I used to work for a big and complicated enterprise – a multinational, multibillion dollar financial services confection of companies. I worked on public policy. In large commercial enterprises, it is essential to have a business structure and process to resolve the conflicts that arise between departments, product lines, manager passions, executive egos and even philanthropical objectives.

Most successful companies have a structure that accommodates this essential process, with someone empowered to decide to resolve the conflict. When it comes to judging the effectiveness of the CEO and board of directors, it might well be that successfully navigating these decisions is the most important of all leadership skills.

But when it comes to navigating public policy, even well-run businesses sometimes make choices that appear random. My experience was that such deliberations don’t always go through the same decision tree that works reliably on the business side. Sometimes, the public policy decision never even gets made, and the company will support interests in conflict with each other and occasionally even antithetical to its own mission.

Likewise, in the political realm more broadly, there’s long been a shortage of important players who see the big picture. Unlike a successful CEO, our president prides himself on his unwillingness to bargain with the opposition. He is unashamed that not a single Republican member of Congress could be persuaded to vote for the legislation for which he is most known. His focus, like that of many politicians, is to delivering all the benefits of government that he can control to those constituencies that heavily supported him. These are not unusual tendencies in political systems, nut the public is right to question the incessant weighing of interests with a thumb on the scale.

Consider the president’s chief political adversary of recent years. I have known John Boehner for many years and consider him generally to have one of the finest political minds I’ve ever encountered. A dozen or so members of his caucus did not vote for him as Speaker, sparking news media and blogosphere discussions about how the system is supposed to work in the midst of mutiny. It has been true through history that, when you take on the king and lose, there are uncomfortable consequences. None of the Republicans of Congress who refused to support Boehner should be shocked that they would face some kind of retribution.

But perhaps the speaker will take a slightly different approach. “My way or the highway” has not been the hallmark of his term and vengeance doesn’t really befit the man. It’s true that the ability to fashion a solution from all of the competing interests for the good of the order is not as highly valued today as it was in the past. Indeed, those who demonstrate the capacity to do precisely this often are reviled, as compromise rarely aligns perfectly with a particular passion or theory of government. The Pew Research Center found last year that 92 percent of Republicans are more conservative than the median Democrat, and 94 percent of Democrats are more liberal than the median Republican. This constitutes both a pretty big challenge for the leader of a national legislative body and a major shift from most of U.S. history.

If I were advising Speaker Boehner, I might start with the legendary advice from Dick Armstrong, the former president of the Public Affairs Council. To paraphrase, he might say: “do not ask the caucus to sacrifice itself on the altar of your convictions.” The speaker might well say to his caucus members something like this:

“We are a large family, and families don’t always agree. Standing up for principles is not just important, but critical. But much of what we do here involves many principles. Some of ours compete for primacy among themselves, not to mention with principles popular in the other caucus. If our many long hours of work in the Capitol are to be consequential, we must occasionally build solutions from principles in unfamiliar combinations.

“Leadership must resolve these conflicts and hand the American people the best solution we can find. None of us can figure this out alone, but with the talent in this room and in all your offices, we can provide the direction that is needed. Everyone has a chance to help. If you have good advice for us it will be in the mix. If you came here unappreciative of the difference between governing and a protest movement, you won’t have much influence the next couple of years.

“The American people didn’t vote for us because they simply want to see us in charge. They voted for us in the hope that we could encourage good things to happen in this country and stop bad things from happening. It is our job to convince the folks which is which. They don’t care about scoring political points. They want solutions, but need to be reminded that government is not the only solution available. They want this never-ending recession to be over and to feel that the national government works for all of its citizens.”

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