Edward Saatchi, a young Transcendental Meditation practitioner from the UK, is hitting it big with a program launched to manage President Obama’s 2012 campaign.
- The team who created NationalFiel
The success of the program, NationalField, is largely down to its flexibility. Though credited by many experts as ‘the key asset responsible for Barack Obama’s re-election victory,’ it is truly a social network suitable to run any big and complicated business operation.
Co-founder and CEO Saatchi says the success of NationalField is an indication that meaningful tech startups can be spun out of political campaigns. “Here what you’re seeing is traction to the idea that campaigns are tech incubators,” he says. 
A Facebook for the corporate world
With his characteristic humour, the Oxford and Sorbonne graduate Saatchi describes the problem he and his team aimed to resolve: „By the time workers [in an enterprise] have finished their internal meetings and re-done work that their colleagues have already finished, they’ve still got less than ten minutes before the next internal email distracts them.”
In designing the NationalField, the first priority was therefore that it could replace spreadsheets and e-mail. The second was that it would be easy to use, the third was that it had to be real-time – which took a lot of technological work – and the last was it had to be social.
By tapping the reporting system based on live news feeds, managers and organizers are able to deeply drill down on the data coming back from the field. The tool lets everyone share their work – not just the typical structured data, but qualitative information as well.
This allows teams to increase collaboration, open access to information, and eliminate time consuming internal meetings which cost the economy billions of euros a year.
Watch a video:
A look back at 4 years of NationalField and a look forward at the future of NationalField
