As the 2012 presidential campaign enters the home stretch, Mitt Romney, self-described “business guy,” continues to press the case that he is more qualified to lead the nation out of its economic doldrums than Barack Obama, who has spent his entire career in either government or not-for-profit institutions. Romney’s argument is at once utterly familiar—and somewhat unexplored.

So I set out to explore it. What skills make someone successful in business? And how are they similar—or different—from the skills that make someone successful in politics? I decided to pose these questions to people who have had successful careers in both.

Autocracy vs. Democracy

Jack Markell, the governor of Delaware who was a technology and financial-services executive before running for state treasurer in 1998, when asked about the similarities, ticks off five “big things” that he believes are essential to both: a compelling vision, the ability to lay out a plan for getting there, the ability to bring people together—and to hold them accountable—and a tolerance for ambiguity. “You have to make decisions based on imperfect information, since that’s what you have,” he explains. “If you wait for perfect information, in business, a competitor will pass you, and in government, problems will go unsolved.”

Erskine Bowles agrees. In both worlds, “you have to be organized, structured, and focused,” he tells me. “You have to set goals, objectives, and timetables. And you have to hold people accountable.” Like Romney, Bowles ran a private-equity firm before joining the Clinton administration in 1992, where he led the Small Business Administration and served as chief of staff. He later ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate, served as chancellor of the University of North Carolina, and led the Simpson-Bowles Commission in crafting a bipartisan plan to reduce the federal debt and deficit.

But the similarities, though real, have their limits, Bowles says. “You can make government operate in a more business-like manner, but you can’t operate it like a business.” Perhaps the differences begin with credentials. “Business people have to stay with something and move up gradually; you can’t leapfrog,” explains Bill Daley, who has moved back and forth between the private sector (as a lawyer and financial-services executive) and the public sector (as a Cabinet secretary and White House chief of staff). “In politics, you can be a state senator and decide you want to move up and run for the U.S. Senate and then for president. You can’t do that in the private sector,” he says.

Once in office, the process for making and implementing decisions takes on a life of its own. “In business, there is a pretty stable group of factors—employees, shareholders, customers, competitors,” says Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who co-founded the telecom company that became Nextel before running for office. “In politics, there are way more”: Congress, the public, the press, advocacy organizations, and political parties, to name a few. And leaders have little or no control over any of them.

“The power to persuade is essential to politicians,” says Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the recent book The Spirit of Compromise. “Businessmen also need the power to persuade, but they can get away with focusing on a narrower group than politicians.”

“Business is a more autocratic environment,” Bowles says. “You and your team make a decision, get buy-in from the board, everybody pulls together, and you get it done. But in politics, you have 535 directors, and they manage every line item in your budget. If they don’t approve, you can’t get it done. And even if they do approve, it takes forever.” Daley adds, “Half of them are constantly trying to undermine your strategy and get you out.”