The Leadership style of Barack Obama

The Leadership style of Barack Obama

Out of the box Leadership

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. His parents met while attending the University of Hawaii, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. His mother was from heartland-of-the-U.S. Kansas, and his father from Kenya. Barack's parents eventually divorced, and after his mother remarried, he lived in Indonesia for a time before returning to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. He later moved to New York, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983.

True to the values of empathy and service that his mother instilled in him, Barack put law school on hold after college and moved to Chicago, where he became a community organizer with a church-based group that was dedicated to improving living conditions in poor neighborhoods.

Before winning the US Presidential election, Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was already busy making history. Obama was the third African-American to be elected into the U.S. Senate of Illinois in 2005 and according to Encyclopedia Britannica Online in the article "United States Presidential Election of 2008," the first sitting U.S. senate to win the election to presidency since John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Barack Obama gained national recognition during the first U.S. senate race in which two of the leading candidates were African-Americans. He stood apart from his competition when he delivered his address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. His speech included a personal recount of his biography with the theme that all Americans were connected in ways that surpassed political, cultural, and geographical differences (Britannica).

The address at the convention was very powerful, and it pushed Obama's first book “Dreams from My Father,” a memoir published in 1995, onto best-sellers lists. In August 2006, Obama published a second book, “The Audacity of Hope.” The book contained Obama's vision for change for the United States, and it immediately became a best-seller.

In February 2007, Barack Obama announced his decision to seek the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2008 at the Old State Capitol in Springfield. Obama went up against Senator Hilary Clinton in a tough battle to win the necessary delegates in order to claim the Democratic nomination.

In the end, Obama's charismatic personality, strong composure, and campaign promise to bring about change to the current political system, was enough for Obama to win more than the required ...