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.