ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the early life of Barack Obama as a case study with implications for better understanding the influence of early multicultural experience on leadership and change management. Using a strengths-based positive psychology perspective, it explores Obama's development through the use of primary sources such as his books, existing scholarly analysis of his childhood and youth, including a version of this chapter published as an article, and information from various news media. The high school years in Hawai'i continued the preparation stage of creativity in Barack's life, providing more perspectives and encounters with diverse persons and institutions, and with various role models that offered contrasting viewpoints with what he had experienced in Indonesia. Within a few years he attended Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American editor of its famous Law Review, and then returned to Chicago where he joined the law faculty of the prestigious University of Chicago in 1991.
