White House collecting the Bush legacy

Al Kamen - Showing History the Way Ahead - washingtonpost.com: "Part of the Bush legacy effort -- at least covering the early years -- has already been taken care of in the classic 2003 book 'The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush: 10 Common Sense Lessons from the Commander-in-Chief,' by consultants Carolyn B. Thompson and James W. Ware, a volume rediscovered this week by Marc Abrahams, editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research, writing yesterday in the Guardian. The punditocracy used Bush as a 'piñata,' the book says. They thought Bush 'was a lightweight worthy of little but scorn and contempt,' the authors say, but 'something was wrong with this picture. As authors and consultants in the field of leadership, we were knowledgeable about the subject. . . . We asked ourselves: what makes him so effective? How does he do it?'

Keys to his 'brilliance,' are that he knows to 'bring in the right people,' and not to 'be afraid to hire people smarter than you' and then 'leave 'em alone' to do their jobs. You've got to, as Bush does, 'trust your instincts' and 'hold people accountable.'

Bush compares favorably to Moses-- another 'leadership genius' -- and Albert Einstein.'For Einstein,' they explain, 'intuition was more important than knowledge.'"