a White House worker brings President Eisenhower a piece of unopened mail addressed to the President. Ike immediately says “No one should ever bring me a sealed envelope” and he drills into his team that nothing comes to the President unless it can’t be resolved at a lower level, and when it comes to him he needs to be briefed and presented with his staff’s best thinking and possible options.
> Ike immediately says “No one should ever bring me a sealed envelope”
This is correct to the best of my knowledge; the actual opening of said mail should have been handled by the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, established in 1897.
I was a bit curious about what this process looks like in relatively modern times, and found this video from the President Obama White House YouTube channel from 2009:
Eisenhower's approach, as both a general and president, was to assemble a very good staff and delegate, while monitoring how things were going. Staff, not line. Line managers in the military are unit commanders at various levels. Staff officers, derided though they tend to be, are extensions of the commander for whom they work. They have to be very competent but less ambitious than line commanders.
"The Hidden-Hand Presidency" (1982) is the best overview of how Eisenhower got things done. Eisenhower was probably the only person ever to be overqualified for the US presidency. Holding the Allied coalition together while winning WWII in Europe was a tougher job. As president, he was fairly relaxed and not overworked, while accomplishing an incredible amount.
He wasn't as laid back as people thought at the time. He wrote clear, incisive directives for his staff and Cabinet. It took a long time before Eisenhower's work was properly analyzed, partly because the Eisenhower Library is in Abilene, Kansas, and few historians wanted to spend a few years there going through the files.