Even Great Ideas Don’t Sell Themselves. You Need Three Types of Power to Make Them Win.
Nikolai Tesla was a revolutionary thinker with bold, transformative ideas. Yet it was George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison who shaped how electricity was brought to the world. The personal computer was invented at Xerox PARC, but it was Apple who brought the Macintosh to market. William Coley pioneered cancer immunotherapy, but Jim Allison made it a reality.
We grow up believing that if an idea is good, it will naturally rise to the top. Yet that’s rarely, if ever, true. To make an impact, you need to understand power and influence. It isn’t about titles, authority, or formal position. It’s about understanding how decisions actually get made, how people get mobilized, and how systems really change.
To do that, you need to master three forms of power: hard power, soft power and network power. Hard power compels. Soft power persuades. Network power amplifies. Real influence comes from knowing how to combine all three. That’s the difference between having a good idea and building the traction you need to bring about the impact you want to see.
How A Group Of Kids Harnessed Institutional Hard Power To Bring Down A Dictator
In 1998, five young activists met in a café in Belgrade. Still in their 20s, they were, to all outward appearances, nothing special. They weren’t rich, or powerful. They didn’t hold important positions or have access to significant resources. Nevertheless, that day they conceived a plan to overthrow their country’s brutal Milošević regime.
The next day six friends joined them, and together they became the 11 founders of the activist group Otpor. They had some experience with activism, taking part in the protests against the war in Bosnia in 1992 and then in the Zajedno movement in 1996. But those efforts had fallen short, and Milošević continued to rule with an iron hand.
Yet they had learned from the experience and an activist introduced them to the Albert Einstein Institution as well as the ideas of Gene Sharp. What they found was that there are sources of power that support the status quo and these have an institutional basis. As long as these remain in place, nothing will ever change. But if you can shift them, anything becomes possible. Even a seemingly all-powerful dictator needs to control or influence institutions to carry out their will.
So Otpor set out to influence key institutions, such as the media, local businesses, international organizations and had a particularly innovative strategy for influencing the police. When Milošević tried to steal the election, people took to the streets, in the Bulldozer Revolution. Those institutional shifts proved decisive in bringing down his government. The Serbian strongman would die in his prison cell in The Hague in 2006.
Everyone with an idea is, in some way, like those five kids in the cafe in Belgrade. If you’re ever going to get anywhere, you need access to hard power and that means you are going to have to learn how to influence institutions with the power to compel change. That’s the essence of hard power strategy.
The Pervasive Soft Power Of Ramanujan
As the story of Otpor shows, influencing the hard power of institutional authority is critical for driving through transformational change. Others, such as the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, were able to mobilize massive numbers of people, but without institutional influence, they were unable to achieve significant progress.
Still, you can’t just use institutional heft to overpower. You also need to attract people to your cause and that’s where soft power comes in. Consider the story of Ramanujan, a destitute Indian with little formal education. In 1913, he sent his work to G.H. Hardy, a prominent mathematician at Cambridge, one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.
It’s obvious why Ramanujan reached out to Hardy and not the way around. As a leading professor at a major center of learning, Hardy carried a lot of institutional clout, while Ramanujan had none. But in the end, it was Hardy who did Ramanujan’s bidding and, in fact, considered it to be one of the greatest privileges of his life to do so. How did that happen?
Ramanujan was able to harness the three foundational elements of soft power: ethos, pathos and logos—credibility, emotion, and logic. Ramanujan was, by any measure, one of the greatest mathematical minds the world has ever produced. His story as a poverty-stricken man doing complex mathematical proofs in his spare time was emotionally compelling, and the logic of bringing him to Cambridge was clear and undeniable.
In other words, for a variety of reasons Hardy found Ramanujan attractive and that’s at the core of the concept of soft power—it is the power to influence without coercion. Hard power might get people to do what you want, but can create resentment and backfire. Soft power is how you get people to want what you want, and that can be even more valuable.
The Power Of Tony Soprano’s Networks
As a Mafia boss, Tony Soprano clearly understood hard power and strictly enforced his will. He was also no stranger to soft power, joking and cajoling with his associates. But at the root of Tony’s power were his networks. He was, in gangland parlance, connected, not only to other criminals, but to government officials, religious leaders and legitimate businesspeople.
Yet it isn’t only mob bosses that need to be connected. Consider the Medici Family in renaissance Florence. The Medici weren’t kings. They didn’t hold official power, but they became one of the most powerful families in Europe. How? Because they sat at the center of multiple overlapping networks.
Through their bank, they were connected to merchants, princes, and even popes. They built alliances through strategic marriages. They funded artists, scientists, and thinkers. And they acted as boundary spanners, connecting powerful people who wouldn’t otherwise talk to one another. That network power made them extraordinarily influential.
The same pattern shows up again and again. Bill Gates used network power to take power away from IBM and dominate the tech industry for over a decade. Microsoft didn’t own the hardware. They didn’t control distribution. But everyone needed their software. That’s what made them dominant. That’s network power.
In a similar vein, when home video recorders were just coming to market in the 1980s, Betamax built a better product, but VHS built a better network and came to dominate the market. And next time you make a purchase, think about what you use to pay. Visa, Mastercard, American Express—that’s also network power at work.
While soft power can persuade and hard power can compel, it is network power that can help you gain scale, expanding access to information and providing the connectivity needed to communicate ideas and actions widely
Setting Your Ideas Up For Success
Most of us grow up believing in merit. We’re raised to think that the truth will win out and the best idea will always win in the end. Unfortunately, that’s not really true. As much as we might like to believe that our ideas can stand on their own, the truth is that we need power and influence to put them into action.
Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches the incredibly popular course Building Power to Lead, defines power as the ability to get things done your way in contested situations and that gets to the meat of it. People don’t encounter our ideas in a vacuum, but in a sea of other ideas, ambitions, prerogatives, and priorities.
For people to adopt an idea, it needs to cross their thresholds of resistance, points at which joining in no longer feels risky or costly. To get them over that hump, we need to access power and influence, which comes in three forms: hard power, soft power and network power. Hard power creates incentives. Soft power persuades. Network power builds momentum and propagates the idea forward.
These don’t work in isolation, but in combination. Hard power can force a decision, but risks resentment. Soft power can win buy-in, but without connection to authority, it can’t deliver results. Network power can get you access, but not action. When you use all three in tandem, you can unlock the power to achieve what you want.
So don’t just ask whether your idea is good enough. Think about how you are going to access the power and influence you need to set it up for success. That, more than anything, will determine whether you succeed or fail.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, a lecturer at Wharton, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, watch his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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