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.

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Follow the Shanghai Conference by China Institute of CI on Twitter

I'm in Shanghai China this week at the 4th Annual Competitive Intelligence China conference by the China Institute of Competitive Intelligence with my good friend, SCIP President Joe Goldberg from Motorola. Just as in Rome a couple of weeks ago, I will be Twittering the meeting live while I'm on the ground and you can subscribe to the Atom-feed in your feedreader to follow the action.

Zài jiàn,

Arik Johnson
Founder & CEO