Who are the strongest players in this scene? Who’s leading and who’s following?
The answer is given by Maureen Dowd in the closing paragraph of her column in today’s NY Times:
”Hillary and President Obama look bigger when they share the stage with other talented players,” writes Dowd.
That Bill Clinton and Kim Jong-Il are the stars of this scene is a result of strong supporting moves by players who were not onstage for the photo op. (more…)
I attend a session on the Obama presidential campaign’s use of social media. A guy from Howard Dean’s online team and a female Republican digital strategist (just how oxymoronic can one person get?) also sit on the panel, but when they speak, the crowd gets restless, like Sasha Vujacic is handling the ball instead of passing it to Kobe. People want the Obama narrative.
I get in line to ask a question. The moderator, Michael Bassik, the Chief Digital Officer for Air America asks me to keep it short. I say it’s a yes-or-no question. After explaining what I do, and noting that Hyde Park, where the Obamas lived before the election, is the birthplace of modern improvisation, I ask the Obama people on the panel if, to their knowledge, anyone on the Obama team used ‘improvisation’ to describe their candidate’s methodology.
“No,” says Bassik.
“Thank you,” I say.
The instant the panel is over, I make a beeline for Bassik, hand him my card and say “What Obama does is learnable.” This gets his attention. A week after the conference, Bassik and I are corresponding about how GameChangers can help evangelize and scale Obama’s style and a progressive political agenda.
(This is a version of a piece I wrote for the Huffington Post early in 2008. The context is even more appropriate today than it was then.)
Barack Obama is an improviser. His campaign, his platform, his history, draws on a spirit kindled in the same Chicago South Side neighborhoods where modern improv was born in the 1930s.
How does Barack Obama improvise?
He says “Yes and…” Like any good improviser, President Obama understands that agreement enables a scene to progress, and new, shared realities to emerge from it. “I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all,” he writes in the preface to Dreams From My Father. As an improviser, Obama understands that erasing the lines that divide us–enabling “Your situation” and “My situation” to become “Our situation” is what makes any kind of progress possible. (more…)
Our November GameChanger of the Month selection was a slam dunk. Barack Obama is going to be America’s first baller president, and he’s going to be its first Improviser-in-Chief.
His and his team’s ability to improvise their way to an election victory against rivals who were, initially, much better funded, more networked and more familiar brand names proved beyond any doubt how skillful improvisation can change the game. Obama is the epitome of what it means to be a gamechanger. (more…)
I’m hearing it from all over these days, so it must be official–the word ‘gamechanger’ has broken into the popular idiom. Why, I remember back in the day when it was just Pontiac Motors, A. G. Lafley of P & G, a few sportscasters, and me. Six weeks ago, William Safire wrote about the etymology of ‘gamechanger’ in his NY Times column. Now it’s everywhere, especially in politics. I must have heard the words ‘game’ and ‘change’ used together a dozen times last night in relation to the presidential debate.
This morning, my friend David LaPlante (if you want to read something beautiful, see his most recent blog entry) sent me a link to a CNN story and headline:
Here’s my response:
Candidates and media use the word erroneously, as CNN does in this story, when they refer to an EVENT as a gamechanger. A gamechanger is PERSON with the ability to change the game. Like you : ) A gamechanger can also be a brand, as in the focused, networked behaviors of a group of people who share business objectives. (more…)
I can’t possibly grasp the nuances of the current crisis and the bailout bill. There is so much data, so many opinions, so many experts weighing in. The problem of credit derivatives unleashed into the global markets by mad mathematicians is so complex it will take legions of sane mathematicians years to unravel and set right.
So I look at it like this:
The crisis is an Elephant, and everyone wrestling with it–you, me, Hank Paulson and Barney Frank–is a Blind Man of Hindustan. How we describe it depends on which part of it we’re feeling. And no matter how we describe it, it doesn’t help us figure out what to do with the Elephant. It’s just a very large animal standing there while blind people disagree about it.
So six blind men of Hindustan
disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
exceeding stiff and strong;
Though each was partly in the right,
they all were in the wrong! – John Godfrey Saxe
One of the benefits of improvisation in business is that it provides a lens, and a common language, through which we can see and learn from performance. This triangulates the problem and gives us common ground for solving it. Barney Frank sees the Wall Street problem from a Massachusetts legislator’s perspective. I see it from a small businessperson’s perspective. As a person the cameras are pointed at, Barney is probably feeling the tusk, so he describes the Elephant as being ‘like a spear.’ From my perspective, the Elephant ‘feels very like a wall’ between me and capital. If all we’re going to do is debate our differences, we’re never going to get anywhere.
But if Barney and I both speak improvisation…aha. We can find agreement in that language. Our disagreement about what the Elephant looks like is no longer important because now our dialogue can be about what to do with the Elephant!
Here’s an analysis of the ‘Bailout Scene’ seen through the lens of improvisation: (more…)
