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

by Jeremy Heimans

This trend is allied with a shifting view...

Our world is a little more Yelp and a little less Frommer’s.

Those with new power values are less committed but more affiliative—and

and that’s a paradox many old power institutions are now grappling with.

Since the advent of the internet we’ve seen a huge new wave of joining, affilia...

New power loves to affiliate, but affiliation in this new mindset i...

People are less likely to be card-carrying members of organizations or to forge decades-long rela...

They tend to opt in at particular moments, and then opt out again.

We shouldn’t confuse this with a lack of engagement.

Rather it is a different way of taking part. This shift has big implications for orga...

offer increased agency, flattened hierarchy, and a joyful embrace of diversity,

Those businesses and organizations that rely on new power models are not necessarily embracing the new power values

In fact, we see different combinations of new and old power models and values that reflect very different strategies for survival and success.

In a world of old and new power colliding, competing, and converging, everyone is on the move.

All organizations need to consider where they are on this compass, where they should move in the coming years, and

how they are going to ...

The Ice Bucket Challenge—love it or hate it—was a phenomenon that tells us something important about our era.

The striking thing about that era was how much of our cultural experience was shared.

Most people would watch the same few television shows and read the same kinds of newspapers. If you had access to mainstream media or could pay to advertise, you were one of the very few who could really shape the culture. Without that access, your ideas would be fringe at best.

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...

Organizations relied on old power defaults. Stories continued to be downloaded to audiences, only now they also arrived via the company blog or Twitter f...

The job now is not simply to create sound bites, but what we call “meme drops”—whether

whether images or phrases, across every type of media—that

that are designed to spread “sideways,” coming most alive when remixed, shared, and customized by peer communities, far beyond...

The Ice Bucket Challenge worked not because it was a perfect piece of content, like Nike’...

because it created a compelling context to seed activity by people ...

It was a blueprint for action dropped into the fast-moving current of ideas and information, ready to be taken in countle...

six qualities the Heaths see behind a sticky idea:

We may understand how to “make it stick,”

but in a world of manic participation, awash in information, how do we

“make it s...

When people are no longer satisfied with simply consuming ideas, but increasingly expect to play a role in developing, tweaking, and propagating those ideas to an unlimited potential audience, w...

ACE stands for the three design principles key to making an idea spread in a new power world:

Actionable—The

Connected—The

Extensible—The

The initiative gave people what we call

permission to promote,

and not just for ordinary people but also f...

a perfect way to humanize the serious...

you were the rock star, your friends were your rhythm section, and your social network was your audience.

The potential for small tweaks and personal flavors invited everyone to become not simply a participant, but a producer.

The Ice Bucket Challenge mixed that perfect cocktail of emotion:

it made people feel the same,

in that they were all part of a com...

but it also made people feel...

with each video feeding the agency of its crea...

At the core of its success is what it wants its reader to do.