Barack, Inc : Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign

What can business leaders learn from Barack Obama's improbable victory? A great deal, says this brief, readable book, which spells out the lessons of the Obama campaign and goes on to illustrate them, citing companies that have used similar techniques to succeed. Obama ran a nearly flawless campaign that stayed on message, attracted tens of thousands of dedicated volunteers, and collected a record flood of dollars from donors large and small. But his triumph was also to use social networking to create a vast online community that has changed politics forever. And that's precisely what businesses need to do. In a soundbyte, Obama's threefold approach was (1) to keep his cool, (2) to apply to politics the social technologies of the Internet, including blogs, texting, and viral videos, and (3) to embody in himself the change that he meant to bring to the country. None of these goals are as simple as they sound. Barack, Inc., not only spells them out clearly but offers actionable lessons that businesspeople can apply, beginning tomorrow. 'Change' has become a tired political cliché, but Obama gave it new life by persuading a solid majority of voters that he could lead them to a whole new kind of politics and government, transcending the petty partisanship of recent years. And he himself embodied that change. 'We are the ones we've been waiting for,' he told his rallies. 'We are the change we seek.... Let's go change the world.' Just so, says this important book, business leaders must embrace change and become the change they offer. Only then will their constituencies - shareholders, employees, suppliers, customers - follow them to achieve it. But having done that, their companies will have become communities - and the authors tell us that community, in addition to products and profits, is what business is about in the Web 2.0 world of the 21st century.

Barry Libert is chairman and Rick Faulk CEO of Mzinga, a leading enterprise social technology and services provider. The company manages over 14,000 online communities, which draw more than 60 million total online visitors every month.

 

Libert is a recognized authority on entrepreneurial leadership strategies and a pioneer in the business use of social technologies. He recently co-authored We Are Smarter than Me, a critically acclaimed book created in collaboration with Wharton Publishing and more than 4,000 community participants that illustrates how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds. A one-time McKinsey and Company consultant, Libert has also co-authored two other highly regarded books about the business value of information and relationships entitled Cracking the Value Code and Value RX. He is also a regularly featured keynote speaker who has delivered speeches to audiences of 20,000+ globally.

 

Faulk is currently the CEO of Mzinga, and has more than 21 years of executive leadership and marketing experience at some of the world’s most notable high-tech companies, among them Cisco, WebEx, Intranets.com, PictureTel, Shiva Corporation, and Lotus. Early in his career, he also founded First Software, which grew to sales of more than $175 million in less than four years and was ranked on one of Inc. magazine's lists of fastest-growing companies in the United States.

Introduction IntroductionWho 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 dozens of 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 that they have a lot tolearn from a savvy politician.In the flush of Obama's triumph, we need to recall his initial hurdles, all seemingly insurmountable. Here was a truly exotic presidential hopefula stranger with a Muslim-sounding name, an African father, a white American mother, a Hawaiian childhood, a Harvard law degree, and a political resume of perhaps 25 words or less. As he put it in his victory speech, "I was never the likeliest candidate for office."All sorts of moves, from tried-and-true tactics to cutting-edge strategies, turned Obama's candidacy from improbable to inevitable. He assembled a first-class team of staffers who ran a nearly flawless campaign; he attracted tens of thousands of volunteers, many of them so dedicated that they left their jobs or dropped out of school to work on his election; and he collected an unprecedented amount of money, both from small contributors and big traditional donors. But we were especially riveted by the campaign's prodigious use of social networking. That's a subject we have studied in depth, and Barack Obama is tuned to our wavelength. He turned a 50-state presidential campaign into one enormous online community. His networking inspired millions of people across the United States to join a national crusade, pooling their skills, time, and dollars to achieve a decisive victory. As a result, American (and perhaps world) politics will never be the same.We believe Obama's political pioneering set a brilliant standard for any business seeking to prosper in the Web 2.0 world of the 21st century. Hence this book: Obama's campaign saga annotated for business use.We combined our own observations with those of a diverse group of media whose expertise was on display during this long, dramatic campaign. We interviewed Obama supporters, collected an array of superb reports from a variety of sources, and paid close heed to the blogosphere's unprecedented election coveragethe latter a concatenation of diverse views and voices ranging from Politico to Twitter that did much to make 2008 a turning point in politics. Our goal was to tease out the relevance of this historic campaign to business leaders everywhere.Let's get started. Barack, Inc.: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign"From social networking on the Web to stunning message discipline, the campaign holds lessons for every leader, from the world of soap powder to the practice of accounting. Barack, Inc. does a fine job of capturing these universally applicable and immediately implementable precepts." Tom Peters best selling author, Re-Imagine! and In Search of Excellence"Obama is the first president of the Internet age.