Contemporary Authors

• New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconncted World—And How to Make It Work for You Doubleday (New York, NY), 2018

1. New power : how movements build, businesses thrive, and ideas catch fire in our hyper-connected world https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061467 Heimans, Jeremy, author. New power : how movements build, businesses thrive, and ideas catch fire in our hyper-connected world / Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. First edition. New York : Doubleday, [2018]©2018 1 online resource. ISBN: 9780385541121 () 2. New power : how power works in our hyperconnected world --and how to make it work for you https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039966 Heimans, Jeremy, author. New power : how power works in our hyperconnected world --and how to make it work for you / Jeremy Heimans & Henry Timms. First edition. New York : Doubleday, [2018]©2018 325 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm HM851 .H435 2018 ISBN: 9780385541114 (alk. paper)

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/20/new-power-jeremy-heimans-social-media

  New Power author Jeremy Heimans: 'Like it or not, the old world isn't coming back'
  Decca Aitkenhead

  Social media and online movements such as #MeToo are more potent than experts and elitist thinking, argue the authors of a manual on how to navigate the 21st century
  Decca Aitkenhead

  Fri 20 Apr 2018 12.35 EDT
  Last modified on Tue 24 Apr 2018 04.55 EDT
  Jeremy Heimans
  Jeremy Heimans. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

  There is nothing out of the ordinary about a book that makes one angry. We have all read ones that provoke us, and the internet is an inexhaustible feast for anyone easily outraged. It is unusual, however, to read a book that makes one mad with oneself.

  The co-authors of New Power could not be more likable. Clever, witty and creative, Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans are baby-faced wunderkinds of digital activism; the type whose optimistic energy ought to make one feel hopeful for the future. So it is uncomfortable to confess that I hated almost every word, and wished more than anything for them to be wrong. The reason their book made me so cross with myself was that, if they are right, it means my way of thinking is old-fashioned and elitist – the very problem, in fact, they are trying to solve.

  New Power begins by contrasting a 20th-century model of power – “jealously guarded, closed, inaccessible and leader-driven”, typified by Harvey Weinstein – with a new 21st-century model – “open, participatory peer-driven”, exemplified by the #MeToo movement. No political or commercial organisation will survive, it argues, unless it abandons “old power values” of expertise, confidentiality, formal governance and managerialism, and adopts “new power values” of online crowd-sourcing, radical transparency, leaderless structures and amateurish enthusiasm. The future belongs to Airbnb and Black Lives Matter, in other words, and the book is a manual for us to learn how to be more like them.
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  Heimans is Australian, but has just flown in from the US hours before we meet; Timms is British, but based in New York, so takes part by phone. Heimans is 40, but looks as if he is in his early 20s, and we spend the first five minutes discussing his skin-care regime. He indulges my curiosity about moisturiser choices with self-deprecating humour, but small talk doesn’t feel like his natural register, and the purpose of the book is deadly serious. “The future,” it predicts, “will be won by those who can spread their ideas better, faster and more durably.” In 2018, as Heimans says, “It’s really hard not to make the argument that the forces of misinformation and extremism and nativism are in the lead.”

  He invites us to contrast the success of the new power recruitment strategy of Isis with the failure of the US state department’s old power effort to thwart it; Isis recruits through a peer-to-peer network of youngsters sharing seductive intimacies on social media, which the state department sought to defeat with a calamitously ill-judged Twitter account bearing an image of its official seal and the instruction: “Think Again, Turn Away!”

  “This is really the reason why we wrote the book, and why we made the book quite practical,” Heimans says. “Because we want these tools to be in the hands of those on the side of the angels.” Timms agrees: “We’re going to need a lot of people – the scientists, the community organisers, the people who believe in enlightenment values – to embrace the new power tools and get really good at being powerful.” Their problem, of course, is that this target audience can be as sniffy about it as me.

  “Yes, there’s this emotional resistance,” Heimans reflects equably, trying, I think, to conceal his impatience with it. “There’s a complacency on the liberal side: ‘Why should we have to do this? Why should we get our hands dirty? Who needs a meme when you have a fact?’” That pretty much sums me up, I cheerfully admit. If others want to spend their time sharing amusing video clips on Twitter, they are welcome to, but why do I have to get involved? The question is semi-ironic; his reply is arrestingly earnest.

  “The moral argument is, Decca, you care about these values that the newspaper you work for stands for, and we all have an obligation to learn these skills of building movements, spreading ideas, figuring out how to manage these communities.”

  The case he and Timms make for the superiority of social media-driven, open, mass participatory movements, loosely structured but cleverly engineered for loyalty, is unarguable. By deploying new power tactics, organisations as diverse as Ted talks, Pope Francis’s Vatican and the National Rifle Association are thriving, whereas Uber – which treats its drivers with contempt – is in trouble. This doesn’t, however, alter my problem with the fact that the stunts that capture attention in the new power model are often toe-curlingly inane.

  Gormless frat-boy humour doesn’t, curiously, appear to trouble Heimans. He is a huge admirer of the Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised more than $115m (£82m) for charity in 2015. Then there is Reddit, whose highest-scoring post ever at one point was a message titled: “test post please ignore”, provoking what Heimans calls the “rebellious” instincts of the Reddit community, and others might call asinine. In 2016, the Natural Environment Research Council experimented with new power by launching a #NameOurShip social media campaign. When some bright spark proposed Boaty McBoatface, “the internet,” note Heimans and Timms, apparently amused, “of course agreed.” I am relieved when Heimans tells me he would not have voted for Boaty himself – but less so when he adds that he would have gone for the popular alternative option, “I Like Big Boats and I Cannot Lie”. Public subversion sabotaged the campaign because the NERC, the argument goes, was a new power amateur. Nevertheless, its decision to overrule the Boaty vote and call the ship the RSS David Attenborough instead was, Heimans maintains, a mistake.

  “You’ve got this really dull research vessel that no one would have paid any attention to, at a time when we’re trying to get people enthusiastic about science, at a time when the anti-science crowd is gaining potency. You could have had a crowd of people follow Boaty McBoatface on its journey. You could have had people help fund it. You could have had people engaged as citizen scientists. You could have created a whole community around that work that would have put people into the funnel of creating some intensity around science. Why wouldn’t you do that?”

  “Because it’s moronic!” I want to say – but am embarrassed by how stiff and snooty I sound. Heimans and Timms make me feel as if I have turned into Jacob Rees-Mogg. There is nothing snobbish about the next misgiving I raise. At the heart of every successful new power platform are what Heimans and Timms call “feedback loops” – reward systems of likes, shares and comments engineered to keep us coming back, craving the next dopamine hit of external validation. That this buzz is addictive is obvious; the authors’ assertion that likes on Instagram “aren’t (just) ego boosts”, however, sounds laughably delusional. What other possible function can “Looking gorge, babe!!” serve? Has Timms, I joke, not seen Instagram?
  Henry Timms
  Henry Timms: ‘Elitists will still have a role’

  “We are not here to defend the culture of narcissistic selfies,” he says. “No. We want a healthcare system that works. We want a government that people actually like. We want an education system that gives people a sense of connection. The problem is most of those institutions were created in an old power context. They were built for the 20th century, and sometimes the 19th century, and so we have to start reimagining those institutions so that they don’t fail. You think about a millennial person whose life is full of these feedback loops – a lot of their life is mediated through these new power platforms, right. That’s what they want from their institutions now.”

  But the authors never mention the growing evidence of the psychological damage feedback loops are doing to young people’s mental health. If millennials are addicted to loops, of course they will want more – but if the relentless judging and ranking is making them ill, the state doesn’t have to oblige, does it?

  “I think mental health is a real concern,” Timms acknowledges. “But I think the really huge risk is the damage of distraction. We are all so engaged in our participation – but it distracts us from the things that matter. If feedback loops are only built around cat videos, that’s clearly a distraction. That’s clearly going to distract us from the things that matter the most.”

  Taxes, for example, matter. “They’re critical to any society. But as feedback loops go, the system does not perform particularly well. You essentially just give the government money, and have no real sense of where it ends up. Imagine a world where actually you’re getting much better feedback loops around your taxes, so you pay the taxes and you end up in a world where you find out where the money goes. Maybe you have some more power over how it’s spent. Maybe you hear about the impact along the way.”

  The possibility that anyone might not want this appears not to have crossed Timms’ mind. Personally, I don’t want a feedback loop with HMRC. But as I don’t want to share a meme, upload a video or name a boat either, to infer a contemporary trend from my preferences might be absurd. What is less clear, but more important, is whether Timms and Heimans’ temperamental bias similarly distorts their work on new power. Their authorial voice is reporterly, but the affectation of clear-eyed critical distance is misleading, for both are key protagonists in the new power movements they write about. It is hard, therefore, to know whether the power of the new power they report is objectively real, or just wishful thinking.

  The son of immigrants, by the age of 12 Heimans was already a precocious political pundit on national Australian TV. At 27, he founded a grassroots movement called GetUp!, which, according to their book, now has more members than every political party in Australia combined. He is also the founder and CEO of Purpose.org, an international activist organisation incubating political campaigns worldwide. Timms is the director of 92Y, a cultural centre in New York, and in 2012 founded a philanthropic movement called #GivingTuesday that brings new power tactics to the old challenge of fundraising. They are evangelical pioneers in the world they describe in their book, and I wonder whether this makes them more cheerleaders than observers.

  “We’re optimists,” Heimans concedes. “We do believe that there are inherent benefits to participation, if done well and smartly.” He would still have written exactly the same book, however, if he shared all my misgivings. “We’re very invested in getting this right, because we have to be, because the old world isn’t coming back. Like it or not, it’s just not coming back.”

  Both men see plenty of problems with the new world. Facebook comes out of their book very badly, accused of co-opting the rhetoric of new power while behaving more like the Kremlin. Writing long before the Cambridge Analytica revelations, they predict that “Participation farms”, which harvest our data for profit, will have to be tackled. Politicians such as Donald Trump, who deploy the power of social media for authoritarian ambitions, pose a grave danger, they warn, and leaderless new power movements such as Occupy can unravel into chaos. The Parkland students in Florida campaigning for gun control “get it,” Heimans says. “They know how to harness the energy of a connected crowd.” To succeed, however, they will need to partner with old power. Hashtags and marches won’t do it alone. “Our argument,” explains Heimans, “is not: ‘Throw away these old power skills that you’ve learned, the expertise, the understanding of how to navigate traditional organisational structures.’ We all still need those skills. The key is learning how and when to use old and new.”

  I think Timms might be trying to cheer me up when he agrees. “Elitists will still have a role. They will still be needed.” After all, he jokes, he had his appendix out a month ago. “And no one wants a group of hipster makers to crowdsource an appendectomy, right? No one wants that.”

  New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms is published by Macmillan, price £20. To order a copy for £17, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on orders of more than £10, online only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• Greater Talent Network - https://www.greatertalent.com/speaker/new-power-jeremy-heimans-henry-timms/

  View All Videos of Jeremy Heimans & Henry Timms
  At the Podium

  Why do some leap ahead while others fall back in today’s chaotic, connected world? In New Power: How Power Works in our Hyperconnected World – and How to Make It Work for You (Doubleday, April 2018) Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms reveal the new methods and mindsets that are propelling some leaders and organizations to extraordinary success. They confront the stories of our time–the rise of mega-platforms like Facebook and Uber; the out-of-nowhere victories of Obama and Trump; the unexpected emergence of movements like #MeToo–and reveal what’s really behind them: the rise of “new power.”

  The concept of new power was introduced in Harvard Business Review as its “Big Idea” and this was followed by a popular TED talk by Jeremy Heimans, named one of the year’s best by TED editors. Since then, a global community of practitioners has sprung up around these ideas, with everyone from nurses to environmental activists to business leaders like Richard Branson to the French President using the framework to re-frame how they exercise power and encourage participation. CNN has named new power one of the “Top 10 ideas to change the world.”

  In this dynamic new program, Timms and Heimans unveil the most essential skills to effectively navigate a “new power” world – where power is now flowing very differently and new forms of mass participation and mobilization are now possible. Through compelling case studies, and examples from their own work, they demonstrate how organizations who thrived in the “old power” world can transform to these new realities. Their work offers completely new insights into how leaders and organizations can spread ideas, build movements around their products or causes, develop new business models, reimagine their workplaces, and lead organizations to success in our radically altered world.
  About Jeremy Heimans & Henry Timms

  Jeremy Heimans is co-founder and CEO of Purpose, a home for building 21st century movements and crowd-based social and economic models to tackle the world’s biggest problems. In 2005, he co-founded GetUp, an Australian political organization and internationally recognized social movement phenomenon that today has more members than all of Australia’s political parties combined. And in 2007, Jeremy was a co-founder of Avaaz, the world’s largest online citizens’ movement, now with morethan 43 million members.

  In 2011, Jeremy received the Ford Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Visionary Award for his work as a movement pioneer and the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. He also serves as Chair of the Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Civic Participation. In 2012, Fast Company named him one of the Most Creative People in Business. The World e-Government Forum has named him as one of the top ten people who is changing the world of politics and the internet, and The Guardian named him one of the ten most influential voices on sustainability in the US. And in 2015, Jeremy received the Performance Theatre’s Inspired Leadership Award, whose previous recipients have included Melinda Gates, Richard Branson, and Paul Polman. His work has been profiled in publications like The Economist and The New York Times, and his most recent thinking with Henry Timms on “new power” was featured as the Big Idea in Harvard Business Review, as one of 2014’s top TED talks with more than 1.25m views, and by CNN as one of ten top ideas to change the world in 2015.

  As President and CEO of 92nd Street Y, Henry creates programs and movements that foster learning, civic responsibility, culture and innovation, both in New York City and around the world. Under his leadership, the 144 year-old institution was named to Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” list. He is the founder of #GivingTuesday, a global philanthropic movement that engages people in close to 100 countries and has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for good causes. Henry’s work has been profiled in publications like the Harvard Business Review, and his most recent thinking with Jeremy Heimans on “new power” was featured as the Big Idea in HBR and by CNN as one of the ten top ideas to change the world in 2015. Henry is a Visiting Fellow at Stanford PACS Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils. In addition to being listed on The Nonprofit Times Power & Influence Top 50 for the past three years, Henry was named the Nonprofit Times Influencer of the Year in 2014. Henry was also honored as one of Crain’s New York Business 40 under 40 and City & State’s 50 Most Influential People in Manhattan.
  Speech Topics

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

• The Monthly - https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2018/april/1522501200/malcolm-knox/jeremy-heimans-start

  Jeremy Heimans: the up-start
  The co-founder of GetUp! might be the most influential Australian in the world

  If you were riding in an autorickshaw in Delhi, India, in the past two years, handkerchief over your mouth against the smog, you might have been surprised by your driver giving you a mini-lecture about how the pollution was linked to global climate change. If this was one of the 359 days of the year when Delhi’s pollution exceeded World Health Organization safety standards, and you began coughing, the driver might have offered a mask to replace your handkerchief. Many of the city’s autorickshaw drivers were trained members of “Help Delhi Breathe”, a grassroots movement whose actions resulted in the Indian government announcing an ambitious solar energy scheme, among other measures aimed at saving the thousands of lives lost in Delhi each year to pollution-related causes.

  At around the same time, during the Australian federal election of 2016, Tasmanian hard-right Liberal MP Andrew Nikolic was surprised by a result that bore closer resemblance to a local citizens’ uprising than a political campaign. Launceston doctors and nurses with a lifetime of political inaction, rebelling against budget cuts to public health that Nikolic had supported, mobilised to persuade their fellow voters to kick their member out of office.

  The Delhi autorickshaw drivers, the Launceston GPs and dozens of apparently disconnected progressive campaigners around the world had a common lineage. Help Delhi Breathe had started with a group of frustrated activists pairing up with Purpose, a New York–based organisation co-founded and headed by an Australian, Jeremy Heimans. A critical factor in the 2016 rejection of Nikolic was the contribution by GetUp!, which Heimans co-founded in 2004.

  Once you start looking, the 40-year-old Heimans becomes a Zelig of 21st-century progressive movement-building. Purpose has enabled non-hierarchical, participatory initiatives ranging from Everytown for Gun Safety, the anti-gun violence coalition in the United States, through a diverse portfolio of public health, clean energy, humanitarian and other campaigns. Before setting up Purpose in 2009, Heimans also had a role in founding the international activist organisation Avaaz, which now has close to 47 million members. Fast Company magazine ranked Heimans 11th in its “Most Creative People 2012” list, and he has addressed numerous forums from TED Talks to the World Economic Forum in Davos. He has co-written a book, New Power: How Power Works in our Hyperconnected World – and How to Make It Work for You, which carries personal endorsements from Richard Branson, Jane Goodall and Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza. Heimans might be the most connected and influential Australian on the world stage, yet his profile here is minimal. As GetUp! co-founder Amanda Tattersall says, “Jeremy is a complete genius, but nobody here knows who he is.”

  Although Heimans’ movement-building is synonymous with online and mobile technology, his campaign experience dates back to doorknocking, paper petitions and street marches. At the age of eight, Heimans responded to a third-grade challenge – “What would you do for world peace if you were arriving on earth in a spaceship?” – by writing a song called “Rainbow of Peace”, which won the Australian section of the International Children’s Peace Prize. For Heimans, that meant a trip to Disneyland to collect his award, and another trip to the Banner of Peace conference in Bulgaria. (“A great cultural exchange”, Heimans said looking back on it as a 15-year-old, but also “a kind of communist PR job”.) Heimans’ public speaking prowess led to meeting Prime Minister Bob Hawke and appearing on A Current Affair in 1990 when he was 12. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Heimans’ intelligence and cogency reduced the ACA reporter “to moronic expressions of bewilderment”. There was a trip to the Netherlands to meet Nobel Prize laureates, a short film about children that was presented to the then foreign minister, Gareth Evans, and at one point Heimans rounded up 50 teenagers to tell members of the NSW parliament pretty much how to do their jobs. As a schoolboy, he had a business card and a rented mobile phone (“really the best way to communicate with the real world from school,” he told a newspaper).

  Heimans is the first to admit that he was “a strange child”. The youngest of three (his middle brother, the portraitist Ralph Heimans, is eight years older), he was more focused on adults than other children. “When I started at Sydney Boys High there was an ‘Anti-Heimans Movement’, which wasn’t a real thing but a reflection of people’s horror at this talkative kid getting up in front of the assembly and on TV in Year 7.”

  To talk to, Heimans has a rumpled charm that shows a long evolution from the “arrogant brat” he once called himself. Tattersall, who co-founded GetUp! with Heimans and David Madden in 2004, says, “Jeremy is so bright and quick, and has a sophisticated way of understanding the world, but back then it could get in the way of his relationships. It wasn’t spectrum behaviour but it was on the edge of it – not fully picking up how some stuff was landing.” By all accounts, Heimans soon learnt how to prevent his intelligence from intimidating others. “He’s quite softly spoken, not a stereotypical ‘big personality’,” says Evan Thornley, the tech entrepreneur and former Victorian Labor MP who helped fund GetUp! and mentored Heimans. “He started out as a thought leader, but he’s become a significant people leader. People follow him.”

  Loud or soft, the talking was innate. His father, Frank Heimans, told an interviewer in 1992 that his son at nine months of age was presented with some food and pronounced from his high chair, “Actually, I don’t like it.” Heimans says his parents were “befuddled, encouraging and protective” of his precociousness. Frank was a documentary filmmaker whose work on subjects as diverse as the Holocaust and Indigenous Australians’ relationship with the environment interested him, but “independence and entrepreneurialism” was his father’s key legacy. “The cycle as an independent filmmaker was that you had to hustle to raise the funds, make the film, market it … and then it starts again. The things I’ve done have followed a similar pattern. It’s not scary to me because I didn’t have a dad who was an employee of a big company or a big organisation. Being passionate about something and going out and making it – he was the model for that.”

  While politics was not a regular dinner-table topic, Heimans’ family history left a deep mark. “The founding story of my life is this kid who had a narrow escape,” Heimans says, explaining that his father had been conceived in 1942 in an attic in the Dutch town of Tilburg, where his Jewish family hid from the Nazis – protected by a Christian family. “He’d been given a pacifier to stop him making noise so the neighbours wouldn’t hear him.” The story goes that when the Allies liberated Tilburg, in 1944, Frank’s head was swollen from oxygen deprivation because he’d never been outside. “One thing he did that I really admire is that he turned outward, not inward,” explains Heimans. “He didn’t think his first duty was ‘protecting the tribe’. He devoted his career to making films about other people’s injustices.”

  Frank emigrated to Australia when he was 12. His family was smaller than that of his wife, Josette, who arrived from Lebanon in 1965. “She came of age in Lebanon’s glory period in the ’50s and ’60s when Beirut was this sophisticated, pluralistic, multi-religious kind of place,” Heimans says. “She went to a Catholic school but she had Muslim friends, Catholic friends, Jewish friends – she wasn’t leading a stratified life. It’s a reminder that history is not linear. Her upbringing was the story of Beirut as the so-called paradise that was.”

  Most of Josette’s Lebanese-Jewish family were in Sydney and they provided the cultural influence on Heimans’ upbringing. “French was the calm language, and swear words were delivered in Arabic. It was not a super-religious situation. We’d go to the Sephardic synagogue in Woollahra: very austere, no fanfare, no organs, women upstairs and men downstairs, old guys singing out of key. At home, religion was only nominally there and we never spoke about it, but the cultural traditions were very prominent.”

  Ingrained was the knowledge that both of his parents had come to Australia under duress, and refugee policy was among his early political interests. He was surrounded by adults who had fled conflict and, typical of his time, he grew up in fear of a third world war. As a five-year-old, it was the theatre of politics that hooked him. “Bob Hawke had just been elected prime minister, and I remember Malcolm Fraser’s tearful concession speech. There was something about this thing that generated such drama and emotion. I remember when I was seven, in 1984, handing out pro-immigration leaflets in time for the election … Other kids might have been interested in sport, but my sport was politics.”

  With a tertiary entrance ranking of 99.95, Heimans started an arts/law degree at the University of Sydney, but soon dropped law to focus on an honours arts degree in government. A brief stint at management consultancy firm McKinsey & Company dissuaded him from corporate life, and he won a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship to study at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. There was an exchange year in Paris, and he commenced a PhD at Oxford aged 25 before leaving after two terms.

  Heimans was lucky enough to be able to “try on different suits for size” and define his future by which alternatives he was rejecting. “The McKinsey phase was business and the language and lens of business. Oxford was the track to being a technocrat: get a PhD, work for the UN or an international institution. There was a little bit of horror when I left Oxford, but I wanted to explore more active engagement, campaign against the Iraq War. My supervisor, Ngaire Woods, said, ‘I guess you’re right, Jeremy. The world needs more activists and fewer reflectivists.’” Heimans had figured out that he was suited to an “outside-in role, which was pretty consistent with my childhood”.

  Independence of spirit was something Heimans shared with David Madden, whom he met at Harvard while they were both waiting to be interviewed for a Rhodes Scholarship. Madden, two years older, a law graduate with an army background, was the son of a Canberra magistrate.

  “Everyone was dressed to impress, but I remember that Jeremy was rocking a pair of Blunnies,” Madden recalls. “We were both very ambivalent about the Rhodes and, perhaps at a deeper level, these ‘traditional’ pathways and institutions in general. Jeremy was wearing that ambivalence on his sleeve or, rather, on his feet!”

  The pair became involved in the Harvard Living Wage campaign, supporting higher pay for service workers at the university. Most weeks they met in an Indian restaurant and discussed how to develop grassroots campaigning from petitions and marches to “thinking on the edge of how you engage, inspire and motivate people”.

  The pair stood at a crossroads. Given all their advantages and all the offers that could come their way – employment, security, identity and, ultimately, wealth – they prized their independence most of all. But if they were to be political activists, was true independence ultimately possible? That question would influence the course Heimans and Madden undertook.

  During the 2004 US presidential election, Heimans and Madden were committed to campaigning against the Iraq War. They raised money mostly from small donations and produced an independent television campaign, which ran in 12 states, contrasting President George W. Bush joking about not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq with clips of an American mother speaking about her son being killed in the search for those non-existent weapons. The organisation that Heimans and Madden helped start, Win Back Respect, attracted an advisory board that included former senator Gary Hart, and former advisers to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Win Back Respect funded a speaking tour by general-turned-Democrat politician Wesley Clark and also flew the Band of Sisters, female relatives of US soldiers, around the campaign trail to bedevil Vice-President Dick Cheney.

  Heimans and Madden’s inspiration came from MoveOn, the public advocacy group founded in 1998 by software entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd. Its main aims were to support and campaign for “progressive” issues and electoral candidates. MoveOn soon compiled mass email lists and developed a decentralised power structure to mobilise protest broadly and quickly.

  Elections in 2004 saw crushing defeats for centre-left candidates in the US and Australia. Bush won a second term, and John Howard seized control of both houses of parliament. Heimans came home to Sydney that December to visit family and friends. At a pub, he ran into Amanda Tattersall, whom he had known in activist circles since undergraduate days. Then a community outreach organiser with the Labor Council of New South Wales (now Unions NSW), Tattersall had been active in Iraq War and refugee policy protests. Heimans told her that he and Madden would love to set up an Australian version of MoveOn. “We should sit down properly in daylight hours and not have a drunken pub conversation,” Tattersall recalls saying. Two days later, Heimans and Tattersall met again in a cafe at the city end of Oxford Street.

  “I loved his idea,” Tattersall says. “We’d been trying to build an activists’ register, and I thought, Oh my God, this is exactly what we need.” Tattersall had been doing some digital organising, setting up a 15- to 20,000-people email list to run the peace movement, “but we were bumbling our way through without a model, and Jeremy presented that model: a massive email list with an organisation behind it that runs multi-issue campaigns … I had been setting up campaigns and then dissolving them once they were over. Instead, we could have one thing and brand it across movements, a piece of social infrastructure for progressive politics.”

  Tattersall undertook to secure initial funding within 48 hours. She sent a text message to John Robertson, her boss at the Labor Council, and the next day he committed $50,000. “Because of where the union movement was at, crisis dovetailed with opportunity,” Tattersall says. Heimans returned to the US, but two months later he came back with Madden. They worked out of Tattersall’s office, experimenting with names on A4 sheets of paper (they tried MoveOn Australia before settling on GetUp!), hiring staff, and defining the organisation’s fundamental aims in order to pitch for more start-up capital. After the Labor Council, the first funders included the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU; then under Bill Shorten’s leadership) and Evan Thornley. “They were shopping around a video of what they’d done in the US,” Thornley recalls. “Jeremy was always creative, looking for different styles of campaigning. His intelligence was only half of it, though. Intelligence alone doesn’t make a leader. It’s his moral values. He knows what he believes in.”

  Within those first days, however, the seed for more than a decade of attacks on GetUp! was planted: the unions were giving it money, so GetUp! had to be a union and ALP front. Senator Eric Abetz would dedicate years to the failed effort of having GetUp! classified, for funding purposes, as an “associated entity” of the ALP. The Murdoch media would tirelessly point out the overlap between GetUp! and the likes of Shorten and Robertson (future Labor leaders), Tim Dixon and Lachlan Harris (professional associates of Heimans who would work with Labor), and Cate Faehrmann (who later became a NSW upper-house Greens parliamentarian, and until recently was the chief of staff to Richard Di Natale) to build a picture of a Labor–Greens–GetUp! conspiracy. In its support for the controversial Australian Federal Police raid on the AWU’s premises late last year, the Coalition was still burrowing away at the union’s donation to GetUp! back in 2006, as the Registered Organisations Commission investigated whether Shorten followed correct procedures.

  And yet, to be allied with Labor or any other party was specifically what Heimans and Madden were rejecting when they founded GetUp! “We thought the parties were hopeless, they’d completely failed to provide an effective opposition to the conservative policies of the Howard government,” Heimans says. “We believed the only way to revitalise the progressive movement in Australia was to have nothing to do with changing the political party apparatus.”

  Tattersall, a disenchanted ALP member at the time GetUp! was founded, says the donors were drawn to the GetUp! idea because it wasn’t about a political party. “They had been throwing their money away on political parties, and this was about independent politics, something sustainable that might make parties better.”

  Heimans describes GetUp!’s pitch: “If you want a democratic anchor for progressive Australian politics, that is what we’ll be. We’ll keep all the bastards honest – Coalition, Labor, the Greens.” GetUp! campaigns would follow the values of “social justice, economic fairness, environmental sustainability”, fall where they may in the political debate. GetUp! was far from neutral on those debates, but Heimans says it took the side of the issue, not a party. “If an other-universe progressive version of Malcolm Turnbull had been in power in 2009 pushing gay marriage, we would follow those issues and be behind legalising it. That’s always been the posture and I’m very proud of how GetUp! has maintained it.”

  Madden says the Coalition, before its Howard-era purge of “wets”, could as easily have been a beneficiary of GetUp!’s campaigns. “When we were growing up there was a genuine [small-l] liberal wing of the Liberal Party. Many of GetUp!’s positions would have been fine to those in the ‘wets’. Indeed if you look at GetUp!’s membership you’ll see plenty of disaffected Liberal supporters.”

  Small-l liberals were wooed: MP Petro Georgiou would work alongside GetUp! on a campaign to legalise the abortion drug RU486, and former Liberal leader John Hewson was enticed onto the GetUp! board soon after its launch in 2005. Hewson resigned only weeks later, replaced by Don Mercer, who was chairperson of mining services company Orica. Joe Skrzynski, the chairperson of CHAMP Private Equity and former SBS chairperson, and Lonely Planet founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler would, over the next decade, be part of what Heimans calls a “potpourri” of donors motivated to do something outside the existing political parties.

  GetUp! membership grew to 230,000 in its first two years as it expanded its presence in the lead-up to the 2007 election, most notably in its campaigns against the imprisonment of David Hicks and against Howard in his seat of Bennelong. As a result, the attack on GetUp!’s independence solidified into a firm Coalition belief. Yet, both before and after Kevin Rudd won power that year, GetUp!’s links with Labor were fracturing. Robertson grew disenchanted with its focus on middle-class interests at the expense of economic fairness, while Shorten’s successor at the AWU, Paul Howes, had a personality clash with Heimans. “We were really passionate about maintaining independence and not letting it fall under anyone’s control,” Heimans explains. “As soon as GetUp! became hackish or institutional, it was going to fail.”

  Nor was there a cosy GetUp!–Greens alliance, GetUp! separating itself from what its founders saw as the Greens’ ideology-driven policies. “The parties were confused,” Tattersall says, “because none of them could control GetUp!”

  Heimans and Madden, meanwhile, saw their role as “founders”, leaving the organisation in the hands of its first executive director, Brett Solomon, formerly of Oxfam, who surrounded himself with talented operators working out of an office above the Edinburgh Castle pub in Pitt Street, Sydney. The founders remained on the board after the dynamic Solomon stepped aside in 2008, replaced by Simon Sheikh.

  When interviewed by Heimans and Evan Thornley, Sheikh says he was “starstruck” but soon “dumbfounded”. Thinking he was applying for an operations role, Sheikh discovered he was being sized up for the leadership. Wes Boyd, co-founder of MoveOn, had mentored Heimans, impressing on him that naivety could be a strength in new power organisations, and now Heimans was following that advice, hiring a 22-year-old who hadn’t been inhibited by bad experience. Sheikh found Heimans to be a stimulating collaborator, always driving the organisation to innovate. “While you could tell he was the smartest guy in the room, he never acted like he was,” Sheikh says. “He never felt he had to prove himself, which meant he could focus on getting on with the job.”

  Heimans never micromanaged the executive directors; he encouraged experimentation and was driven by data on membership numbers and each campaign’s effectiveness. GetUp! asserted its independence from Labor with a television ad playfully ‘showing’ John Howard cheering Rudd’s modest carbon emissions target. With Labor in government, Heimans says GetUp! continued to speak truth to power, to the ALP’s chagrin. The board no longer had unionists like Robertson and Shorten but private equity investors who wanted to see a social return on their investment. They and the staff sought to mobilise previously disengaged citizens rather than the activist core.

  In 2007 Heimans and Madden helped start Avaaz, a global version of MoveOn and GetUp!, and in 2009 Heimans co-founded Purpose. He, Madden and Tattersall left the GetUp! board after its 10-year anniversary in 2015. The experience had clarified Heimans’ ideas about the relationship between “old” and “new” power. Purpose, what Heimans calls “a mothership for the movement-building work I’ve done over the course of my life”, operates by developing new organisations in online “labs” and experimenting with models of issues-based campaigning. Its list of achievements includes playing various roles in the formation of All Out, now a 1.7-million member LGBT movement, the Women’s Marches following Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the NY Renews climate campaign that led to the passage of New York State’s significant Climate and Community Protection Act, and climate campaigns in Brazil, India, Kenya and Australia as well as in the US and Europe. It also consults to existing organisations, including Everytown for Gun Safety, the American Civil Liberties Union, UNICEF and UNHCR, Google, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Fred Hollows Foundation (creating its online See Now campaign, which reached 5.6 million social media users within three months).

  Heimans says that Purpose embraces “pragmatic idealism” and doesn’t adopt purist positions. “We like to say we can speak the language of an Occupy activist, a Facebook product manager and a UN technocrat.” It also speaks the language of Unilever and Nike, two of its corporate partners, as well as that of #MeToo. If a partner “veers off course” and does things that nobody at Purpose can support, “then we have to fire them”. This is underpinned by Purpose’s status under American law as a public-benefit corporation, a new legal structure that mandates companies to serve the wider society rather than simply its shareholders, giving an economic value to philanthropy.

  While leading the organisation, Heimans also clarified his ideas in a Harvard Business Review article he co-wrote with Henry Timms of the 92nd Street Y cultural and community centre, and they have developed these in the book New Power. They contrast “old power”, akin to currency that is hoarded and used to exert authority, with “new power”, which channels and distributes agency, acting more like a current. New power values include open-source collaboration, radical transparency and self-organisation; old power values include competition, exclusivity, confidentiality, expertise, managerialism and long-term loyalty.

  To further explain their ideas, Heimans and Timms developed the “new power compass”, which shows how the old and new models and values intersect. There are “castles” (those with an old power model and old power values, such as government taxation offices); “co-opters” (those with a new power model but old power values, such as ISIS, Facebook and Uber); “cheerleaders” (those with an old power model but new power values, such as corporations like Unilever and media organisations like The Guardian); and “crowds” (those with a new power model and new power values, such as Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Airbnb and Wikipedia).

  There is obviously a lot of unpacking of these ideas, and New Power is in part a users’ manual for online movement builders. “We wanted to talk about the exemplars – break down and make rich why they are exemplars and why some are failures, so readers can bring that into the work that they do,” Heimans says.

  But Timms and Heimans started writing New Power before Brexit and Trump, and long before Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power in China. While writing it, Heimans was seeing how some of the far right’s success aligned with the story of new power. “Trump – and this is also true of ISIS – is giving people more agency, unleashing their creativity: ‘Do your worst and I’ll pay your legal fees. I’ll pluck your memes out of the obscurity of Reddit or 4chan and tweet them out.’” Heimans explains that Trump is not trying to circumscribe how his movement behaves. “Trump’s value proposition to those people is very old power, offering certainty: ‘I’ll look after everything, I know you’re anxious about the future, I alone can fix it.’ ISIS is a medieval theocracy that could not be more old power, a brutal hierarchy. And yet how they spread that energy and build that movement is very new power: letting their supporters do what they want, not being doctrinal in allowing them to build on their idea in an extensible way. My worry is that this combination of strategies could be very effective. If you’re a potential ISIS recruit, you’re getting both more agency and more belonging and certainty.”

  Heimans says that the aim of New Power changed as it was being written. Now it is about getting new power “into the hands of the angels”. But as the GetUp! experience has shown, it’s rarely simple. Who is funding the “angels”, and what influence do those funders exert? How do the angels reconcile their own conflicting aims? And, going back to the most personal thread in Heimans’ life, how to maintain independence when the money has different ideas? Or, in a much older language: how do you stay effective without selling out?

  Madden, who now works for social ventures investment company Omidyar Network, says independence was never negotiable in any enterprise he and Heimans set up. “We always took the position that if a donor wasn’t willing to support a 100 per cent independent GetUp!, then we weren’t interested, and we would always make that clear to people who wanted to get involved.”

  Thornley, from a donor’s point of view, says Heimans never compromised values for money. “The deal is, if you support the values, please give money.”

  Youth is well represented at Purpose and GetUp!, and in their membership. Heimans’ own transition from professional young person to established player, from mentee to mentor, has refreshed his optimism. He is no longer the kid who was only interested in adults, and what he has found coming up behind him is an antidote to despair: new power for new people. “I was a very unusual child in that I believed I could impact the wider world. The expectations I had as an unusual kid in the ’80s and ’90s – young people today have very good reason to believe they can do that, and they are doing it more effectively.”

  There’s a lot of talk, but it’s not all talk. Real change has been achieved. GetUp! helped get John Howard out and David Hicks home. In its first year, it played a major role in securing $88 million in extra funding for the ABC. It now has more than a million members, a new power organisation dwarfing the membership of all political parties combined. Thornley says the biggest change in Heimans has been the evolution from ideas and the “founder” mentality at GetUp! to “proving his leadership chops” at Purpose. The organisations that Heimans founded and nurtured have achieved tangible results around the world. The citizens of Delhi can be confident their children will breathe cleaner air than they do. The anti-gun movement in America will outlast Trump. Same-sex marriage will be legal for more people every year. Corporations now seriously seek a social dividend. “When I watch these levers work together and bring about dramatic change, that’s the most satisfying thing,” Heimans says. “Earlier in my career I would have been more excited about the numbers, the 10 million people signing a petition. Now we can be much more active and creative in getting new ways for people to participate. The satisfaction is in seeing it all come together.”

  Malcolm Knox

  Malcolm Knox is a former literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and has won two Walkley awards for journalism. His books include Jamaica and The Life.

• New Power - https://thisisnewpower.com/the-authors/

  JEREMY HEIMANS

  (right) is the co-founder and CEO of Purpose, a company specializing in building social movements around the world. In 2005, he co-founded GetUp!, an Australian political organization with more members than all of Australia’s political parties combined, and he is a co-founder of the global campaigning organization Avaaz and the LGBT rights platform All Out. He is a recipient of the Ford Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Visionary Award for his work as a movement pioneer. He has been named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business.

Heimans, Jeremy: NEW POWER
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Heimans, Jeremy NEW POWER Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 4, 3 ISBN: 978-0-385-54111-4
A study of the "new power" made possible by connectivity.
Heimans, CEO of Purpose, which "builds and supports social movements," and Timms, executive director of the 92nd Street Y, debut with an illuminating discussion of how technology and our rising expectations have enabled us to achieve our goals on a greater-than-ever scale. Old power, write the authors, depends on expertise and what you own or control, as in Fortune 500 companies. New power relies on connectivity and the desire to participate and collaborate, as in Uber, Airbnb, and Facebook (as well as protest movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter and terrorist groups like the Islamic State). Using online engagement, crowdsourcing, and peer- to-peer approaches, new power offers a fresh means of participation and a "heightened sense of agency" for all involved. The authors detail how power--old, new, or a combination of both--is now exercised by people, companies, and movements to quietly shape our lives in impactful ways. Old power has the top-down voice of a corporate press release; new power soars through "meme drops," which "spread sideways, coming most alive when remixed, shared, and customized by peer communities"--e.g., in the ice bucket challenge and Pepe the Frog. Heimans and Timms provide fascinating examples of new power at work: how NASA enlisted the crowd (nonexperts) to foster open innovation; the heightened participatory experience of worship at Denver's House of All Sinners and Saints, where whoever shows up is in charge; and how crowdsourcing of ideas rejuvenated the Lego brand. The authors also offer a cogent analysis of the contrasting campaigning styles of Barack Obama (participatory) and Donald Trump ("leader of a vast, decentralized social media army" via Twitter). Their accounts of how diverse groups like the National Rifle Association and TED use both old and new power approaches with great success may well inspire many.
These ideas--first introduced in the Harvard Business Review----will intrigue anyone who wants
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to channel the new power of the crowd.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Heimans, Jeremy: NEW POWER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959685/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3a58f801. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959685
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
New Power: How Power Works in
Our Hyperconncted World--And How
to Make It Work for You
David Pitt
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p10. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconncted World--And How to Make It Work for You. By Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. Apr. 2018.352p. Doubleday, $27.95 (9780385541114); e-book, $14.99 (9780385541121). 303.48.
What, you may ask, is "new power"? It's Facebook; it's Uber; it's #blacklivesmatter; it's the power of social media and the internet; and it's based on a simple idea: anyone and everyone can participate. Heimans, a political activist, teams up with philanthropist Timms to explore this new power structure and show readers how they, too, can affect real change in the world by exploiting the interconnectedness of the world's population and the fact that ideas can move around the world at the speed of light (and, not incidentally, the fact that ideas can't be controlled by any one person or group of people). Using concrete examples to illustrate their points, the authors build up a picture of a world controlled not by the traditional power structures (corporations, political groups) but by its ordinary citizens, uniting in a common goal even though they're scattered around the world, creating change with the power of their words and ideas. A thought-provoking and eye-opening book.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pitt, David. "New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconncted World--And How to Make It
Work for You." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 10. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250762/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b2d238ff. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250762
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
New Power: How Movements Build,
Businesses Thrive, and Ideas Catch
Fire in Our Hyperconnected World
Publishers Weekly.
264.49-50 (Dec. 4, 2017): p53. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
New Power: How Movements Build, Businesses Thrive, and Ideas Catch Fire in Our Hyperconnected World
Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. Doubleday, $27.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-385-54111-4
Heimans and Timms expand a popular Harvard Business Review article on the concept of "new power"--"open, participatory, and peer-driven," as opposed to "old power," which is "closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven"--with mixed success in their first book. The authors draw on their own experiences (Heimans's as CEO and cofounder of consultancy Purpose, Timms's as executive director of New York City's 92nd Street Y), as well as on interviews with other innovators and an expansive review of examples of the "new power," including Airbnb, Black Lives Matter, and the Ice Bucket Challenge. Although Heimans and Timms are effective communicators, the book suffers from too many case studies--however interesting individual entries are--and not enough structure and analysis. Heimans and Timms don't shy away from the darker side of "new power" (e.g., ISIS's social media campaigns) but also don't explore it in any depth, instead focusing throughout on success stories. The book ends leaving the reader with the lingering question of whether the phenomenon it identifies will "do more to bring us together and to build a more just world than it does to divide us and exacerbate inequalities." (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"New Power: How Movements Build, Businesses Thrive, and Ideas Catch Fire in Our
Hyperconnected World." Publishers Weekly, 4 Dec. 2017, p. 53. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518029513/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=acfd7291. Accessed 14 July 2018.
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"Heimans, Jeremy: NEW POWER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959685/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=3a58f801. Accessed 14 July 2018. Pitt, David. "New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconncted World--And How to Make It Work for You." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 10. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250762/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b2d238ff. Accessed 14 July 2018. "New Power: How Movements Build, Businesses Thrive, and Ideas Catch Fire in Our Hyperconnected World." Publishers Weekly, 4 Dec. 2017, p. 53. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518029513/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=acfd7291. Accessed 14 July 2018.

• Stanford Social Innovation Review
  https://ssir.org/book_reviews/entry/road_map_to_a_new_world
  Word count: 934

  Road Map to a New World

  In New Power, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms argue that power and influence are being driven by a new participatory and peer-driven paradigm.

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  Review By Ann Christiano Summer 2018

  New Power

  Jeremy Heimans & Henry Timms

  310 pages, Doubleday, 2018

  Buy the book »

  As details emerged this spring about Cambridge Analytica’s mining of Facebook data to help manipulate elections around the world, it was easy to succumb to a feeling of powerlessness. It can seem insurmountable to drive change in an environment shaped by resources beyond the reach of anyone working to change the status quo. And yet, just as the public learned about Cambridge Analytica, a group of high school students from Parkland, Florida, captured the civic conversation on preventing gun violence. With few resources and without attachment to any organization, they have generated mass protests and brought millions of voices to bear on legislators and others whose decisions profoundly affect the availability of guns.

  These two initiatives are more alike than they are different. Both are subverting traditional power structures to gain their own power and influence. One was extremely well funded, the other runs on the passion of grieving students. But both used the power of platforms to gain traction for their ideas.

  New Power, written by Purpose CEO Jeremy Heimans and Giving Tuesday cofounder Henry Timms, helps us both to understand the moment unfolding around us and to navigate this new world. The term “new power” describes the participatory and peer-driven model of those who share control to drive influence. The authors liken it to an electric current, which is most effective when it’s channeled rather than hoarded. New power is characterized by radical transparency, a willingness to allow communities to reinvent or re-create content, shared control, and actionable ideas that people make their own rather than simply consume. It is not defined by social platforms like Facebook and YouTube, though ideas well designed to flourish in a new power world certainly transmit far more quickly on these platforms than through traditional and highly controlled media.

  By contrast, old power refers to power that is held by a small group and inaccessible for the vast majority. Old power structures are hierarchical, discrete, and carefully guarded—the authors refer to them as castles. In these castles, power is a treasure—held by just a few and carefully protected. Castles are hierarchical and led by small groups who hold control and make key decisions.

  According to Heimans and Timms, new power requires approaches that are actionable, connect to communities, and—perhaps most significantly—are extensible, meaning that they create an opportunity for communities to bring their own content and methods. Drawing from examples as seemingly disparate as the Ice Bucket Challenge, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and the techniques that the Islamic State group uses to recruit from online communities, the book illustrates the practical ways in which those who understand new influence models can attract others to their cause.

  If your canon for fomenting social change includes Rules for Radicals, Here Comes Everybody, Made to Stick, and Switch, you have probably been craving an up-to-date version—a new road map for driving change in a world where power belongs not to small concentrated groups who fiercely protect it, but to those who share control and incite others to cocreate. Heimans and Timms have given us that, and with it a construct for understanding how new tools and the personalities that have arisen by using them are changing power dynamics.

  New Power isn’t an indictment of old power, but it does suggest that those adhering solely to old power structures may be losing their influence as a result. We no longer live in a world where it is possible for a few to hold power. For those who came of age in old power structures or who have relied on them, experimenting with new power approaches will feel scary and risky. For younger generations who grew up in new power structures, such experimentation offers a way to use the platforms they’re already using to communicate with their friends as strategic tools that can help them achieve their goals.

  The irony of the book is that new power is not new. Effective agents of lasting cultural and social change have often used the tools of new power to achieve their goals. The principles of new power were at the root of success in suffrage, the civil rights movement, and even the Revolutionary War. In each of these causes, communities without money, position, or elected office led radical social change by infecting others with their ideas and inviting them to take their own approaches to gain their own power and influence. Making change requires those without power to exert pressure on the institutions and individuals who hold it close. We live in a moment when the confluence of new platforms, a growing understanding of how to use them, and insights in behavioral science and growing differences throughout the world are leading us to a significant moment in social change. This book could be our road map.
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  Ann Christiano holds the Frank Karel Chair in Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.
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• Pro Bono
  https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2018/05/conversation-jeremy-heimans/
  Word count: 2747

  In Conversation: Jeremy Heimans
  Jeremy Heimans is the co-founder and CEO of Purpose, co-founder of GetUp! and co-author of New Power, which reveals how the ability to harness the energy of the connected crowd is reshaping politics, business and society.
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  Heimans has been building movements since the age of eight.

  As a child activist he ran media campaigns and lobbied leaders on issues like children’s rights and nuclear non-proliferation.

  By 2004, he had dropped out of Oxford to co-found a campaign group in the US presidential elections that used crowdfunding to help a group of women, whose loved ones were in Iraq, hire a private jet to follow vice-president Dick Cheney on his campaign stops, in what became known as the “Chasing Cheney” tour.

  The following year he co-founded GetUp, which has since become an internationally recognised social movement phenomenon and has more members than all of Australia’s political parties combined.

  In the last decade Heimans has received the Ford Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Visionary Award for his work as a movement pioneer, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader, Fast Company ranked him 11th on their annual list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business and the Guardian named him one of the 10 most influential voices on sustainability in the US.

  Heimans, who is originally from Sydney but who now lives in New York, is also the man behind Purpose, which was launched in 2009 as a home for building 21st century movements and ventures that use the power of participation to change the world.

  It harnesses what Heimans calls “new power” to work with leading organisations, activists, businesses and philanthropies to put purpose and participation at their core.

  Heimans’ thinking on “new power” was featured as the Big Idea in Harvard Business Review, as one of 2014’s top TED talks with more than 1.25 million views, and by CNN as one of the Top Ten Ideas to Change the World in 2015.

  He is now back in Australia to attend the Sydney Writers Festival and promote his new book, New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World – and How to Make It Work for You, co-written with #givingtuesday founder Henry Timms.

  Heimans has also announced a Sydney office of Purpose.

  Here he talks to Pro Bono News about what drives him, a new framework for understanding power in the 21st century and why we’ve got to get good at the new tools before the extremists and the haters do.

  You’ve been an activist pretty much all of your life, starting from very young. Where does your drive to change the world come from?

  Jeremy Heimans.

  Well, it helps to be the child of immigrants. So both my parents were immigrants to Australia and I think that always meant that I had a global perspective, and I think also their stories shaped mine, as with all kids their stories are shaped by their parents.

  My dad was born in hiding from the Nazis, he spent the first 18 months of his life in an attic. So a lot of the stories of my childhood were stories of injustice and how to overcome that. So I think I had a kind of desire to change the world that was sort of imprinted on me by my parents

  I was also always fascinated by politics and politics as means of making change, so I was sort of captivated by the ways that people tried to change the world and I think that was a part of it as well.

  You are now back in Australia to announce you are opening a Sydney branch to Purpose, what led to that decision?

  In many ways, it was very natural given the fact that we started GetUp! here a number of years ago and it’s my home country and really over the years many of the best of our team have really, even out of Australia, have been Australian. So Purpose has always attracted Australians and I think it’s a great moment for Purpose to be coming back home.

  We do so much work that I think would benefit from both an Australian perspective but also where Australia could benefit. So we work on issues like climate change, refugees, debates around immigration, human rights issues – these are all issues that are very present in the Australian public debate right now. And so I think we can bring quite a bit to that and I also think the background we have as an organisation, purely focused on social impact, certainly among agencies I think is quite unique. There’s some great folks already in Australia, but I think we can add depth of experience on that. And I’m excited to do that.

  I’m also really excited about the possibilities within the philanthropic space in Australia. So I think there’s a real opportunity to get philanthropists being bolder in funding movement building, funding public mobilisation, funding things that really help grow power from the bottom up. And I think Purpose can play a role in making the case for that to foundations and philanthropists in Australia, in the same way that we’ve done I think in the US and in Europe.

  What’s the driving motivation for Purpose?

  Well really, we exist to use our powers which I think are mobilising people in new ways and telling stories that really shift the public narrative about issues. We exist to do that on any issue that helps to build a more open, a more just and a more habitable world and obviously we’re in a big fight right now globally for that world. It’s not like everybody supports those values. And so in the age of Trump, in the age of Brexit, in the age of climate change denialism we have our work cut out for us. And so our work at Purpose is really to advance those values using the tools in our toolkit which are really about how you build movements, mobilise the public and shift public narratives.

  What’s the importance of storytelling when you’re bringing people together?

  It’s central. I think one of the challenges of our age is that people who support science and reason and proof tend to think that that is enough. It’s enough to be right. And it just isn’t. If you’re a climate scientist up against a denier, you need more than trees. You need to be able to prosecute an argument in the ways that arguments get prosecuted in the early 21st century. If you are a doctor up against anti-vaxxers in the same way.

  I think stories really help bridge that gap. And we’ve seen on so many issues we’ve worked on, whether it’s Syria, whether it’s refugees, even on climate change, that when you can break things down into stories, not just stories, you can connect those stories to action and that’s the key thing, you can really break through.

  When you look at the work Purpose does, and the same with GetUp!, it has people at the heart of it and public mobilisation, which speaks to what your book, New Power, is about. At what point did you realise that public mobilisation was the key to new power?

  I guess I’ve been spending my life thinking about mobilising the public in new ways. You know I was a child activist and I was trying to organise people to send faxes to politicians. Obviously not hugely effective. But you know it was an expression of that. Public mobilisation has always been an important part of social change. I think that what is different now is we all have our hands on the means to mobilise each other.

  It used to be that you had to be in a position already of some power in order to really effectively play that mobilisation role and that’s no longer the case. So that creates these incredible new opportunities, like we have got the kids in Florida fighting on the gun violence issue right now. These kids are not waiting around for any institution or waiting around their parents. And they’re making an unbelievable deep impact, aren’t they? I think that’s the difference now.

  Talking from a new power perspective, the possibilities of this new age are vast. But it’s a constantly shifting space. Because the technology’s changing all the time and the kind of tools are changing. And so our work at Purpose is partly about constantly experimenting with these new tools in order to stay ahead, especially in the context of a world in which some of the bad guys, as we might think of them, are also using these tools. We’ve got to get really good at this stuff before the extremists and the haters do.

  You have said before that “whoever is mobilising is going to win”, but public mobilisation can be used for both good and bad. Beyond trying to keep ahead of the game is there another way that we can be protecting ourselves against the “bad guys” mobilising?

  Well, I mean there’s nothing we can do to stop them unless we’re in societies where we’ve closed up. But we can create a better framework. So for example I think the platforms in our lives, the Facebooks etc have a lot of work to do to find ways of addressing the extremism that often presents on their platform, and frankly that their business model fuels. Because their businesses benefit from all of those clicks. So a reckoning about things like that, and we talk about this in the book, we talk about the alternatives to some of these platforms and some ways to reimagine their power, that I think can contribute to reducing some of the extremism. But I don’t think that that extremism is going away, I think that’s going to be a feature of our age unfortunately and so that makes it all the more important that people who do want to build a better world mobilise around that with energy and with passion, and I think with new power.

  How can we harness that new power to effect change and have an impact on global social issues?

  I think there’s some inspiring examples all around us. I think that I mentioned on Q&A the Australian example of the #IllRideWithYou movement which came up after the Sydney seige where people started to organise this movement around riding with Muslim Australians who felt their safety was under threat after all the hostility that was unleashed toward them after the Sydney siege.

  There are so many inspiring examples out there and some of those examples are one offs like that, others are much more developed movements or institutions really that emerge off the back of some of this new power energy. So I think there’s a lot we can point to, and the stakes are definitely high.

  You know, the Parkland kids are another great example right now. I think Black Lives Matter which we talk about a lot in the book, there is a lot we can learn from them in how they think about leadership.

  Our argument in the book by the way, is not new power is good and old power is bad, it’s not even new power is the only thing you need, it is actually that you need to blend the two, that old and new power blended together is likely to be the thing that gets you to the outcomes that you want. On the issue of guns for example in the US, we’ve seen that the NRA has been very effective at blending old and new power which is part of the reason that we need to do the same on the other side.

  How does Purpose as an organisation use new and old power?

  I think the example of the guns issue, we helped to start an organisation in the US called Everytown. And Everytown is about bringing ordinary people into that fight against gun violence including a group of mothers who are organising around America on the issue, who have such moral authority, who were doing great local organising. I think in many ways Everytown brought old and new power together. So it’s a well-funded organisation that does lobbying inside the halls of power. But it also has millions of ordinary supporters who can be deployed at these key moments. So that’s the sort of thing that will close, what we call the intensity gap, with the NRA. And that’s an example of Purpose’s work in action.

  For younger generations who have grown up with social media, does new power come more naturally to them?

  Definitely, I think you already see that, there’s a sort of intuitive understanding of new power with those kids in Florida, they really get it. They just have an understanding of how to conjure the crowd, how to mobilise people, how to spread their ideas, how to deal this new form of storytelling and it is a different set of skills.

  The old power set of skills were, you knew the right people, you could navigate the bureaucracy, the hierarchy. There are all still very important skills in the world, no doubt. But in parallel there’s this new set of skills, mobilising crowds, spreading your ideas sideways, leading in a world in which you can’t just rely on your formal authority but you’ve got a much larger amorphous crowd to manage and that’s really what the book sets out.

  And a lot of what Purpose does is really about creating new power models which require at the moment a lot of tactical innovation because the space is rapidly changing. That’s what Purpose does and we work with philanthropies on that, we work with nonprofits on that and we develop our own initiatives including labs that we have created on climate change and the voting rights and other issues.

  Do you think we can keep up with the issues by using all of these tools?

  Well certainly that is the goal. That’s why groups like Purpose exist to figure out what those new models are, to experiment with new ways to engage people because the technology is going to change. It’s not really about whatever the fashionable tool is of the day, it’s more about power and changing people’s sense of ownership over the institutions in their lives. And that requires more than just mastering technology and new tools, it requires actually taking people more seriously which is a big argument that we make in the book.

  Are you generally optimistic about the direction the world is heading in?

  I wouldn’t say that I’m uniformly optimistic but we wrote the book because we think this is a critical moment and that the fight needs to engaged at this moment. I fundamentally believe that there’s more good in the world than bad. And I think there’s lots of evidence for that. And it’s just a question of harnessing that energy and also being I think less distracted by some of the platforms that sometimes take us away from more productive opportunities to change the world, because we’re so busy socialising and churning out cat videos and while that’s fun and gratifying, we need to remember that these platforms are also a critical arena for democracy and that there’s more that we can do.

• Financial Times
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  New Power by Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans
  An explanation of how movements build, businesses thrive and ideas catch fire
  Occupy London: years later, it is easy to scoff at the latest evangelists for a participatory revolution © Getty

  Save to myFT

  Review by Miranda Green June 10, 2018
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  During the UK general election in 2010, an otherwise anxious electorate, rendered untrusting by a recent financial crisis, was offered a rare laugh. A Labour party election broadcast poked fun at Conservative leader David Cameron’s central social policy idea of “the Big Society” . His vision of a citizenry empowered to take control of their public services was lampooned with the image of a harassed working mother answering various hotlines between shifts manning local services in the absence of government employees.

  Years later, it is easy to scoff at the latest evangelists for a participatory revolution. They tend towards grandiose ideas to “restore vitality to our essential social functions” or even “reinvent democracy”, as Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timmsput it in their handbook on how organisations can cope in a digital age. The calls are becoming deafening for an overhaul of how elites meet the public’s demands and harness ideas from new sources.

  Now that political and social movements such as #MeToo have demonstrated there is a different way to exert influence via social media, the authors are likely to find an eager readership for their book — including both those at the top of the tree, anxious to keep their perch, and the activists and upstarts at the bottom trying to shake them out of it.

  The “new power” in question is characterised as surging like a human current through peer networks and grassroots initiatives — in contrast to traditional old power, jealously guarded by leaders and hierarchies, that is handed down from on high.

  While the former is gaining on the latter, the authors warn that the old power still has its uses. Yes, sufferers from chronic health conditions can disrupt traditional, passive ways of receiving healthcare by sharing their experiences and demanding different treatments, as described in one early anecdote. But expertise in surgical medicine, for example, cannot be replaced by an enthusiastic crowd of fellow patients, who learn from online how-to videos.

  There is “no killer app” that can address all our social ills, as one of the more reflective sections of the book’s conclusion freely admits. Yet new technologies have become an irresistible force, pushing and pulling at traditional ways of solving problems, making money and innovating. And the authors are right that this is changing both our behaviour and our expectations.

  Some examples offered here are encouraging, some oversold, and some are cautionary tales or worse — consider the way Isis recruiters have exploited online networking to lure teenagers to Syria. Then there is the National Rifle Association, expertly effective at building community support to reinforce its conventional lobbying operation. But it is hard not to be impressed by stories like that of Audrey Tang, a Taiwanese coder who found a way to entice her compatriots to scrutinise a government economic reform package by gamifying the process. Later, her group used an online platform to broker a crowdsourced agreement between regulators and ride-hailing apps including Uber.

  Ms Tang has ended up a government minister. But others who have been propelled to greatness after recognising the potential of networked participation come in for the usual disapproval. The “new elite” in Silicon Valley, who farm user-generated content and extract a profit from the data, are described with a fine metaphor. What was once the internet’s Wild West is now visualised as industrialised prairie “where a small number of platforms have fenced and harvest for their own gain, the daily activity of billions”.

  In hoping for a benign alternative, some readers will find the image of a “digital kibbutz” attractive. Others will point out that not every organisation can be a Wikipedia, nor does it want to be. Altruism, or even enlightened self-interest, is not for everyone. But business and political leaders have been warned before, including by Moises Naim, whose 2013 book The End of Power tried to explain “why being in charge isn’t what it used to be”. The idea continues to hold true and this fresh take is a good place to start understanding a world in which you have to “occupy yourself” before the hashtags start coming for you.

  The reviewer is the FT’s deputy opinion editor

  New Power, by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, Doubleday, $27.95

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