Super Tuesday is nearly upon us and on the political front here in the United States, things are starting to shake out. John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani have dropped out as the field winnows, their objectives unmet. On the Republican side, it looks like McCain and Romney have put themselves in position for a knockout blow in a few days, with McCain the favorite. In the debate last night, Romney seemed to have an impressive grasp of the facts, both of his record and the record of Senator McCain. Nevertheless, the Senator seemed to come off slightly better as the Governor showed his exasperation. On the Democratic side, it is now just Obama and Clinton and what a tough choice it is! Experience vs. charisma. What to do.
I’d like to say a few words today in light of the aforementioned results with regard to Secret #3, “Set the High Performance Objective”. The other day, we were musing about the difference between the OBJECTIVE and the HIGH PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVE. We talked about the latter, mostly because the former seems so obvious. But, sometimes, even in sophisticated organizations and teams, the simple OBJECTIVE of the team becomes lost and/or confused. Let’s take the Giuliani campaign, for instance. The Objective of the campaign was to win the White House, and along the way, the Republican nomination. Knowing and setting the objective of the team DEFINES the team. Without an objective, the team is only a collection of individuals, going out on the town for a good time, but not a real team. With the Giuliani team, the objective got lost in the tactics, or the benchmarks, along the way.
The other candidates had studied history and understood the process, setting their own short term objectives to dovetail with the long term. Historically, public opinion of ones candidacy is generated most strongly in the early going, meaning Iowa and New Hampshire. To skip those two for all intents and purposes missed a vital opportunity to generate the proper appeal nationally, as they are easily the most covered primaries in the whole process. Setting the objective is all about knowing what the objective is all about, and using the experience of others as well as yourself to understand how to get there, or the benchmarks needed to get there step by step. It can show a certain amount of arrogance and/or ignorance to ignore the experiences of others and chart a radical course that, while seeming bold, is SO far from the tried and true as to appear counterproductive. This is what happened with the Giuliani campaign. His advisors believed they knew more, had a better grasp of the fundamentals and had crafted a strategy that would trump the other candidate’s more conservative approach.
Following a consistent conservative strategy in planning is not always effective either, but, bold new initiatives, while being vital to progress, are sometimes only ‘bold’ to those who were not in on the planning behind them. Usually, bold, slashing plans have been backed up either by a solid foundation of research on the history of the event in question, or, by intuition backed up by experience. In successful ‘bold’ strategies, there is really very little wild risk. Giuliani’s campaign had almost no historical record to back it up, and the results were predictable. The objective was not really understood.
With Hillary and Obama, the objective is the same, win the nomination and then on to the White House. The benchmarks along the way are, ostensibly, the same as well. To win the nomination, they need to win enough delegates to be elected the nominee at the convention. But with each of them, the steps along the way ARE different. They appeal to different demographics, AND they have to both win those demographics, appeal to the other’s demographics, and convince the national party that THEY are the one most likely to draw independents in the general election. Both campaigns are objective oriented team’s with reliance on polling for course corrections and impressive ground campaigns in a number of states. Focus on their individual objectives is the key. Obama can’t influence Hillary, and vice versa, by concentrating on Hillary, other than the actual results he or she achieves that might alter the planning and the short term objectives of the other. What this means is that the most effective way to achieve the objective is to FOCUS on the objective, and not on external factors that you can’t control.
Most of us don’t do that very well. We focus on the competition, we focus on those things we can’t control. That is a usually counterproductive strategy. That most successful businessmen, athletes, politicians, artists, whatever, focus on what they can control and demonstrate a laser like concentration on the core objective. That does not mean they lack flexibility. Not at all. They use their flexibility to manipulate the resources they have and that they pick up along the way to move constantly towards the objective. Sometimes, this can be described as “staying on message”. This has achieved a less than stellar name over the last decade, but the idea is still very real. The ‘message’ is the objective. Stay focused on it like a bull terrier, but show the flexibility to change benchmarks and tactics along the way. Tomorrow, we’ll talk a little more about story telling, speech making and the core of the Eight Secrets “Ennoble the Effort.”
|
