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An American chief executive exercises authoritarian powers of which a politician could only dream. The chief executive is held accountable for performance, but only upwards to a board of directors who in turn delegate huge amounts of discretion to the boss. The chief executive does not have to share power with other authority figures; indeed, forced marriages between powerful chief executives do not last long and almost always end badly. The chief executive can hire, fire, make mergers and acquisitions or divest himself of entire divisions at will, without the board looking over his shoulder and seeking to micromanage every step. And there is a single bottom line, the corporation’s profitability, which is easily measurable at every moment in time.

An American president, by contrast, occupies an office which is weak by design, limited by the framers of the constitution by checks and balances that prevent the exercise of strong power. The president shares powers with Congress, which is often in the hands of the other party. He is downwardly accountable to voters on many levels, who distrust politicians and are loathe to delegate authority to the executive. A recent example is opposition to Barack Obama’s plan to set up an independent review board to control Medicare costs, which many argue usurps Congress’s oversight role. This is as if a corporate board demanded to be able to individually review a chief executive’s cost-cutting decisions, which in the private sector would be seen as intolerable micromanagement.

Finally and most importantly, there is no clearly measurable bottom line in presidential performance. Government is mandated to pursue a host of often contradictory aims by the voters: the latter want both expansive services and low taxes; some see universal healthcare as an inalienable right, while others regard it as a wasteful boondoggle.

These differences in executive authority mean that the skills required of a president are very different from those of a chief executive.

FT