Here’s a fun, maybe even slightly profound factoid:
Mark Carney, last week’s “who’da thunk” winner in the post-Trudeau Canadian face-off for prime minister, had exactly 5 more ticks on the campaign calendar than Harris had in her post-Biden presidential campaign.
112 days to 107.
Sort of puts paid to the chattering class’s pet claim that Kamala’s biggest lead weight was a lack of time.
Of course, there are major differences between national contests above and below the 49th parallel in scale, scope, and structure.
But there’s also this apples-that-really-do-apply point of comp:
She started out with a huge upside in everything from momentum to the money race to polling that kicked off close to a “within the margin” statistical tie.
By contrast, Carney’s polling began so far underwater, you needed a submarine to find the numbers.
Pro take: while she had the more complex race to run, he had the higher mountain to climb.
So maybe we ask why one sank like a cliché and the other was able to float his already-written-off boat?
He found clarity. She did not.
Which, put more prosaically, really comes down to knowing what’s important and then acting on it.
Seeing the need.
Being relentless in the search.
And then following through with the often massively unappreciated part of the deal: recognizing what you have once you’ve found it.
To borrow former P&G CEO A.G. Lafley’s observation about strategy, “It’s not complex, but it is hard.”
Hard, because it involves making decisions, some of which might not be reversible, and then having the focus, discipline, and guts to stay the course.
For Team Harris, “hard” would have involved avoiding all the distractive underbrush that always populates the Democratic landscape while risking the ire of both the guy who made her his VP and a whole lot of the people who fund campaigns.
For Team Carney, hard wasn’t finding the organizing idea — it was gift-horsed on a White House silver platter — so much as having the chops to see what was on offer, give it unmissable creative wings and then making sure conviction didn’t melt away like wax in the white-hot glare of the big league spotlight.
Like I say, not easy. For either candidate.
At its zenith, Volvo was so famously determined to stay focused on the brilliant beacon of safety, that they introduced a new high-performance car, saying something on the order of: “goes from zero to a zillion MPH in the blink of an eye. Why? To get you out of trouble, faster.”
That’s clarity in action.
It starts with having people on your team who understand not just the why of it, but the how.