Matthew Barzun > Quotes

“The Constellation mindset, on the other hand, offers freedom with. Each of us freely acts in concert with others based on shared principles, habits, and sentiments. This offers choice and autonomy with a different kind of security and stability.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Dee Hock had the word educe; Jacobs had ramify. It’s the root of ramification, as in consequences. But ramify alone means to branch or differentiate. It is an active verb. She felt that the branching is where energy finds new opportunity—branching out a new brand or product line, branching into a new location. It’s these small, repetitive evolutions that make a profound impact over time. The more dynamic the environment—the more people you have with this mindset—the more energy will be created. And energy, which is just power repeatedly given away and returned, is the coin of the realm.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“In 2012, Google began a two-year study to determine what makes, in a nod to Stephen Covey, a highly effective team. They found that the distinguishing factor was interdependence. The more interdependent the team, the more it was a real team capable of high levels of effectiveness and not a mere work group.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“At the beginning of each session, I asked each person to write down on an index card one word that described what frustrated them most about their job. Then on the other side of the card, they each wrote one word that best captured what inspired them most and gave them joy about working at the embassy. We collected the cards and used them to create a word cloud. Despite the question being totally open-ended, the answers were the same at all twenty workshops. By far, the word most commonly written for frustration was bureaucracy. The most common for what inspired them: community.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Integration is her word for the final option and only happens when all members of a group make a new thing together. This new thing is truly yours as an individual and truly the product of the group. You are in it. It is of you. And your individuality is not diminished as a result. It is enhanced. This outcome is not a melting pot. It is not a salad. It is a Constellation.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Turning routine relationships and special transactions into special relationships is the essence of Constellation power creation. It means creating space for our humanity and expecting to need others, to be needed, and to be changed. This inevitably raises new issues to factor in—how to bring in more perspectives and create room to discuss personal issues more often and in different ways—but facing and welcoming this new friction generates energy instead of depleting it.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Follett called for re-personalization—to bring the right kind of struggle into each encounter. In what became her standard presentation, she encouraged leaders to allow all members of the team to share their views and study the problem at hand from many angles, with each person bringing their knowledge to the table. If you did this with your teams, then you could avoid the traps of arbitrary personal power and the twin danger of depersonalized power—you would still have power, but it would be what she called “power-with,” not “power-over.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The seventeenth of September, 1787,” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as the Fourth of July, 1776, but that was the day they signed the final draft of the Constitution, and it’s actually more sacred in many ways. Any band of revolutionaries can declare independence. Only one was able to invent a government and a legal system that realized the ideas represented by the constellation. It really ought to be remembered as America’s Interdependence Day.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The two keys for keeping all that energy in rainforests are branching and connecting. Plants literally branch, and animals figuratively do it with reproduction and species variation, and then it all interacts. There’s cooperation. There’s competition. There’s co-creation. That’s life.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“You know, Matthew, jokes are funny things. I mean they are strange things,” he said. “Think about it: If you play a song and no one likes it, it’s still a song. If you write a play and everyone walks out, it’s still a play. But if you tell a joke and no one laughs, it’s just a sentence.” To me, that was profound. A joke isn’t just the delivery of the words. It’s the connection—a completed circuit. The comedian does his or her part; the audience does theirs. And together they create something new. It’s no longer just you and me. It is us. Engaged. Otherwise, it’s just a sentence.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The task of a diplomat is to first learn how to become comfortable in that space and then to make others comfortable—to draw people out from behind their walls of entrenchment or entitlement into engagement. That’s what turns frustrating friction into fruitful friction”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“It all hinges on tone. Our whole democracy, he said, hinges on tone.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“We unwittingly did what so many Constellations before and since have done. We took the Pyramid mindset’s bait. To put a point on it, and to our cheers, Obama told the Republicans, “Elections have consequences. . . . I won.” Here’s the thing: elections have consequences for the winner too, and not all of them are good. Not only does a candidate win, but winning-and-losing also wins. The Pyramid mindset wins. The Washington establishment and the media know only this battle mode. Not surprisingly, the “elections have consequences” quip became famous again less than two years later: the Republicans hurled it back when they won control of the House in the midterm elections.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Most of us think compromise is a good outcome, but compromising is just the practice of hammering out partial acquiescence from all participants. No growth or group investment takes place because no one leaves satisfied”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“we can unlock energy and become more than the sum of our parts. This creation of energy and power through one another requires that “instead of shutting out what is different, we should welcome it because it is different. . . . Every difference that is swept up into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society; every difference which is ignored feeds on society and eventually corrupts it.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“It is common to hear, from both those who truly want to change and those who seem to be speaking through clenched jaws, the same phrase, “bottom-up,” thinking that this phrase signifies a real change. It usually follows a pledge to put away their “top-down” ways. But here’s the thing: Bottom-up is just the same Pyramid perspective, only upside down. And being the recipient of this leader’s sloganeering is hardly inspiring when your input is welcomed because you are at the “bottom.” We’re still in the shape of dependence.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The Pyramid mindset usually misses what cannot be measured and seeks to analyze individuals in isolation. That’s why it is so ill-equipped to guide us with relationships.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“the Pyramid mindset squanders the potential energy of difference by forcing everyone to be either dependent or independent. Dependence drowns out each individual’s potential. And independence suffocates individual identity because it doesn’t contribute to anything bigger or anyone else.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Churchill’s remarks are remembered as the Iron Curtain speech because of his vivid metaphor for Stalin’s plan to consolidate power across Eastern Europe, but that was not what he came to say. He was not there to sound an alarm so much as to summon the West to a new cause. Great strength would again be necessary to resist a gathering threat. In the nuclear age, the future of humanity depended on it. So what was it that he prescribed? Would the best way to face down a monolithic consolidation of power be to consolidate and centralize our own? To fight Pyramid with Pyramid, to use our language? No. The great lion of defiance and victory believed it was time to put the Constellation first again. To prevail against the threat of the “iron curtain,” he prescribed a “special relationship” between America and Britain, and, more important, special relationships between Americans and British. And between other democracies around the world too.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The Pyramid mindset offers freedom from. Consolidated dependence under a hierarchy offers a certain kind of security from outside threats. Less obviously, the Pyramid mindset is also with us in our independence. We become our own self-contained mini-pyramids (like the little triangle above the big pyramid in the Great Seal)—free, we imagine, from everything.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“If we did the hard work of forming these relationships and preserving these connections, millions of them, old and new, official and unofficial, then together they would form lasting bonds—“sinews of peace,” he called them. “The Sinews of Peace,” he underscored for his audience in Fulton that day, was the title of his speech and its purpose. This speech was not a call to arms. It was a call to form Constellations. He feared that Americans might want to sit it out in isolation again after two world wars or, just as bad, remain perpetually poised for war, with the Western world dependent on American military might. Winning wasn’t the end—it was a prologue to a new and different kind of work. “We aim at nothing but mutual assistance and collaboration” to increase “each other’s . . . powers.” Remember that Churchill had foreshadowed this at the welcome luncheon for Winant when he said that with victory would come “solemn but splendid duties.” It was time to let go of the Pyramid mindset. This would require “faith in each other’s purpose, hope in each other’s future, and charity towards each other’s shortcomings.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Buck Powell’s Britannica and Bill Gates’s Encarta were worlds apart in terms of technology—one old and analog and the other new and digital. But in one key aspect they were identical: their perspective. They were committed to the Pyramid mindset. Experts decided and assigned, locking in power at the top with predictable results.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“We might think that interdependence is some state between independence and dependence, but that couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, independence is a form of dependence—self-dependence would be a better name—and both involve the same Pyramid mindset.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“There was one issue that frustrated the students the most by far. It wasn’t Syria or Iraq or surveillance or any foreign policy topic that had been in the news or that I had been quizzed on in my “murder boards” preparing for Senate confirmation. It was guns. Second and third on the list of frustrations, confusions, and concerns were racism and police brutality.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“I encouraged the volunteers at the seminar to go back home and try something different. Don’t try to win an argument, no matter how justified, no matter how compelling. Instead, sit everyone in a circle and ask each person to share a fear and a hope for this country. Bring a notepad and write it all down. Once everyone has had a chance to express themselves, they will often come up to you and thank you for the dialogue. Technically, you haven’t had a dialogue because you haven’t said much, but it feels that way. Then ask them to please do the same with other groups of their friends and neighbors.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“When it finally came time to analyze the data, what mattered most was what the researchers dubbed “psychological safety.” These were the teams in which the relationships were strong enough that mistakes weren’t held against people and it was okay to bring up hard stuff, to disagree, to ask for assistance, and (to quote Churchill) to show “charity towards each other’s shortcomings.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“When we find ourselves in the awkward quadrants, we must try to get out by humanizing and empathizing, not by automating and replicating. The special relationships quadrant is not friction-free. There’s friction here, but it is fruitful friction.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“I decided it was time to do my best to articulate the pattern and tone I had been using. I called it “a.l.s.o.” Here is the gist: to form special relationships, we can ask others about their hopes and fears, link them to our own, serve the relationship between us, and open ourselves up.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Love and trust are mutual. Many, many other things we care about—laws, manners, prices, and really the bulk of our daily experience—are co-created by all of us and improved or degraded by what we bring to them. Therefore, James believed, the pattern we set and the tone we take with others are immensely more important than any argument we might make.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“Interdependence requires gaining awareness of the Pyramid lurking within and then actively releasing it. You must let go of it, along with the security it seems to offer. And, at the same time, you must make a leap to put your faith in the Constellation and in others.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go