The heart of the issue, many of these people say, is that Obama and his inner circle had scant executive experience prior to arriving in the West Wing, and dim appreciation of the myriad ways the federal bureaucracy can frustrate an ambitious president. And above all, they had little apparent interest in the kind of organizational and motivational concepts that typically are the preoccupation of the most celebrated modern managers.

“No one asked you to write code or be a technical expert, but the expectation is you can set up a process,” said Kellogg School of Management professor Daniel Diermeier. “Companies do it every day.”…

The raid that killed Osama bin Laden may not have been, as Vice President Joe Biden said, the most “audacious plan” in 500 years. But it certainly did not suggest, as the Obamacare rollout did, a president squinting Elmer Fudd-like to understand what was happening — and not happening — in the bowels of his own government about his most important domestic initiative.

“Where we’re seeing these costs are with the largest policy processes in the administration,” said John Hudak, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “So it’s easier to sort of smooth over or tuck away some of the small-ball managerial failures, but this is a really big one and one that requires a lot of managerial expertise and it just wasn’t there and it’s not there in the White House.”