Monday, May 12, 2008

Barack's management style

Is Barack's management style his secret weapon? Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas of Newsweek present a description of the way Obama manages his team. It sound's like a business school example of the best CEO's.
How do you know if Barack Obama is unhappy with what you're saying— or not saying? At meetings of his closest advisers, he likes to lean back, put his feet on the table and close his eyes. If he doesn't like how the conversation is going, he will lean forward, put his feet on the floor and "adjust his socks, kind of start tugging at them," says Michael Strautmanis, a counselor to the campaign. Obama wants people to talk, but he doesn't want to intimidate them. "If you haven't said anything, he'll call on you," says Strautmanis. "He's never said it, but he usually thinks if somebody is very quiet it's because they disagree with what everybody is saying … so Barack will call on you and say, 'You've been awfully quiet'." There are no screamers on Team Obama; one senior Obama aide says he's heard him yell only twice in four years. Obama was explicit from the beginning: there was to be "no drama," he told his aides. "I don't want elbowing or finger-pointing. We're going to rise or fall together." Obama wanted steady, calm, focused leadership; he wanted to keep out the grandstanders and make sure the quiet dissenters spoke up. A good formula for running a campaign—or a presidency.

It worked against Hillary Clinton, whose own campaign has been rent by squabbling aides and turf battles. While Clinton veered between playing Queen Elizabeth I and Norma Rae, Obama and his team chugged along with a superior 50-state campaign strategy, racking up the delegates. [Snip]

The day after his big defeat in Ohio and his popular-vote loss in Texas, Obama traveled to the large corporate offices in Chicago that serve as his campaign headquarters. The mood was grim; they had, after all, blown their third chance to end the primary season early—after the shock of New Hampshire and the muddled results of Super Tuesday. Obama toured the office, visiting every desk to thank his mostly young staffers for their efforts and urging them to keep their chins up. Then he walked into a conference room for a far tougher two-hour conversation with his senior staff. "We rise or fall together," he started out. "I'm not pointing fingers at any single person because we all share responsibility." He talked through his own mistakes as a candidate and went around the table asking people for their input in the postmortem. Speaking calmly but intensely, he then took control to explain how he saw it. He worked his way through a detailed, handwritten list of what went right and wrong—including how they misspent time and money, how they relied too much on impersonal rallies and how the schedule was flawed.

At the end of the meeting, Obama stood up and began to walk out of the room, before wheeling around to say one more thing to his somber staff: "I'm not yelling at you and I'm not screaming. Although for $20 million for two primaries and the results we got, I could," he said, laughing. "But I'm not."
Anyone who has ever read Graham T. Allison's great book "Essence of Decision" about the decision style John F. Kennedy used during the Cuban Missile Crisis will recognize it in this description of Obama's decision style. Only JFK had to learn it after the Bay of Pigs incident. Barack knows this before becoming President.

The question is how this is going to play in the campaign against McCain. I expect this to be the dirtiest Presidential campaign in living memory in spite of McCain's claim that he will not run a nasty campaign. The Republicans do NOT want to give up control of the White House. Can Barack's decision style deal with that kind of campaigning? Hillary tried some of it, but her efforts have been mild because if they went too extreme they would turn off Democratic voters in the Primary. Here is more from the article:
Sen. John McCain himself has explicitly disavowed playing the race card or taking the low road generally. But he may not be able to resist casting doubt on Obama's patriotism. And the real question is whether he can—or really wants to—rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate who populate the Internet and fund the "independent expenditure" groups who exercise their freedom in ways that give a bad name to free speech.

For Obama, the challenge will be to respond quickly and surely—but without overreacting or inviting an endless cycle of recriminations. Team Obama has been a model of tight, highly efficient organization, certainly in contrast to most presidential campaigns. The few tensions that have emerged have been between those who want to stick to the high ground and those who want to fight a little dirtier. (Such debates could intensify in a hard-hitting general campaign.) The campaign has at times been a little slow to fight back. Some of this deliberation is a measure of the candidate's personality. Obama disdains cable-TV talk-show shoutfests as trivial sideshows, and he tends to discount the seriousness of campaign gaffes and flaps. As a result, he was slow to denounce the most recent round of tirades by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. By failing to alert Obama to the gravity of the Wright fiasco, "I don't think we served him well," admits his chief strategist, David Axelrod.

But Team Obama has been consistently able to outstrategize the opposition, and it does have a plan for the coming mud war. In conversations with NEWSWEEK, Obama's aides have signaled their intention to put McCain on the spot. They note that McCain himself has been the victim of a smear. In the South Carolina primary in 2000, GOP operatives spread the rumor that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. Recently, when a reporter asked McCain, "Does it bother you at all that you might actually benefit from latent prejudice in the country?" he answered: "That would bother me a lot. That would bother me a great deal." And last week his wife, Cindy, told NBC News, "My husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all." So if McCain's camp does try to exploit Obama's ties to the fiery Reverend Wright, the Obama-ites can question his sincerity—is he really the "Straight Talk" candidate? And if McCain can't stop others from the sort of innuendo and code that Republicans have learned to frighten voters, Obama can cast doubt on McCain's credentials as a commander in chief. ("In other words," says liberal political pundit Mark Shields, "they can say that McCain is either a hypocrite or impotent.")
So in Obama we have a leader who knows how to get information from his subordinates and who, unlike Bush and Cheney, not only is willing to listen to bad news but actively solicits it. We have a man who is not prepared to leap on the latest Cable "news" shout-fest as though it was the end of the world. We have a man who understands what his subordinates are doing and is prepared to make decisions to control and enable them as necessary, unlike Bush's hands-off style - a style necessitated by Bush's disinterest and general ignorance of how government operates. And in Obama we have a man who already has a strategy for handling the anticipated Republican smears and attacks.

I was impressed by Obama's organization in Texas for the Primary/Caucus here. He also clearly organized and planned the strategy for the primary campaign much better than Hillary did.

Everything that comes out from this long primary season has shown that Obama is an extremely impressive campaigner and manager. All of this is coming together so that the Democratic Party is going to be in the position to take advantage of the ideal conditions for a change election.

This description of Barack's management style is not the least of the impressive news.

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