Power is who needs whom more. You shift it by asking the people already around you for a commitment, and asking again once they've kept it Why This Book Matters Marshall Ganz went to Mississippi in 1964 to work in the civil rights movement, spent sixteen years organizing farmworkers alongside Cesar Chavez, designed the volunteer training for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, and has taught organizing at Harvard since 1994. This book is the course he has taught for thirty years: five practices of organizing, each explained through a campaign he was inside. Most books on this show explain how something works. This one teaches how to build power when you start with none. Power, Ganz says, is a relationship rather than a possession: if you need my resources more than I need yours, I have the power. Organizing is the work of shifting that balance. When the farmworkers struck in 1965, the growers had the land, the money, and the law, and there were always more workers. What the growers couldn't replace was the customer, so the union sent farmworker families to fifty cities to ask people not to buy grapes, and five years later the growers signed. Ganz writes for a progressive American audience and never addresses a reader who works for a company, so the translation is mine. Most companies engage the people around them, their employees, suppliers, and the towns they operate in, by sending a message outward and counting who received it. Ganz's organizations are built the other way around: the people in them are asked for commitments, and get a say in return, and that is what lets them act when it counts. He calls a group like that a constituency, and I'm not sure many companies have one. What I don't know is whether a company can offer the people around it a real say, when every relationship it has is one the other person can walk away from. If you've seen a version of that work, I'd like to hear about it. What We Cover in the Episode A Monday morning in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, when Martin Luther King Jr. stood at his window and watched the first bus of the day go by empty. Within a month the bus company was asking the city to let it double its fares. The people who emptied those buses had no money the company would miss and no vote the mayor feared, and Ganz opens his book with what they had instead. After 2016, thousands of local political groups formed across the United States. Ganz reports on what became of them, and most are gone. Ganz's definition of power, and the sixteen-year fight that proved it. A twenty-two-year-old farmworker named Jessica Govea ran the grape boycott in Toronto and then Montreal, in a French she barely spoke. The one-on-one, the recruiting conversation every organizer learns first, and the afternoon in San Antonio when Ganz, twenty years into his career, watched a veteran run one and realized he'd been doing it wrong. The house meeting: twenty or thirty people in someone's living room, invited by the host rather than the organizer. Ganz asks every host to list fifty people they know, and the episode explains why fifty, and why not close friends only. The two asks every guest leaves with. The second is to go home and host their own meeting, with their own fifty, within a few days. Nancy Pelosi's first campaign for Congress in 1987: six organizers, eighty-seven house meetings, six hundred people in three weeks, and how those meetings told the campaign who its leaders were. What a working team looks like, and the structure Ganz calls a snowflake, in which teams build teams. It put fifteen thousand volunteers on the ground in South Carolina for Obama in 2008, most of them new to politics. Why Ganz gives a volunteer responsibility for an outcome rather than a task, and why an organization built this way grows with use instead of wearing out. Three mental models: Moral Resources, the Arrow and the Cycle, and Mobilizing versus Organizing. Three misreadings: that organizing is a slower kind of mobilizing, that a book about movements is a book about protest, and that leading with values brings people together. What this asks of a company, which is whether the people around it are a constituency or a mailing list, and the budget line almost no corporate affairs team has. Then the mastery lesson: the master organizer is the person who asks.
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