Quickthink

I love this great image from The Work Less Party Party, in British Columbia  It gives such a nice feeling about having fun, and I think creates the right mood to reflect on the trasnition to our “new political era” — the Obama era.

An Aside — Remember Odysseus was proud to say that “I lived in the age of Achilles”. Click to get a nice image of Brad Pitt playing Achilles. Will we dare to say the same about living in the Obama era???? For some Blah Blah Blah on what an “era” or “age” in political terms might mean, check out NYT magazine.

Let’s start off by thanking the Lord that the US presidential election is finally over. Now, we finally have a chance to talk about “what’s next” — and more important what should be next. Here are a few ideas on the politics of the new Obama administration.

One thing I will keep an eye on is the Obama “assertion index”. A basic point of order — Asserting things does not persuade people of the truth or even significance of the things asserted. President Bush got into serious, serious difficulty by overly relying on assertion as his favorite persuasion tool.  Those who suffered through listening to this are now “assertion sensitive”. We need more professional use of persuasion tools from the president! So, I will be taking a close look at whether Mr. Obama finds better ways to persuade than just assert things. After all, this is a guy who has a lot of persuading to do. If you doubt this, take a look at Tom Friedman today in NYT (comparing our current situation to a scary moment in the movie Jaws).

I also will keep a close watch on the “fun index”. We are all in crisis. So now is the time to have fun? Yup. I don’t mean to fool around. I mean that the Obama administraiotn must generate enthusiasm for the tough things that have to be done. The more Obama talks about “pain”, the less enthusiasm he will generate. “I feel your pain” does not get me motivated.

TechCrunch wants  Obama to become a “two way” president — and it is an interesting idea. Obama created a great digital network to get elected but used it mainly as a “one way” tool — sending his message out. But what about using the same network now to invite people to give their input back? I really like this, not just for Obama, but as a best practice for political networking in general. Let’s see if something comes of it.

On a more meta level, we might apply Seth Godin’s “Tribes” message about leadership to test the Obama presidency. Here is a great link by Mixergy.com to a video of Lord Seth presenting. WARNING. It goes on for an hour. RECOMMENDATION. I loved it. Here, I think, is the core question — will Obama build a tribe?

I like two things about the model Seth proposes. First, it is fun. It demands that the leader generates enthusiasm. Second, it gives some testing tools to see if politics a la Obama works 4 us, rather than does something 2 us.

Nicky Kristof has one suggestion — link up with 10 year olds who are trying to change the world. Let them lead the way.  Sounds crazy, until you see what some of  these 10 year olds are actually doing.

BTW — I found the video of Seth by browsing the really nice site of Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 4:38 am and is filed under Negotiation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.