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

by Jeremy Heimans

Were this any normal legacy institution, you might assume that this divide had something to do with people fearing new technology. But this was clearly not the case. After all, these were literally rocket scientists. Nor was the division about age. Or experience. Or reputation.

The populations of the two camps looked pretty similar.

What was behind this big divide were two very different...

The first group had what we call old ...

They came from a world with clear boundaries between “us” and “them,” where only the lab-coated and credentialed were equipped t...

the resistance to open innovation “is really intrinsic, the history of the scientific...

This group believed deeply in the value of expertise.

Their own identities grew out of a tradition that venerated individual moments of genius.

Their instinct was to hoard informati...

work, not expose it to the scrutiny of an unqualified crowd who might not play by the established rules of...

They had some reason to be skeptical: many experiments in open innovation and crow...

Professional privileges and knowledge were hard-won currency. You are what you have amassed.

when people in this group were asked about open innovation, they would often—without prompting—start talking about “why they joined NASA, who they are and how they were trained.”

“I didn’t ask them about them, I asked them about Open Innovation.”

presented a threat to their core identity.

The second group had new power values. They were more open to collaboration, believed in the possibility of crowd wisdom, and wanted to open up their world to let others join in. They decided that their teams would be stronger if they could find ways to create discrete assignments that anyone around the world could help out with.

These scientists stopped thinking “The lab is my world” and started thinking “The world is my lab.”

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.

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 employee who gets the thrill of unlimited creativity and immediate validation from her online community can find her mundane daily workplace projects, which her boss rarely comments on, especially unfulfilling.

This sentence really resonates with me!!!

Participatory experiences are multiplying across all of our lives and further shaping this new power mindset.

It is important not to see all this in normative terms.

This is not a case of “new power values = good,” “old po...

And while these two mindsets often come into conflict, we shouldn’t see the values as a binary.

It’s better to see them as a spectrum and to consider where your beliefs, and those of the organizations you are part of, might sit along them.

more participation does not necessarily lead to more equal representation or inclusion; sometimes new power can mean less of both.)

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 g...

They despair of those who take their dusty places at the biweekly meeting of the standing deliberative committee on multi...

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 a networked world, collaborating with your neighbor or someone on the other side of the world is both much easier and more frequently rewarded.

The most successful open-source software engineers are the ones who collaborate best; they build on and improve the work of their peers, even when there’s no obvious immediate benefit to them.

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. It is the classic thinking behind much of corporate life

It’s worth noting that while norms around collaboration and “sharing” are now all the rage in our business and culture, that doesn’t mean they always produce better outcomes.

“cooperative contexts proved socially disadvantageous for high performers”—who

who find themselves ostracized by the res...

To many young people, this pragmatic rationale for lack of transparency or straightforwardness just isn’t

acceptable anymore.

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 in...

The separation between public and private spheres, so prized in an old power world, is dissolving—and is being replaced b...

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 the first case, experts and authority figures decide what filters information deserves;

in the second the filters d...

Makers are less dependent on institutions.

They figure out how to avoid the intermediaries.