I’m not a businessman, but there is a rule of my trade relevant to running a lean company.

Less is more.

It’s a rule worth talking about in a time when bailout dollars are being given to CEOs more prone to excess than discipline. These are folks who take corporate jets to pick up their handouts and spend $1 million decorating their offices.

We’re giving billions to people who feel “more” is good.

It’s not.

It’s certainly not good in the craft of writing. There are those in my trade — as in the business world — who feel fancier is better. But almost any four-page essay is improved when reduced to three. A good writer knows that what you cut is as important to the final product as what you put in.

The principle applies to many fields. An indulgent movie is a bad movie. An over-actor is rarely an artist. The great director Woody Allen often gives one word of advice if he does not like the way a line was delivered: “Less.”

Athletes know it’s better to play taut than fancy, and engineers, when faced with 100 choices on how to design a product, know the best answer is usually “the elegant solution” — which means the simple one.

So why, especially in this time of scarce finances, do so many CEOs lean not toward “less,” but excess?

I bring this up now because of what has become an almost comical pattern of indulgent behavior by the very CEOs to whom taxpayers have entrusted billions of dollars.

One example: The auto industry leaders who argued they had no money, then flew to Washington in corporate jets to ask for more.

More recently, Citigroup, another bailout recipient, was about to spend $50 million on a private jet until called out publicly on it.

The latest poster-boy for CEO excess is John Thain, former head of Merrill Lynch. Despite signals that Merrill was in trouble, he spent $1.2 million redecorating his corporate office, including an $87,000 area rug. Then, as the company was in its final throes, losing $15 billion in a single quarter, he rushed through an astonishing $4 billion in bonuses to the very executives who had helped him run it into the ground.

This became a taxpayer issue because Bank of America foolishly bought Merrill, whose losses dragged it down to the point where BofA needed $20 billion in bailout money. One might say that BofA’s purchase of Merrill was excess on a grand scale as was John Thain’s $87,000 rug. Indeed, Bloomberg.com just ran a column saying that BofA’s CEO is a “compulsive collector of financial institutions.”

The billions in bonuses even upset the White House. President Obama on Thursday said Wall Street should know better.

One can say these are isolated cases, but they’re not. The CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac walked away from their wreckage with $25 million each, and the CEO of bankrupt Lehman Brothers got $480 million over the years in pay packages for his bad work.

This is not simply about it being obnoxious, on a personal level, to spend $87,000 of corporate money on a rug. It also reflects the CEO’s corporate philosophy. It’s no surprise that a man who would indulge in such décor would also have indulged in risky investments that brought down his firm. He ran his company the way he decorated his office.

Similarly, the Big Three CEOs who showed excess in taking private jets to Washington showed similar indulgence in corporate decisions. Even if you forgive their failure to make better cars than the competition, you can’t overlook their legacy of worker and retiree benefits that have all but crippled Detroit’s ability to compete. Their corporate approach to problems was “more.” Even union members referred to GM as “generous motors.”

There are many models in business that prove “less” is the ideal. The best example may be the richest man in the country, Warren Buffet, who is worth billions, but still lives in Omaha in a modest home, driving a modest car. He sees no room for excess. He feels life and business should be approached leanly and with discipline. It is no accident that his frugal lifestyle reflects an equally thoughtful — and successful — business philosophy.

We are at a time when financial resources are scarcer than ever and yet we are giving hundreds of billions to private companies.

We are doing so in the belief the country can’t afford for them to collapse.

Will their CEOs spend it wisely?

It does not bode well that so many seem to believe in “more” rather than “less.”

mpatinkin@projo.com