(2017-03-08) White House Echoes Tech Move Fast And Break Things

White House Echoes Tech: ‘Move Fast and Break Things’

President Barack Obama may have embraced technology... But he was ultimately a traditional campaigner and manager

Mr. Donald Trump’s staff had remained unusually small throughout the grueling primaries — a compactness, his advisers believed, that had given them a nimble edge.

The Trump campaign, he said, intended to remain sparse and decentralized

As Mr. Trump’s campaign gained steam, for instance, top officials began a dedicated effort to study the tactics of successful digital advocacy groups, particularly the left-leaning Moveon.org, as well as #BlackLivesMatter, to reverse engineer methods for rapidly mobilizing voters.

In contrast to the methodical Obama White House and the Clinton campaign, where tweets often needed approval from at least three officials before they were posted, members of the Trump team could dream up ads or email blasts almost without oversight

Why is he stumbling now? Why has the Silicon Valley mentality failed to thrive in Washington?

It might be that Mr. Trump simply needs to evolve to the next level of tech industry thinking. And, in fact, there is a ready playbook for how start-ups transition into mature firms