The Power of Giving Away Power Quotes

“When it finally came time to analyze the data, what mattered most was what the researchers dubbed “psychological safety.” These were the teams in which the relationships were strong enough that mistakes weren’t held against people and it was okay to bring up hard stuff, to disagree, to ask for assistance, and (to quote Churchill) to show “charity towards each other’s shortcomings.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The task of a diplomat is to first learn how to become comfortable in that space and then to make others comfortable—to draw people out from behind their walls of entrenchment or entitlement into engagement. That’s what turns frustrating friction into fruitful friction”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Giving a tour d’horizon required pretending that I knew everything, that I would command from the top of a Pyramid. I’d learned to fake it and adopt the tone of the foreign policy establishment, in which a “muscular” culture of posturing rather than connecting too often dominates. But pretending is exhausting and corrosive. And I believe pretending is the opposite of what diplomacy demands.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“I decided it was time to do my best to articulate the pattern and tone I had been using. I called it “a.l.s.o.” Here is the gist: to form special relationships, we can ask others about their hopes and fears, link them to our own, serve the relationship between us, and open ourselves up.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“When faced with such Pyramid-style efforts, it is tempting to just walk away in frustration. However, it’s a fatal mistake for Constellation mindset leaders to shy away from efforts to organize and codify because the Pyramid mindset assumes that its type of order (hierarchy) is order itself. All the Constellation mindset prophets and practitioners we’ve met thus far cared deeply about organizing, and about orienting the Constellation around a pattern and tone.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“There was one issue that frustrated the students the most by far. It wasn’t Syria or Iraq or surveillance or any foreign policy topic that had been in the news or that I had been quizzed on in my “murder boards” preparing for Senate confirmation. It was guns. Second and third on the list of frustrations, confusions, and concerns were racism and police brutality.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“When community is inclusive and dynamic, it heals. When it’s insular and stagnant, it “kills.” Think death by PowerPoint.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“It’s us. We are the bureaucracy and we are the community. We do this to ourselves.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“At the beginning of each session, I asked each person to write down on an index card one word that described what frustrated them most about their job. Then on the other side of the card, they each wrote one word that best captured what inspired them most and gave them joy about working at the embassy. We collected the cards and used them to create a word cloud. Despite the question being totally open-ended, the answers were the same at all twenty workshops. By far, the word most commonly written for frustration was bureaucracy. The most common for what inspired them: community.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“You know, Matthew, jokes are funny things. I mean they are strange things,” he said. “Think about it: If you play a song and no one likes it, it’s still a song. If you write a play and everyone walks out, it’s still a play. But if you tell a joke and no one laughs, it’s just a sentence.” To me, that was profound. A joke isn’t just the delivery of the words. It’s the connection—a completed circuit. The comedian does his or her part; the audience does theirs. And together they create something new. It’s no longer just you and me. It is us. Engaged. Otherwise, it’s just a sentence.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The field team—made famous by Buffy and Jeremy and all the folks who created the snowflake model—was now rebranded as Team 270, reminding us of the bare minimum number of electoral votes required to win. Getting any more wasn’t necessary. Reaching everybody wasn’t necessary. We just needed to work backward from that number to win. Anyone walking into the campaign HQ was greeted with a giant version of the famous sign from Iowa four years before with one telling addition: respect, empower. include. win.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“We unwittingly did what so many Constellations before and since have done. We took the Pyramid mindset’s bait. To put a point on it, and to our cheers, Obama told the Republicans, “Elections have consequences. . . . I won.” Here’s the thing: elections have consequences for the winner too, and not all of them are good. Not only does a candidate win, but winning-and-losing also wins. The Pyramid mindset wins. The Washington establishment and the media know only this battle mode. Not surprisingly, the “elections have consequences” quip became famous again less than two years later: the Republicans hurled it back when they won control of the House in the midterm elections.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“For Jane Jacobs, and for Follett and Thomson and all the heroes we’ve met in this book, the Constellation is not an alternative model to be deployed in certain circumstances. The Pyramid is the alternative model—and it can be deadly dangerous. The Pyramid mindset—planning away uncertainty, extracting power from individuals for the purposes of simplification and single-mindedness, prizing stability above all else—can save us in an emergency, but it is also the mindset that leads to authoritarianism, patriarchy, and slavery. The Constellation, on the other hand, is not a “model” at all. It’s nature’s playbook. It’s life itself.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Remember, in life, we don’t grow things. We have to let things grow. There’s just no getting around it. Growth and uncertainty come as a package deal. That’s okay, though. More than okay. Uncertainty is never randomness, if we know how to use it. Uncertainty is potential energy like heat from the sun. Uncertainty is what makes the whole system work—we don’t know what new branching will happen and which branches will grow and which will wither and which will connect with other branches. Jimmy Wales and Dee Hock used uncertainty to make rainforests, so to speak, and that’s what all Constellation leaders do. They create the ecosystem for the use and reuse of energy at any scale.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“She taught us to look for heat. “To seek ‘causes’ of poverty . . . is to enter an intellectual dead end,” she wrote, “because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.” Heat has causes, but cold is just what’s left when those processes are gone. That’s why scientists study heat (thermodynamics) and there’s no such field for the study of cold. “Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development. It can be overcome only if the relevant economic processes are in motion.” Only with Constellations.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Dee Hock had the word educe; Jacobs had ramify. It’s the root of ramification, as in consequences. But ramify alone means to branch or differentiate. It is an active verb. She felt that the branching is where energy finds new opportunity—branching out a new brand or product line, branching into a new location. It’s these small, repetitive evolutions that make a profound impact over time. The more dynamic the environment—the more people you have with this mindset—the more energy will be created. And energy, which is just power repeatedly given away and returned, is the coin of the realm.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The two keys for keeping all that energy in rainforests are branching and connecting. Plants literally branch, and animals figuratively do it with reproduction and species variation, and then it all interacts. There’s cooperation. There’s competition. There’s co-creation. That’s life.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Jacobs saw Constellations all over, especially in thriving cities, with busy and shifting groups of neighbors and shopkeepers and industries making up their own seed pattern of competition and cooperation and co-creation. Like snowflakes, great cities to Jacobs were made up of great neighborhoods, and neighborhoods, in turn, of great blocks. She saw beautiful order in this complexity of life at any scale, while the Pyramid mindset, by contrast, saw chaos. The Pyramid imposed its own idea of order in the form of “superblocks” and big housing projects, which Jacobs saw as nothing less than killing life. Such plans failed the snowflake fractal test.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Barack Obama didn’t grow the snowflake. The snowflake grew. The snowflake grew with the energy of respect, empower, include so that it could unleash more energy in a virtuous cycle for energy growth and energy capture. And it turns out this kind of self-repeating growth is common in nature.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“These self-similar patterns are called fractals. Snowflakes—the real things—are also fractals. If you look at a snowflake under a microscope, you see it is made of tiny snowflakes. One of the reasons this kind of fractal growth is so successful—in trees, for instance—is that it can create something incredibly complex without a complex “master plan.” Instead, it begins with a successful pattern (called a “seed pattern” in fractal speak) and repeats it. Trees use energy to create Y branches capable of capturing even greater energy from sunlight by covering more space and creating more surface area.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“the snowflake test. It asks a single, simple question: Is the pattern the same at any place and at any scale? Put another way, does the small pattern you just expressed or just observed look like the big thing you would want if you repeated it and repeated it?”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The leaders of field organizing, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, had put up a makeshift poster that was a reminder to all in the office of what we were doing and how we were doing it: respect, empower, include. It didn’t come from Obama HQ in Chicago, but it spread around the state and eventually to every field office around the country. “Yes We Can” later became the official campaign slogan, but it was respect, empower, include that set the pattern and tone of the campaign, from which flowed bloom loops, interdependence, and the campaign Constellation.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“In fact, it was a deeper version of the lesson I had been trying to teach to fellow fundraisers in Chicago. Listening to others and sharing mutual hopes and fears as Obama had done with us in Louisville was indeed effective, but it was not a tactic. It was not part of a strategy to multiply in order to win. That would have been the Pyramid mindset. Instead, listening and sharing and being open was the campaign. It was both the means and the end. A listening campaign for a listening government. The “how” was the “what.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“I encouraged the volunteers at the seminar to go back home and try something different. Don’t try to win an argument, no matter how justified, no matter how compelling. Instead, sit everyone in a circle and ask each person to share a fear and a hope for this country. Bring a notepad and write it all down. Once everyone has had a chance to express themselves, they will often come up to you and thank you for the dialogue. Technically, you haven’t had a dialogue because you haven’t said much, but it feels that way. Then ask them to please do the same with other groups of their friends and neighbors.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Her point is that everyone wants to use their money for a cause greater than themselves. That cause might not be your cousin or your candidate. Or your political party or even politics at all. But it is something. And by asking them to give, you are helping them make their money flow.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Notice I said that “the pattern grows” and not how we can “grow the pattern.” Most of us use grow in the transitive sense. We say we grew the business, we grew flowers, we grew the economy. Grammarians have relented on this usage over the years, but traditionally grow was an intransitive verb that didn’t take an object. You can plant and cultivate and fertilize corn, but really, the corn grows itself. I would urge us all to recognize what we can—and can’t—control as we talk about how Constellations grow and what patterns they follow.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The Pyramid mindset usually misses what cannot be measured and seeks to analyze individuals in isolation. That’s why it is so ill-equipped to guide us with relationships.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“If you are here to help, please leave. If you are here because your liberation is bound up with ours, please stay. A declaration of interdependence if there ever was one.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“When it finally came time to analyze the data, what mattered most was what the researchers dubbed “psychological safety.” These were the teams in which the relationships were strong enough that mistakes weren’t held against people and it was okay to bring up hard stuff, to disagree, to ask for assistance, and (to quote Churchill) to show “charity towards each other’s shortcomings.” In other words, the best teams were the ones whose members could form special relationships.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“In 2012, Google began a two-year study to determine what makes, in a nod to Stephen Covey, a highly effective team. They found that the distinguishing factor was interdependence. The more interdependent the team, the more it was a real team capable of high levels of effectiveness and not a mere work group.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go