The successories president: the posterized secret of Obama's success?

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Barack Obama - Column

ON THAT HISTORIC evening in November, as Barack Obama definitively made passe the notion that we cannot, the president-elect's acceptance speech signified a triumph not just for his campaign but for motivational wall decor. Like a Successories catalog made flesh, Obama invoked burning beacons, long roads, steep climbs, and new dawns. He was lofty, he was declamatory, he was as aesthetically challenging as a majestic golf course on a crisp autumn morning. And yet his well-worn rhetoric managed to move multitudes. Could it be that all those corny corporate psalms to Character and Service, the ones hanging in regional sales offices and telemarketing call centers across the nation, have touched us more deeply than we realized?

Like Ryan Seacrest, Successories posters appear to be a permanent, ubiquitous fixture of modern life. And like Ryan Seacrest, they don't get a lot of respect. The wall-decorations first appeared in 1988, the brainchild of Chicago-area entrepreneur Mac Anderson. Their most immediate predecessor was an extremely adorable form of self-propaganda that grew popular in the 1970s: the kitten-in-jeopardy poster. It featured a tiny feline clinging to a tree branch--or sometimes a rope--and the inspirational message, "Hang in there!" In time, other photogenic species and uplifting messages were incorporated into the genre, providing an increasing supply of motivational energy to melancholy teens, jilted lovers, kindergarten teachers, orthodontists, and maybe even the occasional bank manager.

For many workplaces, however, such imagery was too cutesy, too trivial. That's where Mac Anderson stepped in. His lithographs gave inspirational wall art a professional, corporate veneer. They were framed. Their stately, elegiac images of nature were beautiful--but also suitably masculine and impersonal. They featured dramatic black borders and classy fonts. Their meditations on Attitude and Teamwork, sometimes running more than 30 words long, were positively weighty compared to the three-word jokes accompanying imperiled animals.

Amid the personal computer revolution and its relentless calls for increased productivity, Anderson's wares represented an ingenious technological breakthrough. Successories were office decor that multi-tasked! They spruced up the workplace as much as a potted bamboo palm but with substantially more instruction. Such utility made them an easy choice for office managers looking for something safe and commendable to put...