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 us how to build power when we 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 I attempt to make that translation in this episode. To summarize my translation, it's this: 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
- An early 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.
- The one-on-one, the recruiting conversation every organizer learns first.
- The house meeting: twenty or thirty people in someone's living room, invited by the host rather than the organizer.
- 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 snowflake structure 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.
- Then the mastery lesson: the master organizer is the person who asks.
Bonus: ideas that didn't make the episode
Story of self, story of us, story of now
This whole section also reminded me of the three types of conversations we have, which Charles Duhigg explores in Supercommunicators, episode 13.
The chapter I left out entirely is the one on public narrative, Ganz's method for the speech or the pitch that moves people to act. He takes the first seven minutes of Barack Obama's 2004 convention speech as the model. Obama tells the choices that shaped his own life and the values behind them, which Ganz calls a story of self. He then reminds the room of the stories and values it shares, a story of us. Then he names the challenge in front of the room and asks it to choose, a story of now. Ganz says the three questions underneath, why me, why us, and why now, come up in every culture he has worked in, and that a speaker who answers all three gives people a reason to act that a list of policy arguments does not.
Who strategizes matters
Honestly, I never thought about this before reading it in this book. I feel pretty foolish that I have, for so long, separated strategy from the people executing it, in my brain. Probably explains the failures I've had over the years!
Richard Rumelt, whose Good Strategy / Bad Strategy we covered in Episode 8, spends his book on what separates a real strategy from a bad one. Ganz opens his own strategy chapter with a question Rumelt mostly leaves aside: who is doing the strategizing, and under what conditions? He treats strategy as creative work done by particular people at particular moments, the way a jazz set is, and says the people closest to the information should be the ones doing it. That is why authority in his organizations is pushed outward to the teams on the ground rather than held at the centre. It changes what a strategy meeting is for and who should be in it.
The snare of preparation
Ganz builds his chapter on leadership around three questions from Rabbi Hillel: if I am not for myself, who will be for me; when I am for myself alone, what am I; and if not now, when. On the third, he borrows a phrase from Jane Addams, the snare of preparation, for the organization that does one more year of strategic planning and then another, waiting for the plan the world will finally conform to. His line is that understanding flows from action rather than preceding it, and that because nobody knows the future, acting always carries risk. I underlined it because I recognized the habit.