Published: November 17, 2009 09:32 am      

President Obama’s entrepreneurial mindset

Don McNay

“I can give you anything but time.”

—Elvis Costello

I’m sometimes critical of President Obama because it often seems to me that he doesn’t understand people like me — an owner of a small business in a small town.

I have not seen much evidence of Obama being in touch with small-town Kentucky, but after reading David Plouffe’s new book, “The Audacity to Win,” I have become convinced that he knows what it takes to run a business.

I’m a devoted student of Dan Sullivan’s “Strategic Coach” for entrepreneurs. I went through Sullivan’s program in Toronto. Dan has devoted his life to helping entrepreneurs become better at their craft. I am convinced that President Obama operated his 2008 presidential campaign with a classic entrepreneurial mindset.

Common traits of successful entrepreneurs include setting seemingly impossible goals and challenging conventional wisdom.

Planning to be president of the United States is a pretty high goal. Especially for a guy who had been an Illinois state legislator just five years ago.

When history goes back to studying the Obama campaign, it will compare it to the William Jennings Bryan campaign of 1896 or Ross Perot’s in 1992. Those unconventional styles of campaigning set the standard for every campaign after them.

No one focused on Larry King before Ross Perot did. Now, all candidates find their way to Larry, Leno, Dave, Ellen, Tyra and Oprah.

Now, every campaign is going to organize and raise money using the Obama model.

Like a Steven Jobs or Bill Gates, Obama changed the dynamic.

But unlike Bryan and Perot, Obama won.

And he did in classic entrepreneurial fashion. He developed a campaign plan that exploited opportunities that seemed crazy to “Washington insiders.”

It was the same way Steven Jobs and Bill Gates seemed crazy to IBM and Xerox. Or the way that Google seemed crazy to Microsoft.

A good entrepreneur takes what “the professionals” see as disadvantages and turns them into advantages.

Jimmy Carter had one of the most innovative campaigns of the modern era. People laughed when an unemployed, former governor of a Southern state decided to be president. Carter understood that being unemployed allowed him to campaign full time, and that being Southern allowed him to connect to a large segment of the population who didn’t want George Wallace as the primary symbol of southern politics.

Obama took the unconventional candidate theory to a new extreme. We have not had many senators become president, and especially not many one-term senators. I can’t think of another president who was raised by an unmarried, single mother. I’m sure Obama is the first president born in Hawaii. He’s younger than all but a handful of presidents and has an unusual name.

Also, did I mention that he is African-American?

As Plouffe’s book points out, Obama’s “negatives,” like Jimmy Carter’s negatives, turned out to be positives.

Plouffe noted that among people who voted in the 2004 George W. Bush- John Kerry election, Obama beat McCain by only a 50 percent to 49 percent margin. Depending on how the electoral votes would have played out, Obama could have narrowly won, narrowly lost or faced the same fate as Al Gore.

Instead, a huge turnout by African-Americans and younger voters propelled Obama to a landslide victory.

Obama did not run the campaign by conventional rules. He developed his own rules and made them work for him.

It’s tough to challenge conventional wisdom. Everyone wants to tell you what you are doing wrong.

Programs like the Strategic Coach teach entrepreneurs to develop written goals and to have ways to measure how people are progressing towards those goals.

Plouffe noted the discipline exhibited by the Obama campaign in sticking to their game plan. The early campaign was roundly criticized by “experts” who didn’t see the same vision that the Obama people saw.

I was impressed by how they were able to use matrices to measure every aspect of the campaign, like fundraising, organizing and coordinating, to track how successfully the campaign was meeting its plan.

It has been said that anything that can be measured, can be obtained. In Obama’s case, that included the Presidency of the United States.

Dan Sullivan built most of his coaching philosophy around something called the “entrepreneurial time system.” An entrepreneur’s time is the most precious resource of any business, and it needs to be treated as such.

I’ve seen way too many political candidates and business people try to be everywhere, doing everything, and who wind up being nowhere and getting nothing much done.

Until I read “The Audacity to Win,” I had no idea how much campaign focus was directed to proper use of Obama’s time. Time was also scheduled for the candidate to relax and spend time with his family. There was a lot of pressure to have Obama go to outside debates and rallies, but the plan called for him to stay focused on the Iowa primary and never to waver from his central message.

His highly favored primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, did not manage her time as well and had a litany of campaign messages. Obama against Clinton was like watching an energetic start-up go against a bureaucratic mega-corporation.

We all rooted for David over Goliath. Entrepreneurs are those who can look at Goliath and recognize that a giant can be taken down.

Just like Barack Obama took the presidency.

Don McNay, CLU, ChFC, MSFS, CSSC is the founder of McNay Settlement Group, a structured settlement consulting firm in Richmond, Ky. Write to Don at don@donmcnay.com.