Obama, Bartz And You
by Miki Saxon
What does Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz have in common with incoming President Barack Obama?
While they are superb choices as managers and as leaders,
- both are entering their respective stages at a time of crisis;
- both have multiple and diverse constituencies;
- both are the focus of extremely high, often conflicting, sometimes impossible expectations; and
- both are subject to substantial outside influences, circumstances and pressure.
Hopefully both will succeed, but the real lesson to be learned here is in the list of commonality and what they do.
Not because of the obvious difficulties, the scope of challenges or even enormous pressures, but because these four points are what every person in charge faces—from multinational CEOs through small biz owners and managers at every level to parents. In many ways the scope isn’t even all that different, relatively speaking.
It’s like cooking. You can take a recipe for two, multiply by X and feed an army.
Which makes this the opportunity of a lifetime.
Look at your world, professional and personal, and analyze it based on the four points above and sort accordingly. Then watch the actions of these two role models.
For instance, Obama spent substantial time before the election and all his time since talking with a wide variety of people and gathering a diverse amount of information from all quarters—including just plain people—in order to be as fully briefed as possible to the situations he’ll inherit on January 20th.
Bartz plans to gather diverse intelligence from all stakeholders and doesn’t seem interested in just kowtowing to those with power.
“But for the moment, she doesn’t even seem to care [about a Microsoft deal]. She told journalists to stop already with the speculation and advice, and explained that she would take her time listening to employees and customers before making any big decisions.”
Ask yourself, how often do you take on a situation by doing instead of listening, analyzing and thinking first?
Plan on watching these two, learning from what they do and applying that knowledge to your own situations—kind of long-distance mentoring.
Your comments—priceless
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