Politics meets innovation on way to White House

Politics meets innovation on way to White House

Harvey Schachter, November 17, 2008 at 8:57 AM EST
(At the risk of violating copyright laws and whilst I find the "right" way to do this, I am posting this excellent article on how Obama has generated a massive world-changing wave of trust which a great friend from San Diego forwarded to me. PR)

A knock against Barack Obama in his campaign for the U.S. presidency was that he lacked executive experience. But nothing could be further from the truth, asserts Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab strategic consultancy.

"Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: A new kind of political organization for the 21st century," he writes on Harvard Business Online.

Here's what we can learn from the president-elect.

A self-organization design

We're used to thinking about organizations as either tall or flat, but those are concepts built for an industrial era. They force us to think in two dimensions: Tall organizations lead unresponsively while flat organizations respond uncontrollably. Mr. Obama's organization combined the virtues of both organizations through the game-changing power of self-organization. It was spherical, with a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges.

Seek elasticity of resilience

His organization was built to remain resilient to turbulence. When challenger John McCain attacked Mr. Obama with negative ads in September, instead of retaliating quickly and decisively with its own ads, Mr. Obama's team responded furiously in exactly the opposite way - with record-breaking fundraising. "That's resilience," Mr. Haque says, the team reacted "to an existential threat by growing, augmenting, or strengthening resources."

Minimize strategy

His campaign dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naive sense
- as gamesmanship or positioning. They didn't waste resources on dominating the news cycle, strong-arming his party, or cleverly undercutting competitors' positions with nuanced statements. "They realized that strategy too often kills a deeply lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning," he says.

Maximize purpose

Mr. Obama's goal wasn't simply to win an election, garner votes, or run a great campaign, Mr. Haque contends. It was larger and more urgent: To change the world. "Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: Yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things. And to do that, you must strive to change the world radically for the better - and always believe that yes, you can," he observes.

Broaden unity

Marketers traditionally segment and target. They slice and dice, dividing markets into tinier and tinier bits. But they can be hapless at unifying segments. Mr. Obama succeeded not through division, but through unification. His words to his country were that they are "not a collection of Red States and Blue States - We are the United States of America."

Thicken power

The power many corporations wield is thin - the power to instill fear and inculcate greed. True power inspires, leads, and engenders belief.

The power of an ideal

Remember that there is nothing more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative than an ideal, Mr. Haque says. "Where are the ideals in your organization? What ideals are missing - absent, bankrupt, stolen - from your economy, industry, or market? What ideals will you fight and struggle for - and live? Because the ultimate problem with industrial-era business was, as Wall Street has so convincingly demonstrated, this: There weren't any."