Tall? Wide? Spherical?

My friend over at St. Scobie's pointed me to an essay on the Harvard Business Review site that unpacks Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators. She's left scratching her head at the article's use of biz-speak. I agree. "Explode your sense of purpose?" Why does anyone write that way?

The thing St. Scobie didn't mention: the essay just seems to be wrong in many, many ways. The essay's author, Umair Haque, calls McCain's campaign a traditional "command-and-control" organization. That's wrong. It was a freakin' mess. With people coming and going, exiled and rehabilitated, swerving off-message, speaking at cross-purposes, hell, in Sarah Palin's case, speaking in tongues. McCain's campaign had neither anyone in command nor any capacity to exert control over events. It collapsed into a blur of near-daily tactical and strategic shifts and ended in infighting and finger-pointing. Obama, on the other hand, Haque claims, succeeded because his organization was "spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers." True, but why wouldn't an organization of the type Haque describes derail due to an inability to discipline volunteers and control the organization's message? His suggestion is that Obama's organization was all about passion, and discipline and coordination were tossed aside. That is obviously wrong. Obama won because he (or at least key actors within his organization) understood that they could trust volunteers if the campaign engineered the tools and the messages volunteers employed. Campaign supporters shared postings, YouTube videos, and talking-points manufactured by the Obama campaign. Volunteers broadcasted what the Obama campaign wanted them to broadcast. If we want to use Haque's image - of Obama's organization as a sphere - the orb the campaign most resembles is the sun, where everything is generated in the core, and the remaining structure (the radiative zone, the convective zone, the photosphere, the chromosphere and the corona, for you sun worshippers) merely functions to transmit the energy manufactured within the astral core.

Another thing Haque seems utterly wrong about: he claims that Obama succeeded because he "dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naïve sense: strategy as gamesmanship or positioning." Huh? The more I watched the Obama campaign, the more I was convinced they were masters of gamesmanship and positioning and shaping the news cycle. The thing that really brought this into focus for me happened back during the closing days of the primaries. On May 13th, Hillary won West Virginia by 30 points - taking 67% of the vote to Obama's 26%. For a day, the media commentators were talking about Hillary's win as proof that Obama couldn't succeed with working-class white voters. Then, on May 15th, Obama appeared with John Edwards in Michigan to claim Edwards' endorsement. Which, of course, in retrospect, with Edwards wandering in the political wilderness, now seems meaningless. However, at the time, it was a perfectly played card. The Obama campaign most certainly had that endorsement in their pocket for some time, but they waited until the West Virginia primary - which they clearly knew they would lose - to publicize the endorsement, and in the process took the headlines away from Hillary.