New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You

by Jeremy Heimans

Whether this was strategic genius on Trump’s part or just disorganization (or a little of both), this gave Trump’s supporters the freedom the...

Trump caught fire in no small part because of his intuitive grasp of how to build a move...

Twitter turned him into the leader of a vast, decentralized social media army that took its cues from him—and in turn fed Trump new narratives, c...

It would become a deeply symbiotic ...

His unambiguous message to his crowd was that he’d have their back no matter what they did.

The secret to Trump’s success was not simply his own unrivaled ability to grab the attention of both social and mainstream media.

His message also moved—and morphed—without him via a vast network of people who took it and made it their own

Trump took that existing energy, dialed it up to fever pitch, and transformed his campaign into what we call an intensity machine.

In national opinion polls, his supporters were about ten points more enthusiastic about him than Clinton’s supporters were about her, even as his favorability ratings overall trailed Clinton’s by about ten points.

Positive sentiment about Trump on social media also outstripped Clinton’s by ten points in the critical final five weeks of the election,

Strikingly, according to these social media analysts, the moment during the campaign that expanded Trump’s social media following the most was his campaign’s supposed nadir:

This moment, with much of the country lined up against him, caused his supporters to rally around him like at no other time in the race.

the comparison between Big Brother and Trump is not quite right. While Big Brother wielded his power through mass conformity and a fierce resistance to individualism,

Trump became stronger by supercharging individual agency, taking the reins off and championing unorthodox, previously socially unacceptable behaviors.

He seeks control of the conventional media and the establishment not by co-opting it, but by undermining it, seeing it overrun by a battery of constant attacks from his crowd.

Trump is an example of what we call the Platform Strongman:

a leader who co-opts a digital crowd and deploys new power in order to advance largely authoritarian values.

As early as January 2016, researchers had identified “the one weird trait that predicts whether you’re a Trump supporter”—and it wasn’t your gender, age, or religion.

It was whether you had an authoritarian value set.

Trump was the only candidate in either the Democratic field or the sixteen-person Republican field whose support among authorita...

This combination of an old power, authoritarian value set and a sideways, unstructured new power model lies behind some of the most potent and dangerous leadership models in the world today.

Obama campaigned as a Crowd Leader, but he governed as a Cheerleader. While the rhetorical torch for new power stayed lit,

he failed to build a genuine movement to help him govern, to help elect his successor, or to create a sustained and local grassroots to help his political party win up and down the ticket.

Obama left office with some major legislative accomplishments and relatively high approval ratings. He had governed for eight years with no major scandal, and his original supporter...

But his political opposition had won back the presidency, controlled both houses of Congress, and dominat...

The missed opportunity for Obama was that he had no real transition plan for his crowd. All the energy and commitment that ...

The administration then made the fateful decision to fold its organizing infrastructure—renamed Organizing for America (OFA)—and its more than 13 million members into the Democratic National Committee, becoming part of the official party machine.

This decision put real distance between Obama and his crowd, and limited its capacity to act to support his agenda;

it was too cautious and had not tended to the community carefully enough to be able to whip up any real passion.

Obama’s supporters wanted to do more than pledge. Had Obama invested heavily in enabling his supporters to launch local efforts—giving them freedom about how to organize in support of him—he might have built a strong, locally grounded progressive movement.

This could have been a powerful counterforce to the rise of the Tea Party, especially outside of the major cities where Democratic support tends to cluster.

Obama’s team eventually seemed to view his crowd more like an ATM mac...

once President Trump was elected and had the ability to sweep much of his legacy away, one was left wondering what might have been had Obama the president acted more like a genuine Crowd

Leader—and less like a Cheerleader.

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.

unstructuring,

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.

leaders aren’t very popular these days.

The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer shows that only 37 percent of people think of CEOs as credible.

And trust in all four institutions tracked—business, government, NGOs, and media—to do what is right is in decline, the first time Edelman has observ...

Of the three new power leadership skills on display in these stories,

the most difficult to master is

shaping values and behaviors beyond the bounds of one...

how even a leader with good intentions could have gotten the three Ss—signaling, structuring, and shaping—so wrong.

This is one of the big challenges of the “listening tour,” ever popular among CEOs. There aren’t a lot of employees, even relatively senior ones, with the gumption to say, “Great to meet you, boss, love your passion, but you’re dead wrong on this one.”

Simply “consulting” your base is a rudimentary application of new power and not likely to generate meaningful feedback.

Truly structuring for participation requires more.

Paradoxically, in the absence of this, an old power strategy might have helped: holding closed, online, or confidential forums can create ...

#RaceTogether started with just one voice. It would finish that way, too.