Those are some of the more common reactions I’ve heard. Some of our readers have been a little more pointed in their comments about the Obama Show on Tuesday night… like a lot of Conservatives who have come to the conclusion that Obama never says anything new. He just rehashes stuff he’s already said, putting fresh lipstick on the pig time after time.
Actually, I had decided not to listen to Obama’s little extravaganza for just that reason. I felt I knew what he was going to say. The radio that I listen to when I’m writing betrayed me, and once President Obama started speaking I left it on.
I wasn’t disappointed. He spouted about 1950s Russian Sputniks and roofing companies reinventing themselves. He talked about all the neat things he was going to do for business instead of to business. Gee, that would be a nice change.
Barack has a problem. He can get people to listen to him. Getting people to believe him is another story altogether. He is learning the lesson that all liars learn sooner or later. You can only go to the well just so many times and then even the thickest airheads start seeing the light.
He still has the considerable power of the bully pulpit… he still has the slavish devotion of the main stream media and their influence, greatly diminished though it may be. What he doesn’t have is the American people. Obama has been tried in the court of the mind of the American citizen and was found wanting.
You could call it creative accounting. It is certainly very wishful thinking in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, but our never-to-be-phased, ever-eager-to-invent President is out there again weaving stories out of whole cloth. His only problem is that the nation is rapidly figuring out that our would be emperor has no clothes.
Reflected in the teleprompter, Obama in Charlotte, North Carolina.
He’s actually out there touting a 9.5% unemployment rate, which if all numbers were figured in would run somewhere near 18%, as some sort of success. In fact, if the temporary hiring for the census was subtracted the unemployment figures would be even higher than 9.5%. To the adulation of the rent-a-mob crowds, which have become de rigeur at the Anointed One’s appearances, Obama had the nerve to say that we “had turned the corner” on the recession and good times will be had by all.
Hmm… an absolutely jobless recovery… three point eight million jobs lost since the stimulus bill was passed! Commercial bankruptcies at a historical high this year, banks around the country hiding foreclosures by keeping them off the market, a government whose policies toward business is completely antithetical to the private sector, while gobbling up vast chunks of the economy with absolutely no knowledge or expertise in running any of these businesses.
What it looks like from where I sit is a flat-out Marxist takeover of our country by a Marxist ideologue who is desperate to put as many of his totalitarian policies in force as he can, before the just retribution of the people of this country can take place in November. He knows that unless he can steal voter registration or pass amnesty for illegal aliens, he and his Congress are toast – his Congress in 2010 and him in 2012.
His legacy, rather than being that of the most transformative American President, will be that of a treasonous politician who attempted to take the country to ruin and the worst President in the history of this country.
[Blogger's Note: I began this sometime last fall before COP15, but lost track before the holidays; despite my time management ineptitude, these topics are still as timely as ever.]
James Murdoch, son and heir-apparent to conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, argued near the end of 2009 in the Washington Post that conservatives and conservationists make natural allies...or at least they ought to. It's a refreshing read, too, because with both major parties playing Alinsky politics it's easy to forget that, aside from the sum of our available natural resources, our future economic growth and cultural-historical legacy are on the line. In the interest of full disclosure, I have been a fisherman since I could hold a rod and reel, I'm a habitual recycler-reuser-reducer, I really appreciate having had the good fortune to visit some reallycoolplaces during my short time thus far on the planet, and I firmly believe that there's an economic opportunity here - involving the free market - that we don't (or shouldn't) want to miss.
Follow me: author David Pink argued in one of his books that right-brained people will rule the world one day. Certainly we can't get along without the analytical types, but it's the creative ones - the technological innovators - that have ushered man through various epochs across time and which policy makers seem to agree are the backbone of the American economy (this, by the way is true; small firms' marginal costs of production are lower than those of larger firms). Pink's argument goes something like this (and I'm paraphrasing here, not directly quoting):
Raise your hand if you own an iPod.
Lots of you? Good. Keep your hands up.
Now, keep your hands up if you knew you wanted one before they ever had been invented.
No more hands? I didn't think so.
How could you possibly know you'd want a thing before it came to be? It's the people thinking about what you want before you know you want it who really transform society - these are the people that reshape and redefine paradigms in a society.
This argument extends to green products, technology, and sustainable services. Glenn Beck may have assassinated Teddy Roosevelt's character on live television at CPAC this year, but like my good friend J.R. Lind (@jrlind on Twitter) at Nashville Post Business once reminded me, sustainability is good business. Something tells me ol' Teddy would be awfully proud of today's Republican Party if they could find a way to get on board with sustainability-as-economic-policy ethos. It's just going to require re-framing the debate to some degree.
Personally, I liked the way President Obama put it in his State of the Union address:
I don’t like the way the President and progressive Democrats are going about shaping and “solving” the problem…but I liked the way the President put it: whether or not the science is settled is not the chief issue here – there’s an economic opportunity to be had, and in the wake of an unemployment around 10%, it’s time for the Congress to act. We on the Right agree that bad science should not inform policy, but it’s equally important to remember that policy activists and elected officials are NOT scientific experts (unless by coincidence), and to paraphrase Dr. Richard A. Muller, PhD (Physics) the falsification of one area of data does not discredit an entire theoryen masse. The Right is terrified that going green will mean capitulation to a radical socialist agenda [sic]; the most devout opponents of anthropogenic warming theory will reject any and all green movements. Of course, new regulatory schemes should be opposed, but it’s possible to look at conservation through our own lens.
The Right needs to go further. Falling back on small government and low tax rhetoric, too, simply won’t fill the bill – the average American doesn’t take our high polemic seriously anymore (beyond sharing our disdain for the sitting Democratic government – we should recognize that this could only be temporary). Republicans have plenty of momentum in their favor, and, like Rep. Paul Ryan, can seize this opportunity before sliding backward into campaign mode this year. Here’s the good news: it’s entirely possible to be green and pro-business all at once.
The government contracting apparatus provides the perfect setting for a pilot program to see the benefits of sustainability, with minimal impacts to the private sector. Last fall, President Obama signed an executive order establishing sustainability goals for greening up facilities and processes across the federal government, including prime and subcontractor goods, facilities, and practices. Contracting and procurement reform in this area – since it has to take place anyway in order for businesses to comply with as-yet undetermined standards and definitions – is our chance to establish a tiered, incentive-based approach to green business. Rather than allowing the federal government to bludgeon businesses everywhere by standing up new regulatory apparatuses with cap-and-trade schemes, the Right should prop up a reformed procurement system which gives preference in the awards process to contractors who meet certain tiered sustainability goals.
This is also a nice way for traditionally pro-Big Business Republicans to throw a nice-sized bone to small businesses, since the marginal costs of pollution abatement are lower for small firms than they are for large firms; the costs of risk-taking in green innovation are also smaller. The conclusion of this policy approach is a set of sustainability practices in the contracting environment (no pun intended) which can be voluntarily extended into commercial markets by companies who see real long-term benefits from sustainability in procurement space – just like John Q. Public who never knew how awesome the iPod would be before it was invented. Small businesses thrive, costs are lowered, small and large businesses collaborate, and the government is largely kept out of interfering with commercial markets – we merely reform a legacy process for the purpose of achieving a policy objective that has several fringe benefits. There are long-term political benefits to this strategy as well, as there is clearly a well-expressed demand for green products and investments/practices.
We – and certainly I – are a long way off from having an exhaustive, comprehensive approach for going green, framed within the context of our own ideological narratives. But it’s not altogether impossible with a little bit of creative thinking. We don’t have to agree on the science of global warming, but we should probably start from the same basic assumption that sustainability is good for business. Finally, we need to remember that we have a real chance to wrestle this issue away from the Left, but we have to act quickly and intelligently, and remember that committing to this policy arena is not capitulation if we come to the table with our own detailed approaches. Here’s hoping we have a champion on to take the reins and lead the Right into a new era.
The political blogosphere is buzzing about Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s interview. Soren Dayton argues the lessons of the Obama campaign were “budgeting, technology, field, and media,” while Patrick Ruffini finds that the important lesson is that “Obama ran a better kind of offline campaign.” Although it is quite true that these are some critical lessons, as a business nerd and student at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, I think there’s a massive lesson that pundits are missing: Obama for President wasn’t run like a traditional campaign, but instead like a huge corporation. I don’t believe that any campaign on this level was ever able to accomplish this with nearly the same success as Plouffe and company.
Plouffe makes this unmistakenably clear throughout his interview:
There are business analogies. One is, we’re a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. … We had over 5,000 employees… And we were an organization about accountability. Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.
What specific trends that the most successful modern corporations employ were echoed by the Obama campaign?
“Know your customer.” I’ve probably heard this from my entrepreneurship advisor a thousand times now, but only because it is perhaps the single most important phrase in business. Obama’s campaign really knew its customers – just look at the way it outreached to young voters.
A consistent message and high-impact branding. These two go hand in hand. Take Apple, a highly successful company even despite the recession, for example: they have a simple but highly memorable logo, effective messaging (i.e. “Get a Mac” ads), and a well-designed and innovative website. Barack Obama’s branding and messaging was as good as any corporation.
Job performance measurement and personal accountability. Think quarterly or annual reviews at your place of work. As quoted earlier, Plouffe confirms the importance of this in the Obama campaign: “Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.”
Fiscal accountability. Successful corporations have very specific budgets, and virtually all spending is highly scrutinized. Plouffe notes that, “People on the campaign could not make more than a certain amount—$12,000 a month… If you were a deputy you got paid X, if you were an assistant, you got paid Y… From a fiscal management standpoint, Obama was very clear that he did not want to end up with a debt in the primary or the general, so we just planned accordingly. We didn’t spend beyond our means.” (emphasis added)
A willingness to take significant financial risks and depart with the norm to be on the cutting-edge. This sentiment was echoed by the Obama campaign at many levels. Team Obama got the idea of peer production, which is quickly becoming the premiere business model of leading corporations like IBM, Boeing, BMW, and Goldcorp. In addition, as Patrick and Soren point out, Obama invested the campaign’s resources in a very unique way – remember the advertisements the campaign ran on an Xbox 360 racing game?
In business, constant innovation is crucial. Fall behind and your competitors will likely crush you. Find a decisive edge and you stand to profit immensely. Plouffe’s comments and the results of the election demonstrate that business and politics are actually two very similar animals.
This letter was written as a follow-up to some points I raised about idea creation for the GOP in an earlier blog post.
To the future chairman of the Republican National Committee,
We face a tough road over the coming days, months, and years as we work to transform the Republican Party into the party of the future so that we can recover from this year’s devastating losses in the House, Senate, and ultimately, White House. The path ahead will be a challenging one, but I am convinced that we are up to the challenge and that ultimately we will prevail.
In order to do this, however, we must recognize as a party that many of the ways of the past are no longer the way of the future. For example, Barack Obama has proven that new media and the Internet are essential to winning elections. Similarly, we now see that we must be able to raise a large percentage of money and build a powerful infrastructure online.
Following this logic, we also need to realize that peer production is the way of the future – not just in politics or business, but in all walks of life. At a macro level, this means that we must democratize the Republican Party by opening it to mass collaboration. If the Republican Party wants to be the party of the future, it must adopt this sort of collaboration driven, peer production based model.
Indeed, peer production has proven enormously and unequivocally successful as a business model. Corporations are scrambling to replicate the impeccable successes of companies like Goldcorp, Inc., who in 1999 was on the verge of bankruptcy because it was unable to locate sources of gold on its property. Out of desperation, CEO Rob McEwen issued the “Goldcorp Challenge,” inviting anyone and everyone to help the company locate gold on its campus. The success was astounding: due to peer production, Goldcorp went from being an underperforming $100 million company to a $9 billion juggernaut. Many other leading companies, including IBM, Boeing, and Procter & Gamble have adopted peer production as a central component of their business model to similarly resounding success. Although political trends tend to lag behind business trends, peer production is clearly one trend in which we cannot afford to fall behind.
In fact, Barack Obama’s electoral success was not really due to his use of the Internet. Rather, the Internet only served as the medium through which Obama’s volunteers and supporters could peer produce. In the end, it was the Obama campaign’s understanding of the necessity of utilizing peer production and its ability to do so that fueled his victory. MyBarackObama.com was immensely successful in doing this, resulting in his supporters peer producing 200,000 offline events, 400,000 blog posts, 3 million phone calls, and $500 million. Everything at MyBarackObama made it unambiguously clear: “This campaign is about you.”
Democrats, following in the footsteps of countless successful corporations, are going to continue to use this model in 2010 and beyond because it is a proven winner. Accordingly, this begs the question: are we going to do the same? Please, Mr. Chairman, let the answer be an unmistakable, “Yes!”
