Business Lesson of Election '08: It's the Vision, Not the Economy.

Whatever your personal political preferences, the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States reaffirms the hope inherent in the American Dream and provides every corporate executive with a new set of guiding principles for managing in 2009 and beyond. We should not get swept up in press reports that the Obama and Democratic victories were the result of the economic downturn. Without an effective Obama campaign focus on vision and hope for the future, accompanied by a brilliant use of new media to connect emotionally with voters, the election would have been far closer and McCain probably would have won.

While President-elect Obama must focus on solving our economic problems, he cannot lose sight that his greatest mission will be to define a vision for America's future and assure the hope he has instilled remains alive. Corporations also cannot afford to remain focused on Wall Street. A continuation of the current emphasis on Investor Relations completely misses the point of this election. Corporations cannot afford to miss the greatest opportunity they have to extract themselves from their current morass by adhering to the principles apparent in the Obama campaign. This election was about hope and vision for the future. It was about acknowledging the challenges ahead but refusing to remain locked in outdated patterns and relationships.

For too long, corporate policies and business models have been driven by lawyers, accountants and Wall Street's quarterly performance demands. In an industry with compressing traditional revenue models and the need to make visionary investments with limited short-term payout, the next two years should not be about driving stock prices up. They should be about emerging from the current economic downturn with intact business models that drive long-term growth.

No matter what media companies achieve in the next few months, short of radical cost-cutting that eats into the corporate bone, they will not be rewarded with increased shareholder value. Media companies are paying the price for years of neglecting the need to build new business models for the future… models that transcend traditional supply-demand buy-sell business constructs. For more than two decades I have been shouting as loud as I could in daily commentaries, books and speeches that the future would require completely new business models. I have urged companies to refocus their efforts away from transactional business models dependent on media buyers and fragmenting advertising budgets.

I have argued against the negative sell -- TV network against network; magazine against magazine; broadcast against cable; radio against newspaper. If this week's election has taught us anything it should be that traditional ways of doing anything simply are not applicable in the new environment of the 21st Century. I have offered solutions; focused on new economic models; explained the importance of media brand-building; created new models for asset development; shared detailed vision for targeting sales promotion, event and database budgets. I have urged companies to reinvent their client relationships with a focus on investing rather than buying and selling. I have developed new research strategies developed around the idea that Emotional Connections will be rewarded while mass reach will be commoditized. I urged executives to re-envision their companies as players in The Relationship Age rather than the mass media Industrial Age economy.

For many companies, it's now too late to learn, just as it was too late for the Republican Party and the McCain advisors who so egregiously misread the national and global psyche. In my 1998 book Reconnecting with Customers, I wrote:

"I believe the most important objectives for businesses today are to manage their changing environment by having a clear vision for the future and by building stronger relationships with their customers.'

The Obama campaign was brilliant in its vision and message of hope, and in its embrace of new media to connect with voters, building stronger emotional relationships. While business executives may think they have built stronger relationships with their customers and with their audiences, they have not. They remain locked into outdated paradigms. As I wrote in 1998:

"Change is volcanic. Volcanoes lull those nearby into a false sense of security. Their constant rumblings and small, uneventful eruptions convince those living nearby that they can manage and survive. But there is no security. When the top blows and the lava flows, everything it touches is either destroyed or changed forever."

The Presidential Election of 2008 has been a volcanic event. Our nation and world have been changed forever. If you do not believe your business is about to be destroyed or changed forever by the events of the next two years, you are dangerously mistaken. You can play by the established rules or take advantage of the opportunities this economic downturn is creating and adapt quickly to the future. The solutions are not, however, apparent in economic models, on Wall Street, on Madison Avenue or in Silicon Valley. Your future depends on your vision and your ability to define it, share it, communicate it and offer hope to those who you can motivate to join you on your mission.

Jack Myers Media Futurist: For more than two decades, Jack Myers has been the media industry's leading analyst, researcher and advisor on relationships among marketers, agencies and media sellers, providing business development services and custom insights on relationship best practices to more than 200 marketers, agencies, media companies and industry service providers. Jack can be reached at [e-mail].

To communicate with or to be contacted by the executives and/or companies mentioned in this column, link to the JackMyers Connection Hotline.

This post originally appeared at JackMyers.com.

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Comments

[IntrepidReader]

I sure hope the CEO of my company immediately sets out on a decisive plan of hope, making sure that we implement hope in every department, and spares no expense to achieve hope at every level. This will help us design and implement vision, though we will need lots of task forces and studies to consider vision and how to make it interact with hope. I absolutely remain confident that with vision and hope, we can't possible fail. If necessary, my company should call in consultants to help us learn to acquire hope through a series of seminars and self-empowering weekend retreats. We will move proudly ahead, knowing that we have more hope than our competitors and that our vision is up to date and very inspiring to hear about in an annual report.

[joebaggadonuts]

OMFG, Jack. This is so timely. Thank you so much. I see antithesis of your position, EVERYWHERE. Even here, DuganS1 has bought into it.

The pie has to be expanded. The zero sum game has to be surmounted and supplanted with better information. Working together for mutual benefit and holding cheaters accountable for pressing unfair advantages against other human beings is the only way to make this work. The idea that passing down advantages through generations of anointed heirs is better for the world than supporting meritocracies is the idea who's time has passed. Americans have awoken to their shared plight but only because of the threat of the loss of all social cohesion, financial credit and systemic societal value.

To DuganS1, he is not saying that it will affect corporate conduct, just that if they are smart, they will learn something from it. Here it is distilled for you: A positive growth vision of the future of your company that your customers and employees share is essential to survival. Trying to compete without it is a losing proposition.

[DuganS1]

I don't understand how the author thinks this Presidential election will affect how corporations in general will conduct their business. Businesses now have to focus on survival and that means cutting costs and preserving cash. Businesses in excellent fiscal condition have an opportunity to strengthen their businesses by gobbling up other cheaply priced companies and can enhance share-holder value by buying back their own cheaply priced shares. I don't know what abstract ideas or principles that companies, according to the article, supposedly must "adhere to "extract themselves form their current morass." That just sounds like meaningless rhetoric, which we should get passed now that the campaign is over. Besides, outside the auto industry and a dozen or so financial institutions, corporate balance sheets haven't been this strong in many decades.

[iambusto]

Companies cant relay on "empty rhetoric" of political campaigns. this is the real world. Consumers are tougher to crack than voters :)

Politicians know how to get elected. Executives are supposed to know how to increase shareholder value (or supposed to!!)

[Sundialsvc4]

When a corporation "cuts costs and preserves cash," that is just a euphemism for layoffs. And unemployed people don't buy things.

Sure, you can "preserve cash" by tying-up your corporate ship in safe-harbor. "But that's not what ships are built for."

How about this: "Mister Corporation, you will pay NO corporate income taxes during the next four years for any activity that you can show used only domestic suppliers and sold only to domestic customers." You'd be using government authority to jump-start the nation's LOCAL circulatory system, emphasizing suppliers, supplies and consumers that would operate in, and profit in, the geographic boundaries of this country. When that economic activity resumes, the currency that denominates those transactions will, by definition, be valuable again. In time, it would once again be "as good as gold."

[joebaggadonuts]

first off, activities which cost money that the corporation takes are deducted from profits, so they are not taxed events anyway. Secondly, a clear bias toward domestic activity may cause trouble with our trading partners, although China seems to get away with it all the time. If the bias were constructed to favor all partners but those who have the same regulations as are in this bias, that should insulate this kind of regulatory activity from attack.