Many years ago, I had lunch with a man who was the head of a national sales force selling new car warranties.  (I had known him back in my college days).  When we returned to his office after lunch, there was a piece of paper on his chair.  It had the national sales tallies from the day before.  Yes, “national” – from the entire country.  He got that report every day around noon.  He totally ignored me, picked up the paper, poured it over, then got back to our visit.  He was “obsessed” with that piece of paper.  I’ve never forgotten it.

I thought of this as I read these opening paragraphs from Slate.com’s How To Run a Killer Campaign:  The president’s campaign manager explains how the Obama campaign did it by John Dickerson, about the successful Obama campaign:

Every morning when Barack Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina turned on his computer, he saw a snapshot of the state of the race. Campaign software engineers had built him a dashboard that showed how many doors volunteers had knocked on the night before, how many phone calls they had made, how much money had been raised, and what was moving on Twitter and other social networks. It also included a feed of traditional news feeds. “That allowed me to get a good sense in the morning of what was going on in our world.” Messina says it was about 10 days before Election Day when he looked at those numbers and the early-vote tallies that he began to smile. “That’s when I started to feel pretty good. I looked at the numbers and we were crushing it out there.”
Mitt Romney referred to himself as a “numbers guy,” but in the end, the numbers betrayed him. Messina used the same label to describe himself, and in the end, he earned it. His obsession with measuring and collecting data paid off, but not because he abandoned the human aspect of politics—just the opposite. Messina’s obsession with numbers was built on repeated bets about human nature.
I talked to Messina as he drove west for some post-election relaxation about what lessons he took away from managing the 2012 enterprise, about team building, managing the information firehouse, knowing when to take risks, when to adapt, and when to just keep moving. Throughout, Messina’s core message was that he strove to combine the human and the numerical.

There are enough business lessons in this article to set any agenda for quite a while.  Here are the obvious ones:

#1 – Pay very close attention to “where things stand,” every day!

#2 – Thus, learn to be a numbers person.  And, as a numbers person, be sure you know which numbers to pay attention to.  In Nate Silver’s terms, learn to separate “the signal from the noise.”

#3 – But, the numbers are not the thing – the “human” is the thing.  “Learn to combine the human and the numerical.”

Consider this:  the Obama people started out with iPads at the doors of neighbors, showing videos.  It was too impersonal.  So, “we trained our people to have longer conversations. We iterated.”

One more paragraph (this is a really good article – read it!):

“When you’re in a big world of a $1 billion campaign, you are in many ways just someone who brings a team together and empowers them,” he says. This sounds fuzzy, and so does the goopy word “empowerment,” but that’s where the data comes in. Data means accountability. “The trick is allowing everyone to feel like they have a piece in building it, but it can’t be pie in the sky. You have to have firm metrics that are measurable every day. There’s a fine line between allowing people to dream up their campaign and having them be accountable.”  So…

#4 – “Bring a team together “ and set them free to do their thing (based on the numbers, to keep the team accountable).  The article describes how each neighborhood Obama campaign office looked different – it reflected that neighborhood.  Whereas the Romney neighborhood offices looked pretty much the same.  Obama’s offices looked like they fit into the specific neighborhood.  Romeny’s offices looked more like corporate implants.

#5 – Keep moving.  Keep changing.  Make decisions.  From the article:  “In campaigns you have to keep moving. You have to make decisions.”

Consider this, from Campaign Director Jim Messina directly:  “I studied every campaign for the last 60 years, and the ones that tried to run a re-elect like the first one ended up losing.”

Now, if the Obama team had lost, all of this would now be looked at as “wrong.”  But they won, didn’t they?  Time for us all to learn some lessons from these very smart folks.