So important. Two weeks later, on the night of his victory over Hillary Clinton, the President-elect of the United States put the matter plainly. Which raises a fundamental question: How can the lessons of business—from real estate deal-making to large-scale corporate management—apply to the work of government? We are about to live through a case study testing a perennial American proposition that all might be well if only the government could be run like a company. The consummate pre-Trump private-sector white knight, of course, was Ross Perot inwho perfectly encapsulated the pro-business argument in the presidential debates with George H. Bush and Bill Clinton. Do business leaders make good Presidents? Given the most common paths to the White House, history offers us few examples. Trump, after all, is the only American in years not to have served in the military or held political office before becoming President. Unless we count Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Jackson—slave-owning...