An inter­view with Barack Obama’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign man­ager, David Plouffe:

There are busi­ness analo­gies. One is, we’re a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a mat­ter of weeks. Our com­pany, if we were suc­cess­ful, would only last two years at the most. You have an end line. You don’t have quar­ter after quar­ter to suc­ceed. You either win or lose on Elec­tion Day. It is a very accel­er­ated envi­ron­ment. For us par­tic­u­larly, because we weren’t plan­ning to run for pres­i­dent, he got into this very uncon­ven­tion­ally. It’s like tak­ing off while you’re fix­ing the wings on a plane. You’re up on the high wire, but by the end we raised over three quar­ters of a bil­lion dol­lars, over $750 mil­lion dol­lars. We had over 5,000 employ­ees, we had mil­lions of active vol­un­teers. So it was a big orga­ni­za­tion. The most impor­tant thing for me as a man­ager was the senior staff. If you don’t have strong senior staff, you’re going to strug­gle, and I was blessed to have a strong senior staff. And we were an orga­ni­za­tion about account­abil­ity. Down to the entry-level staffer, we mea­sured their job per­for­mance based on metrics.