During the 2008 campaign we all saw maybe the most polished speaker rise to the lead and then win the Presidential election. Obama, when reading a teleprompter, is slick, engaging, and draws people into his charisma. What bothered me most was that I had lived through a charismatic leader who lacked the depth of character to lead those who followed him. I could see it happening again, but on a much larger scale as I would watch Obama.
In the late 70s and early 80s I was part of a large multi-level marketing business that was growing like wild fire. The charismatic leader of the organization I was involved I will just use his first name, Bob. He was one of the best speakers I have ever heard, one of my favorites of all time. He had a nearly a magician's skill of holding an audience in the palm of his hand drawing whatever emotion he wanted from them. He could have you laughing, crying, or ready to charge Hell with a water pistol, and all without the use of a teleprompter. Obama isn't nearly in Bob's league as a speaker.
As a speaker myself who has spent years teaching sales, doing motivational talks, and some evangelizing, there are skills and speaker tools that are used to move an audience, to engage them, to get them to buy in and to emotionalize your message. I was interested in watching Obama use them all, it showed me that he had been trained in how to speak in the style that motivational speakers have used for decades, if not longer. He is one of the first politicians I have seen who has used them, at least as effectively. Anyone not trained in speaking wouldn't realize that they were being manipulated into their response to his talks. There is nothing wrong with using these techniques unless the intention of the speaker is wrong.
When I was a very young man, I heard Zig Ziglar explain the difference between motivation and manipulation. The techniques uses might be the same, the difference is the purpose the user of these techniques uses them. If they are doing it to try to cause someone to do something for that other person's best interest, then it is motivation. If they are however talking someone into doing something for the one using the techniques best interest, it is manipulation. There is nothing wrong with it being win win, but it has to be first and foremost in the best interest of the person being motivated. As Zig says; "You can get everything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want."
Watching Bob rise to the top of the organization was like watching a meteor race across the sky, it was truly inspiring. In just six years he went from nothing to one of the largest organizations in America. His personal lifestyle mirrored his rise, with mansions in Tulsa, California, and Atlanta, private jet, and hiring the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Abbey Road Studio to produce an album with his wife singing. However, as an insider in his organization I was able to see the beginnings of cracks in the armor.
Once while I was on a set of headphones helping run one of the big seminar conventions, I was listening in while Bob was informing the lighting crew to back light him with a blue light. He wanted the blue light to reflect off his white tuxedo to create an illusion of an aura around him on stage. Bells started going off in my head on that one. Another time I was working in a function and was able to notice a woman in my own organization standing near Bob trying to get his attention as he held court with admirers, something about this caught my attention. At one point she reached out and took his hand and held it in her two. What really surprised me was his lack of reaction, he never turned to look at her or acknowledge her in any way. I thought "why not just turn, pat her on the hand and smile?" She would have been ecstatic, granted she was far too much into hero worship, but I thought as a person she deserved to at least be acknowledged.
Eventually, Bob's ego was too large to be constrained in a larger organization. He decided that he was going to pull out of the company and start his own that was going to be just like the parent but better since he would own it. Unfortunately, while brilliant at motivating people, he knew nothing about running a manufacturing company, and didn't have the personality to deal with those details either. It was a total failure, this entire ordeal destroyed hundreds of businesses like mine. My full time income from the business that had us living in a 4,000 square foot home on a 10 acre horse farm, driving Cadillacs, and traveling to some resort monthly, dropped to just 300.00/month in just 45 days. This left people all over the country scrambling to try to salvage businesses built with blood, sweat, and tears.
Years later Bob decided to write a book about his rise and fall. He contacted me about it, I had no interest in reading it, I lived it. However, later that winter I was on a ski trip with a some friends who had bought the book and had it with them. With it laying on the coffee table of the condo was too much not to peek. I read the first and last chapters, it read like a three hundred page apology to those who had mentored him that he had turned his back on. He mentioned the pain of watching his furniture, home, cars, and more be repossessed, but no mention of the pain he caused to thousands who had followed him. Remorse over his embarrassment at failure, but no remorse for the consequences to others.
One day while driving with Rick Setzer, one of the great leaders in the business, and in life, I was talking about Bob who was mentored by Rick until Bob thought he was smarter than anyone else. I was talking about how I thought it was such a waste for someone of Bob's obvious talents to have wasted them so. Rick's words have always stayed with me. He talked about how much he liked Bob, but how obvious it was that just having the ability to be a great speaker, to be a great motivator, or manipulator isn't the same as being a great leader. That unless you have true character all that talent is never going to make a leader worth following.
As Dexter Yager, one of the greatest leaders of leaders ever told me, "When making a decision about your organization, always make it that most benefits your people over yourself. If you take care of your people, your people will take care of you." As Dexter always said, "I eat a lot of crow, it pays very well." In other words in Dexter's world no matter what goes wrong it is his fault, what goes right is always to his people's credit.
What Dexter and Rick taught me was the difference between a servant leader and a leader looking for servants. When you look at Obama what do you see?
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