Obama Team Can Use Some Rivals.

A history professor is not impressed by President-elect Barack Obama's purported plan to appoint a Lincoln-like "team of rivals" to his Cabinet.

There is little doubt that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. But not much of what made him great can be discerned in his appointment of a contentious, envious and often dysfunctional collection of prima donnas to his Cabinet.
— James Oakes, "Assemble team of rivals; that's what you'll get"

Oakes gives examples of how members of Lincoln's cabinet schemed, grumbled and avoided meetings in favor of private access to the President. But he doesn't make the case this was bad for the country or how it compromised Lincoln's effectiveness as a leader.

Contentious or harmonious Cabinet meetings when the President is in the room aren't the point. Arriving at wise decisions for the nation is.

One would hope that rivals would hash out their differences in front of each other and that loyalists would always bring forward harsh truths for the leader's consideration, but that's not the way it often works. Reservations are often shared privately or through back channels. Group think and personal regard can result in soft-pedaling bad news.

It still remains for the chief executive to extract the required information and insight and to weigh appropriately whatever those methods surface.

In today's Star Tribune, you only have to turn the page from this New York Times analysis to find this truncated NYT story about how the CEO at Citigroup relied on the reassurances of a small group of executives about the well-being of its large position in mortgage-related assets. But the men charged with building the business, trading and overseeing risk were all close friends.

Their trust and faith in each other apparently led to ineffective oversight of the ailing financial giant's holdings. The boss didn't ask the right questions, and no one warned him.

Of course, it was also easy to overlook the spiraling risk, when Citigroup made up to $500 million in fees from the collateralized debt obligations business in a single year.

While the sheer size of Citigroup’s C.D.O. position caused concern among some around the trading desk, most say they kept their concerns to themselves.

“I just think senior managers got addicted to the revenues and arrogant about the risks they were running,” said one person who worked in the C.D.O. group. “As long as you could grow revenues, you could keep your bonus growing.”

With the nation facing grave challenges, Obama doesn't need Kumbaya Cabinet meetings. I think he knows what he's doing here.