Julie Battilana | The Psychology of Power

Srini Rao

 Julie, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Julie Battilana

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to join you.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So I found out about you and your work by way of your publicist, and you have a new book out called Power for All, which we will talk about. But before we get into that, I want to start by asking you where in the world were you born and raised and what impact did that end up having on the choices that you've made with your life, your career and where you've ended up today.

Julie Battilana

Well, as you can hear from my accent, I am not a pure Bostonian. I live in Boston and that's where I am today. But I happen to be a French-American Bostonian. I actually grew up in Marseille, a bustling port city in the south of France, where people and families have settled from all around the world for more than 26 centuries. And I grew up in Marseille in a family of Italian immigrants.

And so I vividly remember the weekly meals with my extended family at my grandparents' home, during which women were in charge of all domestic chores, while the men would remain seated at the table for hours discussing whatever matter they deemed important that day. And so I have to say that as a girl at the time, I didn't really understand why these women who I admired and respected, accepted what I saw as a very unfair division of labor.

And even though my own parents rejected this model, they embraced gender equality, and they encouraged me to dream big, I could see the power differential between men and women all around me. And I have to say this was not the only issue that caught my attention. The beautiful thing in Marseille was and is still the diversity of the city. It's a port. So as I said, people from all over the world have settled in Marseille.

But it was clear to me at the time during my childhood that inequalities were everywhere I turned my eyes. They were complex markers that seemed to constrain the power of some people and enable the power of others from your gender, the color of your skin, your immigration status, the part of the town you lived in and your accent. And so this was a really formative experience for me that certainly played a role in my decision to then become a social scientist.

to study power differentials. I wanted to understand where they come from, what it takes to challenge them. And that's the kind of research I've been doing now over the past 20 years. And that's also what I've taught my students over the past 15 years. I've had the privilege of teaching students about power dynamics in organizations and in society, social innovation and social change. So I guess that's how my childhood in Marseille has certainly played a role

Julie Battilana

shaping my interest early in life and an hour later.

Srini Rao

Yeah. You mentioned that you were the child of Italian immigrants. And I wonder, did your parents integrate both the French culture and the Italian culture into the way that you were raised? And do you identify more as being French or more as being Italian?

Julie Battilana

So my parents were the second generation. So the question was for my great grandparents and my grandparents. So though I have to say that my mother was raised by her grandparents and so they spoke Italian at home and I was born in the 70s. And sadly at the time, a lot of the specialists in Europe and in France, and I knew it was the same in some other parts of the world.

got things wrong based on the early research. And they would tell parents that it was a very bad idea to expose a child to multiple languages. We now know that it's a good thing to expose a child to multiple languages and to have your children be bi or multicultural and again, speak many languages. But so my mother spoke Italian to me at the very beginning. And then just because of all of those social pressures around you're going to confuse that child.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julie Battilana

she stopped. Now she was convinced at the time that we would spend all of our summers in Italy the way she did and then it didn't work out in such a way. So shame on me. My name is Julie Battilana and I do not speak Italian. Now I wrote that book on power with Tiziana Caccio who is Italian so there's still a connection to Italy, but so we didn't speak Italian at home I love the Italian culture and I've been exposed to it

Srini Rao

Hahaha.

Julie Battilana

But I mostly grew up in an environment that was a French environment.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it's funny because my parents do speak two Indian languages, Hindi and Telugu. And to this day, we tell them you guys are idiots because when we were kids, they would speak in Hindi when they didn't want us to understand something. And we're like, you guys could have just taught us the language. You realize that would have been far more beneficial to us.

Julie Battilana

I have to say, I have two kids and they speak French and they speak English and they feel very French and they feel very American. So we're learning from one generation to another and the grandparents were actually encouraging us to do more of what they couldn't do. So we all learned along the way.

Srini Rao

Yeah, my parents' strategy fell apart when we had a kid who moved to town who literally spoke like six different Indian languages and they're like, we can't get anything over on this kid.

So one thing I wonder is the way that you were socialized and educated in France, what have you seen as the differences, particularly now that you have kids here who are, you know, I am assuming going to school in the United States. What did you notice as differences and did your parents encourage any particular career paths? Because where you've ended up doesn't sound like something that you're going to find in a high school guidance counselor's office as a recommendation for something you should do with your life.

Julie Battilana

So, indeed, I never had a conversation with anyone who sort of said, hey, why don't you go and become a social scientist? My father is a doctor and became an entrepreneur and a social entrepreneur later in his life, and my mother is an artist. But what I have to reveal now is that, so I'm very close to my sister. My sister has a rare genetic disorder.

And so she's heavily disabled. So she's two years younger than I am. And I think that my sister was incredibly courageous and resilient. She cannot speak, but she can tell you a lot with her eyes has been a role model for me. And I think she's made all of us in our family much better human beings than we would have been. And so thanks to my sister very early in my life and then in our life as a young family, we started spending a lot of time volunteering in our community.

helping people who were facing hardship. And that certainly played a key role in, I think, developing our empathy. And that's why I'm saying, I hope making us better human beings than what we would have been. And so the reason why I talk about my sister as I talk about my choice and my parents' approach is because when you grow up with a sibling who is disabled or a parent who's facing a really difficult situation,

All of the norms that people take for granted, all of these things you're supposed to do, you're supposed to say, they are not as important to you as they are to other people. You start thinking about the fact that, you know what, you just have to invent your own model. And you should be thinking about how you can contribute and that if things are broken in a community or in a society, why don't you try to roll your sleeves and do something to help? And so this experience with my sister, I think, has also probably been a great experience.

change my parents and their thinking has always been to say just go and do whatever you're interested in doing and I was interested as I told you in inequalities but the truth is that I was also very interested in supporting the work of social changemakers, social innovators, people who are trying to make their communities better because these people had helped us when my sister was very young like we found a not-for-profit that is quite remarkable called a bourgette in the south of France that

Julie Battilana

takes care of people with disabilities like the one that my sister has, and that's a truly innovative one. And I admired what the people there did, but I could see the struggles they faced and how complicated it was to change the communities. And my idea was to say, well, could it be that I could help them by conducting research that would then be helpful to them and would help social change makers, not only in the domain that I knew thanks to my sister, but across other domains. And

I guess my parents were excited because just like me, they had learned a lot along the way as we were trying to care for my sister and help other people and other families like us.

Srini Rao

Well, I mean, you've alluded to this whole idea of inequality multiple times throughout our conversation, which we'll definitely do a deeper dive into when we get into the books. But I want to explore that a day through the lens of education. I mean, you're a professor at Harvard, which in a lot of ways is a representation of inequality in the United States. I only know this from having gone to a school like Berkeley where opportunities are given to you at schools like this that are not accessible to other people. I learned this when I went to Pepperdine.

which was a dramatic contrast. At Berkeley the people who came to recruit were Google, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs. At Pepperdine nobody came to recruit students. And so you know as somebody who is a professor at one of the most elite institutions in the world, if you were tasked with redesigning the education system from the ground up to serve the needs of people in society today without crippling them with debt, how would you do it?

Julie Battilana

that if only I could have a magic wand. So you're asking a very good question and I'm glad you're asking the question because here I am, you know, like writing a book entitled Power for All, but I'm writing it from an institution that's one of the most powerful institutions. And you just described all the issues with the field of education in the United States. So I grew up in France as we've been discussing, right? And so-

Srini Rao

Hahaha

Julie Battilana

In France, the educational system is very different. It has its own issues, different ones, but it has its own issues. But in France, when it comes to access to education, access to health care, money is certainly less of an issue. You're a citizen. You're entitled to have access to high quality health care, high quality education.

Now you could say that's an aspiration. Is it really happening everywhere in France? And the answer would be no. And we have the statistics. And there are things that have to be fixed. But certainly in France, you would never have to pay the amount of money you have to pay in this country to go to school and have access to high quality education. So for me, being French and being European, you can imagine that when I first moved to the United States, that certainly was a shock. And what I have to say is that I was

I've been thinking about is just like you, what could we do to create a fairer system? Because it's so critical for everyone to have access to high quality education. And we need it as a society if we want to create a society tomorrow that will be more democratic, that will be greener, and that will be fairer. So now I know it's easy to say that's what we need to do and it's complicated to implement. I joined Harvard University more than 50 years ago now.

And one thing that has certainly changed is scholarships and everything the university has been doing to sort of give more students the opportunity to come and study at Harvard, especially the students who could not afford it and creating all these channels to not only reach out to them and then give them the opportunity to come and study and have everything be covered from, you know, like not only the cost of studying there, but also

paying for all of the things they're going to need during that time at Harvard, which is so critical if you don't want for students to feel isolated and to feel powerless during their time. But I think you would say, well, great, Julie, but that's not enough because you mentioned the elite status of the institution. And an institution like Harvard has a lot of responsibility. We faculty members have a lot of responsibility.

Julie Battilana

And we have to be thinking about how we're going to use the power of the institution to improve the lives of not only the people who come and are part of it, but improve the lives of so many other people in the United States and across the world. I'll tell you that I remain excited about the potential of online education. But there again, I think that we need to do much more. So I'll just share with you my own experience. I've been working.

over now the past two years with a great, great team of professionals at Harvard Business Online to develop a course on power based on my past 15 years of teaching plus the work that it's the book that it's and I have been writing. So what I've been telling the team since the very beginning is the following. If we create an online course and we ask people to pay $1,500 to take that course.

then some people will be able to pay and this is great, but then you have all the people who cannot pay for such a course and then if they don't take the course, then I'm creating this course and we're putting it online and we're contributing to reinforcing the power hierarchies because if only people who can afford to pay for such a course have access to it, then all of the people who could be part of the change with them and are in power disadvantage position don't have access to that content. So I've been pushing Harvard Business Online to work with me to try and find a solution.

to make this course available to people who cannot afford it. I know that I'm asking them to confront difficult issues, but I'm excited to report that they care and they want to find solutions. Again, this is the beginning, and I'm very hopeful that we're going to use that course as a way to experiment and see how we can make that content more broadly available and make it work for everyone. And I think it's about creating hybrid business models for a not-for-profit organization like...

Harvard Business Online and for Harvard Business School. The other thing that I've done at Harvard University that I deeply care about is five years ago, I created at Harvard Kennedy School, the Social Innovation and Change Initiative. And the purpose of the initiative is to support the work of social change makers who are trying to address some of the most complicated social and environmental problems we're facing today. And so we are supporting.

Julie Battilana

social change makers among our students, but we're also supporting social change makers across the world. We've been developing content and executive education programs that we're making available to people who come on campus as well as I hope soon people who cannot come on campus but want to have access to all this content. So again, we're working with the online community and trying to make all of that available. And we're also working at the social innovation and change initiative to...

contribute to the broader movement that wants to change the ecosystem so that we start valuing the work of those social change makers the way we should so that all of the students and young people who make the courageous decision to help all of us solve those social and environmental problems will actually be celebrated and make a decent living instead of having to struggle and fight and make everything happen without being able to make any money. So those are things I'm trying to do, but I recognize the issues.

And I do believe that we do need a systemic change and that what we have to be thinking about is again, power is all about access to valuable resources. Education is so valuable. We as a society have to make sure that we enable every young citizen to have access to the best possible education. And so money cannot stand in the way because if it does, then you just reproduce all the inequalities.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So one thing I wonder is how much power do students actually have to change this situation? And how much do they believe they have? Because Michael Moore did this documentary called Where to Invade Next. And I think it might have been Slovenia where he went and he said even Americans from abroad could come and go to university completely for free in Slovenia. And the minute that somebody tried to put a tuition in place, the students revolted.

of that, whereas right in the documentary immediately after he flashes to a scene on the UCLA campus where he says, and this is what happens in America when tuition hikes happen and there's just students lazily sitting on the lawn not doing anything. And I remember writing an article on Medium about this saying that if every college student in America decided to walk out until tuition was brought down.

would they have the power to do that? And would the administration at these universities have no choice but to actually respond?

Julie Battilana

So this is leading us to, here's the thing, right? The critical question becomes what's power? If I really want to be specific in answering your question. So power is the ability of an individual or a group of individuals to influence the behavior of other individuals. That's a definition, that's not an explanation. So the next question is where does power come from? And what we explain in the book with Titiana is that power comes from

control over access to valued resources. So I have some power over you if I control access to resources that you need and want, and you have some power over me if you control access to resources that I need and want. You may be connected to a person I need to talk to because they have the expertise I need to complete my project and you may be the only one I know who's connected to that person. And if so, you do have some power over me. So what it says is that power is always relational.

And if you want to understand power in any situation, you have to be thinking about two critical questions. What is it that people value? And who controls access to what they value? Now, what's going to be helpful to both of us to understand the power relationship and the balance of power in our relationship is to be thinking about what is it that we each value? To what extent does the other party control access to that? And then,

Is the other party the only party that has access to what I need and want? Or actually, do I have many alternatives to you? Or do you have many alternatives to me? Because if you do, then I really do not have that much power over you. And it's the same for you, right? So now what's the implication if we take that to your question about students? It's interesting you talked about students getting together because once you understand.

the fundamentals of power that I just described, that power is about control over access to resources. Then you understand that if you want to change the balance of power in any relationship, there are four things you can do. The first thing you can do to try and increase your power is convince the other party that the resource you have to offer is more important to them than what they thought. You're trying to attract them. That's what marketing professionals do every day. They're trying to convince them that

Julie Battilana

We need that object, we need that car, we need that watch, whatever, right? More than what we ever thought. And that's how they influence our behaviors. Now, another thing that you can do to actually increase your power over another party is use a consolidation strategy. What do I mean by that? You reduce the number of alternatives they have to you to access the resources. And so that's what workers have used.

right, and they continue to use when they go on strike, when they form unions. And this is also what you're describing for students, right, when students get together and say, this is not going to work for us as such, that's indeed one possible strategy to rebalance power and it can be an effective one. Now, you also have two other strategies that you can use to rebalance power in a relationship, and those are about trying to decrease

the power that the other party has over you. So what can you do? You can turn your back and say, you know what? I thought I needed what you had to offer, but I don't need it anymore. And I think it's related to your example too, because you could say to the American educational system, you know what, I thought I needed access to your educational system, but now I'm turning my back. I'm going to travel abroad and try to have access to this education that's going to be of high quality, but that will be far less expensive. And then the other thing that's

you can do is again, like try to access the same resource, but from alternatives, you're not just turning your back, you're sort of looking for alternatives you could have in the United States. That would be of very high quality in terms of the education, but that would be less expensive than what you have to offer. So I think that students have power, that they obviously have to become more aware of the power they have, like every one of us, like what...

Titiana and I have seen is that because people do not understand power and do not understand the fundamentals I just described, they sort of often think they're powerless when in fact there are things they can do to gain a measure of power. But I don't think we should be thinking about the problem we're facing in a confrontational way. Like what's happening now is that I think that we all stakeholders, like sort of students, professors, staff, citizens, public authorities have to be thinking about how

Julie Battilana

we can continue to improve, enhance the educational system and make it more accessible to people in a way that's going to be much fairer and that's so needed for the future of society. So I think it's a core and central issue that we all have to tackle and feel responsible for. And so the students are one part, but we cannot put everything on their shoulders. We should be working with them all together to make things change. And again, I study hybrid models. You could imagine that people who can afford to pay

continue to pay so that these universities can continue to function on certain dimensions and people who cannot afford to pay do not pay. But you have to be very thoughtful and courageous because you need to diverge from the existing system and dare to rethink the system quite differently.

Srini Rao

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it's funny because you covered the fundamentals of power. But one of the things you talk about when you open the book is the fallacies of power. And you say that most of us have deep seated misconceptions about power, three fallacies in particular, prevent many people from grasping it and ultimately being able to exercise it. The first fallacy is the belief that power is a thing that you possess and that some fortunate individuals have special traits that enable them to acquire it. The second fallacy is that power is positional reserved for kings.

queens, presidents, generals, board members, and CEOs, the rich and famous. And the last but most widespread misconception is the power is dirty and acquiring, and wielding it entails manipulation, coercion, and cruelty. Where do these fallacies come from, and how do we begin to unwind this narrative that we have about these fallacies?

Julie Battilana

I'm glad you're talking about the Pharisees because they played a key role in motivating us to write that book. You know, like if you think about the current situation, we talked about education, but we have to say that we're currently facing a multi-dimensional crisis, right? That's a healthcare crisis. That's a tragic one, obviously, related to the pandemic, but we're also facing a crisis of social and economic inequalities, right? Education is one part of that.

And we also have been facing for some time now an environmental crisis. And so it's a moment in time when we need to implement change. And if we want to succeed in implementing change, we need to understand power more than ever, because it's about influencing other people's behavior. So I'm very hopeful because I know that many, many people want to be part of the changes that are necessary. But I've also come to worry a lot because

in my position as a teacher, as a researcher, as an advisor to people trying to implement change, I've come to realize that people have these deeply entrenched misconceptions that prevent them from understanding power. And when people don't understand power, the implications are disastrous for each one of us individually, because if you have misconceptions and you don't understand power, then you cannot have the impact you aspire to, and it's frustrating. And the risk is you disengage. And

Collectively, the implications are even more disastrous because if we do not understand power, then we cannot get organized collectively to prevent, to stop power abuses when they emerge. And these power abuses actually can threaten our rights and our freedoms. So to me, it's critical to talk about these misconceptions and debunk them. The first misconception you mentioned is indeed this idea that power is a possession. So people would come to someone like me and they would say,

Julie, you're a specialist of power. You've been researching the politics of change in organizations in society. You're teaching about power. Now you wrote that book. I can tell that the powerful people have some personal characteristics in common, but I didn't have time to think much about it. So could you tell me what these are? And so what they are waiting for is kind of the magic recipe of, hey, here are the five personal traits that will make you powerful in any situation. And then people are like, well, maybe I have that.

Julie Battilana

If I'm lucky, I can emulate those traits. If not, hey, I'll never be powerful. But the thing is that if you understand the fundamentals of power that we just talked about, if you understand that power is about control over access to valued resources, then you understand that power is never a possession. The truth is that I can have some power over you today because I control access to something you didn't want, but it could be that tomorrow you'd

don't need that at all anymore, and I'll just have zero power over you. But I need to say the same for you. Maybe you have power over me today, but maybe you won't have power tomorrow. And think about it, you're the same person bringing the same traits to most of the relationships in your life, and you have much more power in some and less in others. So once you understand the fundamentals of power, you know that this is not something that you can possess. Now you were asking me why.

Do we have this fallacy in mind? And I'll tell you, this is a quite well known psychological mechanism that, uh, when we see people behaving in a certain way, it's called a fundamental attribution error. We tend to believe that people do that because they have personal characteristics that, that lead them to do what they do. So powerful people, we say, oh my gosh, like look at the impact they're having. This must be because they have personal characteristics that make them behave in such a way.

But again, we just debunk that fallacy. That's nonsense. Power is relational, and it's going to vary depending on what people need and want. Now, the second fallacy you mentioned is this idea that power is only for the people at the top. And here what's happening is people confuse authority and power. What is authority?

Julie Battilana

orders, comments, instructions, right? It's a formal right to the people in your organization. Now, authority can be a source of power, but it is no guarantee of power. And in fact, you would be surprised by the number of people, CEO, top executives who come to me, close the door and say, Hey, Julie, I actually feel quite powerless.

I've been trying to push for change in my company, in my not-for-profit, in my public organization, in my social enterprise, and I just cannot have the impact I want to have. And so again, that's because authority and power are not the same thing. And there's a story I always share with my students to try and make them realize how important it is to distinguish between power and authority. And so I'll just summarize it for you briefly, but here it goes.

In the 1960s, a group of researchers in Europe wanted to better understand the productivity of workers in factories. And so they went to study a factory. It was a cigarette factory at the time. And when they arrived at the factory, they actually asked for the organizational charts, right? So they got the organizational chart and the chart said that the workers were reporting to foremen, who were reporting to managers, who were reporting to top managers within that company.

And so the researchers had the organizational charts, and then they started observing what was happening on the floor of the factory. Now, after two days, they went back to the people who gave them the organizational chart, and they said, you probably gave us the wrong organizational charts. And so the people in charge of the company said, well, we don't have 100 organizational charts. This is our organizational chart, and we know we gave you the right one. And so here is why the researchers were puzzled. They were puzzled because

they got to realize that the workers didn't seem to care that much when the foremen, the managers, the top managers asked them to do something. But when the maintenance workers asked them to do something, they immediately complied. And these maintenance workers were significantly lower in the hierarchy than the foremen, the managers, and the top managers. And yet they seem to have more power over the workers. Why?

Julie Battilana

because the machines at that factory had a bad tendency to break. And the maintenance workers were the only ones who knew how to fix the machines. And they were careful at the time to not share this knowledge with anyone. So the workers were completely dependent on the maintenance workers, right? So they were the most powerful people, even though they were very low in the hierarchy. So.

Srini Rao

Hahaha.

Julie Battilana

make sure to never ever look at the organizational chart and say to yourself, oh, now I know who has the most power, because it may well be that the people at the bottom have more power than, you know, many of the people at the top, including the CEO. And so that's, I think, is a good example to understand why power and authority are different. And in fact, it's Siana and myself in the research we've been doing, we've been looking at who are the most effective changemakers in companies. And the most effective changemakers

are often not the people at the top. They are the people who are central in the network of the organization. The people to whom others come for advice. Those are the most influential people because those are the people others trust. So again, like don't look at the organizational chart. You have to understand what is it that's valued. You have to understand the network of relationships. That's going to give you a better idea of who has power and who doesn't. And then you talked about the third fallacy.

You're right, you said it's probably the most widespread, right, this idea that power is dirty. People are convinced that power is dirty because think about it, look at the media, look at all the historical examples, right? Those negative examples are the ones we remember, they fascinate us, they disgust us, but that's how we are anchoring and we're then convincing ourselves that power has to be dirty. And this is very worrisome because when people think power is dirty, they turn their backs.

on it. And so people will tell me, you know what, Julie, I may not have the personal characteristics. I'm not one of the people at the top, but good for me because at least I'm not getting my hands dirty. And that's when we get in trouble because we all need to engage with power. It's the energy we all need to make anything happen. So power can be dirty, but as we explain in the book, it doesn't have to be. And we explain to our readers what they need to do and what we collectively need to do to make sure that...

Power doesn't become dirty in our hands.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. So one of the things that you talked about when we're talking about resources that people value were the basic human needs for safety and self-esteem, which show up in the form of material possession, status, achievement, affiliation, autonomy, and morality as valued resources. Can you explain the role that those resources play in a person's power?

Julie Battilana

Sure, so if power is about control over access to resources, as I mentioned, then if you want to put on your infrared glasses to see power that when you use maybe to not see it, you just have to ask yourself, okay, what is it that people value and who has access to the resources that they value? And so that first question of what is it that people value?

is a difficult question to answer because what you and I value today may be different from what we will value tomorrow and it's certainly different from what other people would value. So you could be thinking, wait, it's quite, it's complicated enough. I'm not going to have time to understand what all these people around me value. But here, here it is, right? A, you absolutely have to ask yourself this question if you want to understand power relationships in interpersonal, I mean, in your, in your life, in organizations and in society.

But then the good news is also that, as we explained in the book, we've learned a great deal over the past centuries about what it is that human beings value. And although there are huge differences across cultures, across time, across individuals, and for each one of us, we vary obviously over time. We have two fundamental needs that are quite universal. We have a need for safety and a need for self-esteem.

we are worth something and that we're respected and we're valued. And we also want to know that we and our loved ones are safe and that we can survive and do well in our communities and more broadly in society. And so once you understand the importance of these two fundamental needs, you also get to realize that these needs can and have been and are still used, obviously,

by people to exercise power. So now take the need for safety. We have a deep need for safety. So what can you do? One way to actually be able to influence people is to do what dictators have been doing and continue to do, which is threaten people's safety. Make people really worried and scared and afraid, threatening them to not have access to the

Julie Battilana

most basic resources they would need to ensure their survival. And using that power to force people to do things. You're using the fear that you're generating to force people to do things. And sadly, this has been over the course of history, a very effective way to exercise power. And it is still today in some parts of the world, a very effective way to exercise power. But it's not the only way what you can do instead of threatening people and using fear.

is inspire people, is sort of tell them, you know what, here is what we're going to do collectively to ensure your safety. Here are the institutions we're going to create to make sure that your safety is now ensured. And let's work together so that you can be proud of yourself and you can contribute to your organization, your company, your community. And now you're inspiring people and you're influencing them in a way that's not about fear and that's not about threats, but that's about

these people having a chance to fulfill their potential. Like I'm thinking about Toni Morrison, who we caught in the book and who liked to say to her students that if you have any power, your job is to empower someone else. That's a kind of inspirational leadership and empowerment that you can also use once you understand that people care deeply about safety and self-esteem.

Srini Rao

Well, so you talk about sort of keeping power in check. And this is probably one of my favorite parts of the book, where you said, deep and lasting development of empathy requires more than temporarily seeing the world through someone's eyes. It entails sustainably shifting from a focus on the self to an awareness and appreciation of interdependence. And you say this recognition is central in the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., who famously remarked, all life is interrelated.

Srini Rao

of mutuality tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

And, you know, when I read that, you know, I started kind of reflecting on it this morning as I was thinking about what we now call the creator economy and how, uh, you know, the creator economy basically is dependent on platforms and platforms are dependent on creators. But in the creator economy, it's pretty much winner takes all. And the biggest winners of all are the platforms. So for example, Facebook has an interdependent relationship with its users, uh, particularly creators.

content on Facebook, share links, write status updates, upload pictures. But the power dynamic there is not balanced in any way at all because the creators do the bulk of the work and Facebook takes home, you know, the majority of the bacon for lack of something better.

Julie Battilana

You're right. And it doesn't have to be that way. Right. We have examples in fact, of cooperatives, like platforms that, you know, use the legal form of a cooperative and that then share power and distribute it very differently. So if we think about the digital transformation that we've all been experiencing, to me, what's truly interesting about it is that

many people and many of us actually had this hope that this digital revolution would be the great equalizer, that finally people would have access to knowledge, to resources they were not able to access before thanks to the internet, thanks to these platforms, and that would lead to a society that would be fairer and that would empower more people. Now we have, at least up until now,

Close to the opposite objective, like let's not be completely negative. For sure, there are some really very positive effects of this digital revolution. If we think about what we can do technologically, we can save more lives. We are making progress in so many different domains that are improving so many people's life on this planet. So yes, we have to acknowledge that. But let's think about the distribution of power though.

What we're experiencing today is, I would say, quite extreme and unheard of. And it's been well documented by Shoshana Zuboff in our excellent book, The Edge of Surveillance Capitalism. We are in a situation in which we have a number of tech companies and, you know, there are leaders and owners who basically have access to all of the information about us.

They know more about us than we do about ourselves through access to our personal data. So think about it. Remember the fundamentals of power. They can answer the critical question of, what is it that we need and want? Now, through all the technologies, they can also influence, and we know that from all of the research that has been done, what we need and want. And then they can provide to us,

Julie Battilana

for profit in most of the situations, what we need and want. So this is a quite extreme concentration of power in the hands of people who control access to these technologies. But the fact that we've let it happen in such a way doesn't mean that it should continue in the same way. Again, there are alternative models. The past decades have been all about maximizing profit and financial value for shareholders.

That's the neoliberal doctrine. But if we want to save our planet, if we want to create a more democratic and fairer society, we just have to make change happen. We cannot stay the course. And we have alternative models from cooperatives, from social enterprises, hybrid organizations that pursue a triple bottom line and that I've studied for a long time. And these organizations share power and redistribute wealth differently.

And I think that this is what we have to do. If we stay the course, we know what will happen. We will further destroy the planet, further increase inequalities, and everyone will lose the people at the top and the people at the bottom.

Srini Rao

No.

So it's funny you mentioned inequality and you just said that you know everyone will lose both at the top and the bottom and you say in the long run inequality results in less productive economies and lower rates of economic growth. As Nobel Prize winning economist Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Defoe point out, it would be in the interest of the rich to argue for a radical shift toward real sharing of prosperity.

Srini Rao

to the long-term consequences of reinforcing massive imbalances in a social system in which we are all mutually dependent. So how do you make these people see that?

Julie Battilana

So we should say that some of them see that. So we are just want to put everyone in the same basket and say, this is what everyone does. So I have to be fair to a number of people who I talk to, I work with, who see these things and really want to make some of the changes happen. But it's also true that some of them don't see it. And it's also true that some of them say, oh, things should change, but they do everything to maintain the status quo. So my hope is that they're going to start hearing.

Srini Rao

I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

Julie Battilana

and listening and understanding what you just talked about, right? Which is why is it that change should happen? Why is it that we should redistribute power in companies and more broadly in society? You can provide a moral answer to that. And you could say you should do it. You know why? Because it's fair. Because the system in place is utterly unjust and you should not support such a system. And we have to change it. So that's one way to think about it, which I think in and of itself.

is something critical to discuss. As a society, we may disagree what's moral, what's not, but that's a conversation we need to have and we're having, but we need to continue to have. And then there's the other line of arguments that we also use in the book and that you just mentioned, which is, but by the way, even if you do not want to have this moral conversation, you need to realize that if change doesn't happen and you're at the top, you are also going to lose.

And so I think this is the message that people need to hear more and more. You're going to lose because A, we all live on this planet. And so if we destroy our planet, everyone will be affected. Right. That that's number one. And B, we do know from research, as you mentioned, that in communities where the levels of inequality are getting to be extreme, productivity is actually lower. Those communities are less safe.

these communities are also less healthy. And so they're just more unstable. And so that's affecting everyone. And we know that from research, we know that from our experience and we know that from past history. So that's why it's easy in everyone's interest to make the change happen. Now, power changes people's psychology. So from that standpoint, you could say, well, it's going to be complicated to make change happen because the people at the top tend to believe that they deserve to be where they are.

And to be very specific, power does two things to us. It tends to make us more confident, more hubristic, more arrogant. And the second critical thing that power does to our psychology, and it's again, you see that in history, but it's been documented in lab experiments, is that power makes us more self-centered, more insensitive to others and to their needs, right?

Julie Battilana

And by the way, power also makes us more likely to take action. So you combine those three in the book, we refer to that as the infernal trio, because you're in a power position. You're used to being there. You're thinking, oh, you're so good, and you deserve to be there. And you become less sensitive to others, and you take action. And so what do you do? You basically gain ever more resources. You become ever more powerful. You reproduce the status quo. And sometimes you do that without being even aware of it, because that's, again, what power does to everyone.

That's human psychology. So what do you need to do? Well, for the people in those positions, my hope is that they're getting to understand now in the midst of this pandemic, that we are all interdependent, that we also all face the same deep challenge of impermanence, we're just here for some time. And so we have to work together to make sure that we create the most possible society for everyone and it has to be a just society. So you're sort of hoping that there will be that wake up call.

But then for those in power, there are also critical things that they need to understand. If you have any power, you need to cultivate empathy and humility, because empathy and humility are the antidotes to self-centeredness and to hubris. And so you need to engage in these kind of daily practices, cultivate your humility.

Cultivate your empathy. Now you're going to tell me, but Julie, these people do not cultivate empathy and humility. And I'll tell you, some do and others don't certainly. And then that's a deep issue, but then you're gonna say, but then how do we make change happen? And then I'll say, collective action. You know, the people at the top may not want to change things, but if we get all together as you know, citizens and we...

just participate in movements that do not only agitate against the status quo but propose noble solutions, we can make existing power hierarchies evolve. Look at the MeToo movement. Look at Black Lives Matter. Yes, we still have a long way to go, but over the past few years, we've been able to really disrupt some of the existing power hierarchies in organizations and in society. We are not yet there, but we are on our way. And we've learned from research and from past history

Julie Battilana

takes, right, the collective action of people getting together to just change the power distribution. Like you were talking about Martin Luther King, another quote by him that I like very much is he liked to say that change makers have to accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

And so I hope that that's what we'll do, that we will not lose that infinite hope and we'll have the courage to continue the work of previous generations and be part of these movements to better society and ensure a fairer distribution of power.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I think that makes a perfect segue to talking about the very last piece of this that I want to cover, and that is the three types of people that are involved in movements, innovators, orchestrators, and agitators. What is the role of each one and how does somebody identify for themselves what role they would play in such a movement?

Julie Battilana

So what's important and the reason why we are highlighting these three roles is that when they think about movement, people about those movements, people often think about just the agitation, the protest, right? And they say, oh, that's what a movement is about. But what we know is that the effective movements are not only made of agitators, but you also need the

innovators and the orchestrators. So what do they each do? The agitators are the ones who bring people's attention to the current issues and help everyone realize that the status quo is not tolerable anymore. Now for the writing of the book, we interviewed people from across the world, more than a hundred of them. And one of the people we interviewed, Chie Batista, is a young woman from Mexico who is based in New York now and

who is part of the Fridays for Future movement. And so she's been involved with Greta Thunberg and young people from across the world. And I met with her before the pandemic, in fact, in September, when you probably remember those marches were organized by these young people across the world, including one of them in New York that gathered many people, and I was there and met with she there. And so...

These young people of Fridays for Future are a good example of agitators, right? They've been just agitating, protesting, getting people together to tell all of us that this is it, like this climate crisis has been around for a long time. Now what's at stake is the future generations, their health, their wellbeing. It's time to take action. So you need agitators. But what these young people also understood, and that was clear to me when I talked to

to agitate, you also need the innovations. You need the policies, for example, for the environment. You need to be able to talk to government and say, building on the science, building on the work that has been done, this is what we know has to change. So this is what innovators do, right? They propose new ways of organizing, they propose new policies. I work with a lot of social change makers who are the ones who come up with the novel practices, the new kind of organizations and say, hey, here's the alternative, right? We were talking about

Julie Battilana

and platform cooperatives, those are the alternatives. There are other ways to do things. Let's see what we can learn from that. And then beyond the innovators, you also need the orchestrators who are the ones who implement the solution at scale and work with all the stakeholders to make sure that, there will be a new status quo, that those new ways of doing things are going to become the new normal for everyone tomorrow. And so some of us are able to play all three roles.

as part of movement or some organizations can do that. And some of us are wired to play only one or two of these roles, but what matters is for every one of us to think about what we can do as citizens, what we're passionate about, whether we are more of an agitator, innovator, or orchestrator and think about the role we can play to contribute to these various movements that are all about improving society and creating a more democratic, a greener and a fairer society. And we give a number of examples in the book.

innovators I want to briefly talk about is Jean Rogers. I'm thinking about Jean Rogers because I met Jean Rogers in 2011. She came to my office at Harvard University. She had asked me for an appointment. She entered my office, sat down the couch, looked at me, and said, hey, I'm going to create the sustainability accounting standard boards. And I want this organization to create metrics to measure the social and environmental performance of the world.

companies across all 80 plus industries. And I think that this should now become the norm that organizations, companies should be held accountable not only for their financial performance, but also for their social and environmental performance. And it was 2011 and I remember looking at Jean and telling her, hey, you realize that what you're talking about is trying to change the face of capitalism, right? And she said to me, yes, and I came to talk to you because you're a specialist.

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha.

Julie Battilana

divergent changes like that, and you study the politics of change, and you study hybrid organizations that pursue the triple bottom line. And so she was talking to me and many other people. And Jean and I became friends and I followed what she did at SESB. She's now stepped down as the CEO of SESB. But that's an amazing example of an innovator. She basically was the one who said, you know what, let's stop just talking about the fact that we would need metrics to measure. Let's make it happen. Like if we...

want to change our economic system, we need to have a new infrastructure, we need new tools and so people have to develop the tools. And so she just went to develop the tools. It was incredibly hard work. She was starting from scratch. People didn't know who Jean Rogers was, but she built the power base she needed to make it happen. And here we are today and SASB is one of the standard setting organizations. So that's to say agitators are needed.

innovators are needed and then the orchestrators are needed. And in the book, we give the example of Maya Rashid, who in Argentina, together with the gay and lesbian movement, was one of the key leaders pushing for the legalization of marriage for everyone in Argentina. And as you know, Argentina is a very Catholic country. It ended up being one of the first countries to actually make it.

legal for gay people to have the possibility to get married. And she described to us all the work that went into the orchestration. Once they have drafted the piece of legislation, they had worked with their colleagues, activists in Spain, who had succeeded in passing the law. So they had the innovation, they had the law, they had everything written and ready. But then they had to convince everyone.

to basically support this new approach and the new legislation in Argentina. And it took for her to, and the people who were part of the coalition, to deal with opposition, not only coming from the Catholic Church, but also coming from inside the movement where some people were opposed to that kind of approach and were more in favor of some kind of a different kind of civil union. So we described how she did all the political work of...

Julie Battilana

convincing everyone to join them and just rely behind the cause and make that legislation become the legislation that everyone in the end ended up voting for. But that's a lot of work, a lot of energy, and it's also work for which people are not always recognized, right? You have people who've played such important roles as agitators, innovators, orchestrators, but no one is going to ever know that.

they played these important roles. Like those are incredibly courageous and generous people who just want to better the life of people in their communities and take it on them to do that work. And I think it's important that we celebrate them more.

Srini Rao

Amazing. This has been absolutely fascinating. I feel like I could talk to you for 10 hours about all of this because it's just such a deep rabbit hole. So I have one last question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews with the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Julie Battilana

Well, I think it's a great thing to make mistakes and to learn along the way. And what I hope we can do, we are going back to one thing you said you liked about the book, which is humility and empathy. So what I certainly try to do more than I probably even did in the past and I'll try to nurture myself is

cultivate this empathy and humility. And this is something we can all do. And I hope that this is something that all of us will do more, which is cultivate the empathy, cultivate the humility, remind ourselves that we are impermanent and that we are all highly interdependent. And so in many situations, it's not about you and you only, it's about you and others and what you can do to help them. Now let's not be naive, we're human. And as we've been discussing power, can in some situations corrupt us?

It doesn't have to, but that can happen. So we should also be careful and not rely only on those personal interventions of cultivating humility and empathy, but also preserve and enhance those democratic institutions, the checks on power that we've created over the past centuries. And that, you know, we now have to make sure we strengthen in the years and the decades to come. So that would be my answer to your question.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your wisdom and insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book and everything else that you're up to?

Julie Battilana

So we have a website, Power for All book that you can go check. I should also remind people of the Social Innovation and Change Initiative that we created at Harvard University. I'm very, very privileged to work with an incredible team there. So if you are a social changemaker, if you are a social changemaker,

an activist, if you are a social entrepreneur, if you are someone running a not-for-profit, if you are a social entrepreneur within your company and you're looking for resources and you want to be in touch, please check the Social Innovation and Change Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School website. And don't hesitate to be in touch. We're interested in what you're doing and we'd be glad to see how we can support it. And then again, I hope people will also.

send emails and send reactions after they listen. My hope is that, and I know it's Titiana's hope as well, that the book will be truly empowering. Like Machiavelli wrote the book for the prince at the time, right, now more than 500 years ago. We really tried to write this book for all. We want to democratize access to knowledge about power. We believe it's critical, especially at a time like now, when we need to reform our social and economic system. And so I hope that...

Again, people will find that helpful.

Srini Rao 

amazing and for everybody listening we will wrap the show with that