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

by Jeremy Heimans

Legitimacy:

the next question is whether you already have—or are prepared to build—trust and credibility in the space you want to engage.

This means there are specific communities that you’re confident wi...

This requires more than simply having the CE...

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 v...

Otherwise you’ll never really unleash people’s energ...

This does not mean an organization has to embrace anarchy. But it does mean that once you have carefully structured the...

you need to be prepared to be surprised if they lead you in an u...

Commitment:

Too often, old power organizations see new power as an occasional, peripheral, and intermittent

acti...

But getting the best results requires a willingness to cultivate the energy and enthusiasms of a community of...

If new power enthusiasm is simply a flavor of the month, or the passion project of an unsupported mid-level millennial, ...

the greatest viral successes and most impactful moments usually come after months and years of consis...

When organizations confront the big questions posed by the decision tree—and make the decision to “take the turn”—there can be significant upside.

The following LEGO case study is really powerful and worth studying closely

What he saw in the crowd was great passion.

And also great commercial potential.

Individuals all over world had kept on building into their adulthoods,

but they just hadn’t found one another.

Even though AFOLs were only 5 percent of the total

market at this point, they were outspending the average family with kids twenty to one.

The Lego Group’s big pivot was to stop treating AFOLs as an underclass of nobodies, or a den of weirdos, and

start building structures to respect them, engage them as super-participants, and channel their value for the Lego ecosystem.

Part of Askildsen’s success was his openness to ideas from the outside.

After years of cultivation, the Lego community is now a critical piece of business infrastructure,

as important to

the company as its factories or intellectual property—something that it can count on...

The base was critical to the success of The Leg...

The Lego Group built a strategy in which cultivating its new power community was key to reviving its core business—this

this wasn’t just window

dressing or pa...

acted as an incredible—and incredibly inexpensive, compared to traditional broadcast advertisi...

The crowd also provides it a huge expert innovation resource ...

Executives also had a clear sense of what they could do for the crowd.

They earned legitimacy with the AFOLs by legitimizing them, taking them out of their AFOL closets and putting them at the center of the company’s culture and innovation engine.

This offers a key lesson: if you want to be taken seriously by your crowd, taking them seriously is a good place to start.

leadership should still be credited with an essential insight: that

by relinquishing control even further, they would uncover value.

By providing smart routes for participation, Lego staff was able to guide its crowd in certain directions, bu...

All this progress required a long-term commitment from Lego. It went through an evolution over a decade, not a revolution over a season, with a steady stream of initiatives and experiments that shifted the structure and culture of its business and its communities.

Talking about “win-win” models is easy to do, but striking the right balance between crowd and company is “hard work to make it work on both sides.”

This commitment came from the very top of the institution—and has...

four important characters tend to emerge.

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 ...

The rallying cry of this generation has in many ways been “disrupt!,” with traditional institutions being quickly classified as dinosaurs and earnestly instructed in the ways of the future by those with slick spectacles and thin résumés.