What Business Can Learn From Campaign '08

RapidChange principles at core of strategy

November 2008
By M. Daniel Suwyn

Valuable business lessons can be gleaned from Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign, no matter what your political preference.
    For Jack Welsh it was all about a consistent, clear vision, making few mistakes and having well-placed allies (Business Week, Nov. 4)
    For the Wall Street Journal, Obama’s win was about the strength of personality – “his rhetorical skills and unique appeal.”
    At RapidChange we tend to view things through the prism of the brain and cognitive research. This campaign is no different. Again, this is not an analysis of Barack Obama's policies or politics. Instead, we're looking at the strategies behind the win.     Here’s what I see:
    •    Obama focused on calming the Reptilian brains of people who normally would be afraid to vote for him.
    •    His organization focused on stories over marketing. It was a bottom-up enterprise that built its success one volunteer and one story at a time. Much like Google built its success.

The Reptilian Brain

Barack Obama knew that his most important task was to create safety. He needed to convince enough white people, especially white males, that they would be safe with him as president. He had to convince enough black people that supporting him wasn’t throwing away their vote. He couldn’t accomplish this by pandering or by making race an issue. He wasn’t going to reason people out of what they didn’t reason themselves into.
    Instead he had to project an image as calm, consistent and predictable. He could not show unreasonable anger, he could not appear to waiver. When he spoke he needed to do so in a measured tone and he needed to repeat his message over and over. When the economic crisis dominated the agenda, he had to appear in control.
    Through these behaviors he was able to calm the Reptilian brains of enough people that when the barrage of last-minute accusations came, those people were able to use their neo-cortex (the rational, logical part of the brain) to assess their relevance.
    John McCain, on the other hand, entered the campaign as someone with whom many of us were comfortable. He had his own ideas and sometimes, yes, he could be a maverick. But we knew enough about him that many people's Reptilian brains were calm and comfortable. Then McCain began to make choices and behave in ways that were not consistent with what we expected. So the Reptilian brain kicked in and every slip up and/or bad decision hardened our Reptilian responses of fear or anger – making it difficult for people to access their neo-cortex and examine what McCain was saying.
    A small, but telling example of Obama's understanding of the Reptilian brain came just before his acceptance speech. There were no "thumbs up" signs of victory or "fist bumps." The 93 percent of his message (body language and tone) was not about him or about victory at someone else's expense. He was reaching out, attempting to calm the Reptilian brains of those who had not supported him.

Stories connecting to values

The second lesson is about the Obama campaign’s organizational approach to change and it owes much to Harvard professor Marshall Ganz.
    Obama’s campaign relied heavily from the outset on volunteers. As such, their driving philosophy was organizing energized and empowered people rather than marketing to a receptive base. In short, organizing over marketing.
    Marketing their candidate would have required calling, pushing and selling Obama like soap or the latest fashion on QVC (think McCain’s skit on Saturday Night Live).
    Organizing required these steps:
    •    Recruiting natural leaders with similar values from within the community
    •    Using the internet to exchange quick, basic information
    •    Allowing those volunteer leaders to have access to information usually only given     to campaign “insiders,” such as budgets and voter rolls.
    •    Giving those leaders the ability to make level-appropriate decisions without going     through a huge bureaucracy.

    Ganz, from Harvard’s Kennedy School, describes his approach as “translating values into action.”
    After recruiting those community leaders, the Obama campaign used a two-day workshop to give them the skills to create energy, model behavior and promote innovation. They taught people how to develop their own short narratives around three themes:
    •    Story of Me. Why and how I got involved.
    •    Story of Us. Why this is important to the community and how it aligns with our     values.
    •    Story of Now. What people can do now to be part of the change.

    Armed with these stories, the first 200 trained volunteer leaders formed 200 teams that made 100,000 contacts a week. Each member had their own story to tell and a clear idea of how to tie it to the “corporate” mission of getting Obama elected. And they asked for specific follow up action – “here’s what you can do to help us now.”

Bringing it back to business

    Translating these lessons to your business is much simpler than developing a “cult of personality” or tracking down “well-placed allies.”
    It requires top management to choose a values message and stick with it; to project calm and reason; and to be as predictable and consistent as humanly possible.
    Next, it requires leaders to reach deep into their organizations to find and develop leaders of all kinds. Then it requires identifying where the values of your employees intersect with the values of the company.
    The three stories – Me, Us, Now – is a powerful tool for change. Too often, the company leadership believes that “if it is good for the company it is good for the employee.” While logically that can be correct, people do not act on what they calculate to be important, rather they act on what they feel is important. So taking the time to make the connection between Me and Us is critical.
    This goes for Leadership Teams as well. Members need to spend time developing both their individual and collective stories along these themes. We’ve all heard how important stories are to organizations, but many of the CEOs we talk with question how sharing individual stories can equal results. This election is a good example of exactly that.
    If it worked for a nation, it can work for your company.


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