Posts Tagged ‘President Obama’

As a believer in “soft power,” I think that I have to make an exception when it comes to presidential leadership and politics. President Obama may be in need of  using a slightly hybrid type of power on the hard-soft continuum. Soft power is a term that has gained prominence in how leaders communicate whether they be presidents, prime ministers or CEOs. Soft power became part of the business lexicon when it was defined by Joseph Nye at Harvard’s Kennedy School several years ago – ”Soft power rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others.”  It is different from “hard power” which uses sticks, carrots and sometimes coercion to get things done.  Most CEOs today, like Obama,  use soft power to influence outcomes, get employees to follow their strategy and treat customers well.  We see CEOs walking the halls, holding town meetings, sending out congratulatory notes, caring about the community and so forth.   The command-and-control hard power employed by CEOs  of years past does not work as well in the Information Age.  

Obama’s bi-partisianship and consensus-driven “soft power” approach  may be in need of a serious shift. Instead of leaning closer to the soft end of the power spectrum, President Obama needs to lean forward using more “firm power.”  There has got to be an in-between where President Obama can lead the country and the U.S. can lead the world with immedicacy, steadfastness and hard action.  As Nye has said, “Reputation has always mattered in political leadership, but the role of credibility becomes an even more important power resource because of the paradox of plenty.”  Obama’s reputation for credibilty is bruised. Coalition-building takes too long and is too hard to measure when pennies, jobs and confidence count.  His activities and communications are too diffuse at this time of global economic crisis. Firm power might just be the answer for these unusual times.

[Whether firm power applies to CEOs, I do not think so. I still that that soft power gets better results and attracts the best talent when employed by business leaders. And ultimately....CEOs do not have to build coalitions in the way that politicians do. CEOs can fire the nay-sayers more easily.  Presidents do not have that option. ]

  I must be on a “leadership” kick as this week ends. Yesterday I posted about leadership’s role in crisis preparedness. Today I am going to post on the effects of crisis on a leader. At a dinner the other night, my colleague mentioned the impact of the killing of Osama bin Laden on President Obama. We agreed that he had to be a changed man. In yesterday’s reading, Daniel Henninger wrote the following in the same vein:

A candidate is not a president. In the fall of 2008, after Mr. Obama won, our offices were visited by then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, a former anti-mob prosecutor. Asked about the Obama criticisms of the war on terror, Mr. Chertoff replied that it was impossible to overstate the sobering effect of learning the true magnitude of the threat and bearing responsibility for thwarting it. On another occasion, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who as a federal judge presided over terrorist trials in New York, was asked the difference between his understanding of terrorism then and as attorney general. “About the difference,” he replied “between what you thought you knew in the sixth grade and a post-doctoral education.”

Without a doubt, the decision to launch the Seals attack on bin Laden’s hideout and the risks that entailed changed the man. Whenever people go through their CEO transition to finally land their company’s highest office, they realize the enormity of the position. Nothing ever looks the same. The buck really does stop at that corner door. As you’ve undoubtedly heard before from Shakespeare,

“Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown.”

   A new survey from Norton made its way to me and collided in my head with another observation. The survey among British adults was about online reputation and some interesting tidbits surfaced in the perennial discussion of reputations online. Once again, it quickly gets down to privacy issues that seem increasingly difficult to fence in online.  Over one half of British respondents said they would not mind “resetting” the button to erase everything about them online. I think there is a huge pent up demand to hit that reset button at least once in our lifetimes — and for good reason. About four in ten (40%) report that they don’t actively safeguard their reputations online.  We worry and pout about the loss of privacy but do we do anything really to protect ourselves?

I sometimes try to imagine the world even five years from now when everything about us is woven together into an online profile about where we were born, our friends, colleagues, indiscretions, good deeds, professional and professional events we attended all spliced together with rumors, hearsay, innuendo and just plain misinformation.  I got to thinking about this as I was reading an interesting article about President Obama’s mother and her journey to Indonesia with the president as a young boy.  I thought how interesting it was that the author, Janny Scott, had to interview Stanley Ann Dunham’s  (Obama’s mother) former colleagues, friends, neighbors and two children (one being in the White House) about her because she never lived her life online. This was all pre-Internet days. Probably a good thing. The author had to resort to the old way of writing a book . It is almost delicious in its quaintness. Here is what is says on Amazon about the book:

Award-winning reporter Janny Scott interviewed nearly two hundred of Dunham’s friends, colleagues, and relatives (including both her children), and combed through boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, and photo albums, to uncover the full breadth of this woman’s inspiring and untraditional life, and to show the remarkable extent to which she shaped the man Obama is today.

The juxtaposition of people living their lives online for all to see with people who lived the majority of their lives without the scrutiny and accessibility of the Internet actually makes the new book even more interesting because it probably contains the unknowable.  Imagine depending on letters and photo albums to tell our lives today.  Almost unthinkable.

   Who would have thought that who you lunch with matters? A new way to pick stocks is revealed in BusinessWeek. Research found that if you bet on the CEOs that President Obama has dined with since taking office, you’d be outperforming the S&P 500 index. The six luncheon set of CEOs he has met with outperformed the S&P by more than two percentage points.  The article points out the the President is obviously only going to dine with winners, not losers or scandalized companies, so it makes commonsense.  Although this strategy for stockpicking  is not recommended, it is hard not to think that there is some smart thinking behind the CEO luncheon invitations.  Just get out your list of most admired CEOs and see if they are dining at the White House and away you go.

Forget that economics or business degree. This may be a lot easier.

The reputation of business is certainly in need of repair. CEOs probably even more. Here’s a start to helping show that they do serve a purpose.  President Obama turned to chief executive officers for ideas on making the government more efficient and modern. At least the President and business leaders were seated at the table together and acknowledging that business has something to teach government in return.  Nearly 50 CEOs were invited to the White House this past week to “brainstorm” how to better streamline technology to improve government infrastructure.  CEOs were placed in break out groups to discuss ideas on making government more responsive and customer service oriented with the help of IT. The sessions were called Forums on Government Modernization.

The President says that government can’t do it alone. He said that while the public can make dinner reservations or buy movie tickets online, people can’t electronically set up appointments with the Social Security Administration.” The general public could surely tell the President that the technology revolution has not reached government.  Anyone applying for a government document knows this well. CEOs came up with several ideas such as producing performance report cards to reach goals, instigating a crisis to get things started, changing the culture, creating a Manhattan Project group, etc.

As the president said:

To this day, there are still places in the federal government where reams of yellow files in manila envelopes are walked from desk to desk, or boxes of documents are shipped back and forth between offices because files aren’t yet online.  Believe it or not, in our patent office — now, this is embarrassing — this is an institution responsible for protecting and promoting innovation — our patent office receives more than 80 percent of patent applications electronically, then manually prints them out, scans them, and enters them into an outdated case management system.  This is one of the reasons why the average processing time for a patent is roughly three years.  Imminently solvable; hasn’t been solved yet.

Business has its problems but not this bad!   Business leaders have teachable experience getting organizations moving forward on difficult and culture changing initiatives and changes.  CEOs have faced many of these challenges many times over and can lend a hand. The White House videotaped the discussions (here’s one of them) and it didn’t take three years to get them up on their site. Progress.

The sessions on tape should go a little ways towards demonstrating that CEOs do more than go to the bank. Every little bit helps to improve the reputation of business. I am all for that.

  I was reminded today of some information I read a few months ago about President Obama. Apparently his correspondence director makes sure that Obama sees 10 letters or emails every day from average Americans. Some of these letters are positive and some negative but they are clear reminders of how Americans are suffering and thriving today. President Obama also reads them aloud at certain meetings when he looks around and notices that people are losing touch with the common man or woman. I am sure they come in handy.

When I wrote my first book on CEO reputation (CEO Capital), I mentioned a CEO who started every weekly management meeting with a tape recording from a call center where people complained about the company’s service. The CEO felt that it was important to remind his team that there was still plenty of room for improvement. The Obama example above is similar to the company CEO one I told.

I think that this act of customer awareness is a practice that could help many CEOs who sometimes forget that the purpose of a business is to create a customer, to quote from the late Peter Drucker.

Both presidential and CEO leadership needs to be reminded who they serve to safely steer their country or company reputations in the right direction, especially in these tough times.

Maybe it took me a long time but the word “reset” has become awfully popular. I first noticed when it was used by GE’s Jeff Immelt in his Letter to Shareholders about the effects of the economy and how GE needed to reset itself in response to the global economy. I found it an effective word because it brought to mind a reset button. 

IMMELT: “I believe we are going through more than a cycle. The global economy, and capitalism, will be “reset” in several important ways. The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner […] I think this environment presents an opportunity of a lifetime. We get a chance to reset the core of GE and focus on what we do best.”

Then I noticed President Obama using “reset” in reference to his visit with Russian President Medvedev. “I think that there has been a time over the last several years where Russian-U.S. relations were not as strong as they should be. What I said coming in is that I wanted to press the reset button on relations between the United States and Russia.”

Since I liked the term, especially for talking about my favorite subject of reputation, I decided to investigate whether it has been around for a long time or was fairly new.  In the chart below, you can see that the word reset has jumped 337% since 2000. As expected, the greatest jump occurred between 2007 and 2008.

Unfortunately I was not the only one to notice this trend. The New York Times Magazine columnist William Safire wrote about this popular new word in April 2009. I found the article online when I was searching to see if others were thinking the same thoughts. Apparently the reset button idea bloomed during the U.S. presidential election when it was used repeatedly by VP hopeful Joe Biden and President-elect Obama to describe their campaign strategy. Even secretary of state Hillary Clinton has taken to using the phrase now.  As Safire writes, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum mentioned the growing ubiquity, “Press the reset button. Is there any phrase more enticing in the modern lexicon? We all know what it means: Press the reset button, watch your computer reboot and presto! A nice, clean screen appears, and you start again from scratch.”

I am glad that “reset” is a trend and intend to use it as often as I can for describing reputation-building.  You have to reset your reputation now.  Until you press the reset button, your reputation will be ground zero. Resetting your reputation is the right thing to do. If you don’t like the word reset, you can always substitute reboot.

  Ironic. I was finishing my reading of an article by Michael Hirschorn from Atlantic Online that I was given by my boss. Today is the day after President Obama’s inauguration. The article titled “End Times” is about the death of traditional (or “old”) media in favor of “new” media, with a particular spotlight on The New York Times. “The former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal often said he couldn’t imagine a world without The Times. Perhaps we should start.” I could not help but think that such a disappearance might be inevitable after reading about the paper’s dire economic straits and contemplating the reading habits of the younger generation.

I stopped into my local newspaper shop where nothing much is ever happening at 6:15am. The newspaper stand is located on Flatbush Avenue and Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn where I live. The guy who I hand over my $3.50 over to every morning (The Times and the Wall Street Journal) is from the Middle East and has four fingers on his hand that hands me back change. The newsstand is like most in the city…grungy, poorly lit and dingy.

This morning it was packed. There was a line of at least 30 people, mostly African-Americans, standing on line to buy their copies of the New York Times. The Times had not been delivered yet which was unusual but every person wanted their own personal copy with President Obama on the cover. The commemorative issue for posterity!  I tried to imagine what we would do 10 years from now (maybe 5?) when all news was online and we wanted a keepsake of some momentous event. Somehow downloading the Huffington Post or even The New York Times Online would not do it for me.  I thought back to 9/11 and how that horrific event would be covered without the old news publications. It would not be the same as picking up the paper to those two page spreads of person after person killed and their heart-wrenching individual life stories cut short. Not the same. No way.

The incongruous juxtaposition of reading about the potential death of newspapers and this morning’s long line at my local newsstand with people beaming with pride, speaking languages I could not place and knowing that seeing President Obama on the front page of the most reputable paper legitimized everything will not be forgotten.