The Power of Giving Away Power
How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go
Book Edition Details
Summary
In a universe where leaders are often guardians of power, a revolution awaits. What if true strength lies in scattering authority among many, rather than hoarding it for oneself? "The Power of Giving Away Power" dares to turn conventional leadership on its head, advocating for a constellation-like organization where individuals shine both alone and as part of a greater whole. This paradigm shift is not mere theory; it’s the engine behind Visa's payment revolution, Wikipedia's rise to prominence, and Obama’s grassroots political wave. Matthew Barzun, weaving history with his own eclectic experiences, crafts a narrative that challenges the status quo and invites leaders to embrace a radical trust in collective creativity. This book isn't just a guide; it's a manifesto for those ready to reimagine what it means to lead, illuminating how shared power can light up the darkest skies.
Introduction
Imagine standing in a cornfield in Iowa, watching a relatively unknown senator named Barack Obama speak to a handful of elderly voters. Eighteen months later, you witness him taking the oath of office before two million people. What happened in between wasn't just political strategy—it was a fundamental shift in how power flows and multiplies when we dare to give it away. This transformation reveals a profound truth about leadership that challenges everything we've been taught. We've been conditioned to believe that power is something to hoard, that success means climbing pyramids where only a few can stand at the top. But what if the most effective leaders throughout history discovered something entirely different? What if true strength comes not from accumulating power, but from releasing it to others? From the founding of Wikipedia to the creation of Visa, from Churchill's wartime diplomacy to the civil rights movement, the most remarkable achievements in human history share a common pattern. They emerge when leaders abandon the traditional pyramid mindset and embrace what might seem counterintuitive: that by empowering others, we create something far greater than any individual could achieve alone. This isn't about being nice or democratic—it's about unleashing the exponential energy that flows when people feel genuinely needed, valued, and free to contribute their whole selves to a shared purpose. The journey ahead will show you how to recognize these constellation patterns in your own life and work, and how to cultivate the courage to make this essential leap from controlling others to connecting with them.
The Lost Art of American Leadership: From the Great Seal to Modern Politics
On July 4, 1776, America's founders made two declarations. While everyone remembers the famous document declaring independence, they also realized they needed something else to be taken seriously as a new nation: a logo. What followed was a six-year struggle that reveals everything about the tension between two fundamentally different approaches to power. Benjamin Franklin wanted Moses parting the Red Sea, complete with Pharaoh drowning. Thomas Jefferson proposed wandering children of Israel backed by Anglo-Saxon mythology. John Adams suggested Hercules choosing between easy and difficult paths. After hiring consultants and forming committees, they eventually settled on something revolutionary: a constellation of thirteen stars, deliberately asymmetric, representing states that were simultaneously independent and united. Charles Thomson, the forgotten architect of this design, understood something profound. He had witnessed his own father's transformation through fellowship rather than force, and he grasped that true strength comes from voluntary connection, not imposed authority. The constellation pattern he championed represented a new kind of organization where big states like Virginia and small ones like Rhode Island could each stand out while fitting into something greater. Yet 150 years later, during the Great Depression, this constellation was overshadowed when the pyramid side of the seal was featured prominently on the dollar bill. FDR's administration needed the symbolism of consolidated power to fight massive national emergencies. The pyramid mindset served its purpose in crisis, but it gradually became our default setting for everything, from boardrooms to schools to families. We began organizing ourselves around the assumption that someone must be on top, someone must be on bottom, and success means climbing higher than others. The constellation hasn't disappeared—it lives on in every moment when people choose to connect rather than compete, to include rather than exclude, to trust in collective wisdom rather than individual brilliance.
Mary Parker Follett and the Forgotten Science of Integration
In 1920s America, Mary Parker Follett was the most sought-after speaker on leadership, drawing audiences of Fortune 500 CEOs who hung on her every word. Peter Drucker called her "the brightest star in the management firmament" and credited her as his greatest teacher. Yet within a decade of her death, she had become what Drucker called a "non-person," erased from history despite having discovered what every great leader intuitively knows. Follett's journey began in tragedy and transformation. Growing up with an alcoholic father suffering from what we now call PTSD, she watched traditional authority figures—military commanders, ministers, wealthy relatives—fail repeatedly to change his destructive behavior. What finally worked was entirely different: a temperance speaker who shared his own failures and pain, creating space for her father to join a fellowship of mutual support. Her father found healing not through submission to authority, but through genuine connection with peers who understood his struggle. This experience shaped Follett's revolutionary insight about power. She observed thousands of meetings across business, politics, and community work, recognizing that most ended in three predictable failures: acquiescence, where someone gives in; victory, where someone wins by making others lose; or compromise, where everyone leaves partially dissatisfied. But occasionally, something magical happened that she called integration—moments when diverse people created something entirely new together, something that belonged fully to each person while transcending what any individual could achieve alone. Follett discovered that these breakthrough moments required three fundamental shifts in mindset: expect to need others, bringing your whole self while recognizing that others' contributions are essential; expect to be needed, showing up with your full truth rather than what you think people want to hear; and expect to be changed, remaining open to having your perspective transformed through genuine encounter with different viewpoints. Her insights were so threatening to the pyramid mindset that dominated the Depression and wartime eras that her teachings vanished from leadership education. Yet her fingerprints appear throughout modern management theory, often diluted or misunderstood, waiting to be rediscovered by leaders brave enough to integrate difference rather than eliminate it.
From Wikipedia to Obama's Campaign: Modern Constellation Builders
When Jimmy Wales launched his first attempt at an online encyclopedia, he applied the traditional pyramid approach: experts would write articles, editors would review them through a rigorous seven-step process, and readers would consume the finished product. After a year of painstaking work, Nupedia had published exactly eighteen articles—one of which was completely plagiarized. Wales himself became so intimidated by his own review process that he abandoned writing an article about his favorite economist. Everything changed when Wales made a radical leap. Instead of controlling quality from the top, he opened up the process through Wiki technology, allowing anyone to contribute and edit. Skeptics predicted chaos, but something remarkable emerged. People began organizing themselves around shared standards, fact-checking each other's work, and creating the largest knowledge transfer engine the world has ever known. Wikipedia now contains over six million articles in English alone, proven by Nature magazine to be as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica, while both Microsoft's Encarta and the original Britannica have ceased publication. Wales succeeded by abandoning the "hunting" mentality that seeks to capture a subset of experts and instead embracing a "farming" approach that plants seeds of possibility. He discovered what Barack Obama's campaign would later prove on a massive scale: when you trust people with real responsibility, they don't just meet expectations—they exceed them and invite others to join. The Obama campaign's breakthrough came when field organizers Buffy Wicks and Jeremy Bird convinced headquarters to do the unthinkable: give volunteer access to the precious voter database that campaigns typically guard like Fort Knox. Despite fears of espionage and data theft, they argued that the energy of empowered volunteers would far outweigh any risks. They were spectacularly right. Instead of the typical "flake rate" where 50 percent of committed volunteers don't show up, Obama's campaign achieved negative flake rates—for every ten people who committed to help, fifteen appeared, bringing new recruits with them. Both Wales and Obama discovered that the constellation pattern follows nature's fractal growth—simple successful patterns that repeat and multiply, creating incredible complexity without complex master plans. They learned to set the right conditions and then step back, trusting in the intelligence and commitment of people who feel genuinely needed and valued.
Diplomatic Lessons: Creating Special Relationships in an Age of Division
When Ambassador John Gilbert Winant arrived in London during Britain's darkest hour, he faced a predecessor who had declared Britain a "lost cause" and sought meetings with Hitler. Instead of maintaining diplomatic distance, Winant made an unprecedented choice: he walked bomb-damaged streets at night, helping pick up rubble and asking ordinary citizens what he could do to help. When coal miners went on strike, threatening Britain's war effort, both Conservative and Labour leaders agreed on the solution: send Winant. Winant's speech to the strikers contained no threats, no arguments about patriotic duty, no mention of the word "strike." Instead, he connected their struggle for fair wages to the broader fight against fascism, treating the immediate conflict as part of a larger shared purpose. The result was immediate: newspapers declared "Winant Talks, Strike Ends" and praised his "Gettysburg in Durham." He succeeded by refusing to see daylight between different groups as a problem to be eliminated, instead treating it as creative tension that could generate new possibilities. This insight about "special relationships" would later inspire Churchill's famous Iron Curtain speech, though that title misses the point entirely. Churchill wasn't primarily sounding an alarm about Soviet power—he was prescribing a constellation response to pyramid threats. Instead of matching Stalin's consolidated authority with our own, Churchill called for millions of individual relationships between Americans and Britons, creating what he termed "sinews of peace" strong enough to preserve freedom without permanent warfare. Modern diplomatic protocol often falls into the same trap that destroys energy in corporate boardrooms: the obsession with eliminating "daylight" between allies. Diplomats are trained to deny any differences, creating routine relationships and special transactions that drain energy from both sides. But the most effective diplomatic encounters—from peace negotiations to trade agreements—happen when people move beyond their talking points and risk genuine connection across difference. The lesson extends far beyond diplomacy. Google's exhaustive study of team effectiveness found that the single most important factor wasn't skill sets or leadership style, but psychological safety—the ability to disagree, admit mistakes, and ask for help without fear. The best teams create space for fruitful friction, generating energy rather than depleting it. They discover that special relationships, with all their messiness and uncertainty, produce results that smooth transactions never could.
Summary
The journey from pyramids to constellations isn't about abandoning structure or accountability—it's about recognizing that the most powerful force in human affairs isn't control, but connection. Throughout history, the leaders who've created the most lasting change understood a counterintuitive truth: by giving away power, they unleashed exponentially more energy than any individual could generate alone. This shift requires courage because it means letting go of the illusion of control that pyramid thinking provides. It means entering conversations without predetermined outcomes, trusting that diverse perspectives will create something better than your original plan. It means replacing the exhausting theater of having all the answers with the energizing work of asking better questions alongside people who see the world differently. The constellation mindset offers a different kind of strength—not the brittle dominance that breaks under pressure, but the flexible resilience that bends without breaking. It transforms "I might" from a sign of weakness into an invitation for others to join you in uncertainty, creating "we might" moments that change everything. Whether you're leading a team meeting, raising a family, or trying to heal divisions in your community, the same principle applies: the magic happens not when you illuminate the room alone, but when you help everyone else discover their own light. In a world hungry for authentic connection, the leaders who thrive will be those brave enough to show up as full human beings, expecting to need others, expecting to be needed, and expecting to be changed.
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By Matthew Barzun
