September 26th, 2010 8:10 AM

So Lawrence Summers’ announced this week that he’ll depart his post as director of the National Economic Council and resume his tenure as a Harvard business school economics professor by yearend.

How does this event tie to themes here of home building, residential development , and the housing crisis?

In our minds, in two ways, one macro, and one closer to home.

First, broadly, Summers’ leaving and his successor’s arrival–irrespective of its klieg-light atmospherics–are personnel matters at their heart. Only, at this particular juncture, nothing can be simply what it is. Summers played a critical role in shaping the current Administration’s belief system and action plan to meet the economic crisis head-on and ward off its scarily imaginable worst-case effects.

What Summers was and what he wasn’t; what he aimed to accomplish, and what he failed to do; what he was good at, and what he didn’t do so well; … all of these matters now become grist in the mill of politicking, of angling for agendas, of throwing some under the bus so that another may step on board. In hiring a successor, the President has a predicament that’s as basic as the job description.

In fact, recruiting someone to fill Larry Summers’ shoes is far beyond being a personnel decision. The man Summers, or at least his job, would seem to be at the very nexus of the most tender nerve of our moment in history, for what we can see of it. He, or the job, is freighted with an entire zeitgeist of ill-will that oversimply sets up government, business, and people as intractable opposing dynamic forces.

Dumbly, we ask, should the next guy or gal that works as President Obama’s trusted economic go-to person be

• an economist?
• a business executive?
• a policy expert?
• a sales person?

As the President’s most trusted economic advisor amid a continued economic maelstrom, which type of person (especially given that many insiders say it must be a woman) does this particular moment call for? A beautiful economics mind might be able to solve the riddle of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, but he or she would fall flat on his or her butt in the self-absorbed hive that Capitol Hill has become. A business chief executive would counter the he’s-got-no-one-who’s-ever-met-a-payroll criticism, but, then how long before that person gets pilloried for caving to the bonus-crazed CEO set who took over Wall Street and ruined the universe?

A policy maven might ably navigate the perilous shoals of economics, business, and government, but his or her action plan would–after a once-over in Congress–wind up a toothless reminder of how we’d all love all bureaucrats to go on long, long vacations.

Finally, a salesman or woman, would use sound-bite and photo-op stepping stones to media moment glory, but what chance really does somebody like that have of getting at the structural unemployment issues in our economy, let alone unwinding the toxicity credit default swaps permeated into the financial complex.

What if the nation had competence at all levels right now–government, policy, business, and society? What would each dimension of this cosmos optimally do to bring about improved outcomes? Would each continue to oppose the other three in an attempt to defeat them and stand in triumph? What would that look like?

Hiring someone to replace Larry Summers, must look rather odd as a approval to hire request form, and this telescopes us into the home building operations.

We had a conversation recently with Doug Yearley, Toll Brothers’ recently annointed successor to Bob Toll as ceo of the company. An avowed land-deal-junkie, Doug used a remote device to zero in crystal clear Google earth images on a big-screen TV in his office. He zoomed in on Frenchman’s Harbor in Juno Beach, Fla., on the Intercoastal between Jupiter and Palm Beach. Closer, and closer, and pretty soon, you could see the docks of a near-by marina, where luxury yachts were the floating symbols of the home buyers Toll will court for its seven-figure new homes on the canal there.

Point is, Toll Brothers has put operators–people who have run communities’ on a P&L basis–in charge of functional areas like technology, IT, and other enterprise support services. To Yearley, it makes for success in the company when somebody who’s addressing challenges, be they in research, IT, or any number of other functional disciplines, has actually been an operator, and can think like an operator.

We believe that, too often, the professionalizing of home building and development has gone like the maturation of other industry sectors. Too many times, the focus is too strongly on expertise in the functional area, without a visceral and real-world sense of how the capability needs to apply.

Yearley’s using Google Earth to measure the width of the Intercoastal canal so that he can figure out how big each homeowner’s boat slip can be, which is a pretty cool tool to put to use when you’re trying to do the math on a land deal.

So, hiring someone with real-world experience in addition to that functional expertise is a blend that someone else might best think about as he comes up with the phrasing for the Help Wanted ad.

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