If autocrats wrote management books—the kind displayed on stands at airport bookstores—they would have titles like “I Alone Can Fix It” or “I’m My Own Strategist_._” “I’m, Like, a Smart Person” would make a good subtitle. The autocratic impulse is best expressed in the first-person singular, a point of view that President-elect Donald Trump—the man who made each of these pronouncements—uses with relish. Trump’s inner autocrat is further apparent in his man crushes on despots, chiefly Vladimir Putin; in his threats to silence and jail his opponents; in his cruelty and vindictiveness; on his walls lined with portraits of himself wearing a well-practiced, ruthless squint; and in the cult of fervent reverence that prevails among his relatives and retainers.

Yet Trump lacks the cold efficiency of the autocrat. His comment last week at his meeting with technology company C.E.O.s that "we have no formal chain of command around here" should ring true to anyone who watched his campaign or has studied his eponymous empire. Michael Kruse, of Politico, who interviewed a range of Trump Organization executives earlier this year, concluded that Trump, the boss, is not “magisterial and decisive,” as advertised, but erratic and often ill-informed. His slapdash decision-making and short attention span are not a management style so much as a pathology; he “swings wildly between micromanaging meddler and can’t-be-bothered, broad-brush, big-picture thinker,” Kruse wrote. A former aide, more charitably, refers to this as a “hands-off, hands-on” approach.

Will this work in the White House? It all depends on when Trump decides to be hands-on or hands-off, and to what effect—none of which can be predicted. History offers no good guide for what to expect from Trump, who proudly refuses to look or sound or act Presidential. (“They’re saying, as President, he shouldn’t be doing rallies, but I think we should, right? We’ve done everything else the opposite,” Trump told a crowd in Mobile, Alabama, on Saturday.) All modern Presidents, of course, have alternated between hands-off and hands-on leadership, but one in particular—Ronald Reagan—brought to the White House what he called a “business and industry” style of management. “You get the people that you believe in and that can do the things that need doing,” Reagan once said. The big decisions, he added, “are mine, and I make them.”

Trump, of course, has nothing of Reagan’s charm, vision, moral clarity, or personal dignity. His management style, however, may be Reaganesque in the wrong ways. At the time of Reagan’s Inauguration, in 1981, Robert Lindsey, of the Times, wrote that he “seemed to personify the cowboys he once portrayed in film”: clear-eyed, straight-shooting, self-reliant. He made decisions quickly and didn’t second-guess them. But his hold on the reins, it turned out, was slack. Reagan’s “biggest problem,” as his biographer, Lou Cannon, has written, “was that he didn’t know enough about public policy to fully participate in his presidency—and often didn’t realize how much he didn’t know.” Reagan’s understanding of most issues—even his signature issues, such as the federal budget and defense—was thin at best. When congressional Republicans tried to talk with him about U.S. weapons systems, they found him unable to transcend his talking points. When the budget director David Stockman posed difficult questions about economic policy, Reagan waved them away with stock phrases: “We’re here to do whatever it takes” was one, signifying nothing. Publicly, and with some frequency, Reagan made comments at odds with his own policies. White House press aides learned blandly to insist that Reagan’s misstatements, if technically inaccurate, were essentially true. His advisers did not consider him unintelligent; they found him, instead, uninterested—in new ideas or new information.

In the void that Reagan created, his staff rushed in to compete over policy and influence. Reagan’s benightedness invited his aides to play to his preconceptions and advance their own agendas. “They were all manipulators,” Cannon observed. “The sad, shared secret of the Reagan White House was that no one in the presidential entourage had confidence” in his judgment; they “treated Reagan as if he were a child monarch.” The resulting battles, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the United Nations Ambassador, recalled, were “Shakespearean,” reflecting “a real lack of mutual respect and a real lack of . . . disciplined limits at the top.” James Baker and Donald Regan, the chiefs of staff during Reagan’s first and second terms, respectively, functioned as de-facto Presidents—with greater (Baker) and lesser (Regan) degrees of success. Other advisers simply assumed—or asserted—that their actions were consistent with the President’s goals, if not one another’s. Garry Wills joked in 1982 that, “for a while, [the U.S.] had five foreign policies”: those of the State Department, Pentagon, National Security Council, U.N. Ambassador, and Senate. Reagan, for his part, seemed to agree with them all. As his aides understood, if a policy was said to advance the cause of freedom—a principle that could mean, in practice, almost anything—the President could be convinced to support it.

It cannot be denied that Reagan, despite all this, succeeded in important ways. His optimism—his belief in progress as an American birthright, an inevitability—lifted many Americans’ spirits after two difficult decades. Though he had contempt for government, he was never a contemptuous figure; he displayed a largeness of spirit even when his policies showed disregard for the poor and the weak. Reagan also had a pragmatic impulse, a willingness at key moments to compromise—whether with congressional Democrats over tax reform and Social Security or with the Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, over arms reduction. And Reagan’s staff, for all its internecine conflict, was rarely short on experience or intelligence; most of the nation’s best conservative minds made their way through his Administration during those eight years.

Trump was not one of them. “I really am tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, how we’re really making other people live like kings, and we’re not,” he proclaimed in 1988, toward the end of Reagan’s Presidency. This is the Trump who will now sit in the same office that Reagan did, putting his hands on and taking them off the levers of government. Members of Trump’s staff have already begun undercutting and openly mocking one another, battling for access to the boss. They must understand that access equals influence—in some Administrations more than others.