Thursday, June 2, 2011

The Obama Chronicles

The last chapter of my soon-to-be published book, Reading the Room, applies its theory, Structural Dynamics, in an analysis of President Barack Obama’s behavioral profile. These chronicles will, from a Structural Dynamics (systems) point of view, comment on the dilemmas Obama faces as he seeks reelection and the decisions he makes in the period leading up to the election and beyond.

A June 2nd article in the New York Times, Employment Data May Be the Key to the President's Job, begins “No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2%”. Today, roughly 9% of Americans who want to work are unemployed. The chances of reducing this rate to the article’s alleged threshold are dim if not grim. A second article in the Times of this same day, A Way Through the Debt Mess , describes how Lyndon Johnson faced the problem of how to raise the debt ceiling while also raising taxes. Obama faces the same debt dilemma, which is linked to unemployment. Johnson’s tactics offer important lessons.

In systems terms, Johnson, a master politician and tactician, looked for pressure points, what we would call leverage points, to move a stuck system. When a system is stuck, Structural Dynamics says, it is sometimes necessary to perturb it. The idea is that when a stuck system is “blown up”, so to speak, and the dust settles, it will have changed. Such tactics do not come natural to Obama. Let us say that, with reelection at stake, he has no choice and must consider imitating Johnson’s famous ability to twist arms in order to get his way.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Two Testy Questions

I’m back doing this blog after a lapse of just over a year. What follows is a departure from the venue I’d established, as you will see. I’m doing a book which threatens to cross a couple of boundaries, and I’m seeking reactions. The book, Reading the Room, redefines what leadership is all about. In it, I raise some issues that are a challenge to the publisher and probably to some readers as well. In the first, I take the position that those I call behavioral consultants (those who deal with the behavioral rather than the strategic side of consulting) should, with proper training, be free to elicit from leaders what I call their Childhood Stories of Imperfect Love. Some would say that I’m crossing the boundary into the territory occupied by therapists. I take this position because (a) these stories are already in the room when the stakes are raised for leaders, and (b) that many behavioral consultants are already entering this territory behind closed doors but not advertising that they are doing so.

The second issue is just as tender, and could arouse objection. I am recommending that leaders be required to develop and articulate their own leadership model. It occurs to me that lawyers must pass the bar, surgeons go to medical school for an MD and more schooling for a specialty—why, then, should leaders not do something similar? Why not, to be a little facetious, require them to get a “PhD in Leading”? In any case, why should they not develop a model which gets tested in action, rather than simply setting them free after they complete a stint in business school, which may offer courses in leadership, but does not prepare leaders for what they do in the real world.

I would be interested in thoughts about these two issues.