“Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.”

~ Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.

Last week's historic election of Senator Barack Obama as our nation's 44th Chief Executive struck me as a case study in the open source application of asymmetric interpretation that is the cornerstone characteristic of Aurora's Intelligence 2.0 concept.

This idea came up while I was discussing a workshop outline I'm doing in China in March with my good frlend and SCIP colleague Dr. Martha Matteo immediately after the results of the election were in. The Obama example of how his Presidential campaign made use of information everyone else had but interpreted differently made for a perfect opening example of how businesses must do the same to compete in the Intelligence 2.0 world.

When then-Senator Barack Obama was considering running for the highest office in the land and - however arguable it seems sometimes these days - the most powerful seat of authority in the world, he had no idea what would be required of him to succeed. He even asked if he could get weekends off (not if he wanted to win, they told him).

Martha pointed me to an article in the New York Times that described the inflection point when all the pieces fell into place:

It was the third week of September, and Senator John McCain was speaking to a nearly empty convention center in Jacksonville, Fla. Lehman Brothers had collapsed that day, a harrowing indicator of the coming financial crisis and a reminder that the presidential campaign was turning into a referendum on which candidate could best address the nation’s economic challenges.

On stage, Mr. McCain, of Arizona, was trying to show concern for the prospect of hardship but also optimism about the country’s resilience.

“The fundamentals of the economy are strong,” he said.

A thousand miles away, at Senator Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago, the aides who monitored Mr. McCain’s every utterance knew immediately that they had just heard a potential turning point in a race that seemed to be tightening. They rushed out to tell Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s communications director, what Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate, had just said, knowing that his words could be used to portray him as out of touch.

“Shut up!” Mr. Pfeiffer said incredulously. “He said what?” Mr. Obama, who had just arrived at a rally in Colorado, hastily inserted the comments into his speech. And by nightfall, the Obama campaign had produced an advertisement that included video of Mr. McCain making the statement that would shadow him for the rest of the campaign.
At the McCain campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., at almost the same moment that morning, Mr. McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, looked stricken when his war room alerted him to the comment. Within 30 minutes, he was headed for a flight to Florida to join Mr. McCain as they began a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful effort to recover.

Mr. McCain’s inartful phrase about the economy that day, and the responses of the two campaigns, fundamentally altered the dynamic of the race. But the episode also highlighted a deeper difference: the McCain campaign team often seemed to make missteps and lurch from moment to moment in search of a consistent strategy and message, while the disciplined and nimble Obama team marched through a presidential contest of historic intensity learning to exploit opponents’ weaknesses and making remarkably few stumbles.

We all know by now that the McCain campaign was getting daffier by the day, but how did Obama actually win the race? Obama's calm and measured response to the financial crisis helped, of course, but McCain's staffers realized they had a problem when they were moving to the general election campaign and in a strategy session five top advisers couldn't come to agreement on why McCain should be president. "Without an overriding rationale, our campaign necessarily turned tactical rather than strategic," one adviser said. "We focused more on why Obama should not be president, but much less on why McCain should be."

Likewise, Obama was uniquely prepared for the general election after the Darwinian primaries and, even as the Democratic establishment was up in arms about McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, the campaign saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Palin nullified McCain's primary argument that experience matters, and one of Obama's top advisers knew the Alaska governor after having run a campaign against Palin two years earlier - she was convinced Palin wouldn't pass the electability test.

Now that Obama has been elected, it's up to a leader with almost no executive experience to tackle some of the most intractable challenges a new president has encountered since Franklin Roosevelt. And President Obama and his administration will have more opportunity than ever to deploy its considerable intelligence capabilities in the interest of the U.S. and her allies.

Operationally however, if Obama runs his administration anything like he runs his campaign, then we should be prepared for a lot of surprises. He's already made it cool to be an American again.