Why CEOs Fail in Washington; Moving The Wrong Cheese: All the gurus say that government needs to run more like a business, but these days, the reverse is increasingly true.

Byline: Richard Haass (Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur: How to Be Effective in Any Unruly Organization.")

Walk into any bookstore, and you'll find shelf after shelf of books on business, from how-tos and case studies to inspirational tales about dancing with elephants and moving your cheese. But you will be hard pressed to find even a few books on how to succeed in government or the nonprofit sector. This may not seem odd, until you consider that more people in the United States (7 million more) now work in government and the public sector than in manufacturing.

Notwithstanding this fact, most people believe that the business guides are enough. Indeed, this is a common refrain: we need to run the government like a business.

This would appear to have been the philosophy of the first administration of George W. Bush. The president has an M.B.A. from Harvard and worked in oil and baseball. Vice President Dick Cheney is the former head of Halliburton; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ran drug behemoth GD Searle. Former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill was the top guy at Alcoa while his successor John Snow ran transportation giant CSX.

It's not even clear that business is good training for business anymore. The environment in which businessmen and women find themselves is changing fundamentally.

Take Paul O'Neill. He never quite caught on to the reality that he was no longer the ultimate boss or that speaking his mind was dangerous, especially when he spoke the truth about the dollar, Congress or Argentina. O'Neill was unceremoniously shown the door after less than two years in the job.

Then there is Charlotte Beers, the advertising executive (she was once chairman of J. Walter Thompson) brought in by Colin Powell to revive U.S. public diplomacy. Her attempts to improve America's image in the Arab and Muslim worlds through media spots depicting happy American Muslims fell flat. Clearly, it is one thing to sell Uncle Ben's Rice; it is something quite different to sell Uncle Sam's foreign policy.