Fortune Magazine's Adam Lashinsky, in awe of tech showman CEO Marc Benioff, takes the position that you get it or you don't when it comes to showmanship.  He's referring to Benioff's ability to work a room...even to trump his former boss and tech titan Larry Ellison.

I've worked with Benioff and Ellison, both, and I can confirm that what they do is innate.  In 1995, when at an IDC conference in Paris, Larry Ellison declared "The PC is a ridiculous device," he was instinctively working the room.  Bill Gates was next on that morning's agenda, and Larry wanted to put his arch rival on the defensive.  Only a few years later, when Benioff flew the Oracle coop, the new salesforce.com CEO preemptively prounounced software to be dead.  This, too, was pure brilliance and guile.  And it was instinct.  They each knew what they were doing -- and they still do as evidenced by Larry's homerun gamble in the courtroom and Benioff's continued mastery of the cloud's agenda.

But do Larry or Marc know how they do it?  Or Jobs or Chambers or Palin or Obama or Lady Gaga or Osama bin Laden for that matter?  Do they have terms for their moves?  Can they teach what they do?  No.  They are high masters of the discipline of influence strategy.  But they could never pass the test or teach the subject.  They play by ear what struggling musicians attempt to read.  They have no language or lexicon.  They have no units that define these things.  So certainly they have no way to classify or illustrate what they do.  They can predict an outcome of their "plays" but with no framework or basis but a honed showman's hunch.

At this juncture of industrial history, few will argue the power and value of working the room -- what we know at the Playmakers to be the fast-rising discipline of influence strategy and what we call colloquially playmaking.  As Ellison and Benioff demonstrate -- and as their many victims, like Hasso Plattner and Leo Apotheker, will ruefully admit -- influence strategy is the new currency for making and moving markets.  Yes, it's innate to a few, but that doesn't mean it can't be practiced by mortals for reasonable success and judged by pundits with some accuracy.

What plays do Ellison and Benioff run?  Preempt, Bait and Label for starters.  And bin Laden?  Same answer.

Post by Alan Kelly

Photo credit:  searchcloudcomputing.com, latimes.com, al-jazeera.com, businessinsider.com