New Power by Jeremy Heimans

Power, as philosopher Bertrand Russell puts it, is the “ability to produce intended effects.”

That ability is now in all of our hands. Today, we have the capacity to make films, friends, or money; to spread hope or spread our ideas; to build community or build up movements; to spread misinformation or propagate violence—all on a vastly greater scale and with greater potential impact than we did even a few years ago.

Yes, this is because technology has changed. But the deeper truth is that we are changing. Our behaviors and expectations are changing. And those who have figured out how to channel all this energy and appetite are producing Russell’s “intended effects” in new and extraordinarily impactful ways.

This book is about how to navigate and thrive in a world defined by the battle and balancing of two big forces. We call them old power and new power.

• Old power?works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.
• New power?operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.

THE INGREDIENTS OF NEW POWER

Thanks to today’s ubiquitous connectivity, we can come together and organize ourselves in ways that are geographically boundless and highly distributed and with unprecedented velocity and reach. This hyperconnectedness has given birth to new models and mindsets that are shaping our age, as we’ll see in the pages ahead. That’s the “new” in new power.

These new means of participation—and the heightened sense of agency that has come with them—are a key ingredient in some of the most impactful models of our time: big businesses like Airbnb and Uber, China’s WeChat or Facebook; protest movements like Black Lives Matter, open software systems like GitHub; and terrorist networks like ISIS. They are all channeling new power.

Think of these as new power models. New power models are enabled by the activity of the crowd—without whom these models are just empty vessels. In contrast, old power models are enabled by what people or organizations own, know, or control that nobody else does—once old power models lose that, they lose their advantage.

To grasp the essential difference between old and new power models, think of the difference between the two biggest computer games of all time, Tetris and Minecraft.

THE MISSION OF THIS BOOK

The future will be a battle over mobilization. The everyday people, leaders, and organizations who flourish will be those best able to channel the participatory energy of those around them—for the good, for the bad, and for the trivial

Many are still deploying these new means of participation in profoundly old power ways. This book is about a different approach to the exercise of power, and a different mindset, which can be deployed even as particular tools and platforms go in and out of fashion. How do you create ideas that the crowd grabs on to, makes stronger, and helps spread? How do you operate effectively within an organization in which your (perhaps younger) peers have internalized new power values like radical transparency or constant feedback? How do you create an institution that inspires an enduring, mass following in an era of much looser, more transitory affiliation? How do you switch between old and new power? When should you blend them together? And when will old power actually produce better outcomes?

2.THINKING OLD POWER, THINKING NEW POWER

A TALE OF TWO MINDSETS

Old power and new power values are not clashing just at NASA. More broadly, two very different mindsets are doing battle in today’s world.

The twentieth century was built from the top down. Society was imagined as a great machine, intricately powered by big bureaucracies and great corporations. To keep the machine humming, ordinary people had critical, but small and standardized, roles to play. Do your drills. Say your prayers. Learn your multiplication tables. Serve your time. Sit for your yearbook photo. Many of us were relatively content to play a minor role in a larger process. Yet the rise of new power is shifting people’s norms and beliefs about how the world should work and where they should fit in. The more we engage with new power models, the more these norms are shifting. Indeed, what is emerging—most visibly among people under thirty (now more than half the world’s population)—is a new expectation: an inalienable right to participate.

It is important not to see all this in normative terms. This is not a case of “new power values = good,” “old power values = bad.” After all, there are many times we might choose old power values over new.

Formal vs. informal governance

Professor of political science Jeffrey Henig expressing an old power view of how education funding decisions should be made: “We have vested school boards, superintendents or mayors’ offices with authority to make decisions about schooling because we understand they will be made out in the open, where questions of conflicting values are negotiated and compromises are made”.

Those with a new power mindset have an aversion, which often comes with a dollop of disdain, for the centralized bureaucratic machines that drove the old power world. They prefer more informal, networked, and opt-in means of getting things done. They despair of those who take their dusty places at the biweekly meeting of the standing deliberative committee on multi-sector-high-level-decision-making.

Competition vs. collaboration

New power models, at their best, reinforce the human instinct to cooperate (rather than compete) by rewarding those who share their own assets or ideas, spread those of others, or build on existing ideas to make them better.

In contrast, those with old power values celebrate the virtues of being a great (and sometimes ruthless) competitor, defined by your victories. Dividing the world into winners and losers, this mindset considers success a zero-sum equation.

Confidentiality vs. radical transparency

In an era in which young people are sharing the most intimate details of their lives on social media, it shouldn’t be surprising that in the workplace they are now demanding that their bosses share information previously considered strictly confidential, like company-wide salary information.

The big clash here is between the “need to know” mindset, which instinctively keeps information away from the public for its own protection, and a rising “right to know” expectation, where new power thinkers demand openness from institutions as a default.

In an age when it is ever harder to guard secrets and avoid scrutiny, some leaders and institutions are embracing radical transparency, if only as a preemptive strategy. To borrow a phrase from the world of protest, they are choosing to occupy themselves before they themselves are occupied.

Experts vs. Makers

“It really comes down to just being able to make something. Make something that’s important…Always be creating…For me it’s that sweet, sweet beautiful toasted bread. I’m Andy Corbett, and I make toast.”

This trend is allied with a shifting view of expertise. Restaurateurs, filmmakers, hoteliers, artists, and writers used to live in fear of the all-powerful critic whose expert opinion could tank or make their enterprise. Today, these elites still retain great influence, but increasingly we look to one another for direction.

Long-term vs. transient affiliation

Since the advent of the internet we’ve seen a huge new wave of joining, affiliation, and participation, though not on the terms Putnam was seeking. New power loves to affiliate, but affiliation in this new mindset is much less enduring. People are less likely to be card-carrying members of organizations or to forge decades-long relationships with institutions, but they are more likely to float between Meetup groups or use social media to very visibly affiliate with a range of causes, brands, and organizations, and rally their friends to do the same.

NEW POWER VALUES IN ACTION—WELCOME TO THE HOUSE FOR ALL SINNERS AND SAINTS

At the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado, we see many of these new power values in action.

What makes pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber different isn’t the tattoos of religious stories all over her body, nor is it her media-friendly rags-to-dog-collar story. It’s her congregation’s simple philosophy: “We’re anti-excellence, pro-participation.”

What House does so well is to offer increased agency, flattened hierarchy, and a joyful embrace of diversity, the opposite of the quiet-in-the-pews, top-heavy, single-note experience that many find when they go to a traditional place of worship.

THE NEW POWER COMPASS

Those businesses and organizations that rely on new power models are not necessarily embracing the new power values we have unpacked in this chapter. In fact, we see different combinations of new and old power models and values that reflect very different strategies for survival and success. We can more clearly understand a lot of the successful (and some of the more challenged) organizations of our era by using the new power compass.

Black Lives Matter, for instance, has a new power model: it is highly decentralized, lacking an organizational owner or traditional leaders. It has inspired coordination and participation among people all over the United States. It also displays new power values: it gives huge leeway to its supporters to adapt its message and has been highly transparent about its decision-making, such as when a loose-knit collection of groups came together to produce its first policy platform. For all these reasons, it fits squarely in the Crowds quadrant.

3.FROM SOUND BITES TO MEME DROPS: HOW IDEAS SPREAD

The Ice Bucket Challenge—love it or hate it—was a phenomenon that tells us something important about our era. By unpacking how and why this campaign went so big, we can learn a lot about how ideas—good, bad, and ugly—spread in a new power world.

THE BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SOUND BITE AND A MEME DROP

The rise of new media changed things. Organizations and individuals began to bypass big media and tell their own stories. Audiences fragmented. The communications pathway no longer took a mandatory stop at Madison Avenue or the office of the local newspaper. Yet when the medium changed, the messaging didn’t always. Organizations relied on old power defaults. Stories continued to be downloaded to audiences, only now they also arrived via the company blog or Twitter feed, rather than simply via a press release or a two-page spread in Fortune. “Craft and blast” remained the dominant approach.

But there is something new happening, which we saw on a grand scale with the Ice Bucket Challenge, and which is reshaping how we think about spreading ideas. The job now is not simply to create sound bites, but what we call “meme drops”—whether images or phrases, across every type of media—that are designed to spread “sideways,” coming most alive when remixed, shared, and customized by peer communities, far beyond the control of the meme creator(s). The Ice Bucket Challenge worked not because it was a perfect piece of content, like Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan, but because it created a compelling context to seed activity by people all around the world. It was a blueprint for action dropped into the fast-moving current of ideas and information, ready to be taken in countless directions, in countless forms

FROM “MADE TO STICK” TO “MADE TO SPREAD”

What these examples share are six qualities the Heaths see behind a sticky idea:

Simple—simplicity is the key

Unexpected—surprises you and makes you want to know more

Concrete—creates a clear mental picture for people

Credible—uses statistics, expert endorsements, etc.

Emotional—appeals to deep human instincts

Stories—takes you on a journey that helps you see how an existing problem might change

With a hat tip to the Heath brothers, we propose that many of the most successful ideas and communications strategies today add?ACE?to?SUCCESS.?ACE?stands for the three design principles key to making an idea spread in a new power world:

• Actionable—The idea is designed to make you do something—something more than just admire, remember, and consume. It has a call to action at its heart, beginning with sharing, but often going much further.
• Connected—The idea promotes a peer connection with people you care about or share values with. Connected ideas bring you closer to other people and make you (feel) part of a like-minded community. This sets off a network effect that spreads the idea further.
• Extensible—The idea can be easily customized, remixed, and shaped by the participant. It is structured with a common stem that encourages its communities to alter and extend it.

4. HOW TO BUILD A CROWD

We explore how crowds are built in a new power world, and share the most important lessons we’ve learned as movement builders.

THE FIVE STEPS TO BUILDING A NEW POWER CROWD

Step 1: Find your connected connectors:?connected connectors,” those people who share a worldview, are networked to one another, and are influential in their reach. For any new power movement, identifying and cultivating the right connected connectors is often the difference between takeoff and fizzle.

Step 2: Build a new power brand:?Every company or institution must make key early decisions about how it will project outward into the world. It has to come up with a name and settle on a visual aesthetic and maybe some iconography; it needs to refine a “voice” for how it speaks to consumers or clients. These things define its “brand”—the way a product or organization looks, sounds, and feels in the world.

Step 3: Lower the barrier, flatten the path:?New power era has promoted a form of activism that can be scaled much more quickly than a twentieth-century movement, and can be initiated by almost anyone, including those without a formal apparatus or an existing bully pulpit. These movements can more easily include wider groups of people, including those who previously had been left on the sidelines or couldn’t easily participate.

Step 4: Move people up the participation scale:?Commitment matters. As we’ll explore in the next chapter, the “super-participants” in any movement or new power community do some of its most important work. But this new capacity to get many more people in the door comes with incredible opportunities for impact.

If you’re trying to build a movement or grow a crowd, you’ll need to unlock a series of new power behaviors. You get people in the door via simple, low-barrier asks toward the bottom of the scale—for instance, by asking people to consume and then share content, or by affiliating: in GetUp terms, by signing your first petition. Once you have recruited these new participants, the job is to keep them engaged and to move people up the scale, toward higher-barrier behaviors like adapting or remixing the content of others, crowdfunding a project, creating and uploading their own unique content or assets (we call this producing), or, at the top of the scale, by becoming a “shaper” of the community as a whole, with the capacity to influence the strategy, norms, and culture of a crowd, often without having any kind of formal authority. Today’s most cutting-edge activists understand both how to create frictionless entry points and move people up the participation scale.

Step 5: Harness the three storms:?When growing a crowd, good organizers take advantage of such moments. Sometimes, those moments happen to them and their job is to embrace them, even if at first they seem like setbacks, not opportunities. Sometimes, they see a moment out in the world and use it to fuel the movement. And at other times, they create a moment out of thin air. We think of this as harnessing the three storms.

• Storm creating, It had found a way to capture the imagination of the media on a vital topic—and give a cheeky win to its members.
• Storm chasing, Sometimes a storm is in full swing, and the job of the crowd builder is to chase it down and harness its power
• Storm embracing, Sometimes the best way to build a crowd is to embrace the fact that a storm is at your doorstep and let yourself get swept up in it.

5.WHAT MAKES NEW POWER COMMUNITIES WORK (AND WHY THEY SOMETIMES DON’T)

Many of today’s new power platforms are as economically powerful as megacorporations and as populous as many nations. Our daily lives and our livelihoods are wrapped up in them. So it’s vital to understand how they work, the roles we play within them, and the impact they are having on society.

Any new power community has three key actors—its participants, its super-participants, and the owner or stewards of the platform. Think of these as three corners of a triangle.

Some new power communities don’t have any person or entity that meets this definition of owner. Instead, those communities have what we call platform stewards, who play recognizable but sometimes informal leadership roles that allow them to channel the energy of the broader community, create rules or norms, and define the structure of a platform.

Super-participants:?The energy of a new power community is driven by its super-participants—the most active contributors to the platform, and often those who create the core assets that power the platform and create its value.

Participants:?Finally, participants are the people who “take part” in a new power platform, and tend to form the vast majority of its users.

The power of “platform culture”

The sum of the relationships between platform, super-participants, and participants makes up what sharing-economy guru Arun Sundararajan has called “platform culture,” those “shared norms, values and capabilities among the providers.” He sees this as the analog of a corporate culture, but “without the directive authority or co-located social systems that traditional firms can take advantage of to manage their employees.”

INSIDE THE TRIANGLE: DESIGN CHOICES FOR NEW POWER COMMUNITIES

Anyone wanting to understand the dynamics of a new power community—or design one for themselves—needs to wrestle with these key questions.

Who gets rewarded—and who “pays”??Incentives and rewards in new power platforms shape whether—and how—participation occurs.

Who gets recognized and who has status??Recognition systems that validate the work of participants or super-participants can be hugely motivational.

What creates stickiness??At the heart of every successful new power platform is a great feedback loop. We are all now hooked on them.

How do you establish trust??Many new power networks simply wouldn’t function without the reputation systems that manage risk and incentivize collaborative behavior within them. Ten years ago if you had described to someone the basic model for Airbnb—that you’d rent your home, with all the furniture in it, to a complete stranger without meeting him or her—he’d have chuckled heartily.

Who calls the shots??Occupy took an extreme stance on who calls the shots: namely, everyone. And it ultimately cost them.

6.WHAT MAKES NEW POWER COMMUNITIES WORK (AND HOW THEY FUSE WITH THE WIDER WORLD)

THE CIRCLE TEST: BUILDING NEW POWER COMMUNITIES THAT WORK, INSIDE AND OUT

The dynamics of new power communities aren’t important just because they help us understand why Reddit might revolt or Uber might combust. They also matter because these platforms are having far-reaching effects on all of us.

When we think about the effect of vast new power models like Facebook and Uber on the wider world, we should apply what we call the “circle test.” The circle test asks us to consider the impacts of the platform, both on the actors inside its triangle and on those in its wider circle. For Facebook, this test asks some tough questions. What is its effect on the ability of traditional media to carry out their public interest role? What is the psychological impact of Facebook, as the scientific evidence mounts that the more we use it, the worse we feel? What are the ethical implications once it has billions more in its reach (especially relevant as Zuckerberg attempts to bring Facebook-enabled—and possibly narrowly limited—internet access to places like rural India)? Should the “public square,” as Facebook is increasingly becoming, be privately owned and controlled?

7. THE PARTICIPATION PREMIUM

UNDERSTANDING THE “PARTICIPATION PREMIUM”

What the story of Star Citizen shows us—in both amazing and worrying ways—are the dynamics of how people are spending, raising, and investing money in a new power context.

In the twentieth century, we tended to think of our transactions in one of two distinct ways.

One was the basic economic exchange.

The other kind of transaction was more altruistic.

In recent years, we’ve seen these two kinds of returns—the economic and the altruistic—being blended more and more often. Think of impact investing, which promises investors they can make good returns and do a little good for the world. Or think of the countless brands that promote themselves as causes—Patagonia, Toms, or Warby Parker, for example. This isn’t a new phenomenon—for years, public television has incentivized donations with the promise of free swag—but today it is becoming much more mainstream.

Whatever you’re “selling” today, there is great advantage in providing all three returns. To lay this out as an unscientific (but useful) equation, think of this as:

(Something in Return + Higher Purpose) x Participation = Participation Premium

The great power of the participation premium is that it can lead to a decoupling of material value and price.

The rewards you get as a backer or participant are not simply tied to the value of the product involved. They are more complicated—and potentially much more significant, for both “seller” and “buyer.”

THE NEW (AND OLD) SKILLS OF MAKING AND RAISING MONEY

To generate funding in a new power world—be it via revenues, donations, investment capital, or loans—you need to develop a fresh set of skills, different from the ones needed to make things happen in the twentieth century. Think back for a moment to how life used to be.

What is emerging, whether at epic scale on a project like Star Citizen, or on a micro scale with someone forced to raise money for his own knee replacement surgery, is a new set of funding skills. Here’s an overview:

THE BRAVE NEW ECONOMY: THE BIG IMPLICATIONS OF NEW POWER FUNDING

Implication #1: More “bosses” do not equal better governance, The dark side of new power funding is that often, in our enthusiasm to be part of something, we don’t spend enough time considering the nature and terms of that participation. We grasp for what we might get, and fail to grasp what we might give up.

Implication #2: Viral ≠ vital, However, while individual stories of success lift our hearts, the aggregate picture that emerges from the many cases of new power funding is more complicated.

Though there is no question that crowdfunding has opened access greatly for people to run their own initiatives and put them to market, it currently lacks any mechanism to ensure that its benefits are evenly shared or efficiently allocated.

8.TAKING THE TURN FROM OLD TO NEW POWER

For old power organizations wishing to move into the new power world beyond the occasional initiative or stunt, there are four fundamental issues to consider as they set out to “take the turn,” as shown in the decision tree on the following page. Imagine if NERC had asked itself these questions in deciding when and how to turn to new power.

Strategy: The first question to consider is whether new power really fits with your strategy. What problem are you trying to solve that your old power repertoire can’t handle? What opportunity exists in the energy of the crowd that could add real value for your efforts? What new innovations might come from the crowd that would not have come from inside your walls? In NERC’s case, it wasn’t clear that it really needed (or wanted) the crowd to name its boat, given that executives were set on a conventional choice. But part of this equation, too, is the question of what value you can deliver to your crowd. The crowd cannot be seen as an asset to be strip-mined: any new power strategy needs to consider what’s really in it for the people you want to engage with.

Legitimacy: If engaging new power makes strategic sense, the next question is whether you already have—or are prepared to build—trust and credibility in the space you want to engage.

Control: Meaningfully incorporating new power—and getting something meaningful out of the result—requires a willingness to give up at least some control and accept a range of outcomes, including an answer you might not view as ideal. Otherwise you’ll never really unleash people’s energy and enthusiasm.

Commitment: Too often, old power organizations see new power as an occasional, peripheral, and intermittent activity. But getting the best results requires a willingness to cultivate the energy and enthusiasms of a community of people over an extended period.

BUILDING A NEW POWER TEAM

The shapeshifter (vs. the disrupter)

The shapeshifter is a new power change agent in old power garb, a figure with unimpeachable institutional credibility who smooths the path to change and sets an example for the timid or resistant to follow. The shapeshifter figure will likely not be the person who executes day-to-day the big structural changes that make transitions happen, but will be the spiritual and symbolic figure who, steeped in tradition, is ideally placed to guide the institution toward a new identity and a new relationship with its communities.

Leading an old power organization through transition isn’t about “breaking shit.” It requires a tricky blend of tradition and innovation, past and future. Those efforts need shapeshifters who can show—by example—how to get the best of both worlds.

The bridge (vs. the digital beard).

More than one old power organization has found itself with a “chief innovation officer” or “director of strategic initiatives” parachuted in by a CEO desperate to uncover some magical revenue line, or to serve as public evidence that her leadership really is engaging with the new world. But despite good intentions, these people often end up as “digital beards,” providing cover for a risk-averse leader and an unchanging strategy, and relegated to the margins of power and influence within the organization. They are often a small department paid to think about the future, resented by the rest of the organization for not doing what is considered “real work.” They cut ribbons at openings for 3D printing labs but in reality are often siloed and underfunded.

Instead of the “beard,” what organizations really need is a “bridge,” that person who can meaningfully connect his organization to the new power world, making the practical “jumps” between old and new power.

The solution seeker (vs. the problem solver)

The “problem solvers” were those who resisted change. Their identity was invested in their own expertise. They were scientists in the tradition of Galileo, those whose individual genius would light the way.

The “solution seekers” got their name from a heated debate that Hila Lifshitz-Assaf observed, where a highly respected scientist rebuked reluctant colleagues: “Your main responsibility is to seek for solutions and they may come from the lab, from open innovation, or from collaboration, you should not care! You are the solution seeker!

It was this group of scientists that got creative and serious about the wider community. They shifted the boundaries of their worlds to invite people in. For this group, success wasn’t that you personally had the answer, but that you were open to experiment, ready to find answers in unexpected places and from unexpected people.

Any team “taking the turn” needs to build a squad of solution seekers. These are the people, typically drawn from the main body of staff, who will become the experimenters and allies of new power initiatives. Investing in this group—and recruiting for it—is key, not just in creating new value for an enterprise, but as a political force

The super-participant (vs. the stakeholder)

No new power team would be complete, of course, without those people who create huge value in the community: the super-participants.

One of the dangers of transitioning to new power is in seeing the crowd as a distant, amorphous asset—a blurry mass of occasional opportunity. But crowds cannot be approached in the same way that organizations often treat such “stakeholders” as civil society or investors: as external actors who must be managed (and sometimes tolerated) alongside the pursuit of the activities that “really” matter. In contrast, super-participants always participate, and they create value by doing so.

9.LEADERSHIP

“Thank you for everything. My last ask is the same as my first. I’m asking you to believe—not in my ability to create change, but in yours.” —Barack Obama, January 2017

“I alone can fix it.” —Donald Trump, Republican National Convention, July 2016

To start to make sense of it all, let’s take the new power compass from chapter 2 and apply it to how people lead. If we map out both the values and leadership models people are using, we can draw four different leadership archetypes. You will recognize some of these in the news and in your own world.

The Crowd Leader (top right)?combines a new power leadership model with a commitment to, and articulation of, new power values. The Crowd Leader wants to do more than channel the power of her crowd; she wants to make her crowd more powerful.

The Cheerleader (bottom right)?champions new power values like collaboration, transparency, and participation, but leads in an old power way. He either isn’t able or doesn’t want to genuinely distribute power.

The Castle (bottom left)?pairs old power values with an old power leadership model—this is the traditional hierarchical and authority-based model of leadership most of us grew up with, and which is widespread in sectors like the military, business, and education.

The Co-opter (top left)?deploys a crowd and skillfully uses new power tools and tactics—but does so in the service of old power values, and to concentrate power

We can start to pick out the skills unique to leadership in a new power world.

• Signaling?is the way a new power leader makes a crowd feel more powerful through his speech, gestures, or actions.
• Structuring?is how a new power leader puts in place structures and practices that enable the participation and agency she seeks to build.
• Shaping?is how a new power leader sets the overall norms and direction of her crowd, especially in ways that go beyond her formal authority.

CONCLUSIONS: REVISITING THE LEADERSHIP COMPASS

The future is going to see a leadership contest between Co-opters (and the Platform Strongmen they often become) and Crowd Leaders. At their best, both can signal, structure, and shape highly effectively. But these two archetypes tend to produce very different outcomes in terms of how power is distributed.

In many ways, it is the Crowd Leaders whose work is hardest. Their proposition is more complex than “I alone can fix it.” They are asking people to do more, to take on greater responsibility, and to collaborate more freely.

And even if that is the kind of world we might all want to live in, it’s far from clear it’s the one we’ll get.

10.THE ART OF BLENDING POWER

A big theme of this book has been the contrast and conflict between old and new power. Think back to the definitions we shared right at the beginning, expressed in the chart below.

Many of the stories in the book speak directly to these oppositions. Look at the way the Ice Bucket Challenge did away with the telethon. Recall the friction between the solution seekers and the problem solvers at NASA, or the reform-minded pope and the intransigent Vatican bureaucracy.

This chapter is not about the tension between new and old power. It offers stories about organizations that have worked out how to blend power, creating models that bring together old and new power in ways that reinforce each other. Instead of seeing the chart’s pairings as dichotomies—open or closed, download or upload—these organizations have found that the combination of old and new power can be greater than the sum of the parts. An essential theme of all their stories is how they know when to dial each one up.

11.NEW POWER AT WORK

Reuven Gorsht, global VP of customer strategy at SAP, told us a funny story about an intern he hired a couple of years ago. She did the job for three weeks, then mentioned in passing, “Oh, you know, I met Bill.”

Bill is the CEO of SAP. Reuven had worked there for ten years and had “never had a minute with him.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” said Reuven, studiedly nonchalant.

“Well, I’ve got a meeting with him next week for a half hour.”

Reuven was a little flummoxed. What had just happened?

His intern explained: “I came up to him and I said, ‘I’d like to meet with you to give you feedback.’ And he said, ‘Fine,’ and gave me a time.”

Many people have their own version of Reuven’s story. Of all the challenges in the workplace, perhaps the most mystifying for the old power leader is the daily task of management in a world where many now have new power values. Younger workers, and others as well, are increasingly pushing back against norms like hierarchy, loyalty, and the very idea of the specialized professional who stays in her lane. Old power and new power are colliding in today’s workplace.

Many of our old power leaders grew out of a world that prized those who fit well into a set process and organizational structure. Yet today, that exact skill can be seen as a major liability.

In the twenty-first century, managerialism as both ideology and practical reality is under assault. Our cultural heroes are increasingly scrappy disrupters, not corporate managers; the efficiencies of managerialism are seen as sand in the wheels of innovation; decades-loyal “company men” are being replaced by contingent and on-demand workers; and an amorphous “maker culture” is challenging long-standing norms about expertise. Old power managers are facing workplaces that can feel like they are full of wannabe Elon Musks, with vastly higher expectations and unending demands for feedback, with one eye on their next promotion and the other on their next job.

NOT WHINING BUT PLEADING: WHY FEEDBACK AND RECOGNITION NOW MATTER SO

Just imagine for a moment that your workplace functioned with the same dynamics and incentives as a social network like Instagram.

In that world, an ordinary act—let’s say submitting your expense report to your boss—would be met with some pretty extraordinary validation.

Within seconds of hitting Send on your report, you would receive dozens of comments from your colleagues saying how terrific your work was. You’d hear things like “OMG that is AMAZING!!!!” “So cool!” “Great work!” People would stop by your desk to smile at you and congratulate you on getting it in on time. Someone might even bring you a little heart-shaped sticker to wear on your shirt. Your boss would share copies of your expenses with everyone he knows with a note that says “#MUSTREAD!”

Throughout the day, you would enjoy a steady stream of praise, as more and more people became enthralled by how much you’d spent on taxis and cappuccinos. You’d get notifications that say things like “Pradeep just read your amazing report!” Your expenses wouldn’t actually need to add up. After all, the only people assessing them would be those predisposed and hand-selected to affirm you, offering dose after dose of personalized delight.

Contrast this experience with something that looks a lot more like reality.

A twenty-three-year-old assistant spends all weekend on a new marketing idea he has for his company. He is super-excited about it, and goes above and beyond to put together a slide-deck that lays out his thinking. He emails it to his boss first thing Monday.

And then he waits.

On Wednesday he sends a follow-up, just to check she’s received it.

On Friday, he gets a note back apologizing, saying she’s been at a conference, and will get to it next week.

The Thursday after that, she finally emails back, saying, “Interesting…Thanks for sharing.”

There is a reason that feedback and recognition are so highly prized by the new power set. For most, their lives are punctuated (perhaps even defined) by the validation and engagement of others. Every text, every image, every post is a call designed for a response: the drip-drip-drip of dopamine-reward they receive from every heart-shaped like. Even their dating lives are adjudicated by strangers looking at carefully curated photos and deciding to swipe left or swipe right. Being judged, in explicit and implicit ways, is part of their lives. It is how they navigate, guided by a galaxy of digital North Stars that shape, encourage, and catalyze every move.

Their lives are rich in data, too. They measure their steps, calories, heart rate, and sleep. Think of the experience the millennial worker has as he runs home from work using the Nike running app. He gets instant information on his speed and pace, dressed up with a nice map of the route ahead. He can “get cheers” from his Facebook community who can track his progress in real time and applaud. He can compare his times with his previous times and those of his friends. Once he completes his run, his stats are posted to his community for their validation and admiration. Then an Olympic gold medalist praises him via his Bluetooth headphones to tell him what a great job he’s done. (Believe it or not, there is now even “wearable” technology that monitors a person’s energy levels in the bedroom. On completion, a mobile app offers you a score.)

Of course, for many young workers this is the story not just of their digital lives, but also of their childhoods. They were raised as part of a “trophy generation,” recognized for the act of participation rather than the level of performance, getting medals and lavish praise just for completing the race. The parenting philosophy that governed their early years—build self-esteem above all—conspires to deliver the same artificial feedback loops as most social networks: persuading the individual that the ordinary moments of their lives are actually of extraordinary value. Those who enter the workplace with this mindset often find that reality bites hard. And so do their bosses.

FROM “TILL DEATH DO US PART” TO “FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS”: HOW TO COME TO GRIPS WITH THE TRANSIENT WORKER

When you understand the draw of the founder feeling, it’s no surprise that many workers at big organizations are increasingly impatient to move up or move on. Instead of resisting this, LinkedIn’s co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman has embraced it. Everyone who interviews there is asked a version of a question that the upwardly mobile intern would surely appreciate: “What’s the next job that you would like to have post-LinkedIn?”

For many old power thinkers, this is the professional equivalent of asking your brand-new fiancée what she thinks your second wife should look like. But Hoffman wants to put a stop to what he sees as the biggest lie the workplace tells us: We are a family. We shouldn’t think of our workplace commitment as we do our marriage vows, “Till death do us part.” Instead we should frame the employee-employer relationship as an “alliance,” made up of short and clearly defined “tours of duty” that last two to four years

Here are some of the clauses from Hoffman’s sample “Statement of Alliance” which can be used by those embarking on a tour of duty. Consider how different this is from the “for better, for worse” promises we implicitly demand from our new hires in the old power world.

• I want you to help transform the company.
• In return, I and the company need to help you improve your market value and transform your career (preferably within this organization).
• While I am not making a commitment to offer lifetime employment, and you are not making a commitment to stay for your entire career, we will act to maintain a long-term alliance, even if the employment relationship ends.
• We the company expect this current tour of duty to encompass the time it takes for you to execute the following mission objective: __________
• I expect this tour of duty will last approximately the following amount of time: __________
• Here is what the results of a successful tour of duty look like for the company (product launches, process improvements, sales, etc.): __________
• Here is what the results of a successful tour of duty look like for you (knowledge, skills, accomplishments, recognition, etc.): __________

12.THE FUTURE: A FULL-STACK SOCIETY

Yochai Benkler is a professor at Harvard who has spent the past twenty years writing and thinking about the possibilities of technology-enabled collaboration and mass participation. He has, for most of his career, been an articulate cheerleader for the potential of the internet to distribute power—culturally, politically, and economically. His work has influenced our thinking greatly.

The debate was a clash between Benkler’s new power vision—that the huge opportunities in peer production afforded by connectivity would come to dominate the internet—and Carr’s old power conviction that the forces of capitalism and managerialism would reassert themselves: collaborate vs. capture.

FROM PEER PRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATION FARMS

Carr was certainly correct that peer-to-peer activity online would become more commercialized and professionalized. The early flourish of something like?Couchsurfing.com —an authentic, often charmingly ramshackle sharing platform for travelers in which no money changed hands—fell by the wayside with the rise of price-based options like Airbnb. But Benkler was ahead of his time in anticipating the huge (and unpaid) peer production that drives the models of everything from Facebook to activist movements.

IMAGINING A DIFFERENT WAY: CAMELS, NOT UNICORNS

To truly reimagine the platform behemoths, we also need to reimagine their algorithms. As Facebook has shown us, social media sites have huge power to alter our consumer preferences, spur or hinder extremism, and sway our emotions with tweaks of code. But today their algorithms function as secret recipes that serve private interests.

Consider how a “public interest algorithm” might work instead. What might a formula designed to favor the interests of platform participants and society at large—instead of just their owners, advertisers, and investors—look like?

NEW POWER, NEW PLATFORMS, NO PLATFORMS?

Another solution to the problem of placing one’s data in the hands of a powerful intermediary comes in the great—and much-hyped—hope of the Blockchain. The Blockchain is a distributed public ledger that allows everyone to record and see what transactions have taken place. Unlike a centralized secret ledger—such as those of banks—it is transparent. And transactions are verified not by a central force, but as a distributed process. You might know the Blockchain from its most famous (and controversial) application to date: it is the underlying technology upon which the virtual currency Bitcoin is built on.

For non-technologists—even those who have spent hours trying to get their heads around this—the way this actually works can be hard to grasp. But the most important things to understand are the potential human applications. As The Economist puts it, “It offers a way for people who do not know or trust each other to create a record of who owns what that will compel the assent of everyone concerned. It is a way of making and preserving truths.”

TOWARD A “FULL-STACK SOCIETY”

The political thinker and social innovator Geoff Mulgan describes one of the great paradoxes of our age: “People were promised that the currents of change, economic, social and technological, would make them feel powerful. Instead, they see decisions being made by political and corporate leaders ever further away from them. They feel like observers, not participants.” He cites research that shows that majorities of people across the world think their countries are on the wrong track.

Platform strongmen and extremists will offer easy answers. But we need something different: a world where our participation is deep, constant, and multi-layered, not shallow and intermittent.

Think of this world as the “full-stack society.”

When coders speak of stacks, they are referring to the different components of software that work together to make a product hum: programming languages, applications, and an operating system. The “full stack” is when all of those layers come together to form a coherent whole, both those that we see (the “front end”) and those that we don’t (the “back end”).

BUILDING UP THE STACK

To help us imagine what a full-stack society might look like, here are two stories of people adding layers to the stack in critical areas, one in media, one in government. Each teaches us something about how to make people feel more powerful, and how to make society stronger. And they offer a critical lesson: if we want to rebuild public trust in our institutions, we have to let people get their hands on them.

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