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Sat Aug 21, 2010 at 11:15 AM CDT
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(For discussion. - promoted by Karl-Thomas Musselman)
Today's Wall Street Journal has an article entitled: "The End of Management". It is a very interesting article that posits that the management techniques developed in the 20th Century by people to run large corporations are being obsoleted in the 21st Century, just as Sloan, Durant, Ford, Drucker, et. al. obsoleted the 19th Century artisan model of management. The author, Alan Murray, says we still don't know what the new model will be, but there are intimations in the rapid change in communications and connectedness. He illustrates with the examples that it took 38 years for radio to reach an audience of 50 million, television 13 years, internet only four years, the ipod three years, and Facebook two years to do the same. |
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| This piqued the thought that perhaps the Ted Ankrum Campaign for TX-10 has become, out of necessity, the harbinger of the 21st Century campaign management model. We don't have much money, nor did we in the unsuccessful 2006 camapign. The 2006 campaign, under the auspices of John Lyon of Austin, established a Google Group and we thought of it as a "virtual office". It was a method of organizing effort without the necessity of coming together in a common place. We made a virtue of paying no rent and having no paid staff. When that campaign was over, many of the members of that group formed multi-county "True Blue Ten", a State PAC whose purpose was to help identify and promote a new candidate for TX-10.
Flash forward to 2010. The same problems with money are there and Kernan Hornberg of Austin set up a new internet presence which started as a virtual office, also. But, it evolved to more than that. It's actually a human equivalent of cloud computing in which members across the eight counties of TX-10 work independently towards a common goal with very little central direction. This has been made easier because many of the people are from the 2006 campaign and we have developed a common understanding of the core values of the campaign. As examples of how this works, two excellent campaign videos were done by Javier Bonafont completely on his own and without any central direction. Each county operates independently and suggests events the candidate should attend. Photos are uploaded by individuals. We have philosophical discussions and one of those with Harold Huff of Austin County resulted in arguments I used in my recent endorsement interview with the Austin-American Statesman. I post to Facebook, and Ken Bielicki, a media company executive in Houston, extracts information for twitter posts. The campaign is developing a hive mentality. Have we tapped the full power of social networking? No. But I do suggest that this is where campaign "management" is going. We saw it in President Obama's campaign, but I don't think we recognized it for what it was, or at least I didn't. There is a difference between "management" and "control". My campaign is being managed in the sense that I've chosen the direction, but I don't have centralized control of it. |
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| Is centralized campaign control going away? |
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