Is There Any Evidence for "New Power?"

I do get it--why the just-released book New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms has been published to such favorable reviews, and why The End of Power by Moises Naim received much praise when it came out a few years ago. The latter book was even recommended by Mark Zuckerberg--although I can not help but point out the irony of someone who has cemented himself in power in his company by affording his shares supermajority voting rights praising a book that speaks to how being in charge isn't what it used to be. As the Edelman Trust Barometer for 2017 points out, trust in leaders has fallen precipitously and virtually universally. Edelman's measures have, for years, shown that trust in institutions and their leaders is in very short supply. No wonder people yearn for messages that imply that "people power" and democratization are on the ascendance, and old power--and old power figures and theories--are on their way out.

It would be nice to believe that new technologies and communication modalities have changed everything, and that as the Amazon description for New Power maintains, while once "power was something to be seized and jealously guarded...our ubiquitous connectivity makes possible a different kind of power...made by the many." That power is now or soon will be "open, participatory, and peer-driven."

I know well--and admire--Henry Timms. The organization he leads, the 92nd Street Y in New York and Timms originated "Giving Tuesday" which has raised tens and hundreds of millions of dollars for deserving charities. Moreover, the world he and many describe is certainly one I would want to live in. But in case you haven't been reading the news, we don't live in a world with power shared by the many--and certainly the many are not sharing in the economic well-being that is often foundational for power. Moreover, I have come to believe that "new power" nostrums and much of the similarly-idealistic writing about leadership actually hinders the prospects for building a different, and better, world.

David Brooks recently published a column entitled, "The Most Influential Man on Earth." That man was, of course, Vladimir Putin, and Brook's thoughts on why liberal democracies are under threat from authoritarian regimes are profoundly insightful. Putin is just one example of the pervasive rise of strongman leaders--people such as Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recept Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Xi Jingping in China, and many more. The example of China nicely illustrates how economies can modernize and be connected and seemingly embrace new technologies--and see those technologies, such as facial recognition and artificial intelligence--used in the service of surveillance and the institutionalization of power.

It's not just in the domain of politics where one can observe increasing centralization--not democratization--of power. Income inequality is on the rise. Economic concentration is increasing too, not just in the United States but around the world as mergers reduce competition in industries ranging from airlines to entertainment to telecommunications. Resources are increasingly concentrated in the best universities. The gap between CEO pay and that of average workers is enormous and getting larger. Power and wealth seems to be getting more concentrated, not less, in many domains.

In my teaching at Stanford and in Power: Why Some People Have It--and Others Don't, I try to give my students and readers information on why hierarchy is not only pervasive but not going away. People, when given a choice in situations where they have to accomplish a task, typically voluntarily choose to organize themselves in hierarchical arrangements. I also try to teach people the social psychology of power and influence and how they might use networking, create resources, build self-fulfilling perceptions of reality, employ flattery and asking for help, and other techniques to obtain more influence for themselves so they can get things done. In short, I try to provide people with a template for how to use some "old power" techniques to take on old power institutions that they want to change.

In the end, we can talk all we want about new power and the democratization of influence. But as the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School well understand as they seek to do something about the public health crisis of gun violence in schools and elsewhere, change will come not from Twitter or Facebook or other instantiations of new power and the social media echo chamber. Change will come from the hard work of voter registration, organizing campaigns that get better people into public office, legal suits that challenge gerrymandered political boundaries, and the face-to-face interactions that remain, as a former student and a current member of the Burlingame school board recently reminded me, key to enlisting political support and changing people's minds.

Simply put, building power and influence requires hard work and taking on the world as it is, not as we might want it to be. I am inspired by the high school students who fully recognize they will need patience, persistence, and resilience to make schools safer--that change will come neither easily nor quickly. And that sometimes the best way to take on "old power" is to use old power techniques yourself, just even more effectively.