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Constellations of Power: Breaking Free from the Pyramid Mindset
Have you ever noticed how the Great Seal of the United States contains two completely different symbols of power? On one side stands a constellation of stars representing states working in concert, while the other features a rigid pyramid with an all-seeing eye at its peak. This duality isn't just historical curiosity-it represents two fundamentally different approaches to power that shape our organizations, relationships, and society. Matthew Barzun discovered this pattern while serving as U.S. Ambassador and Obama campaign organizer, where he witnessed firsthand how giving away power paradoxically creates more of it. His insights have transformed businesses, political campaigns, and diplomatic missions. As Simon Sinek notes in the book's foreword, "Our society has overindexed on rugged individualism," but Barzun offers a compelling alternative that has already helped build some of the world's most successful enterprises and movements.
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The Lost Constellation: America's Forgotten Symbol of Power
On July 4th, 1776, America's founders made two momentous declarations-independence from Britain and the need for a national symbol that would embody their revolutionary vision. Creating the Great Seal proved to be an unexpectedly complex challenge, requiring three separate committees and six painstaking years to complete. The central difficulty lay in crafting a visual representation that could capture the delicate balance between ordered governance and individual liberty-how to maintain structure without oppression and freedom without descending into anarchy.
The final design, meticulously crafted by Charles Thomson in 1782, featured a striking "constellation" of stars at its crest, each representing a state in the new union. These stars were deliberately arranged to symbolize the states' mutual interdependence while preserving their individual identity. The constellation metaphor worked on multiple levels-representing both America's emergence as a new nation among the established powers of the world and its revolutionary organizing principle: independent entities freely choosing to coordinate their actions to achieve greater collective goals. This pattern of voluntary cooperation and mutual support became America's distinctive advantage in world affairs.
When Alexis de Tocqueville conducted his famous American journey in 1825, he observed this constellation principle operating throughout society. He noted how even America's architecture reflected its character-wooden structures that could be easily modified or rebuilt, unlike Europe's permanent stone edifices, symbolizing the nation's adaptability and dynamism. Most remarkable to him was Americans' natural inclination to form voluntary associations for every conceivable purpose-from business ventures and industrial cooperatives to religious congregations, moral reform societies, and social clubs both serious and lighthearted. By dismantling traditional hierarchical power structures, America unleashed unprecedented social energy through this constellation pattern, enabling democracy, commerce, and civil society to thrive in novel ways.
However, the Industrial Revolution brought a significant shift toward hierarchical organization. The efficiency of mass production demanded more rigid, pyramid-like structures. A telling symbol of this transformation can be found in the Great Seal's own history-while the constellation side was immediately cast in metal upon approval, the pyramid side remained uncast for 150 years. It wasn't until 1934, during the Great Depression, that Franklin D. Roosevelt, implementing centralized federal programs, ordered the pyramid side placed prominently on the dollar bill, marking a profound shift in American governmental philosophy.
The contrast between Pyramid and Constellation mindsets extends far beyond mere organizational structure, representing fundamentally different approaches to human relationships and power. The Pyramid mindset assigns people to fixed roles, pursues predetermined objectives, and manages uncertainty through strict hierarchical control. The Constellation mindset, conversely, embraces possibility and emergence, attracts voluntary participation based on shared values, and generates power through distribution rather than concentration. Perhaps most significantly, these mindsets offer contrasting visions of freedom: the Pyramid provides "freedom from"-either through protective dependence or complete independence-while the Constellation enables "freedom with"-the ability to collaborate while maintaining individual autonomy, creating a more dynamic and resilient social fabric.
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Constellation Makers: When Giving Away Power Creates More
The clash between rigid hierarchies and collaborative networks is perfectly illustrated through the evolution of encyclopedias. When Microsoft's Encarta challenged Encyclopedia Britannica's centuries-old business model in the 1990s, it appeared to be a classic disruption story. Microsoft enhanced Funk & Wagnalls content with multimedia features, interactive maps, videos, and animations, selling it at a fraction of Britannica's $1,200+ price. By 1995, Encarta had devastated Britannica's business, forcing the company to lay off their door-to-door sales force and slash prices, while Bill Gates had become the world's richest person through Microsoft's dominance.
But a third approach was brewing that would revolutionize how knowledge is created and shared. Jimmy Wales, who grew up reading and meticulously correcting encyclopedias in his family's small Alabama home, launched Nupedia around 2000 with a vision of creating a free, expert-written online encyclopedia. Despite recruiting volunteer academics and establishing rigorous standards, Nupedia's seven-step review process proved overwhelmingly bureaucratic, producing only eighteen articles in its first year. When team member Larry Sanger suggested using Wiki technology-a collaborative writing platform developed by Ward Cunningham-to allow open editing, Wales created Wikipedia as an experimental companion site.
This collaborative approach exploded beyond anyone's expectations, generating 18,000 articles within a year through voluntary contributions from thousands of users worldwide. Wales made several crucial decisions that shaped Wikipedia's future: rejecting advertising in favor of donation funding, establishing community-modifiable principles like "neutral point of view" and "verifiability," and implementing a democratic editing process. Wikipedia grew to become the largest knowledge resource ever created, with over six million English articles and versions in 240+ languages, attracting billions of monthly visitors. By 2010, both Britannica and Encarta had ceased print publication, while Wikipedia continued to thrive through its volunteer community.
What made the difference? Despite their technological differences, both Britannica and Encarta operated with the same Pyramid mindset-experts deciding and assigning from the top down, maintaining strict control over content creation and editing. Wales initially made the same mistake with Nupedia but succeeded when he abandoned this approach, embracing a Constellation mindset where users could both stand out through expertise and fit in as community members, creating a self-organizing system of knowledge creation.
This same pattern emerged in the financial world through Dee Hock, who grew up in North Ogden, Utah during the Depression, watching his community survive through mutual support and cooperation. After becoming the first in his family to attend college, Hock worked in consumer credit where he developed a powerful critique of "mechanistic, command-and-control organizations" that treated humans as interchangeable machine parts. When Bank of America's credit card system was failing in the 1960s, drowning in fraud and operational problems, Hock stepped forward with revolutionary organizational principles: participation rights that couldn't be bought or sold, self-organizing structures with no centralized power, and simultaneous competition and cooperation among member banks.
Despite initial resistance from traditional bankers, Bank of America ultimately joined as an equal member, and within four years, the organization-renamed Visa-had expanded to fifteen countries. Today, Visa processes an astounding 65,000 transactions per second across 46 million merchant locations in over 200 countries, handling $11 trillion annually through its decentralized network. At age 55, Hock left his creation to become a philosopher and writer, observing that our institutions fundamentally reflect our consciousness and that true organizational change must begin "in here," in our mental models, not "out there" in structures and systems. His legacy demonstrates how giving away control can create more powerful and resilient organizations than traditional command-and-control hierarchies.
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The Guru's Guru: Mary Parker Follett's Forgotten Revolution
Peter Drucker, called the twentieth century's most influential leadership thinker, had his own guru-Mary Parker Follett. Warren Bennis acknowledged that "just about everything written today about leadership and organizations comes from Mary Parker Follett's writings and lectures." Yet within a decade after her death in 1933, this once-famous figure had become a "nonperson" despite having already articulated what Jimmy Wales and Dee Hock later rediscovered.
Born outside Boston in 1868, Follett grew up with a father suffering from alcoholism and PTSD after the Civil War. From childhood, she felt tension between official authority and her own heart and mind. At Harvard's Annex for women, she found a mentor in William James, who taught that our mindset toward others affects not just perception but actual outcomes. Her groundbreaking thesis on the Speaker of the House revealed that effective leaders develop a creative blend of formal and informal power, helping colleagues feel they were generating power together.
Despite her book's success, Follett was denied academic opportunities because she was a woman. Working in Boston's immigrant neighborhoods, she successfully spread the community center movement to over 240 cities. Her work with job training led to appointments on labor boards, where she witnessed firsthand the conflicts between employers and employees-groups that genuinely needed each other to succeed.
At nearly fifty, Follett wrote "The New State," declaring that American political and economic life was stagnating "because we have not yet learned to live together." She identified four possible outcomes from group interactions, with only one being good:
Bad outcome #1: Acquiescence - Just giving in to someone else, failing your duty to bring your whole self to the group.
Bad outcome #2: Victory - You "win" by prevailing upon others to accept your pre-formed vision, but everyone else loses their ability to contribute.
Bad outcome #3: Compromise - Most consider compromise good, but Follett saw it as merely hammering out partial acquiescence from all participants. No one leaves satisfied.
Only good outcome: Integration - This happens when all group members create something new together. Your individuality isn't diminished but enhanced. This isn't a melting pot or salad-it's a Constellation.
Business leaders in the 1920s quickly recognized how Follett's insights applied to their growing management challenges. Her "power-with" (not "power-over") lecture became a sensation, leading to speaking engagements across America and in London. Her fame peaked just before the 1929 stock market crash, after which businesses focused merely on survival. Following her partner Isobel's death from cancer, Follett herself died in 1933, with her ideas largely forgotten during the Pyramid-minded decades that followed.
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Freedom Together: The Power of Special Relationships
When John Gilbert Winant replaced Joseph Kennedy as U.S. Ambassador to the UK in 1941, he demonstrated a radically different approach to power that would reshape Anglo-American relations. Unlike his predecessor who had defeatistically declared "England is gone," Winant arrived with unwavering solidarity, boldly stating "There is no place I'd rather be at this time than England." Rather than sequestering himself in the ambassador's residence, Winant took a small apartment in London and regularly walked the bomb-damaged streets after Luftwaffe raids, personally helping clear rubble alongside ordinary citizens. This hands-on approach earned him deep respect from both the British public and leadership. His close relationship with Churchill reached its pinnacle when news of Pearl Harbor arrived, and Roosevelt's message united them with the words "We are all in the same boat now."
The personal chemistry between Allied leaders proved crucial. Churchill and Truman's legendary 24-hour train journey in a Pullman car became a defining moment in their relationship, as they discussed global politics and engaged in friendly poker games. During this journey, Churchill made an observation rich with symbolism - noting how the presidential seal had evolved from showing the Constellation to displaying 48 stars in a circular border, reflecting America's growth and unity. This personal connection laid the groundwork for Churchill's historic "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College in 1946, where he prescribed not just a diplomatic "special relationship" between America and Britain, but a deeper connection between their citizens. His response to Soviet power wasn't just military might, but the collaborative energy of free people working in concert.
Ambassador Barzun's later analysis of the Special Relationship revealed its remarkable resilience through numerous challenges and periodic obituaries. His innovative two-by-two grid framework illuminated the distinction between routine versus special interactions on one axis and transactions versus relationships on the other. The framework identified two problematic quadrants creating "frustrating friction": routine relationships reducing people to mere functions, and special transactions forcing conformity to rigid bureaucratic standards. Churchill's vision, in contrast, emphasized special relationships generating "fruitful friction" - the productive tension that energizes rather than exhausts.
The investment in special relationships creates what Barzun termed the "bloom loop" - where the energy and trust generated from fruitful friction naturally enhances routine interactions. He likened it to how a family's morning routine flows smoothly because of the bonds forged during meaningful dinner conversations. The US-UK alliance exemplifies this principle, maintaining effectiveness through its capacity for "disagreement with affection" - the ability to have frank discussions while preserving underlying trust.
This concept of "freedom together" found powerful expression in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. When stockbroker Bill W. and Dr. Bob Smith discovered their mutual healing journey, they created a movement based on interdependent recovery. Their collaboration produced the twelve steps and twelve traditions, carefully balancing individual autonomy with collective support. Though initially dismissed by the American Medical Association as lacking "scientific merit," AA's approach has proven remarkably effective, with the Big Book now translated into 67 languages and over 30 million copies in circulation. The program's success demonstrates how freedom together creates self-perpetuating networks of mutual support and healing.
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The Obama Campaign: A Constellation Takes Shape
How did Barack Obama go from standing in an Iowa cornfield, 27 points behind in an eight-candidate race, to being sworn in as president just eighteen months later? The true cause was the Constellation mindset promoting a particular pattern and tone that allowed power to grow organically.
When fundraising for John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, Barzun struggled with discussing money. After meeting Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, he learned three principles that transformed his approach: 1) Money is like water-when it flows it heals, when stagnant it kills; 2) Only ask people who want to use money for a cause greater than themselves; and 3) Ask everyone. The seeming contradiction between points two and three revealed Twist's insight-everyone wants their money to serve something greater.
Two years after Kerry's loss, Senator Obama visited Louisville for a fundraiser. Barzun also requested he do a free event, which unexpectedly drew 5,000 people. When Obama had unexpected free time before meeting Muhammad Ali, rather than catching up on work, he asked to meet with friends who couldn't afford the fundraiser or weren't Democrats. He gathered a diverse group, spoke little, and instead listened intently to each person. Barzun's friends later called to say how inspiring Obama was as a speaker, which puzzled him since Obama barely spoke. He realized Obama hadn't lit up the room like a spotlight; instead, he had somehow gotten everyone to switch on their own light.
When Obama announced his presidential run, he rejected the idea of exclusive fundraising tiers, insisting the finance committee should spread and grow at least three times larger. The campaign organized both traditional high-dollar fundraisers and unconventional $20 "low-dollar" events. While the campaign initially wanted to cancel these low-dollar events to focus on the "money primary," they changed their mind when they realized this wasn't just about money but about thousands of special relationships forming.
At a fundraising seminar for volunteers, Barzun challenged the traditional "hunting" approach to campaigning-"arm" with talking "points," "blast" "target" lists, "snag" and "land" donors. Instead, they needed to approach fundraising like farming-planting seeds that would bear fruit and more seeds. The numbers proved this: Clinton's campaign started with 250,000 names and converted an impressive 20% to donors. Obama started with just 10,000 names but ended with 100,000 donors by focusing on multiplication rather than division.
The organizing principle "respect, empower, include" spread organically from Iowa field offices nationwide, becoming the pattern that enabled the campaign constellation to bloom. The campaign's growth resembled a snowflake pattern-a self-repeating fractal where each organizer recruited super volunteers who each found regular volunteers, creating an expanding network. By Election Day, this "snowflake model" operated in all fifty states with extraordinary results. In one key battleground state, the volunteer "flake rate" was negative 50 percent-for every ten people who committed, fifteen showed up.
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When Constellations Collapse: The Pyramid's Revenge
Despite the success of Obama's campaign Constellation, the magic began to fade shortly after the inauguration. The weight of office, financial crisis, wars, and Republican opposition all seemed to demand a more commanding leadership style. When Republicans refused to negotiate on the stimulus proposal, Obama told them, "Elections have consequences... I won." The campaign network, renamed from Obama for America to Organizing for Action, was wielded as a weapon for legislative battles.
This pattern repeated at CNET, where Barzun had been an early employee. Though their initial success came from allowing users to participate and share knowledge, by 1998, amid the dot-com frenzy, CNET announced a $100 million marketing campaign with the tagline: "The source for computers and technology. CNET: You can trust our experts. You can trust our opinions." This was the exact opposite of what had made them successful. The stock soared temporarily before the dot-com bubble burst in March 2000, sending the price from $80 to 80 cents.
When Barzun was appointed ambassador to Sweden, he committed to keeping the Pyramid mindset at bay. The State Department's orientation for new ambassadors quickly revealed the bureaucratic culture he'd be fighting-"death by PowerPoint" with endless org charts and acronyms. A veteran staffer shared Colin Powell's insight about how Washington works: every department has something unique. The Navy has aircraft carriers, the Air Force has missiles, and State has 220+ embassies worldwide-"platforms for diplomatic engagement." Powell saw what longtime staffers had forgotten-he looked outward at a Constellation and saw abundance, while others looked up the Pyramid to the White House and saw scarcity.
Later, as ambassador to the United Kingdom, Barzun asked his senior team to draw what a frustrating day in the foreign service felt like. Though hesitant at first, all ten independently drew a triangle with themselves at the bottom-some labeled the apex "DC" or "Main State." When he asked staff to write one word for their greatest frustration and one for their greatest inspiration, the answers were consistently "bureaucracy" and "community." His deputy Liz pointed out the profound insight: "It's us. We are the bureaucracy and we are the community. We do this to ourselves."
Concerned by a poll showing British youth had lower regard for America than their parents, Barzun began visiting high schools for intimate conversations. He brought index cards, asking students to write what frustrated them about America on one side and what inspired them on the other. Despite initial skepticism from embassy staff who saw these as wasteful compared to addressing "influential" audiences, he persisted, eventually visiting 200 schools and engaging 20,000 British students.
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A Different Kind of Might: Embracing Uncertainty as Strength
The most celebrated advice we give young Americans comes at graduation. NPR analyzed over 350 commencement speeches and found five common messages: change the world, listen to your inner voice, work hard, don't give up, and embrace failure. These messages sound inspiring until you realize they all envision a solitary hero-like an astronaut preparing for a solo mission with no radio contact. This contradicts the reality of graduation itself, where students are surrounded by the very people who made their success possible.
The Constellation mindset would reframe this advice: change your mindset (not the world), share your inner voice (not just listen to it), work through hard things together, give up power to make more, and embrace uncertainty. Our youth want to stand out AND fit in-they want unity without uniformity-yet our cultural messages push them toward isolation.
When President Obama delivered the eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was murdered with eight congregation members by a white supremacist, he hadn't planned to sing. On the helicopter ride to Charleston, he told Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett, "I might sing." They both advised against it. During his speech about grace, he paused for thirteen excruciating seconds before beginning to sing "Amazing Grace" alone. Gradually, the congregation joined until everyone was singing together.
Obama could have delivered a safe, eloquent speech-his strength-but instead took a leap into vulnerability. He had the power of position and place but gave it away to create something more powerful with the congregation. The word "might" with its dual meaning of strength and uncertainty captures the essence of Constellation leadership. "I might" leads to "I might too" and eventually "we might." This uncertainty isn't weakness-it's the beginning of true collective power.
Theodore Roosevelt's famous "man in the arena" quote-which presents leadership as a lone fighter battling unnamed foes-embodies Pyramid thinking. Leadership isn't about winning against opponents but banding together for something bigger. When Lynne Twist trekked to meet an Achuar tribal chief to offer assistance, he told her: "If you are here to help, please leave. But if you are here because you feel your liberation is bound up with ours, then stay-let's work together."
This distinction embodies what Mary Parker Follett called "reciprocal freedom." Freedom together heals both parties and can happen between individuals or groups at any scale. The Constellation isn't an alternative model to be deployed in certain circumstances-the Pyramid is the alternative model, and it can be deadly dangerous. The Pyramid mindset-planning away uncertainty, extracting power from individuals for simplification, prizing stability above all else-can save us in emergencies but also leads to authoritarianism.
The Constellation isn't a "model" at all. It's nature's playbook. It's life itself.
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