The Power of Community

If you’ve read our other articles about what makes a human brand, well, human (and we hope you will), then you know we love to start with a clever construct, a winsome anecdote, or a reference to some literary figure who, in short order, will be made metaphorically significant.

We thought about doing that here, too. But the author of this particular article (our CEO, Tony Sorrentino, peeks out from behind his laptop: “Hi guys. It’s me.”) has been so influenced by a single piece of writing on the topic of community, that it seemed absurd and antithetical to the spirit of what we’re about to explore to not just step aside for a moment and give another author the microphone.

That author is Mathew Barzun, and his book, The Power of Giving Away Power, has become required reading for all new OXen (literally), a north star as we seek to build a constellation, rather than a pyramid.

A constellation, as Barzun defines it, is an interdependent network of individuals collaborating to write a common story, built on “power with” and shaped by “connections” rather than rank. A pyramid, by contrast, is a top-down monolith where the few hold power over the many.

In 2021, Time published an excerpt of Barzun’s excellent book, where he introduces us to a few other key voices who will shape our thinking here.

Here are a few excerpts (of that excerpt), though the whole article is worth a read:

In 2003, Harvard Business School published a list of the two hundred most influential leadership gurus and then asked these two hundred to identify the person who had the most impact on their thinking—the gurus’ guru. Famed management thinker Peter Drucker was number one.

Yet toward the end of his life, Drucker wrote an essay revealing that he had his own guru too… Her name was Mary Parker Follett.

Born in 1868, Follett rose from a challenging upbringing just outside Boston to study at the Annex at Harvard, where she researched the leadership practices of past US Speakers of the House. She concluded that the most effective of them led by “using the energy and perspective of many.”

Though her work drew significant praise (including from Theodore Roosevelt), as a woman, academic doors remained largely closed to her. So instead, she spent the next decades applying her ideas in the real world, bringing diverse groups together, fostering collaboration, and creating spaces where people could work through deep differences.

In those rooms, Follett wasn’t just refining techniques for cooperation; she was uncovering a fundamentally different understanding of power itself, one that stood in stark contrast to the prevailing wisdom of her time.

The dominant trend in the brand-new field of business scholarship was something called “scientific management.”

Its founder, Frederick Taylor, encouraged organizations to “de-personalize” and to measure every minor body movement of workers in a factory…

The result, Follett said, was that workers felt “at the bottom level of a highly stratified organization.”

Follett, by contrast, championed the need for “re-personalization” (we might call it “re-humanization”).

She encouraged leaders to allow all members of the team to share their views and study the problem at hand from many angles, with each person bringing their knowledge to the table.

This was what she called “power-with,” not “power-over.” She felt these habits of interdependence were much more important than any org chart. She articulated them in many ways, but they boiled down to this:

Expect to need others.
Expect to be needed.
Expect to be changed.

Too many brands today are living out the legacy of Frederick Taylor, depersonalizing and siloing, advancing their stories and missions as self-contained units of supposed greatness. For them, on the surface, the idea of community seems like a lightweight, soft notion, tantamount to singing “Kumbaya” around the boardroom table. But for most, underneath the surface, it seems to pose an existential risk to their competitive advantage.  

And yet we see (and believe in building) brands who eschew both of these pitfalls, embracing the power of community and living out these three expectations. These are the brands who are multiplying the most good, and they’re the ones we call Human Brands.

Expect to Be Needed

Follett’s first expectation, expecting to be needed, calls all of us from the far corners of our uncertainty, insecurities, and passivity to step forward, into the arena, to do good work and make it meaningful. It asks all of us to take it as a given that we have something important — a perspective, a voice, a question, a connection — to bring to the table in this co-creative work into which we’ve all endeavored.

On a brand level, expecting to be needed also suggests that brands ought to assume that the world — and their audiences — need for them to be uniquely themselves. The brand that’s needed, as it turns out, isn’t one shaped by trend-chasing or moodboards alone; it’s built on a solid strategy designed to uncover what is unique and authentic about your brand, who it’s innately for, and what value it can offer to them.

Human Brands, like human beings, contend with the comparison trap, looking over their shoulders and watching their backs for who might be doing it better, faster, or smarter. But they transcend those anxious questions to instead consider what they are uniquely positioned to bring, and how they might bring it on their terms.

In a few lines of verse that have become meaningful reminders for OX and our partners, songwriter Jana Stanfield summarized it this way: “I cannot do all the good that the world needs; but the world needs all the good I can do.” Human Brands know and trust that the world needs them to do their unique good, embracing their distinctive and individual identity as the first step towards authentically collaborating with others.

Take a closer look at how we helped Forge Virtual Studios build a brand where everyone has a way in.

Expect to Need Others

If Stanfield is right, then Follett’s second expectation only stands to reason. Not only should we expect to be needed; seeing as none of us can do all the good that the world needs, we (and the world) are going to need others.

In 1963, US President John F. Kennedy put a phrase in the popular lexicon: “a rising tide lifts all boats.”  Kennedy was trying to describe the way that economic growth benefits everyone, and his articulation took hold.

For most of us, though, the tide of good doesn’t feel like it’s rising; to be honest, most days it feels more like the shoreline is something we’re all fighting over. There’s only so much attention, so many customers, advocates, or donors. Only so many dollars or euros or pounds. The seemingly scarce reality in which we all exist leads most brands to believe that, in order for them to win, someone else has to lose. “Life is,” we seem to assume, “a zero-sum game.” There’s only so much goodness. Right?

That mindset leads us to look out from our foxholes in fear, studying our adversaries, scouting their weaknesses, and exploiting their vulnerabilities. But for mission-driven organizations, mission-aligned peers aren’t the enemy; if they’re trying to build the same world we are, how could they be?

While competitive drive has its place (it can sharpen us and challenge us), if you’re competing against the wrong thing, even if you win, you lose.

Human Brands, by contrast, unapologetically affirm that we need each other to grow. They choose to believe that there is enough support, passion, and resources. That there is enough goodness to go around. And moreover, they believe that we actually need each other to multiply it.

Human brands consider all the things they don’t know and don’t have. They embrace and acknowledge all the ways they can’t accomplish the larger mission of their sector without other people, other partners, and yes, even other brands.
‍
Looking for an example of what this might look like in practice? Meet Momofuku Ando.

That cup of instant noodles many of us remember from our university days? We have Ando to thank for it. In 1958, after months of experimentation, he brought the first precooked instant noodles to market, and over the next two decades, his company, Nissin, became the dominant player in the category.

Many in his position would have protected that advantage, guarding trade secrets, tightening control, and working to edge out the competition. But in 1997, Ando did something unexpected: he convened his competitors into a community.

When he founded the World Instant Noodles Association (WINA), Ando created a shared table where rivals could exchange knowledge, improve quality, and build trust in the category itself. At the height of his influence, Ando chose not to stand alone as the industry’s tallest tree. In his own words, he chose to plant “a forest.”

Ando understood something many brands miss: organizations don’t thrive when they’re disconnected. When you convene well, the burden of impact shifts from a single brand to a network of aligned actors, each contributing their part. That’s the difference between gathering an audience and growing a community.

In the midst of the chaos and competition, the organizations who convene a community to run together towards a common goal are the ones positioned to truly multiply good.

Curious what expecting to need others looks like for a brand? Take a look at how we worked with The Brickyard.

Expect to Be Changed

For better or worse, “community” has become a bit of a brand-building buzzword. “Audiences today want to form communities,” every over-designed trend report seems to advise.

But the kind of communities that Human Brands trade in aren’t clever social clubs that help move product; moreover, they don’t just exist in Reddit threads and the comments of click-bait-y social posts. They exist digitally, to be sure, and physically and symbolically and otherwise. But more than being insular fan clubs of a brand, they’re the kind of autonomous networks that Follett championed, where every member has a voice and a role to play, and where each party is shaped by the others.

To explore this idea further, if you will, indulge us in a sports metaphor.

The year is 1964. The place is Northern California. It’s late October, and the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers are facing off against the Minnesota Vikings. It’s the fourth quarter, and Viking Jim Marshall is about to make sports history.

After recovering a fumble, Marshall runs an impressive 66 yards. Archival footage of the play shows his gusto, one bounding stride after another, arms pumping with a visible mix of determination and exhilaration.

What Marshall doesn’t yet know is that he is running the wrong way.

His burst of glory lands him in his own team’s end zone, where (thinking he had just scored a touchdown) Marshall pitches the ball in a proud display of victory.

It’s only when Bruce Bosley, a member of the opposing 49ers, gives Marshall a cheeky “Thanks!” that he realizes that he’s just put points on the board for the competition.

It would be easy to assume that a gaff like Marshall’s was the folly of inexperience or incompetence. But Jim Marshall was an accomplished veteran in the league. What his wrong-way run reveals is less about skill or smarts. Instead, it’s a painful (for him) and comical (for us) example of Follett’s third expectation: “Expect to be changed.”

The grainy archival footage of that October afternoon doesn’t make it clear whether Jim Marshall’s teammates were shouting at him to turn around (we do see a few of them stand up, bewildered, on the sidelines, in awestruck yet passive silence — if only they had expected to be needed).

What is clear is that, faced with what seemed like an incontrovertible opportunity, Marshall ran off-course with reckless abandon, and as he made that run, he was remarkably alone.

All of us as leaders — and the organizations and brands we lead — from time to time end up running the wrong way. The pressures we face are real and growing. The audiences we need to reach are increasingly flooded with information (and adept at tuning most of it out). The needs and challenges in front of us seem to multiply by the day.

So, like Marshall, we need the perspectives and passions of others to dispute and question what seems unquestionable, to help us change our minds and change our direction. Human Brands don’t take this as a concession or a sacrifice. They actively invite course-adjusting (and at times even identity-refining) challenges from their staff, their partners, their peers, and (of course) their audiences.

So who are you inviting to change you? And if you’re not, could you be running the wrong way (and not yet know it)?

The Power of the Constellation

After a battle with cancer, Mary Parker Follett died in 1933. Confronted by the chaos of the Great Depression, culture and history forgot much of her wisdom (Drucker at one time grieved the reality that she had “become a ‘nonperson’”). At OX, we open nearly every workshop we facilitate for our clients by talking about Mary Parker Follett, and invite ourselves and each other to hold those three, all-important expectations. They are, in our view, the keys to authentic community.

Ultimately, Follett’s vision of community comes back to the power of a constellation mindset. She encourages all of us to choose to seek “power with,” not “power over.”

That shift in posture is what sets Human Brands apart.

Most brands are still chasing power over something: over attention, over market share or over one another. They compete for position, guard their advantage, and treat success as something to capture and hold. Even their attempts at “community” keep themselves at the center.

Human Brands choose a different path. By expecting to be needed, expecting to need others, and expecting to be changed, they build power with others. They unlock the influence and contribution of the people and brands around them, and as they do, they expand what’s possible for everyone involved.

In the end, their logos, their missions, their equity — none of it matters unless it’s activating others to contribute, to lead, and to multiply good.

Onward.