Audacity to win

The Audacity to Win
The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

by David Plouffe Viking © 2009 400 pages

Focus
Leadership & Management Strategy Sales & Marketing Finance Human Resources IT, Production & Logistics Career Development Small Business Economics & Politics Industries Intercultural Management Concepts & Trends

Take-Aways
• In 2008, Barack Obama garneredseven million more votes in the popular election than any other presidential candidate in history. • Organizers built his campaign around grass-roots volunteers, who raised money, recruited more volunteers and created the Obama buzz via word-of-mouth. • From its inception, the campaign used the Internet to raise money and awareness. It interacted with supporters, posted videos and conducted socialmedia outreach. • Letting voters have direct access to Obama when possible boosted the campaign. • To prepare for the Iowa caucuses, the Obama campaign aggressively hired more people and set to work earlier than any other presidential campaign. • Obama disliked distilling complex answers into 30-second sound bits. • The Obama staff saw John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a vice presidentialcandidate as “a reckless stunt” and believed that McCain had become “impulsive.” • Obama won additional support from voters who saw the choice of Palin as insulting. • The campaign succeeded due to its electoral strategy and consistent message. • Governor Tim Kaine and Senators Joe Biden and Evan Bayh were on Obama’s final list of possible vice presidents.

Rating (10 is best)
Overall 9 Importance9 Innovation 8 Style 9

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Relevance
What You Will Learn In this Abstract, you will learn: 1) What happened on the inside of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, 2) How Internet technology and a disciplined grass-roots campaign transformed U.S. politics and 3) How Obama’s experts built a winning political organization. Recommendation President Barack Obama’s historic political campaign deserves to be studiedfor its innovative organization, volunteer effort, fundraising and use of technology. But it is also a compelling story about an unlikely candidate and the highly motivated expert team that pulled off one of the greatest game-changing upsets in U.S. political history. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe (rhymes with “bluff”) has written a diarylike firsthand account that delivers insights andperspectives previously known only to insiders. While he tells his story chronologically, the suspense builds as internal and external opponents battle and fall by the wayside. getAbstract recommends this engrossing David-and-Goliath story to leaders, political aficionados, technology and media buffs, and anyone interested in overcoming huge odds to become a winner.

Abstract
“The remarkableObama for President campaign, led by a once-ina-generation candidate, had the audacity to win – and not just to win, but to do so with guts, defying conventional wisdom time and again.”

The Audacity of Obama Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign could be the most unlikely winning effort in U.S. political history. Not only did Obama – a one-term U.S. senator with only four years in the...