How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You
December 4, 2017
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.”