From the Influencer-in-Chief, gestures matter

Posted on | November 20, 2009 | 1 Comment

Do you remember when you were a kid and there was always the clown that liked to play that game that ended with this annoying rhyme:

Made you look, you dirty crook,
You stole your mamma’s pocketbook.

Possibly you played different games than we did. The point being this: ever notice that it’s easier for some people to “made you look!” than others? Long before anybody was using the word, some folks were influencers and some are not.

The President of the United States is like that, too. It comes with the job.

I was roundly scolded a couple of weeks ago when I complained in a Policy Matters column that what President Obama had said in a speech, about how central small businesses are to his economic recovery strategy, was not supported by his actions so far.

But the proof is in the pudding.

Now that the President is paying attention to small businesses, everybody else is, too.

Had you heard about the grand gesture made by Goldman Sachs? According to that article in the Wall Street Journal, Goldman is making a $500 million investment in the nation’s small businesses.

The small-business program will make $250 million in charitable contributions, with $200 million aimed at investor education and $50 million for grants to support community-development financial institutions. The remaining $250 million will be invested in such institutions to help them provide financing to small businesses.

They’ve even tapped Warren Buffet and the Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter to co-chair the board overseeing the program.

Now, it is probable that Goldman has been planning this for quite some time. Between the financial markets crisis and the executive bonuses and the H1N1 flu vaccine, I have no doubt at all that their PR consultant advised them that some fence mending with the public was very much in order.

(Pause for musical interlude … )

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But the prism through which it will be seen by everybody will be the President’s recent statements about how much he is looking to the nation’s small businesses to generate all those new jobs he has been talking about since before he got elected.

In fact, I suspect that the reason he and his Administration is taking so much heat on the economy right now — besides the fact that they appear to be focused much more on passing health care reform than on repairing the economy right now — is because they are only now turning their attention to small businesses.

If small business had been a part of the Obama Administration’s strategy early on, this week’s Small Business Financing Forum would almost certainly have taken place four to six months ago.

(Parenthetically, I also think it is interesting that the President could spend so much time talking about small businesses in the context of health care reform without making a dent in anybody’s thinking but, as soon as he started talking about them in the context of rebuilding the economy, everybody is all ears.)

For the record, I’m not necessarily saying that President Obama is evil or anything like that just because he is only now getting around to small business. Frankly, he is surrounded by a pack of economic advisors who (rumor has it) are inclined to be very much large-oriented and very dismissive of small businesses.

They are now in a position to exchange theory for practice and, it would appear, are learning to sing a different tune.

But it does go to illustrate a point I made a long time ago.

The President of the United States can very easily make small businesses (and even microbusinesses) important to everybody else in the country, and he can do it without a single policy proposal and without spending a penny of taxpayer money.

All he has to do is pay attention to them.

Because, if the President of the United States starts paying attention to small businesses, I will guarantee you that everybody else will soon be finding them fascinating.

This week’s statement of the obvious: An irreplaceable part of leadership is … um … leadership.

Happy Friday, folks!

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