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

by Jeremy Heimans

the TEDx experience is carefully structured.

In the official “rules” for wannabe TEDx organizers the word “must” appears forty-eight times. There are twenty-seven app...

of “ca...

The parameters are designed to preserve what TED sees as intrinsic to its model: high-quality curation, the absence of a profit motive, and a ban on pay-to-play sponsors.

TEDx organizers must make a clear case for why they are well positioned to pull off a compelling local event, and they need to play by TED’s rules.

If the first reason TED is so prescriptive is an effort to protect its brand, the second is an effort to extend it.

Key to its success is the paradoxical idea that they can scale exclusivity.

they want every TEDx to mimic the dynamics that make big TED such a hit. Most TEDx organizers are prepare...

Taken together, TED’s four communities offer a master class in how to blend power under one unifying organizational brand.

The three new power worlds it has built around its old power conference have turned it into one of the most effective media platforms in the world.

Every interaction is circumscribed by the brand. Though its putative mission is “ideas worth spreading,”

its leaders have not made the decision to support just any good idea worth spreading, no matter what format it is in or where it was delivered.

Theirs is a huge—but closed—ecosystem of ideas, wi...

gleaming TED brand tied to every single piece of content ...

Through its open system, the NRA can draw on the energy and intensity of gun culture and commerce. And through its closed system, TED protects quality and strengthens its product and brand value.

the TED format—strictly focused on producing unexpected and delightful talks—can feel inadequate to TEDx organizers who want to turn their events into opportunities for real-world action and year-round community engagement.

TED hasn’t always been comfortable about taking this next step. Ideas worth spreading is one mission. Problems worth solving is another.

At a time when the crowd’s desire for participation is only growing, TED may have to r...

Local Motors’ business model as “so radical that it’s hard to comprehend at first: crowd-sourced, 3D-printed electric vehicles built in local microfactories the size of grocery stores, then sold directly to consumers.”

Local Motors has a community of 50,000 people not on its payroll who design and develop concepts for vehicles that the company makes and sells in small batches.

Think artisanal jam, only wi...

The Local Motors community is made up of enthusiasts, from the highly skilled to the amateur, all of whom want to dream big about the future of cars—and play a part in making that future happen faster.

But what is driving Local Motors isn’t anarchy.

Its success is in the careful blend between old and new power

that allows its crowd a substantial (and communal) role in designing its cars, then makes s...

the company has staff from all the same technical disciplines as its more traditional competitors, and a similar product life cycle.

Yet it has found a way to open up the process to a much bigger community of people.

Jay Rogers says his instinct is always to turn to the community. But his success is in knowing when the company needs to set the terms and make the right call.

He calls his approach “drawing the box tightly,” setting clear parameters and conditions within which the community can create and ideate.

When you explain that to the community, Rogers said, “they’ll say ‘Well, it does make sense, I never knew that.’ ”

“participation premium”

People who have been involved in the development of the car are primed to both evangelize for and buy them.

Sure, Twitter would get the younger folks buzzing, and Facebook was great for mobilization.

But to make big cultural shifts that might translate into lasting political power, you needed to occupy (their word for it) the airwaves.

The next move was to create an identifiable group of people to blame.

So they began to turn the people of Spain against la casta (the caste). “La casta” was a new blanket expression they designed to label those seen as responsible for, and benefiting from, the country’s ongoing crises.

no matter who won, the same elites always ended up on top.

Soon, across the country, la casta signified not just a crooked class but a crooked system.

They had a hero. They had a villain. It was time to form a party.

“hacker logic” of the movement:

“When you are doing politics as a hacker you proliferate, you have to be everywhere, you want to be everywhere.”

This thinking drove their low-barrier, light-lift affiliation model, the polar opposite of most twenti...

They made connecting with the party as ea...

There was a heavy emphasis on local agency

people were creating Podemos circles not based on what the “head office” thought was

important, but around the issues they car...

Podemos’s goal was to crowd-source key aspects of its manifesto and policies and choose leaders. The process was a little cumbersome and uneven, but certainly very open.

“I once said, ‘If you want to liberate a society, all you need is the Internet.’

I was wrong.”

Ghonim, looking back, believes that the distributed leadership and social networks of the Egyptian protest movement actually served...