CEO Lessons From Barack Obama

I just finished reading Michael Lewis’ Vanity Fair profile of Barack Obama, and I am blown away. Everyone who knows me knows I’m more than a little fascinated by the POTUS and FLOTUS, mostly because they’re ordinary people holding the most powerful job in the US. A true example of the fact that anyone can make it. This profile takes my fascination a step further, Michael Lewis was allowed to be a “fly on the wall” of Obama’s life for 8 months, and he gives a fantastic account of it. You can read it all here. I came across a couple of titbits that I thought were great leadership / CEO lessons to borrow from the President Of The United States:

On habits you need to build to be a great leader…

“You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price.

They (decisions) don’t order themselves neatly for his consideration but come in waves, jumbled on top of each other. “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama said at one point. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” On top of all of this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically.

On the range of activities he has to take part in a day, all requiring different emotional responses from him. He sometimes more than 21 meetings about different things, e.g leaving a meeting about the Libya invasion, to attend a ceremonial cocktail or spend time with a terminally ill child whose wish was to meet the US president. How does he manage the emotional energy required for this?