Innovative organizations live by new rules. The Obama campaign played by the new rules. Harvard Business Publishing's Edge Economy, featured an article by Umair Haque, Director of Havas Media Lab entitled Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators. Here are some excerpts:
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...Obama's presidential bid succeeded...through the power of new DNA: new rules for new kinds of institutions...
Seven rules for tomorrow's radical innovators:
1. Have a self-organization design. Obama's organization...was able to combine the virtues of both tall and flat organizations. How? By tapping the game-changing power of self-organization. Obama's organization was less tall or flat than spherical—a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges....McCain's organization was left trapped by a stifling command-and-control paradigm.
2. Seek elasticity of resilience. Obama's 21st century organization was built for a 21st century goal—not to maximize outputs, or minimize inputs, but to, as Gary Hamel has discussed, remain resilient to turbulence. When McCain attacked Obama with negative ads...Obama's organization responded with record-breaking fundraising. That's resilience: reflexively bouncing back to an existential threat by growing, augmenting, or strengthening resources.
3. Minimize strategy. Obama's campaign dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naïve sense: strategy as gamesmanship or positioning. They didn't waste resources trying to dominate the news cycle, game the system, strong-arm the party, or out-triangulate competitors' positions. Rather, Obama's campaign took a scalpel to strategy—because they realized that strategy, too often, kills a deeply-lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning.
4. Maximize purpose...Obama's goal wasn't simply to win an election...It was larger and more urgent: to change the world...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. You must maximize, stretch, and utterly explode your sense of purpose.
5. Broaden unity. What do marketers traditionally do? Segment and target, slice and dice...Yet Obama succeeded not through division, but through unification...Obama intuitively understands a larger truth of next-generation economics. Unified markets are what a world driven to collapse by hyperconsumption is desperately going to need.
6. Thicken power. The power many corporations wield is thin power: the power to instill fear and inculcate greed. True power is what Obama has learned wield: the power to inspire, lead, and engender belief. You can beat people into subjugation—but you can never command their loyalty,
creativity, or passion. Thick power is true power: it's radically more durable, less costly, and more intense.
7. Remember that there is nothing more asymmetrical than an ideal. Obama ended his last speech before the election by saying: "let's go change the world." Why are those words important? Because the world needs changing...In the 21st century, there is nothing more asymmetrical—more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative—than the world-changing power of an ideal...
The seventh lesson is the starting point for tomorrow's radical innovators—because it's the thread that knits the others together. And it's where you should start if you want to use these seven rules to start building 21st century institutions—whether businesses, non-profits, social enterprises, or political campaigns.
For the full article go to http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/
I've recently become a big fan of Umair's. He write on juicy topics such as strategic imagination, radical management innovation, the new DNA, corporate revolutionaries and overinnovation.
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