Charisma in Action

(Shared with Cunningham Collective)

We knew that Zachary Bookman, the CEO of OpenGov—the leader in government performance management technology—was a Cult of Personality Missionary almost immediately. But it wasn’t until a follow-up encounter that it really hit home. Our meeting with Michael Schanker, then OpenGov’s head of marketing, was under way when Schanker glanced up and announced, “Yep, Zac is in the building.”

There wasn’t anyone who hadn’t met Zac before, but we all turned to look. He blew into the room with a flurry of greetings, and with his arrival, the energy in the room shifted from post-lunch relaxed to full-on “Zac Attack.”

And there, in a nutshell: A Cult of Personality Missionary.

Before he co-launched OpenGov in 2012, Zach and his future colleagues had offered to analyze a Silicon Valley city’s budget data for patterns and trends, information that they could then share with others online. The project hit a wall, however, when it became apparent that no one on the government end knew how to produce clean data, which was buried within a decades-old software system.

The problem was endemic to governments of all sizes, and the team realized what they were facing was nothing more than a technology problem, albeit a really big one. “We thought, ‘We can solve this problem,’” said Zac. Even more, they realized, “We have to solve it” (a classic Missionary statement).

Thus was born the vision of a suite of solutions that maps to the life cycle of government management, including how governments plan, operate, and communicate internally and with elected bodies and citizens. Even so, while many administrators have sought out the OpenGov platform, others are either unaware of its potential or are so deeply entrenched in the status quo that they are afraid of change. How, then, to bring a vision of better bureaucracy to a market that isn’t always open to new technologies?

THE AHA!

Zac already was acting as a Cult of Personality leader, even if before the positioning exercise no one was able to put a label on exactly what it was he brought to the table. Although he was doing it subconsciously, he was using his Cult of Personality as a tool to inspire and drive his employees.

The trick was to find a way to use that Cult of Personality tool externally to build the company and beyond that to build a movement for change (i.e., more open, effective, and accountable government) on a massive scale. Starting, of course, with selling the executive team on the idea of using Zac’s Cult of Personality as a positioning tool, a means of launching the message of better government through the OpenGov platform.

It turned out to be fairly easy once the team realized the company was a Missionary whose goal was to deliver revolutionary change in the form of better government. Persuading Zac to embrace and align with the designation took longer because of the baggage that can surround the term. Zac came to see, however, that acting as their best selves, Cult of Personality Missionary leaders lead by making heroes out of customers and serving as champions for their organizations. He came to understand the value of using his Cult of Personality to realize a vision of government that runs more smoothly, more transparently, more openly, and with every bit of data exactly where you need it when you need it.

THE RESULTS

OpenGov’s next step in bringing that vision to life grew out of our understanding that the company should promote its Zac-led movement by building an ecosystem (conferences, an online community, training sessions, etc.) around its platform the way Salesforce’s Marc Benioff has done with his company’s annual Dreamforce.

Zac has settled into and even embraced the idea of acting as a Cult of Personality Missionary leader of a movement. Referring to the methodology we used to get him there, he noted that the positioning exercise offered more than branding alone ever could have done: “This was not marketing communications positioning as a thought exercise. It was how do we build a company? How do we disrupt an industry? And how do we create market leadership and dominance?”