A group of CEOs sat around and rattled off ideas for the next president. Here's what they do — and don't — want in 2017.

ASPEN — Ask a bunch of business leaders for their advice to the next president, and inevitably the clichés start flowing.

More cooperation. A better tone in Washington. Fewer attacks on business.

At a panel of CEOs at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, all of those answers popped up. But after some prodding and cajoling from the moderator, the Financial Times' Gillian Tett, the panelists started offering specifics on what they do — and don't — want from the next leader. 

Booz Allen Hamilton CEO Horacio Rozanski gave an unexpected answer: that the president must promote that "it's cool to be in the government." He noted that a third of the federal workforce (about 600,000 people) will become eligible for retirement next year. Not all will choose to step down, but it's likely that a wave of new people will begin taking government jobs. To attract the highest quality talent, the next president must change the narrative that a federal worker is a "bureaucrat who isn't contributing" and instead is actually a civil servant, Rozanski said.

Rosalind Brewer, the president and CEO of Sam's Club, a unit of Wal-Mart Stores, said she'd push to give startups and small businesses tax breaks during their early years in business, a proposal Tett summed up as a "hug an entrepreneur" policy.

Meanwhile, David Rubenstein, co-founder and co-CEO of private equity firm the Carlyle Group, started by joking that, if one unnamed candidate won election, he'd first advise that he resign. The audience cheered.

Then he got serious, saying the president must spend more time with Congress over breakfast, lunches, dinners — even miniature golf — embracing the sort of glad-handing that can get deals done. He also called for cabinet-level appointees with a knowledge of economics and finance so they can be "taken seriously by the markets." 

Next came the topic nearly all agreed on: The president has to focus on infrastructure, and quickly.

Henry Cisneros, a former secretary of housing and urban development and the current chairman of developer CityView, said that 66,000 deficient bridges need attention. Water systems like the one in Flint, Mich., require repairs across the country.

"We need to put people to work,” and large-scale infrastructure projects could do it, Cisneros said. 

President Obama this year proposed adding a $10 tax on every barrel of oil to pay for infrastructure improvements; Congressional lawmakers declared it dead on arrival. But, in a rare point of agreement, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have said they want to rebuild American roads, airports and cities.

Part of the problem, Carlyle's Rubenstein said, is that infrastructure is "sort of like the weather" — everyone talks about it and nothing happens.

"Infrastructure is going to cost money," he said, either in the form of higher taxes or increases to the national debt, both of which will be unpopular. "You need a leader who is going to take political hits for doing so."

As for what to avoid, Sam's Club CEO Brewer said she'd steer clear of any increases in consumption taxes, since it would force retailers like hers to raise the cost of goods. Booz Allen Hamilton's Rozanski says he's all for construction — but doesn't want any walls that would cut off the U.S. from the rest of the world. 

Many of the panelists also said it'd be critical not to over-promise early on. The president should resist the temptation to set an ambitious plan for the first 100 days, Rubenstein said. Instead, he or she should aim for a few modest victories in the first months to show that the era of paralysis in Washington is over.  Cisneros, the former HUD secretary, said it'd be important to find wins that are "sufficiently bipartisan and bite-size." 

A recurring thread throughout the conference is that the next president will almost surely face an economic slowdown, given that it's been seven years since the end of the Great Recession. With greater automation and the job losses that will follow, "we're about to have a storm arrive at our shores," as Andy Stern, a senior fellow at Columbia University and the retired president of the Service Employees International Union, put it during one session. 

It's one reason so many of the CEOs cited infrastructure spending — and the jobs that follow it — as so critical. They also want the next administration and members of Congress to lighten up on the anti-business talk, a point that drew applause from the audience.

"The next president needs to meet with business leaders ... not treat them as if they're from some foreign planet and they need to go out the back door of the White House," Rubenstein said. 

So what about the biggest question, the one underpinning all of these proposals: Which candidate's going to take the prize in November? 

The moderator asked the audience to vote on who they expected to win, and nearly every hand went up for Clinton, hardly a surprise at this liberal-leaning event.

Tett, U.S. managing editor for the FT who had just returned from a post-Brexit trip to London, then cautioned the crowd.

“The one thing I have learned in the past week is that the majority view is not always correct,” she said. “Not when it comes to predicting what’s going to happen next. And not when you’re sitting in a place like Aspen."

Read more coverage of the Aspen Ideas Festival on LinkedIn here.