I agree with you about Chu, and more generally think that we need more smart people and fewer of the blow-dried B-minus students that typically stock the Republican gene pool in Washington.
However, I wouldn’t pin the blame on broader corporate weakness on the cult of the MBA. The Big 3 have always have had a much higher proportion of engineers and designers in senior management. When ex-engineers had their turn in senior roles at the Big 3, they made and continued the same mistakes that the ex-accountants made in their turns in the big chairs.
The problem with the cult of the MBAs is that people think that that is where you go if you want strategic planning and systems analysis. The very difficult problem is that the ability to think strategically and do real systems analysis and engineering is a very very rare skill. I know a couple of guys who are really really good at it. They think differently from anyone else. Finding a Steve Jobs and getting him to the top of a company is really really rare.