Giving Tuesday Is an International Success. Creator Henry Timms Shares How They Did It

0:00This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self.

0:41What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes.

0:59Welcome to the new world of work. I'm Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review. And each week on the show, we talk to a leading business executive, often a CEO, to talk about the new challenges in the workplace. If you're watching this, put a comment in our chat. Let us know where you are. If you have questions for our guests as we go along, put them there, and I'll try to get to some of them later. I will introduce my guests in a second, but first let me read a word from our sponsor, Unisys. Where some see barriers, Unisys sees breakthroughs. Unisys pushes what's possible across digital workplace, app modernization, cloud, and beyond.

1:41Unisys, keep breaking through. And let me also say, if you are an HBR subscriber and you like this content, go to hbr.org slash newsletters. Sign up for The New World of Work, which is an email newsletter where I offer an inside look each week on the conversations that we've had. So now it's my pleasure to introduce our guest this week, and that is Henry Timms. Henry is the CEO of the Lincoln Center in New York City, which is, of course, a performing art center that includes major, major institutions, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Juilliard School, and much more. Before taking that job in 2020, he ran the 92nd Street Y, which is another important New York-based cultural center.

2:25And under his leadership, the Y was named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list. Henry also created and co-founded Giving Tuesday, a global philanthropic movement that happens every November. It just happened recently and has generated more than seven billion dollars for good causes in the U.S. alone. And lastly, Henry was the co-author with Jeremy Hyman's of the book New Power, how power works in our hyperconnected world and how to make it work for you. So with that, let's welcome Henry Timms to the show. Hi, Henry. Nice to see you. How's it going? Uh, it's going fine. You know, you have so many accomplishments.

3:03I think I used up most of the time just on your, your intro. So too, too, too many, too, too, too much, Adi. It's really nice to be here. Yeah. Well, it's great to have you here and there's a lot to talk about. And so I mentioned that, you know, you, you, you, you created, you, you conceived and co-created Giving Tuesday, and that is a big deal for a lot of people. So talk about how, first of all, how that came about? You know, co-creative is the right word. We were at the 92nd Street Y, and I guess the theme for the work I've always been trying to do is to kind of reimagine institutions, right?

3:39What is it we have to do to reimagine our organizations, which is something that, you know, HBR spends so much time thinking about. And the 92nd Street Y was, you know, a cultural and community center, and we had a bunch of beliefs around giving and around philanthropy. And what we were trying to do was really experiment with new models of how do you connect with people. So we were thinking particularly about how do you build community? How do you get people to support each other? And we were thinking about the calendar and there was like Black Friday and there was Cyber Monday. So two days that were really good for for getting deals.

4:09And then there was Tuesday. And I remember thinking somebody is going to grab Tuesday and Tuesday is going to become extra discounts Tuesday or something like that. And I thought, well, what we should do is actually turn it into giving Tuesday. So Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, you know, a simple idea, which was after two days that are about consuming. It was a day which was about philanthropy. And that was the genesis of it. And I think what, you know, 10 years later, Giving Tuesday, as of last week, was in 85 countries. It's raised over$13 billion now in the U.S. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive.

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5:26What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. 40 million Americans took part last week. And it's really been a story, I think, about how generous people are and how if you do have this kind of co-creation mindset, how far something can travel. Well, I want to hear more about this, because I could declare tomorrow Management Thursday, and it might not turn into anything. I mean, you had this amazing idea, and it worked. So, how do you get from a concept to something that snowballs into a really significant philanthropic, in this case, effort? I think there were a couple of things that really worked for us.

6:09So, this was very much a new power idea. So, Adi, we owe Jeremy, Hyman and I owe HBR a great deal because you first published our thinking in 2014 around new power. And Giving Tuesday was a new power idea. And so the idea of new power, put simply, is the big shift of our time has been the emergence of a different way of being powerful. So in the old power world, power was very kind of top down. It was held by the few. It was very command and control versus new power, which is a different way you're powerful. It's power that's made by many. It's much more open. It's much more collaborative. The way we put it on your pages almost a decade ago was it's the difference between power as a currency, I've got it, you haven't, and power as a current.

6:55It's something that surges and flows. So if you think of Giving Tuesday, if you had done old power Giving Tuesday, here's how it would have worked. Old power Giving Tuesday would have been called the 92nd Streetwise Giving Tuesday. There would have been 15 pages of terms of conditions for everyone to sign up. And we had to charge people$20 to participate, right? There would have been those kinds of ownership stamps. But we designed it in a very new power way. And the idea was people could take the idea of Giving Tuesday, and they could turn it into whatever they wanted to turn it into. And we were never going to send them a cease and desist letter.

7:29So I remember in that first year, Giving Tuesday became Giving Shoes Day, where people were giving shoes to women going back into the workforce. It became giving blue day for the University of Michigan and it's been one of their record fundraising days. So the idea itself was designed to be owned by many people around the world because we didn't grab it for ourselves. You know, Asha Curran, who's the CEO now of Giving Tuesday and deserves the lion's share of the credit for the progress we've made. She always talked about this idea of unbranding. And the idea of unbranding was we as institutions are desperate to stamp things with our seal.

8:09So if your Management Thursday was launched this week, the temptation would be HBR's Management Thursday, right? You would make it about you. What Giving Tuesday was, was never about the 92nd Street Y. Neither was it about any of the people who were running the show. It was really about people grabbing it and making it their own. And I really think that's been the secret of his success. So that's fascinating. So let's extrapolate. I mean, so the success that Giving Tuesday has had, for all the reasons you just explained, you know, how else do we, does the world tap into, you know, the money, the donations of time and energy and ideas that seems to be out there, a willingness of people to do philanthropic work?

8:55You know, how else? So Giving Tuesday is a great way to capture that. How else can we capture that desire and those resources? Well, I think the most important question is how are you inviting people to participate? And this is true whether you're trying to raise money or run a business or run a government, that you've got a generation of people, in fact, not just a generation, you've got everybody now, who is expecting to participate in new ways. And yet we often quite narrow routes to participation as institutions and as businesses for ways for people to... This episode is brought to you by Palmolive.

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10:11What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Participate. So if you think about, I'll give you some examples. you know there are media companies who still the most interesting question they ask is you know will you subscribe there are arts organizations whose whose most interesting question is will you get a subscription to come and see an orchestra um and and the problem with all those things is that everyone wants to have greater degrees of agency and so what was true of giving tuesday was that people sensed they had agency to make it their own so you know last week there was a group in Baltimore of Jewish faith leaders, Mormons and Christians who got together and took 7 ,000 casseroles to people in their local community.

10:54There was a giving festival in Ukraine, particularly focused on supporting pregnant women. And across the country in the US, Giving Tuesday military, which is a bit of Giving Tuesday where military spouses have come together, took on a million acts of kindness. All these different ideas existed because people had permission to participate. They knew that they could grab Giving Tuesday and make it their own. And too rarely, I think, organizations give people that permission. So I think in answer to your question, Ari, the question I think we as leaders have to ask ourselves is, how are we allowing people to participate in our mission on their terms?

11:33And that's the new power shift. The old power world was you participate in my mission on my terms. I tell you what to do and you do it or you don't. The new power world is we get people to participate in our mission on their terms. And I'll give you a corporate example just to flesh this out. I think one of the most interesting things which happened during the pandemic was Airbnb. And Airbnb, of course, are a new power model. They were built on new power principles. And during the pandemic, members of their community started booking properties in Ukraine, not because they were going to go and stay there, the war had just begun, but because it was a way that they could essentially cash transfer to support Ukrainians.

12:14So Airbnb as a business, this didn't come out of their CSR department, it didn't come out of their marketing department. It came because their community felt like they had permission to participate. And then the company followed beyond. So if you're trying to do this kind of new power work, it's those kinds of things you're looking for. You're not looking for the thing that the genius person on payroll thinks of. You're looking for the things that are in your community that you can start to follow. And I think that's a different type of leadership. So if you just joined us, I'm talking to Henry Timms, who is the CEO of the Lincoln Center and co-author of the book New Power.

12:47There's a lot to say about innovation and leadership. If you have questions for Henry, put them in the chat. We'll try to get to some later. So sticking on the New Power topic, well, sticking on everything we're talking about, You know, it does seem like it's still important to create an event. In other words, we want to do good, we want to be philanthropic, but we need a nudge. And in a sense, Giving Tuesday is that, as much as you'd hope that every day or every Tuesday or something, people are that generous and that philanthropic and that creative. But it sounds like it helps to have an event.

13:29It helps to sort of focus. We're doing it now. And that's where you get the response. Again, I'm looking for, you know, so how do people think about that in their organizations or, you know, in the things that they want to push, like how to create the event where this can happen? Well, look, there's a reason that, you know, Macy's has a sale 300 days a year, right? And it's not because the prices have changed. It's because you have that prompt, just as you say. And actually, the philanthropic community wasn't doing very well with prompts, right? We tended to kind of, we had something of a kind of Oliver complex where we were worried about asking for more.

14:03And things like Giving Tuesday, I think, do provide that prompt. So I think from a marketing perspective, I think we actually ought to be more intentional about prompting people to give, right? If you think about how much you get prompted to buy. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together.

14:43Shop now at palmolive.com. Propel Fitness Water. With Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins, Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes look at the volume of people trying to sell you things versus the volume of people asking you to help support people trying to cause prevent cancer it's night and day and so i think the philanthropic world actually has to learn something from that kind of prompting on a more general basis but as a broader point i think we all need to think a bit more about rituals right we as human beings respond to rituals it's always the festivals or the events or the moments.

15:27That's how we understand our world. And especially with this period now where we've had so many rituals disrupted, it becomes even more important, I think, to kind of start again with what do you ritualize? What are the things that you ask people to do? What do people look forward to? What do people anticipate? And the big opportunity, I think, for all organizations now is we kind of de-ritualized over the last three years. Lots of things we were used to doing, we stopped doing. And so there's this chance now to start something new. And I think that's quite a compelling opportunity. So let's talk more directly now about new power.

16:00So you wrote this book a while ago, you know, and talking about how power is in some ways diffused, not necessarily top down. You know, globally on the sort of, you know, the high level of politics. There's been a surge, it feels like, in kind of autocratic power, at least in, you know, ruling governments. Did that surprise you? I mean, does that contradict the kind of new power ideas that you're talking about? Or do they coexist and this is just the way the world works? No, in fact, we predicted it. When we first wrote about new power in your pages, Adi, as you know, if you want to get published in hbr it helps to do a two by two matrix and we did this two by two matrix which had um it looked at new power values did you have old power on new power values so do you think in a collaborative kind of crowd-based way or are you feeling very command and control and then it looked at model do you have an old power model or a new power model is your model kind of closed up and top down and you drop things on people's heads or are you creating a space for participation and and on that two by two the most interesting quadrant was the top left and it was organizations who had new power models, right?

17:13So they were taking advantage of all this huge participation, but they had old power values. And it's that quadrant, we call them the co-opters, people who have co-opted new power with old power values, who have actually, I think, seen huge success and huge danger. So if you think about Facebook, Meta in particular, is a perfect example of an organization with amazing new power, right? It's built on the participation of all of us. But they've actually taken that participation, And really, they have so much control over us all in an old power way. If you look at Twitter right now, Twitter is an extraordinary participatory engine.

17:49But Elon Musk has taken on that mantle very much in the spirit of old power. It's going to be his decisions on his terms and his platform very much built in his image. So Jeremy and I talked about this idea of the rise of the platform strongman. And the platform strongman is this new kind of strongman, unlike the 20th century strongman. 20th century strongman was trying to close everything up. The 21st century strongman is trying to own a platform and shape the platform. And if you look at Facebook or if you look at Twitter, you start to see these platform strongmen emerge. And if you look at politics, Donald Trump, I think, would be another example of a platform strongman who is actually taking the mindset of the strongman and supercharging that through running it through these platforms.

18:38And I think we think that's a very dangerous model. All right. So to get recognized by HVR, yes, it helps to have a two-by-two. It also helps to have sort of clear, practical takeaways. So for people who are watching this, they're like, oh, okay, new power, this is all sort of interesting. You know, what are applications of new power that can help? Well, let's start with that can help managers, can help people. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra.

19:14Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. People who are running institutions. I think you have to try things. The great challenge for any organization, especially an organization who had a good 20th century, and Lincoln Center is in that category, is there is such a high price for trying new things.

19:59And I spend more time thinking about this than many. And I still think I don't do anywhere near enough experimentation with new ideas. So I think as a leader and a manager, challenging yourself to try new things is really important. And I'll give you some examples from Lincoln Center. Some new power examples I think work pretty well. In the summer after the pandemic, we realized that one of the things which hadn't been possible was weddings, right? People that had lots of Zoom weddings or very small weddings. So we essentially invited all of New York to come get remarried. If you had had a wedding and you didn't have a chance to have it with people you love or you had to have it on Zoom, we invited everyone to come to Lincoln Center for the re-wedding, the great re-wedding, completely crowdsourced essentially as a wedding.

20:41And we had over 500 couples come and get remarried at Lincoln Center and the mayor of New York led the service. Big experiment, great example of how a new power idea can do something different. Another example from the pandemic, when people, right at the beginning, when people couldn't have funerals, we did a crowdsourced memorial service. So we, every week, would have a different concert, and Yo-Yo Ma would play. This was all online. Yo-Yo would play, or Kelly O 'Hara, or Brian Stokes Mitchell. And anyone could submit names of people to be recognized, and they would scroll across the screen in tribute to people as a way of essentially having a New Power memorial.

21:20So those kinds of things, I think, the danger with new power is that people don't take it seriously. It's the thing which is like an annual stunt. You do one collaborative thing on YouTube featuring the CEO being authentic or whatever it might be. And that stuff just doesn't hold up because this has to become a muscle. So I think the advice to managers would be low stakes experiments often, because that's actually how you start to learn things with new power. And like Giving Tuesday is once in a career, right? That was lightning in a bottle. But on a regular basis, you get some pretty big wins by trying some of these new things.

21:57And the last thing I'd say on this for leaders is give your team some cover. Because the danger in organizations who have made their names in old power is they cling to it. And it's very hard to resist. And if you can give people who have new ideas the chance and the cover to try them out, it's the only thing, I think, that really starts to move the needle. So I don't know if you've seen it, I don't think you've seen it, but a lot of people have put into the chat what they did or what people they know did on Giving Tuesday. So it's great to see. And there are some questions coming in. So here's a question.

22:30This is from Dustin in Boston, who says, you know, does it help to have a big event like the pandemic to, you know, as a watershed moment to accelerate a shift from old power to new power? Yes, 100 percent. And I think there's an even bigger shift happening now. And I think a lot about this. I'm not sure I know what the answer is, but this has been top of my mind recently, which is there's then because of the pandemic, there's been a kind of shift in the software. What I mean by that is we are all now thinking differently about things. We're thinking differently because of the pandemic. It forced us all to be very individualistic.

23:06It forced us away from each other. We're thinking differently because it broke up all these rituals I mentioned earlier. So the kind of the global mindset has been disrupted in a very fundamental way from a kind of software perspective. And then the hardware has shifted, too. So you're seeing the emergence, particularly of Web3 technologies and others. And we are reaching a moment very shortly when half of the world will be spending half of their waking hours online. Half of the world spending half of their waking hours online. So in many ways, we're going to be a digital first world, right? So previous to this, digital was the minor and analog was the major, right?

23:46We lived our kind of analog lives and digital would increasingly chip away at that. But we've just begun this kind of great inversion, right? So this inversion from analog to digital, and we are now living more digital than non-digital lives. And that shift in hardware combined with the software shift of the pandemic, how we think about the world, I think is going to have really fundamental shifts around how power works, how lives work, how our workplaces work. So from a leadership perspective, I think the thing that I'm trying to learn about now and think about now is not how do we get back to the way things were in 2017, 2018.

24:25But if this inversion is beginning now, what is the new rulebook? What is the new playbook for how you think about making change? Well, OK, so let's imagine you were running a complex arts institution in this digital transformation. Let's imagine. Yes, put yourself in somebody else's shoes. so that probably has profound implications I mean I suppose it's tempting to say yes but performing arts is performing arts and people always want to do that if pandemics and things like that allow they'll want to be there in person and that won't change but that can't be true it that has to change and evolve as well so are you starting to think about about that a hundred percent I think that's the the big question and the nuance of that question is we have to get beyond this idea of this kind of false and quite reductionist binary between there are kind of in-person things that are meaningful and then there are internet things that are trivial.

25:24And that's often how we think about this, right? And even the kind of conversation about the workplace now for many people is like, we only had real culture when we were all together in person and these people on the internet are just sitting in their PJs. You know, there's that whole idea of the internet. Who were you impersonating there? Was that me? No, it wasn't you, Adi. It was a kind of generic figure, which probably has components of both you and me in some way. But there is a kind of throwback mindset, I think, around where we are right now, which is looking to kind of recreate the world which has been lost.

25:57But what we have to realize is this isn't one versus the other. This is clearly going to be a blended existence. right how do we meld those two things together in an interesting way and how do we do it which is respectful of what you're trying to achieve so to take your example of the arts right the last thing in the world we want now is like you know suddenly we open up the open up the the doors of everything and like everyone's not paying attention to the most beautiful bits of music because they're busy tweeting their friends like that would be a disaster but we also have to think to ourselves can we be the only organizations where there's no room for anybody's phones, right?