Introduction
Who among us ever fully believed that a Cinderella candidate could soar out of Illinois obscurity and become the 44th president of the United States, confounding many world-renowned politicos in the process? Yet Barack Obama managed to beat the Republican Party at its own game with discipline, organization and massive fundraising.
From his cooler-than-cool leadership style to his use of Internet-based social technologies to his basic message of change, Barack Obama showed businesspeople they have a lot to learn from a savvy politician.
For many years, it was believed that the American government had to be run like a business. The business bench was crowded with star players able and eager to clean up the mess in Washington. Politicians began donning business masks, claiming managerial expertise.
What if it turns out that business has more to learn from politics than the other way around? What if Barack Obama's extraordinary campaign was a feat of managing ideas, people and technology on a scale so massive and demanding that historians rank it as a sort of Manhattan Project of presidential politics?
Three Prime Lessons
Many of the lessons are brand-new and previously untried ideas so innovative that cautious souls may hesitate to use them. Others are familiar, road-tested tactics so common that politicians and businesspeople alike may be tempted to ignore them. Taken together, they created the Obama campaign - a unique set of moves that we can all learn to adapt. Let's start counting the ways.
1. He stayed cool. Barack Obama was unflappable in the debates and showed no anger at underhanded attacks. Even more unlikely, he was able to ignore all distractions and remain firmly on message throughout a marathon race lasting nearly two years. With his relative inexperience, Obama focused unrelentingly on the nation's need for change.
As well as keeping his focus on the main goal, he knew how to correct problems without blaming people for them. He could play hardball when that was necessary, and he could blow off his emotions with his daily exercise or pickup basketball games without affecting his campaign. He knew how to adjust to the needs of the moment. Perhaps best of all, he learned from Abraham Lincoln's example to lead without losing his humility.
So too must business leaders react calmly to hard times and unforeseen emergencies. That means they must build sound organizations, plan for contingencies and be ready to implement their plans, while sticking as closely as they can to Obama's character traits. Just as Obama won over votes by seeming presidential, business leaders can win over their people, their suppliers and their customers by remaining cool, rational and statesmanlike - all the while moving smartly to beat their competitors.
2. He unleashed social technologies. Obama won the 2008 election by seven percentage points, in large part because he used all the social technologies of our time - blogs, discussion boards, viral videos, texting and cell-phone networks - to connect with his constituencies. He created a grassroots community (My.BarackObama.com) to market his campaign and raise an unprecedented flood of capital.
Obama learned to cultivate the new grassroots constituency that the Internet has made accessible. With copious lists of voter registrations, swing voters and possible donors, he built a seamless community of supporters, volunteers and converts to his cause. He made himself bulletproof against the cheap political shots that he himself refused to use against his opponents. He used customer-relations software to create true customer relationships within his community. And he used text messaging and cell-phone networks to expand and reinforce his community.
Companies do themselves an extreme disservice if they forgo the benefits of all these social technologies. Those benefits include more customers, lower costs, additional leads, higher efficiency and greater profits.
3. He embraced and embodied change. Business leaders must enable change, not defend the status quo. By no coincidence, Obama's pre-emption of "change" neatly undercut his two main opponents, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, both veteran Washington hands. Not realizing they were working against themselves, they ran mainly on their past "experience" and readiness to govern - a message badly out of sync with America's weariness with Washington and hunger for new faces and new ideas.
For Obama, however, "change" meant more than a political slogan. To win, he knew he would have to develop a clear vision of the future and share it with the voters. Among the business insights: that vision would have to confront the realities facing the nation and put them in context. He knew that when he held the high ground, it would be foolish to back off, and that he needed a strong team with a minimum of squabbling and infighting. He knew the power of the personal touch and the necessity of getting information straight and unfiltered. Above all, he had the ability to assess himself clearly and objectively - a crucial talent for any leader, business or political.
If our leaders aren't willing to embrace change and new ideas, our economy will never recover from the current meltdown in the financial markets. We need to recognize that financial systems and markets are flawed and must be corrected. The same is true for businesses and their leaders. If they haven't yet answered or even recognized the need for drastic action, they need to make way for others. But to make change work for the good, they must learn the lessons Obama's campaign can teach.
Be Cool
Barack Obama, as a memorable YouTube video portrayed him, is the Mr. Spock of politicians - unflappable, unemotional, cool to the point of seeming Vulcan. His speechwriter, Jon Favreau, has said his reaction to winning the Iowa caucuses was hardly different from his response to losing the New Hampshire primary, when he turned and remarked calmly, "This will turn out to have been a good thing."
This aloofness can tend to turn off voters who crave more accessible public figures. But over the course of the long campaign, his imperturbable, confident strength under fire may have been his key asset. He looked, in a word, presidential, and in the end the voters valued that far more than any guy-next-door affability and easy charm.
That's a lesson for business leaders everywhere. When you're at the helm of a big operation, it never hurts to be friendly, informal and accessible. A touch of human warmth wins hearts and trust. But the indispensable quality of a leader whose decisions and actions can change people's lives is his cool - calm rationality, steadiness under pressure, and the ability to stay on message and control strong emotions.
A leader who shows anger usually seems petty and faintly ridiculous. For all his business smarts and leadership talent, the impulsive Ted Turner was vulnerable to emotional manipulation and found himself outmaneuvered and sidelined in his merger with Time Warner. And when any leader panics, it's a signal to his or her people that the situation is even worse than they thought.
Temperament is determined largely by genetics, and some are more naturally prone than others to being swayed by emotions. But psychologists say people can teach themselves to react calmly to emotional situations rather than fly off the handle.
George Washington, revered as a calm and composed leader, was just the reverse as a young man, fiery and impulsive. "He cultivated his cool through sheer willpower," says Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis.
As a young man taking over his grandfather's decaying business empire, Henry Ford II had to muster coolness to confront and banish Harry Bennett, the thuggish chief of security whose goons all but ruled Ford's main plant. In fact, nearly every successful business leader has a tale to tell of emotions mastered and fears stowed away.
For Obama's strategist David Axelrod, a defining moment came when Obama resisted the politically expedient tactic of opposing the financial bailout. That would have been catnip for voters outraged at seeing their taxes used to rescue greedy bankers, but Obama rejected it as irresponsible, too big a risk to the financial system.
Axelrod told a reporter for The New Yorker magazine that he'd known and trusted Obama for 16 years, "but you never know how someone is gonna handle the vagaries and vicissitudes of a presidential race." The election process can be "barbaric and sometimes ridiculous," he said, but "the thing I love about it is at the end of the day you can't hide who you are." And Barack Obama stayed true to himself.
Not Shy About Being Clear
To run his campaign, Obama chose people close to his own personality type - as he puts it, "people who are calm, who don't get too high and don't get too low." The result was a campaign style that reporters soon dubbed "No drama Obama." But by any measure, the campaign staffers were successful in the job they were chosen to do: they pleased the candidate, functioned smoothly and expertly, and won the race.
Obama was the unquestioned chief, presiding over meetings, cross-examining his staffers and insisting on getting opinions from everyone at the table. "He assumes if you haven't said anything, you might disagree," says his senior advisor Valerie Jarrett. "I can't tell you the number of times he's looked at me when I haven't said a word, and he looks right in my eyes and says, ‘What are you thinking?'"
Obama praised good work publicly, thanked local organizers at his rallies just as enthusiastically as he thanked the mayor or the governor of the state, and gave his staff straight, blunt feedback. "If he's happy, you know it," says Jarrett. "If he prefers to do something different, you know it. He's not shy about being clear. I think there are a lot of CEOs who don't give straight and direct feedback."
Fix the Problem
The Texas primary was a huge prize and Obama's staffers spent $20 million to capture it - only to lose to Hillary Clinton. In the aftermath, Obama sat down with his key advisors for a post-mortem.
Obama was calm and businesslike. There were no recriminations, just a quiet discussion of what had gone wrong and how to avoid those mistakes next time. At the meeting's end, Obama stood up and walked toward the door. Then he turned around.
"I'm not yelling at you guys," he said.
He took another few steps and turned around again.
"Of course, after blowing through $20 million in a couple of weeks, I could yell at you. But …" (pause) "… I'm not yelling at you." With a quick laugh, he walked out.
Business life is full of such post-mortems - as it should be. If a company has no failures, it isn't taking enough risks. What counts is how you deal with mistakes - the lost account, the aborted new products, the competitor's move that blindsided you. Barack Obama's example in the wake of his Texas primary defeat is one to remember - cool to the core.
Good leaders, whether they're engaged in politics or business, know there are times to cast blame and times to move on. If the problems in Texas had been caused by laziness, carelessness or poor organization, Obama would surely have come down hard on the offenders. But if good-faith misjudgments, unforeseen developments or plain bad luck were at fault, he knew it was better to blame nobody and focus on fixing the problem. The damage was done, but there were new battles to fight and no time or effort to be wasted in finger-pointing and staff shakeups. With no one singled out, every advisor would feel a share of the responsibility - and all of them would work harder next time.
And Obama's abrupt parting laugh, showing how much the loss hurt, drove the message home.
Conclusion
As Barack Obama kept saying during his primary campaign, the time for change is now: "We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." That was a remarkable statement for any American politician. By conventional standards, it was far too mystical to appeal to the pragmatic, down-to-earth swing voters who decide elections. Yet somehow it resonated.
Of course, Obama's "we" boils down to individual change and responsibility. It's up to us - the heads of our businesses, the leaders of our communities. It's we who must keep our cool, invest in social technologies and accept the reality of change.
We must learn from his campaign, taking his lessons into our working lives.
- End -
About the authors: Barry Libert is chairman and Rick Faulk is CEO of Mzinga, a leading provider of social software solutions.
Related Reading
Any of these books can be ordered directly from Amazon (A), Barnes & Noble (B) or Chapters (C) or may be summarized in our execuBook library (E).
Obama: The Historic Journey, by Jill Abramson, Penguin Group (USA), 2009, ISBN 9781594488931. ABC
How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election, by Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, Knopf, 2009, ISBN 9780307473660. ABC
Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise, by Barack Obama, Three Rivers Press, 2008, ISBN 9780307460455. ABC
|
