New power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms: Book summary and key strategic framework

Contextual bridge and core thesis of new power vs old power

Heimans and Timms open with a simple but disruptive claim. Power itself now behaves in two distinct ways, and mistaking one for the other is one of the biggest strategic errors an organization can make. The mode you are operating in shapes whether your next campaign, product launch, or leadership decision succeeds or collapses.

Old power works like a currency. A few people hold it, guard it jealously, and spend it from the top down. New power works like a current. Many people make it, it stays open to participation, and it does its best work when someone channels it outward instead of hoarding it. The book's central argument is that the future belongs to leaders who can convert legacy institutions toward participation, or deliberately blend both models as the situation demands.

The authors trace this shift to something deeper than smartphones and social platforms. Ubiquitous connectivity gave ordinary people far greater capacity to produce effects at scale, but the real transformation is cultural. People increasingly see participation as a right they are owed, not a privilege they are granted. Old power models ask audiences to comply or consume. New power models ask them to share, adapt, produce, and shape.

Heimans and Timms describe a generational fault line between what they call the Tetris tradition and the Minecraft mindset. Tetris culture expects you to fit into blocks defined by someone above you. Minecraft culture expects to build the world collaboratively, from the ground up. Their argument is that younger cohorts grew up inside Minecraft logic, and that is why old power institutions keep getting blindsided.

New power does not mean "good," and old power does not mean "bad." The book is explicit that both models can serve constructive or destructive ends. Movements as different as ISIS and Black Lives Matter both run on new power mechanics, while companies such as Apple and Patagonia both run on old power structures with very different values attached.

Old power vs new power value systems and currency comparison table

Before it examines tactics, the book separates two layers that get conflated constantly. The first is the operating model, or how value and decisions flow. The second is the underlying values, or what the organization actually believes about governance, expertise, and affiliation. An organization can run a new power model while still holding old power values, and that mismatch is what drew sustained criticism onto Facebook and Uber.

The table below consolidates the book's value-system comparison so you can diagnose where your own organization sits before choosing a strategy.

A second table, the New Power Compass, plots organizations along both axes at once. This is where most of the book's real diagnostic value lives.

Plot your own organization on this grid honestly before you plot your competitors. Most leadership teams overestimate how far into Crowds territory they actually sit.

The participation scale: read, share, adapt, fund, produce, shape

Not every act of participation carries equal weight. The book's second core contribution is a scale that measures how much agency a person exercises when they engage with your platform, brand, or cause. Campaigns often treat a passive social-media like and a full co-creation contribution as equivalent, and that is a costly strategic mistake.

The participation scale runs from low-commitment to high-commitment behavior: complying, consuming, sharing, affiliating, adapting, funding, producing, and shaping. Each rung asks more of the participant and, in return, generates deeper loyalty and more durable value for the organization that earns it. The lower rungs describe a passive audience. The upper rungs describe genuine co-ownership.

A campaign with ten thousand passive viewers and fifty active co-producers is not automatically weaker than one with a hundred thousand viewers and no producers at all. Map your audience against the scale and you expose which of your channels are building a crowd and which are simply broadcasting.

The book also warns against mistaking a viral spike for a healthy community. The single-button app Yo shot to the top of the app store, then collapsed in the rankings within months because it never built a path up the scale past sharing.

The new power compass: castles, co-opters, cheerleaders, crowds

This section applies the compass as a working diagnostic instead of a static chart. Where you land on it should change how you plan your next twelve months.

Castles rely on closed, hierarchical, expert-driven control and resist participation almost entirely. Crowds pair an open model with open values and thrive on co-creation. Co-opters use participatory tools but still hold the resulting value at the top. Cheerleaders talk the language of openness while continuing to run top-down. The necessary first step toward any transition is naming the quadrant you are actually in, not the one your mission statement claims.

Take the Castle first. NASA's early resistance to crowdsourced solar-storm forecasting is a textbook case of closed-by-design behavior. Its engineers weighed outside contributions skeptically against their own scientific training, even after a semi-retired telecommunications engineer's algorithm reportedly outperformed their in-house models.

Co-opters look more modern but keep the same instinct. They deploy new power mechanics such as open sign-up, viral sharing, and peer networks, then funnel the resulting value upward. Uber under Travis Kalanick built a large peer-driven driver network while imposing unilateral fare cuts without consultation, a pattern that fed the #DeleteUber campaign and his eventual resignation.

Cheerleaders believe in participatory values but have not restructured operations to match the rhetoric. Howard Schultz's #RaceTogether campaign at Starbucks asked baristas to spark conversations about race with no structure for real two-way participation, and the backlash was immediate.

Only in the Crowd quadrant do model and values line up. The Lego Group's turnaround after 2004 is the book's strongest example. By building Lego Ideas and letting fan-submitted designs reach production once they clear a set voting threshold, the company built a product pipeline co-created with its community.

Strategic frameworks: how new power spreads (the ACE model)

Old power communication relied on sound bites engineered for top-down distribution through gatekeepers. New power communication behaves differently. Ideas spread sideways as "meme drops," and they gain strength the more the community remixes them, not the more the originator controls them.

The ACE model explains why some ideas spread widely while others die on arrival. An idea needs to be Actionable, so it asks people to do something rather than just admire it. It needs to be Connected, so it links participants to each other and not only to the brand. And it needs to be Extensible, so it offers a simple stem people can customize and remix. A campaign missing any one of the three tends to underperform whatever the budget.

Actionable ideas compel a physical or digital act. The Ice Bucket Challenge worked because pouring water over your head and nominating friends was a concrete, filmable action, not a passive request for sympathy.

Connected ideas visibly link the participant to a community of peers. Facebook's 2010 voting experiment showed the effect at scale. Users who saw friends' voting activity turned out at higher rates than users shown a neutral "go vote" banner with no social signal.

Extensible ideas have a customizable core. Taco Bell's Cinco de Mayo Snapchat lens spread because users could make it their own within seconds, and it drew a very high single-day view count.

What the book credits with actually changing behavior is sideways peer validation, not top-down messaging. People rarely act on an idea until someone in their own network has validated it first.

Building and sustaining a crowd: the five-step model

Spreading an idea and sustaining a crowd around it are two different disciplines. The book lays out a five-step method for the second.

New Power Framework Explained

Understanding the New Power Framework Explained by the authors requires integrating the Jeremy Heimans & Henry Timms Habit Framework into your daily operating cadence.

How to Apply New Power Routine in Daily Life

When determining How to Apply New Power Routine in Daily Life, leaders should contrast a structured routine vs technique across these five implementation stages:

1. Find your connected connectors. Start with a small, highly networked core that shares your worldview instead of chasing broad reach immediately.
2. Build a new power brand through unbranding. Reduce visible corporate ownership so the idea can travel and mutate. #GivingTuesday's ownerless heart logo is the book's model case.
3. Focus Block Execution. Lower the barrier and flatten the path to action. Anna Hazare's anti-corruption campaign in India used a "missed call" as the entry action and generated a very large call volume, because the behavior cost almost no effort.
4. Move people up the participation scale. Design a deliberate path from sharing toward producing and shaping instead of treating virality as the finish line.
5. Use the three storms. Storm creating means staging a dramatic moment yourself. Storm chasing means riding an external crisis. Storm adopting means turning a threat at your own doorstep into a defining stand. These are the three ways crowds mobilize around urgency.

Real-world case studies: TED, the ice bucket challenge, Reddit, and Lego

The book's case studies show new power principles succeeding and failing under nearly identical conditions, which makes them useful diagnostic tools instead of inspirational anecdotes.

Occupy Wall Street belongs in this set as a cautionary companion to Black Lives Matter's "leader-full" model. Occupy's deliberately leaderless structure made it hard to negotiate concrete demands or hold momentum once the physical encampments were cleared. Black Lives Matter's founders instead built decentralized but identifiable local leadership, specifically to avoid a single point of failure. The distinction the book draws is between "leaderless," which is fragile, and "leader-full," which holds up under pressure.

The participation premium and blending old and new power

Raising money, building loyalty, and mobilizing volunteers in a new power environment works differently from classic fundraising, and the book puts a name to the gap and calls it the participation premium.

The participation premium is the extra value a transaction generates when it combines a higher purpose, a material return, and genuine participation, instead of offering only one of the three. BrewDog's "Equity Punks" crowdfunding rounds combined real equity, community belonging, and a punk-branded higher purpose, and they drew large sums from thousands of small investor-customers rather than a handful of institutional funds.

The most durable organizations in the book refuse to pick old power or new power exclusively. They blend the two deliberately and match the model to the moment. The pattern is an old power core that supplies structure, resources, legal weight, and brand protection, wrapped around a strategically opened new power surge that supplies crowd mobilization, peer distribution, rapid remix, and participatory storytelling.

TED is the book's cleanest example. A tightly controlled old power brand and a fiercely protected live event sit at the core, wrapped in an intentionally open new power distribution layer: free talks, volunteer-translated subtitles, and locally organized TEDx events run under strict but generous guidelines.

Executive action plan: the five-step organizational transition protocol

Moving an established institution from Castle toward Crowd is not a rebrand. The book is blunt that most transition attempts fail because leadership treats the move as a communications exercise instead of a structural one.

1. Run the new power decision tree before committing. Ask honestly whether you need the crowd for a better outcome and whether the crowd needs you. Ask whether you have enough legitimacy with this specific audience to avoid being ignored or crowd-jacked. Ask whether you are willing to cede real control and accept some suboptimal outcomes. And ask whether you can sustain the engagement over years, not months.
2. Recruit shapeshifters, not disrupters. A shapeshifter carries institutional credibility and eases the path to change. A disrupter arrives promising to break things and usually alienates the incumbents whose cooperation you need. Guy Vidra's combative approach at The New Republic is the book's warning case.
3. Build bridges, not digital beards. A bridge structurally connects the organization to new power practice. A digital beard is an innovation lab that supplies public-relations cover while the core business changes nothing.
4. Treat super-participants as partners, not stakeholders. Reddit's moderators, Lego's Adult Fans of Lego, and Wikipedia's editors are unpaid but indispensable. Consult them before major changes, not after.
5. Apply the circle test before scaling. Check whether the platform's impact is genuinely positive inside the core triangle of owners, super-participants, and participants, and also in the wider circle of regulators, media, and the public, before you push for blockbuster scale.

Use this checklist as a pre-launch gate for any new power initiative:

• Have you named which compass quadrant you are starting from?
• Have you identified your connected connectors before your mass audience?
• Does the campaign pass the ACE test (actionable, connected, extensible)?
• Is there a designed path up the participation scale beyond sharing?
• Have super-participants been consulted before any structural change?
• Have you run the four-question decision tree (strategy, legitimacy, control, commitment)?
• Does the plan pass the circle test for both internal and external stakeholders?

Boaty McBoatface remains the book's sharpest cautionary tale for the circle test. The UK's Natural Environment Research Council ran an open naming poll, the crowd chose decisively, and the agency overruled its own participants at the last moment. Asking for participation and then ignoring it costs more reputationally than never asking at all.

New power at work: the founder feeling and tours of duty

Workplace culture is one of the book's most concrete application areas, and it earns its own strategic lens separate from marketing or fundraising campaigns.

Younger employees increasingly expect what the book calls the "founder feeling": direct agency and visible ownership over their work instead of a fixed lane inside a rigid hierarchy. LinkedIn's answer was to formalize employment as a defined "tour of duty" lasting two to four years instead of pretending at lifetime loyalty, and that framing built more trust with candidates than the traditional "we are a family" pitch.

Not every attempt to flatten hierarchy succeeds, and the book pairs the wins with failures. Zappos' full conversion to Holacracy in 2015 stripped out formal management structures so aggressively that employees burned significant time debating internal governance rules, and a substantial share of the workforce left that year. Buurtzorg's Dutch home-care model took the opposite path. It kept self-managing teams small, at roughly 10 to 12 nurses each, gave them lightweight peer-support tools, and scaled to thousands of nurses while cutting the care hours each patient needed.

The dividing line is structural discipline versus structural chaos. Distributing authority works when the organization still gives people enough scaffolding to coordinate. It collapses when "no managers" becomes the entire strategy.

Criticisms and limitations of the framework

No strategic model survives contact with every industry unscathed, so it is worth naming where the new power framework hits friction before you apply it wholesale.

Critics argue that the old-power-versus-new-power binary can flatten situations where regulation, capital intensity, or safety requirements make genuine crowd control impractical, however participatory a leader wants to be. Heavily regulated sectors such as banking, aviation, and pharmaceuticals cannot hand governance to an open crowd the way a media brand or a consumer app can. The compass works best as a diagnostic starting point, not a universal prescription.

A second limitation is timing. Several flagship examples, including the Ice Bucket Challenge's rapid fundraising decline and the Kony 2012 fallout, show that new power surges can be hard to sustain once the initial storm passes. The authors meet this with the camel-versus-unicorn distinction, arguing that organizations built for long-term community ownership tend to outlast those optimized purely for viral scale.