Earlier this week, I shared with you the backstage story of nervousness just as I was about to give my talk at TED2013. Two hours before I was shaking violently. In the moment itself, I had a smile on my face and showed up fully alive. What happened in the middle is a trick you can use next time you want to really resonate with a crowd or even just one person.

A month before the talk, someone I hadn’t yet met in person wrote a note asking if a few people could take me out to breakfast the morning of the talk as a way of showing support. I was pretty sure I would have thrown up on their shoes that morning of, so I’m glad I never said yes. Instead, I suggested they wear a bright color and sit up front in the audience. When you see a few friendly face, you remember how much a community wants you to do well. Whenever that happens, I can stop fretting about remembering every idea I had on the topic, and instead just connect. I was counting on this technique to ground me, so that I wouldn’t mentally run up the ladder into my head. When I speak from my head alone, I am going to try and impress with braininess. When a speaker combines head and heart, they not only inform, they resonate.

As I walked into the hall, I made eye contact with Jane McGonigal. If you don’t already know of Jane, you should. She’s a fellow TED speaker, the NYT best-selling author of Reality is Broken, and a brilliant game designer. (I met her years ago playing Werewolf, which is a weird strategy game, at something called Foo Camp at 1:00 in the morning or something like that.) She made a heart with her hand, and gave me a big smile from a few rows away. (Here, in this picture, she’s reproducing the moment for posterity … just caught on my cell phone camera).

I calmed right down.

So that’s the trick. It’s so simple, perhaps even too simple to believe. But research shows people listen better when they connect with you, emotionally. No faster way to do that than to smile. or Laugh. It’s a stance or asana you can use anytime. In family life, in meetings, and if you are ever lucky enough to address a crowd. Just lift up one corner of your mouth and then the other.

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I can hardly believe it.

People always wonder if speakers are nervous. The question is, with enough practice, does this level of professional speaking ever get easy? I myself have had that question, wondering if I was “the only one” who got super nervous for big venues. As I got ready for TED starting, I looked around at my fellow colleagues who were going to speak in the same session. There in one corner was the rockstar, Bono, a former governor, 2 superb economists who teach at top schools (and therefore audiences all the time), and so on. Some were still rehearsing hand gestures in their seat before going on, others were pacing like crazy, one looked like she was going to throw up. Even Bono’s full-surround entourage couldn’t hide the fact that even he was breathing a little uneven.

About two hours before heading into the hall, I was a mess. I hadn’t had enough coffee. My hair was still wet because I didn’t have time to dry it. I was running late to the green room. As I was scurrying around, one errand I had to do was meet a fellow conference attendee, so I could borrow her earrings.

As I was taking off mine to swap, I could barely do the simple task. I wondered what was going on, and then I looked down at my hands. I was shaking violently. “I never do that”, I thought. Well, apparently, I never do that unless I’m facing the red-dot of TED, 6 cameras, 2,000 people live (and countless others watching elsewhere) in this epic arena.

But you know what I’ve learned? Nervousness says you care.

I had no desire, let alone ability to be anything other than my authentic self. I cared.  I wanted the idea to be so clearly delivered, so the idea could spread. What I wanted that day was to show up, fully alive, and be heard.

Well, you can see for yourself how that went.

(I’ll share more what turned the nervousness to calm, in a future post. My hands are shaking a bit, even now as I share the news.)

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Friends who have known me for 20+ years know that I always have champagne splits* in the fridge. My husband remembers the moment of first noticing this and swears this is when he fell in love with me**. Now it’s our tradition since he’s fully embraced it. It says we’re ready — at the drop of a hat — to mark something good that happened that day. It doesn’t have to be a public recognition. It can be a private moment of clarity.

What we choose to celebrate signals what matters to us. For learning something we’ve struggled to know. For speaking our truth. For being recognized in public for something we’ve labored on for long stretches in private. It can be with a grateful prayer, or the clink of two glasses toasting, or a happy dance***. Sometimes all 3 happen in our home. Maybe even tonight!

At work, and at home, I hope you are ready to celebrate the goodness that is happening all around you. Do you have a favorite way of celebrating?

*What is a split? It is a bottle that holds exactly 2 glasses of champagne. Also known as a pony, snipe or quarter bottle, but Split just sounds like you want to share, doesn’t it?

**It is either this moment or the REI store moment. One day I’ll share the REI story.

***No, there is no video moment of the Happy Dance. But imagine a blend of John Travolta + Big bird dance moves and you’d basically have a picture in your head of what this looks like. Hence, no video.

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That has meant flying into #Sandy, and not knowing which city I would need to drive to, so I could fly to the next event. It has meant coming home for 30+ hours only to turn around and board another flight. It has meant a bedroom floor with stuff all over it as I dump from one trip and prepare for the next. I am both exhilarated and tired by the experience. As I reflect on it, the thing that strikes me is how much I learned and grew. And before I take these experiences for granted, I want to share what I learned from these recent trips in case it might help you in whatever you are working on …

1. Let the Audience Change You. So much content today can be consumed in an asynchronous fashion. Meaning the sender and receiver need not be in the same space or having the shared experience. So, when we are in the same room, it’s an opportunity to connect, not just deliver. And by connect, I mean be engaged with one another. To create some experience that can’t just be piped in via video. Designing a presentation without an audience is like writing a love letter & addressing it ‘to whom it may concern” and showing up to deliver the same talk you’ve already delivered is like acting like every person you are dating is the same person. The joy of in-person work is to be there, fully present, to this venue, this community, and this conversation – which means creating anew and adapting as needed. This can come out in many ways, such as connecting my idea to a prior speaker’s point, or to make fun of an experience we all just shared. I’ve reduced (and in many cases eliminated) slides so I can focus on the moment. And, what I’ve learned is that letting myself be open meant each moment was fresh. You may not be a professional speaker, but you can allow every interaction to be a fresh open moment if you are fully present to it.
2. Be comfortable. My ability to be present is directly tied to how much my feet hurt while standing there. Women do crazy things for the sake of a look, and I used to think it was an “either/or” situation – that either could look stylish or be comfortable and now I’ve discovered that if I look hard enough I can satisfy both requirements. These boots are really similar to a pair Santa bought me last year. (Which reminds me, they really need to get to the shoeshine place, cause I’ve worn them so much in the last few months.) I used to worry about being “too stylish” for a crowd or too casual or too “whatever” and now my big thing insight is this: to be comfortable in what I wear and be comfortable with myself. If you are comfortable, everyone is. I recommend starting with your feet.
3. Celebrate Humanness. In reflection on the 40 days, I realize it’s not the “big stuff” that I remember – not the thousands of people in an audience, or the opportunities to present at Fortune or speaking at the NYSE. The moments I remember are “little things” – that happened along the way:  The way a hotel clerk got me some hot-lemon-honey water to help my sore and overworked throat even though it was 2 in the morning when I arrived and everything was closed up for the night. The vulnerable conversation that a CEO felt they could have with me to find a way forward out of a mess. The French fry lunch at Brasserie. Scotch drinks with friends, some new and some old. The 7 am meeting walk in Central Park. Or, seeing the final presidential debate with some new friends in Brooklyn. The walk along the river in Boston. Dinner with friends in each city, post-events. The stuff I remember from this long journey isn’t the awesomeness of the big, but the specifics of the small. Not what I ate (although I did manage to eat well) or even what was said (as insightful as it was) but the moment of meeting and connecting. I used to not spend as much time pre-planning the connections and meetings and yet I’m coming to realize it’s what I remember the most because it’s what matters most. All of the humanness is the stuff any of us remember. And it’s a lesson to me to prioritize this up in my life. In this day of living so much of life facing a computer, being with one another and dialoguing is going to grow in importance.

I’m now home, looking forward to reconnecting with the family and spending some time first catching up and then writing more. I hope wherever you are this Thanksgiving weekend, you are doing something that brings you GREAT joy and that you are at a place in your life for which you can give thanks. I am super thankful for this Yes & Know community. Gobble, Gobble.

(p.s. Thanks to CeCe Telesco who created the photo montage for this post.)

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I told you a few months ago I would write about what it felt like to do a TEDtalk. I published my perspective earlier this week at my Harvard blog and because I was traveling I couldn’t quite get it to my main site before now. There’s only so much one can do with an iPad … let me know what questions you have about speaking..

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This spring, I got invited to do a talk at a prestigious event — TEDGlobal. And so, I wrote the idea, created a script, polished flow, created slides with a designer, and then worked on the cadence by rehearsing and rehearsing, right up until that final moment of delivery.

And I walked out on that stage. And I flopped. Well, not quite flopped — but I did not deliver a seriously kick-ass talk. I stood on the red-dot of the international stage, and delivered just a “so-so” talk. Something was missing. Why am I admitting this — even though my speakers’ bureau will hate it, and some people who have me booked to speak may start to question their own judgment? Because admitting it is the first step, of a long road to getting better.

Getting better at something is thought to be about learning. First you crawl, then you walk, then you run. Or first you learn addition and then subtraction, multiplication, division — on and on to calculus and beyond. Learning is understood as the path to perfection, of being right, and knowing more than others. You proceed linearly until you reach the pinnacle. Learning accumulates, like bricks being laid neatly on top of one another.

But many things are not linear and neat. Markets change. Today, there are few “barriers to entry” and the value chain is more like a value flow. What worked when we had an largely uneducated workforce doesn’t work in a knowledge economy. And certainly, any of us parents can attest to the fact that as soon as we think we have stuff figured out in parenting, the situation changes and we become flummoxed. And so it is at work and home: change is the only constant and most of the challenges we face each day are messy.

Which is why one “rule” of my recent book on the Social Era is: “Learn. Unlearn. (Repeat.)” Rather than viewing change as an aberration, we need to understand it as a natural part of life and work. Adaptability is central to how organizations and people thrive today. Our goal today is to learn our way into the future. Instead of viewing strategy as a set end point, it becomes a horizon to aim for. Instead of asking employees to each simply man their own oar, we must encourage their capacity to navigate, to tack and adapt as conditions shift. Instead of perfection and getting it right the first time, innovation can be continuous, and core rather than episodic.

So how does one unlearn? I’ll use the experience of my disappointing speech to dissect the process, because the same steps are involved in both personal and organizational unlearning.

The first step is to admit something is wrong. Now, this is never easy. Not on a personal level, not on an organizational level. We’d rather believe things were great. At TEDGlobal, lots of people said incredibly nice things after my talk, and I wanted to believe them — even though something felt off for me. So, I asked my husband to watch the DVD of my talk while I listened from across the room. My husband cannot tell a lie, and he didn’t need to say much to confirm my suspicion. Something was wrong.

The second step is to ask what specifically went wrong — and get help if you need it. I could have easily said “It was jet lag” or “I was over-committed and tired from trying to finish my second book.” Both of those were true. I see the same impulse all the time with companies who sense something is wrong but then write it off to particular market conditions. This is understandable, but it abdicates responsibility, and undermines learning.

To figure out what went wrong, we often need an outside perspective. This is why consultants can add value. Knowing I didn’t know what went wrong, I brought in a performance expert and asked her for clear, actionable feedback.

Then, listen. Defensiveness is a natural response — it’s our ego’s way to protect itself. None of us want to be imperfect, or go back to being a “student” once we’ve reached a certain level of accomplishment. We like the feeling of “knowing” more than we like the feeling of “unknowing.” Most of us spend a lot of time trying to be smart. This plays out inside our organizations, too. The reason companies have a hard time undoing a mistake in the marketplace is because they don’t want to admit they were imperfect. But all people, even shareholders, have the ability to forgive if you tell them the truth and your path forward. Look at Apple with its map apology or Netflix with its DVD market shift as corporate examples of what happens when you listen — albeit slowly. We can also see a counterexample in the less productive response of RIM. I wish I could say I was a great listener, but I probably spent half the time fighting my coach’s advice before circling back to listen to it. It’s seriously hard to hear feedback, but listen we must.

Begin the process of undoing. For any of us to pick up anything new, we have to be willing to drop some old baggage. That tired old idea we’ve used to shape our strategy. That part of our identity that no longer works. Old muscle memory around how something “should be”. As I discussed the talk with my relentlessly honest coach, I realized I had built up a whole set beliefs about how I had to act to be “respectable” on this big stage. Where I am normally less “perfect’ and perfectly willing to be so, standing on this stage — the TED stage — made me want to be flawless. But trying so hard not to say the wrong thing, just made me sound stiff.

In trying to deliver the perfect line and perfect idea, I was buying into a mythology of perfection. And to a degree, I believe that a lot of what many of us are taught is tied to this notion of perfection, and that it can warp our ability to keep sight of our goals. On the TED stage, speakers are taught to stand still on the red dot and not move so the camera can catch them correctly, which leaves us feeling robotic and self-conscious. On Wall Street, the focus on making profit results down-to-the-penny accurate has shifted the conversation away from delivering value over time. In entrepreneurship, a lot of focus goes into pitching to VCs but not the work to build the company. It takes great discernment to realize that what matters to the value creation process, is not always the same as how we measure things.

And, this is crucial to realize: The beliefs we are using to guide us are often a tacit thing — something we can’t see because we are so close to it that we actually can’t see it as a “thing”; it has become something “true”, an assumption that frames every decision. Chris Argyris wrote in 1992 that a major impediment to learning is that most organizations “store and use” information in tacit, versus explicit, forms.I’ve come to see that this is true for both personal and organizations situations. And without being able to name the thing, you can’t change the thing. But by naming it, any of us can and will see it as something we can question and only then can we unlearn it. When I unlearn that “perfection must rule on big stages”, I will return to connecting deeply. This carries a risk of course: It may turn out that I’m less “appropriate” in future talks, and my imperfections and flaws may not resonate. Yet, I have to trust — as all people need to — that they can and will learn and adjust and be flexible enough to adapt to ever-changing conditions.

It is actually easy to learn about doing. It is harder to learn about being. If you’re learning to use calculus or to fly an airplane, you don’t want to have to start from scratch; you want to learn from others and follow the road already paved. But most of life is about learning to be ourselves, and to “learn to be” is about figuring out what we take as a truth — those ways we just “know”. To unlearn, we need to get good at seeing and naming those ways. Unlearning is harder than learning, but it’s crucial to do … because innovation and creativity are rarely about doing more of the same.

We have to be willing to reinvent. To not fall so in love with something that we’re not willing to let it go. And so unlearning becomes our life’s work.

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As #SocialEra (my new book) has been released into the world, the world has shouted back with enthusiasm. But some days and hours, I’ve felt like the surfboarder being battered by waves as they are flung beneath the surface, not knowing which way is up, not being able to cope with the deluge, and feeling very disoriented.

It’s harrowing.

And while I’ve been feeling this way, I was telling myself that this topic needed to be off limits for the blog, because it would only sound like I’m complaining. And maybe it does to you, or will to others. But I am really processing this issue, and it seems like a common problem; it seems to me that the thing I’m trying to deal with is something all of us deal with. In fact, whenever we each grow into a new role (a new job, or a new project, or in this case my work of releasing an idea into the world), the hardest time isn’t doing the creative work itself, it’s figuring what part of the work to say yes to when it’s all so new, and intensely submersive in nature.

Then, my friend, Julien Smith, shared a post about “Choosing your Bible”, a way of characterizing what anchors one to what is “true” and “right”. So even though Julien didn’t assign “homework” as he is apt to do, I am self-assigning it, knowing it could be fodder for your own commandments list…

• Be Purposeful, in an Orgasmic Big Way. This weekend, I happened to stay at a crappy hotel where I woke up to some noises from the next room that I was super-embarrassed to hear. But at the same time, how great is it that some things evoke the sounds of “yes” from deep within a person that there’s no suppressing it. When any of us are working from our deepest purpose, it feels that way. I know mine, and each “opportunity” needs to lead me to full a “Hell Yeah”. Or a clear, yet kindly delivered, no.
• Define Your Unmovables. Work is important but what makes life worth living isn’t just “work”, right? Whether one’s ‘non-work’ commitment is to build a startup on the side, write a book, raise children, even work out, those things have to be unmovable or else they can easily be sideline by other people’s requests. For me, family is crucial. I love walking my son to school, knowing there will be a day when he won’t be holding my hand as we jointly enjoy the crisp fall weather as a way to start our days. So, early morning meetings always get a no. Also, most dinner meetings and networking bar meets just can’t compete with a home-cooked meal where my son still crawls into my lap for a cuddle after he’s done eating, and we all sit and talk. A part of me wants to apologize for having this kind of priority because it’s not the cultural norm, but it is what works for me, and I’m coming to accept this. Which ultimately allows more hard-and-fast-blocking of specific time slots makes saying no (or yes) faster, and easier.
• Yes/No/When. I have a contemporary piece of art by Michelle Scott, that says Yes / No / Maybe and the “Maybe” has about 50% of the space on the piece. I think we’re afraid to say no to people so we settle for this Maybe space. Maybe is squishy; like a purgatory space for ideas and for energy. I prefer Yes/No/When set of buckets. Yes and No being self-explanatory, I use When to manage the interest but not the time. I say whenI can take on new projects or requests. I do this in quarter-timeframe buckets, and I identify the key focus area for this quarter and the next two. Rather than try to take on everything as it comes, I share with people that I am thinking of that next bucket of ideas in Q1 or in Q2 and I signal when I can even start to consider the idea with them. An answer of “when” lets me say yes but in a more managed way.
• MUTE More. Certain things are growing in volume for everyone — emails, list serves, rss feeds, dialogues on twitter, checking in on Facebook stuff etc. And each of us could do that transactional flow of stuff just about all day long… between that and going to meetings, we might never do the real thinking that creates value. Now, I am blocking off times to do deeper work and manage my energy so that in those blocks, I can really focus. (I know there is some software you can use to block internet access – gotta find that cause I lack the discipline to self-manage some days.)I also really use the auto-respond notes –  saying what is going on, and asking people to get back in touch in x window if it is still important. Then, I literally delete every email that comes in that window (other than things I’m already committed to i.e. corporate board things, audit committee communications, etc) without EVER looking at them. People who keep sending repetitive notes after receiving first bounce message end up being put into auto-delete (never to be seen from again) process because they apparently can’t respect boundaries so it gets managed for them. I’ve done the math: 100 emails costs me about 2-3 hours of productive work or ~30% of my productive work time for any day. (What does it cost you? Really – figure this out. Literally, do your own math) So, the imperative is to be prudent about deleting “nice to haves” whenI’m not already getting my own work done. I’m less strict about this when I’m all caught up. And, yes, I’m sure I’ll make a mistake and miss some communication that could have been important or hurt someone’s feelings by not getting back to them. But – better that outcome, then to go under the waves trying to please someone else, which is like trying to kiss an ever-moving butt.

   

• Preserve a Give / Get Mix. Saying yes to someone else can mean saying no to your own priorities. But any of us “just” working on our priorities alone doesn’t seem right; we’re not being very open or giving…which is central to thriving for the system. I want to support other women entrepreneurs or catch up with the inventor working on collaboration tools… There’s something about serendipity, meeting new people, hear of new ideas, advising people who need your help, etc.But if I said yes to even 5% of the inbound requests, I could easily do this as a full-time job. My answer? I have turned 99% of advisory / networking meetings into hikes. That makes sure that as I “give” I am also “getting” what I need. People who want to meet with me can walk (slow or fast, but fast is preferred) with me at set times on my calendar. That lets me limit these networking requests to set spots on the calendar and even if the meeting is not amazing, at least I get 20-25 miles a week of fitness in my life. And, I am (hopefully) a better listener when on a hike than if I’m in a coffee shop. Hikes for work for me, but the larger point is how can you give generously and freely without it being a burden? Have people come to you; have a set day or time spot…there are ways to say yes without it being overwhelming.

   

• Recruit the Posse.
  Some of us work with natural teams so we know who supports us or not. But some of us don’t and support in the form of a posse is not as obvious. Get clear what kind of support you need; it is financial, is it time, is it care in a particular way?If you are doing 20-some-mile walk for the Komen fundraising effort, people know the way to support you is to give you money because it’s clear you want to stand up to cancer. People can throw you a shower / come to your shower / buy you a baby gift if the learn you are pregnant with child as a way of showing they share in your joy of expanding your family. And if you just got fired, you can get support from your friends saying that such-and-such firm … “they didn’t deserve you, anyways”. And they might offer to be a network of resources while you look.In many cases, the convention for how to show support a friend is known. But what if you’re doing something that lacks conventional understanding?I’ve learned through experience (and other authors), that most people really don’t know how to support an author. Just the other day, one of my very best friends asked some question around the book and I realized she had no idea what I had been working on. I wanted to groan aloud. And I would have, except for the fact that this is the norm. I’ve spent a dedicated 11 months on this and they have no idea what ideas matter to me, or why I care so much.  Even though they would easily buy me a $4 coffee at Starbucks, they don’t buy the same-priced book. They don’t read the first 5 pages of the book so they can ask “what makes you care about this topic”. The same people whose baby/wedding/race/breastcancer/whatever thing get support…  they don’t show support back because they don’t know how. A part of me wants to fix it but the other part realizes it’s not likely to happen. So perhaps the answer is to find the people who DO know how to care, and just depersonalize the situation with those who don’t. Build the community that feeds your creativity and soul work — find your posse — and just realize they might not sit next to you in that cube / city / chalice line.

   

• Fit in Friends. Any one of us can regret the time we waste on things that did not matter but we rarely regret spending time with the people that do matter. I just returned from Chicago in support of a conference entitled, Pitch Refinery. Melissa pierce, who manages to get lots of shit done in the entrepreneur world, asked if I could come to her event and be her closing keynote. She has been there for me during hard times, so I said yes to herand because I could see how passionately she was persuing her big “Hell Yeah” cause.
  Of course, the conference mattered, but that’s not really why I said yes. I am saying yes to the person who stood next to me when I needed a friend. (Sometimes I write back to friends explaining what else is on my plate, to make sure that this thing really matters to them enough for me to stop other stuff to show them I care. That helps triage what really matters in case it’s not clear.) Busyness is fine, but it’s no excuse for not supporting friends. Cause loneliness … sucks. Isolating yourself from friends might work in the short-run but I’m not convinced it ever does in the long view.
• Honor the Body. I am one of those people that gets super cranky if I’m not getting enough sleep. And, I easily get sick (pneumonia-in-a-day kind of sick) because when I was young, I got TB and it has permanently affected my immune system. So for me… sleep, working out 6/7 days, walking in the sunshine, eating vegetables … are not just nice to haves, they are crucial to being able to function. I used to ignore this wanting to believe I could be more bad-ass or something, but I’ve stopped the war with my own body.  Now I track activity / food / sleep every day (using this really fun device, the Fitbit) because I really want to improve both my consciousness and my feedback loop for what is  / is not working.
• Archimedes, not Hercules. No idea is ever made into reality by oneself, or by the one who pounded himself into oblivion. Which means: I don’t have to do it all, and, in fact, I shouldn’t even try to do it all. I have to think of how to use my time and creative attention to enable others. I need to focus on higher leverage stuff. I’m asking myself this question: “Will spending this time lead to hundreds, thousands of human beings being more fully alive in the world?” Where can I engage or partner with others to create this change in the world? Where is there leverage? Saying yes to 10 small things – doing lots of work — means I’m not being thoughtful to figure out the point of leverage – to create the shift I’m seeking.  Which circles back to Commandment #1. There’s a reason I’m doing all this, and it’s not to earn money or to be popular or to be everywhere. It is to see a certain change in the world.

Even while our intellectual side knows we can’t say yes to everything, our emotional side fears we might miss out on something that could be Amazingly Great. That’s why saying no or yes is so stinking hard to do and why we need our own personal commandments, our own “bible” source for what matters and why. And when we are going up a new learning curve, we are probably even more afraid because things are new and we want to do well. I’m not proud of how overwhelmed I feel right now (and I hope none of this came across as whiny). I think that by coming up with these commandments and sharing them publicly, it’ll really help manage what is still to come.

Curious – what would be on your Commandment list?

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When you write online, no one checks to see if you have a journalism degree before they start to read. If you experience an earthquake and want to report on its danger or safety, no one asks your credentials before you report to Ushahidi. And if you were interested a creating a new company, you can simply initiate the idea and get funding through Kickstarter or Indie GoGo.

The gateways of power have changed.

Or have they?

When I look around, I see a culture that honors being prepared, doing the right things to get ahead, and achieving more and more, starting with our education — we need to go to the right high school to get into the right college, to get the right job after college. Our culture also honors fancy titles and brand affiliations, as visibly celebrated by the first question most Westerners ask on meeting someone new: “And who are you?” It’s as if knowing one’s title and affiliation will let you know if a person’s ideas are even worth considering. And of course, premiere venture capitalists talk with pride about “pattern recognizing” for success, signaling that they typically fund a 23-year old from Stanford over say, women, people of color, or those with a more diverse life experience. All this, even though research shows creativity and innovation peak later in life.

So, which is it?

I’d like to explore this topic with you by sharing two arguments about what defines power today.

Argument 1: You Are Powerful Beyond Measure

Academic degrees, once a status differentiator, are no longer required to create good ideas. After all, Peter Thiel pays kids to leave school. Title and status are no longer essential. Opportunities that were once vetted opportunities — limited to a select few — are now available to many.

Case in point: Crowdsourcing solutions often allow us to include voices and talent we’ve never heard before. One such “game,” Fold It, allows any individual to work with sequencing amino acids to figure out how that protein is going to fold. This particular work is very important to research and medicine, and is usually conducted by scientists with PhDs. But when Fold It studied who was the best protein folder in the world, it wasn’t someone they “expected” to see. Instead, it was someone who is an executive assistant by day — a woman — and is the world’s best scientific protein folder at night. This individual, driven by her own skills and passions, is not being assigned the work, nor being vetted to do the work, but is simply doing the work.

The Social Era unlocks new doors of both who can contribute and what can be created, and thus changes the very source of power itself. Crowdsourcing, SaaS models, open source, social networks, virtual workforces and other new meshy processes, tools, and business models have enabled new ways to create value. And, just as the Social Era shifts how an organization can create, deliver and capture value across its business model, it shifts — of course — the source of power for each of us, too.

The ingredient level of the social era starts with and is built off a single unit, that of a social human. Where the industrial era rewarded accreditations and employee numbers, the Social Era will reward those with the ability to connect, create, and contribute. As it stands, work has been freed from jobs, and each of us can find many ways to have impact without someone else telling us “we are allowed.”

Argument 2: Power is a Limited Commodity

We still live in a world where being part of a powerful, exclusive group gives you power, whether that group is educational (the Ivy League, Skull and Bones, Harvard Law), professional (McKinsey, Google, Exxon Mobil), or demographic (white, male, straight). Who would argue that such affiliations no longer confer some degree of power?

I was recently talking to someone (a white male) who I considered a friend and fellow management thinker. I went to him for help crisping an idea; he gave me this advice:

“As a brown woman, your likelihood of being heard above the noise is next to nothing. For you to do so, you need to be way more edgy. But if you are too edgy, you’re not safe. As a brown woman, you need to be safe for people to hear your ideas. And so don’t be too edgy.”

I asked him if there was any specific way that any human being could actually do what he suggested. He stared at the floor, and then shook his head.

Now here’s the embarrassing part. After a couple of days of retelling this story and receiving only blank stares or uncomfortable silence in return — with no one saying anything close to “this advice is stupid” — within a day or so I started to believe… that it was true. I started to believe my skin color wasn’t right to be seen as a management thinker. I started to believe that my ideas were not right because my history wasn’t right. I started to believe that what mattered was not the power of these ideas, but whether I fit the mold of a “powerful” person enough for these ideas to be seen.

Reconciling the Two Points of View

So, let me ask you: Is power that thing assigned by others? Is it about getting top grades in the right school, and having the right titles and rank at work? Is it about being born to the right parents, into the right gender, in the right country? Are you more powerful if you are on the top org chart, or less powerful if you’re at the bottom of the ladder? Do these external assignments define any of us as more or less powerful?

Or is power something that each of us manifests by knowing our purpose, applying it to what we create, and using that to define how we see ourselves in the world?

Power has been defined in terms of the ways in which you can have control over others — by paying them to do things, to direct activities, by allocating resources. In this view, some people have power and some don’t. It’s a win-lose construct.

But, the Social Era shows us that power can also come from how we create with others. In this way, power can be about what we can each affect. It comes down to contributing based on what we can each uniquely bring, something I’ve called owning our “onlyness.” When each of us recognizes our own agency, we have power enough to each create and contribute what we can.

What I see is a shift in the nature of power and influence. And I wonder if we might want to call out two specifics:

1. Power is open. Power used to be the thing that got things done, and influence used to be the thing you used to try and get things done. But today, the power of connections, community, and shared ideas offer a different lever in what can be accomplished. It is open-source software and encyclopedias written by crowds and revolutions seeded on Internet portals. It is Kickstarter, Meetup and Ushahidi and any number of other platforms that allow disparate, diffuse strangers to marshal the kind of influence that once only centralized institutions could. This power is different than the traditional classification of hard and soft power. It is networked, engaged power.
2. When power is assigned from the outside world (based on others’ opinions or on status), then it is power that can also be taken away by that world. But by granting ourselves agency — a power that comes from understanding our individual ability to contribute to the world — we give ourselves a power that cannot be taken back.

It does not define you. No. You define it.

There is a cost to defining power in the traditional, limited way. If we keep defining power in the same way, we end up staying in place. Look around. There are plenty of signs that suggest that what we’ve used so far isn’t working. The act of reimagining our own notion of power might very well be central to what happens next, in our own lives, in our organizations, and in the economies in which we live.

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This post was originally posted at Harvard Business Review here, and in long form: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/just_how_powerful_are_you.html. As is my normal practice, I ask that you add comments directly there.

The post Just How Powerful Are You? appeared first on Nilofer Merchant.

Someone could have created a barometer of sorts for how near it was to Test Day, based on witnessing what had been scrubbed.

If the bathroom was scoured, and the bed was made, it was 5 days to the test. However if the bathroom was scoured, the bed made, the closets tidied, the laundry done, and the kitchen fridge cleaned out……then, the test was surely the next day. The place was never so clean as when a big report was due.

Now, I do the same with writing. I will struggle to capture an idea from deep within, and then remember that there was some dust on some light fixture. And, off I go.

So, it was with delight and relish that I read this poem aloud to the family. Entitled, “Advice to Writers”, By Billy Collins, the first two stanzas:

Even if it keeps you up all night,

wash down the walls and scrub the floor

of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.

Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

And he goes onto write that we writers shouldn’t just clean the house, we should go out into nature and even scrub the undersides of trees, and scour the nests. It’s worth a giggle or two, and so captures that moment of deception we writers and other creative types create for ourselves. We would rather scrub the toilet than face into the abyss of not knowing what we will create next.

Yet, I know that if I gave into every fear and situation like this, I would never ever write. As in: Never. Ever. Focus. Hard work is often best tacked by actually just getting to the work, and not allowing oneself to be distracted. I’ll have PLENTY of temptations in the next few weeks as I’ve signed up to produce a new book (my 2^nd title) and the deadline will sneak up before I know it. So, hopefully, I will remember this. (Yet given my own history of “scrubbing the toilets” instead of studying, I recognize that I might need others to remind me.)

Billy Collins is a two-term US Poet Laureate. His gift is in capturing every day moments, and he recently spoke at TED2012. This poem is from The Apple That Astonished Paris, by Billy Collins (The University of Arkansas Press); 1988.

Video of his funny self, here, may just convince you to give poetry another chance:

Gifted, isn’t he?  (And probably not by scrubbing the underside of trees, or of toilets but rather by doing the work that needs to be done.)

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