RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Not the brains, the instigator

Fast Company misses the point about the Dean campaign phenomenon by emphasizing the management of Joe Trippi rather than the collective efforts of tens of thousands of people that have produced the results the magazine celebrates as a triumph of management.

If Howard Dean Inc. is a dotcom, then Trippi, 47, is its COO. Growing up in Los Angeles, Trippi says he was a "hopeless early adopter" and technophile. He en-rolled at San Jose State University, planning to study aerospace engineering. Although politics intervened, Trippi has still managed to sample the Silicon Valley thing, consulting for a couple of tech companies and serving on the board of a startup.

So while he's frustrated when people focus on the "phoney baloney dotcom thing," he readily acknowledges the parallels. "Every presidential campaign is a startup," he says, "and every one becomes, essentially, one of the fastest- growing corporations in America." But, he says, those who think that this is simply the next Pets.com are missing the point: "We're actually trying to get people to participate in democracy again. And we're using the Internet to get the message out faster and earlier and asking supporters to help spread the word. If you want to call that a dotcom, go ahead. We simply call it a bunch of Americans." ...

The campaign's strategy is one that nimble companies have been using for years: give staffers on the ground the authority to make decisions tailored to their markets without having to check back constantly with the home office. But it's a radical, and some would say risky, way to organize a campaign, where control is usually fanatically guarded.

Staffers were allowed to make all sorts of decisions and that's good, but the real grassroots efforts evolved despite resource limitations that prevented even empowered staffers to make things happen. Instead, the staffers literally said, "We can't do this" as a campaign and passed responsibility to citizens, who went with their ideas on their own, often carefully isolated from the campaign. I doubt the majority of Dean supporters have the slightest idea who Joe Trippi is, as they went ahead and created tools and connections with their own energy. Trippi let go in a much bigger way than Fast Company suggests, and to his credit, but only because it worked. Without an active citizenry activated by the campaign there would be no article. So, I think this article, which talks about the Abercrombie & Fitch 20-somethings at headquarters is profoundly off the mark.

Sorry, Joe, but that's the truth. Don't listen to Fast Company. Never listen to your rave reviews and the campaign will continue to thrive. If you start believing this crap, you'll shoot the campaign in the foot.