The end of a week which saw a new American President take office is an appropriate moment to spare a final thought for the last one.

This blog is apolitical and has nothing to contribute to the mountain of opinions about his policies, but it is the separate issue of his management style that might be of interest to entrepreneurs.

After all, George W Bush was the first President to have an MBA – from Harvard Business School, no less.

So how did he rate as a manager rather than as a statesman?

On the credit side, the one thing one cannot deny about Mr Bush is that he was decisive. Whether the decisions he made were good ones is a matter for debate, but he was never afraid to make them.

He was also good at delegation: he was prepared to pick powerful subordinates and trust them to get on with their jobs. Whether some of those people were worthy of that trust is another matter for debate, but he did well to delegate.

At the same time, all informed sources confirm that he was the dominant personality within his Administration, “The Decider”.

For all that, the common theme through the failure to limit federal expenditure, the disastrous early years of the occupation of Iraq, and the inadequate federal response to Hurricane Katrina was a lack of control over the machinery of government. The Master of Business Administration was never really Master of his own Administration.

In fairness, that is due in part to the sheer scale of the federal bureaucracy and to the inefficient division of authority under the US Constitution.

However, Mr Bush must bear responsibility for his failure – doubly reprehensible in one who claimed to be a follower of Ronald Reagan – to make any serious effort to address those structural problems during his eight years in power.

As of Noon Eastern Time on Tuesday, that responsibility is President Obama’s. He needs to give the restructuring of government a higher priority. It cannot wait another four or eight years for someone to sort it out.