Obama's Nobel Prize in Charisma - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org

Description

Obama's Nobel Prize in Charisma

4:30 PM Friday December 11, 2009
by Morten Hansen

Tags:Barack Obama, Leadership

We've just witnessed a great spectacle in the persuasive power of charismatic leadership. During his stay in Oslo, Norway, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama showed us the tremendous impact of charisma. Whether you believe that he deserved the prize or not, we learned a lot more about why he received the prize. Through his interactions with the five members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee and especially its head, Mr. Thorbjørn Jagland, we could see how the committee has been infatuated by the charisma of President Obama.

The power of charismatic leadership in politics and business has been aptly analyzed by a number of scholars. For example, Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana has detailed how company directors can be smitten by charismatic candidates when selecting CEOs. Charismatic leadership can be very useful, of course, by inspiring people to follow a particular course of action. Soaring oratory, clear visions, and a rockstar persona all help to explain the persuasive power of charismatic leaders, such as President Obama.

But we also saw in Oslo how the receivers of those persuasive powers were besotted by the message and the messenger. As a Norwegian witnessing the show from San Francisco, I followed the local online coverage and media interviews with Mr. Jagland. For him, this was stepping out of the shadow of a quiet ex-premier's life and onto the world stage. Norwegian newspapers were full of articles about how Obama dazzled his hosts. Jagland himself was so full of glowing words — "extremely nice, intelligent, funny, a president of grand proportions" — that one wonders what happened to the typical ...

Original URL

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/12/obamas_nobel_prize.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HarvardBusiness.org%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/12/obamas_nobel_prize.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HarvardBusiness.org%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#