From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States

This is definitely worth reading. I think many companies are beginning to realize the value of their employees and treat them as assets rather than slaves. I remember working for a large pharmaceutical company and we were "told" to increase our frequency of calls to the medical providers from once every 3 weeks to once every 2 weeks and that they were hiring another rep to be in the opposite rotation such that the providers would be called on every week. It TOTALLY BACKFIRED. We reps tried to tell mgmt but THEY KNEW BEST! The providers closed their doors and refused to see any reps. And, of course, the reps were to blame. A huge downsizing resulted. Oh...surprise, surprise! The old pyramid is indeed OLD! Great read!

The author is trying to present a collection of well-known facts to make an argument about the power decay that is happening now. I couldn't stop thinking that a similar book could have been written at any point of time in the human history.

I found the presentation poorly organized, hard to follow, and repetitive.

Such a complicated concept to organize -- in my lifetime, all these changes have occurred -- really a fascinating book.
And this is clearly a practiced author and journalist -- such beautiful writing and such clear and precise explanations. Thank you, Moises Naim!

I enjoyed the ideas presented in this book. It helps explain the changes we see in the politics of this nation and the world in general. I recommend it for all who want to hear a different analysis of today's world power players.

I first read an opinion piece that outlined some of the ideas in this book a few weeks ago in the Washington Post Outlook Section. Mr. Naim hooked me with that shorter piece and I sought the book out, reading it at a torrid pace. What Mr. Naim has been able to do is actually quite astonishing: in a world that seems to get harder and harder to understand as the pace of economic, social, political, and cultural change accelerates, he has laid out a framework to think about how the collapse of traditional power structures has affected these changes. In many respects, what is so puzzling about the world today is that these punctuated changes (whether political as in the Arab Spring, economic in the European economic collapse, or otherwise) are not the watershed events they initially appear to be. Instead, intractable problems seem to arise out of half-mediated solutions and stalemates. In turn, Naim goes through how the fragmentation of traditional power and the rise of impactful "micro"-players has created large gains for those bent on disrupting power and diminished returns from those who have traditionally tamed it. In other words, the shake ups of today are easy to induce and hard to put an end to. It is a mistake to think that this change is for good or evil -- rather, like someone trained in the world of international affairs (I believe he was the editor of Foreign Policy for years), Naim presents the multifaceted beast of this new power matrix. For those of us looking to avoid the denser, dry conventions of political science reading but looking for a cohesive, comprehensive framework with which to view global current events and trends, Naim provides a valuable opportunity to engage, think, and debate.

It was interesting but nothing that said WOW. We are heading for a world where everything has to be done by consensus or by committee approval, and we know where that leads. It is the shortfall of democracy.

Whatever our political ideologies, most of us are aware that we've entered one of those periods of accelerated change that mark the transition from one historical era to another. In the last dozen years we've had the War on International Terror, the Great Recession, public and private sector financial collapses, and a change in politics that has shifted the country from ultra-laissez faire economic conservatism toward a slightly left-of-center regime of higher taxes, more regulation, and more federally-supervised healthcare.

These changes may be viewed through many economic and political prisms. This book views it through what is purported to be a change in the power structures that govern politics, business, the military, and even religion. As author Moises Naim posits: "Power is decaying. To put it simply, power no longer buys as much as it did in the past."

My first thought is that this is deja vu back to the late 60's/mid 70's when a plethora of books like MEGATRENDS and FUTURE SHOCK predicted that "The Establishment" would soon be overthrown by an explosion of knowledge, communication, and rising social consciousness among the people, especially the young. The Establishment was alleged to be a cabal of large corporate and academic interests allied with big government for the purpose of suppressing the desires of the "little people" to have a greater share of economic and political influence.

Something along these lines did happen on a limited scale. Grass roots environmentalists did combine to thwart powerful corporate interests and their political allies. Young people, women, and minorities did take over the Democratic Party in 1972 and oust its old guard. In foreign affairs some ragtag guerilla movements, notably the Viet Cong and the Afghan resistance, did force the humiliating withdrawals of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. superpowers

But the trends mostly went the OPPOSITE of what was predicted. The minor political parties faded away so that today we have an even more entrenched major party duopoly. Most of those thousands of new entrepreneurial companies spawned by the revolution in computer information were bought up and consolidated into the existing corporate oligarchies. Today America's industries, banks, and tech companies are more concentrated into "too big to fail" behemoths than ever before.

Nor did the "little guys" do especially well on the international stage. Instead of the world slipping away from dominance by the old US/NATO and USSR/Warsaw Pact Superpower blocs, we now have a world dominated by the U.S. and China. Most of the middling powers that were supposed to rise are actually LESS influential now than they were in the 1970s. The European Union and Japan are seen as has-beens, while the other rising powers like India and Brazil are still decades away from becoming world-class powers.

The author's thesis that the balance of military power has shifted from nation states to irregular forces is also dubious:

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Indeed, when nation-states go to war these days, big military power delivers less than it once did. Wars are not only increasingly asymmetric, pitting large military forces against smaller, nontraditional ones such as insurgents, separatist movements, and militias. They are also increasingly being won by the militarily weaker side.
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And yet it hasn't been an especially bright time for guerilla movements. The big ones like Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Colombian FARC have been all but exterminated by local governments allied with the U.S. Russia and China have suppressed their home-grown terrorists. The world may be more secure from terrorist attack than at any time since international terrorism first erupted in the mid 1970s.

I also wonder if the author is correct about the passing of power from the major parties to fringe groups:

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In the United States, the rise of the Tea Party movement-- far from unorganized, but also very far from any traditional political organization-- boosted candidates like Christine O'Donnell, who allegedly dabbled in witchcraft
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But in truth the Tea party was effective in only ONE election in 2010. Tea Party backed candidates were obliterated in the electoral route of 2012 when they lost 21 of 23 contested Senate seats. The Tea Party seems to have no more staying power than other short-lived fringe parties like those that backed Ross Perot in 1992 or Ralph Nader in 2000.

I'm also skeptical of the idea that the major financial exchanges will lose their market-making power to upstarts:

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IN SUM, NEW ENTRANTS SUCH AS HEDGE FUNDS, NEW STOCK EXCHANGES, dark pools, and previously unknown start-ups that suddenly upend an entire industry are harbingers of things to come: more volatility, more fragmentation, competition, and more micropowers able to constrain the possibilities of the megaplayers.
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The financial markets will probably continue to be dominated by the established exchanges except that they will become more regulated. I am guessing that hedge funds, which have accomplished little other than making their managers obscenely wealthy while losing their investors' money on crazy speculations, will fade away. As the economy gains traction people will go back to investing in the traditional buy-and-hold way instead of imagining that hedge fund charlatans will make them fortunes with exotic investment derivatives that usually fail.

I also don't believe that big government will be losing its grip on power any time soon. Didn't we just get through imposing government supervision over one-sixth of the economy via the Affordable Care Act? And, if anything, hasn't the economic crash strengthened the G20 governments by making their Federal Reserve Banks the ultimate backstop against global financial calamity?

Thus, I question many of Naim's assumptions. I do think the power of big corporations is going to be reined it, but it will be reined in by government, not by upstart competitors. Competition sure didn't do anything to drive down healthcare costs, so now we have government intervention into the sector. My estimation is that the people will demand that the government extend its umbrella over a private sector that is seen by the public as being too chaotic, volatile, and prone to systemic failure.

I see the world moving opposite to the way Naim predicts: toward the ENHANCED power of government enforcing an umbrella of stability over big corporations. I'm not a fan of ossified big government bureaucracies that tax everybody to death while stifling innovation with mind-numbing red tape and bureaucratic delays. But I do see the private sector being placed in a relatively weaker position after the 2008 financial collapse, and of government retaining the position that it has grown into since then. That means a cozier relationship between the concentrated power centers of big government and big business rather than a lessening of them.

On the International front I would guess that the U.S.A. and China will continue to exercise a superpower duopoly far stronger than the old US/USSR duopoly. Perhaps eventually other emerging powers in South America, Africa, South Asia, and the Arab World will rise to make the "multi-polar" world, but that will probably happen later rather than sooner, if happens at all.

I could certainly be wrong about these conclusions, and that is why this book should be read. Other readers may come to the same conclusions as Naim does. And Naim does recognize that power is a nebulous concept. He seems to be saying (paraphrasing): "in the future the powerful will still be powerful, but less so." Thus, the book should be read as an opinion piece to stimulate the reader to deepen his/her thinking about the direction of change the U.S. and global political and economic systems are moving in as we get back on our feet from the shocks of the early 2000's. The book is very well written and Naim has a talent for making complex concepts of power easy to assimilate. Regardless of your conclusions you'll enjoy reading this book if you have any substantial interest in U.S. and international business and political trends.

The End of Power starts like dynamite.

Moises Naim, an extremely well-respected and well-informed author (he thanks everybody who's anybody in the acknowledgments except perhaps for David Beckham) is truly on fire to begin with. He starts the book by telling you what power is. He defines it as the ability to make others do what you want them to do. It's not about the size of your army or your nuclear stockpile or your advertising budget. It's the ability to get your way.

Next, he sets up a matrix, Mc Kinsey style. Two types of power, hard and soft. And each breaks down in two. So hard power breaks down to coercion and bribery. Soft power breaks down to code and persuasion. So "if you don't eat your broccoli you don't get to play with Lego" as well as "if you don't eat your broccoli you'll have a spanking" are both coercion. On the other hand "if you eat your broccoli you can then have ice cream" is bribery. That's hard power, because I have ways to make you change your mind. On the other hand if the pope says you should practice abstinence, that's soft power, he can't do much to keep you chaste. He sets a moral code and that's that. Similarly, if Patek Philippe buy the back cover of the Economist every week and your wife asks you for a diamond-crusted watch (or you decide to buy a little something for the next generation) that's persuasion, but there's nothing in it for you directly.

And of course power is seldom on one vector only. The pope, for example, may be going beyond code. If you don't follow his rules, it may later cost you salvation. And if you do, you might go to heaven. So you could argue it's 70% code, 15% coercion and 15% bribery. You get the idea.

With those analytical tools in place, the author then explains that three revolutions have taken place, all of which significantly limit power today.

The "more" revolution is self-explanatory. For example, the UN had 55 members in the forties, it has 197 members today. There are more countries out there and that makes for more voices, more alliances and more freedom.

The "mobility" revolution is a bit of a misnomer. It is meant to be a catch-all that accounts for a bunch of concepts. Ideas move quicker because information is spreading faster. People can move more, but it's mainly figurative. Technology allows a doctor in India to look at your x-rays, for example, and that's as good as having him there in the ward. Phone cards (which Moses Naim rates higher in impact than the Internet so far in terms of shrinking our world) have made it possible for emigrants to stay in touch with their families etc. In summary, distances are much shorter than they used to be, all borders have become porous, there's no longer such thing as a captive audience, and that limits local power.

The "mentality" revolution is the third major force that attenuates power worldwide and, to cut a long story short, it's to do with the fact that ideology across the world seems to be converging toward more liberal ideals, but also with the thing that people have the tools and the information to think for themselves.

You can already discern that the three "revolutions" are a bit blurred. Maybe the need to get them all start with an M had an influence. Frankly, getting them all to be adjectives or nouns might have helped more, from where I'm sitting.

Less facetiously, the author never, not once, goes back to applying the "three revolutions" to the four-way setup that defines power. He quotes from everybody, he lays out a million examples, he writes extremely well, but with the best possible intentions I failed to see why he introduced the whole setup only to never use it again.

You do learn a lot from reading the book. For example, you learn about the decline of Catholicism in Latin America, you learn about the uncontestable spread of democracy across the world, the journey you embark on with Moises Naim is never boring or tedious.

The destination, however, is unclear. The intention of the book was to convince me that we face the End of Power. The only thing I took away is that the world is a lot more complex than it used to be and a lot more difficult to analyze with the tools we have. But I would have loved an attempt at using the tools, especially after I've seen them laid out.

So this would be a three star book from my angle, but I've taken one off, to reflect that the author quotes Tom Friedman. Please give us all a break! I jest. I took off the third point because the author totally mangles the concept of Entropy, with which I am familiar from the Thermodynamics I studied a long time ago. In reading a book, I trust an author to know what he's talking about. I caught him out in Entropy, but my trust in his ability to analyze rather than quote, got shattered.

Shame, because when I started reading The End of Power I could not get enough of telling everybody how much I was enjoying it. As I ploughed my way through, it became increasingly evident that Moises Naim was going to fail to convince me of his main thesis. "Being confused about more difficult problems" would actually have cut it for me. But I'm merely unconvinced.

Fareed Zakaria's recommendation of this book has disappointed me; although I find myself more educated on the subject of power in the 21st century, I found the author's prose to be less than satisfying. Would I purchase this book again? No.

The same thing is being said over and over again. The point is sound but seemsto ignore reality of modern day political facts -- we have a corporatist economic society that is controlled by the nation's corporate interets. It's a 'form; of facsism -- the 'economic form.' It ignores the growing disdain for that situation -- which, in the end, will destroy our nation as we know it -- because the net result is the 'rich get richer' syndrome and the loss of the middle class.

This is Mark Zuckerberg's first book recommendation for his 2015 Read a Book Every 2 Weeks Book Club. Thumbs down, Mark. The book is thorough I will give it that. But why anyone needs to read this entire book is beyond me--maybe for a book report or college term paper? It is not entertaining and who really cares if power no longer matters. And if you do not understand power, advertising, influence, group thinking, persuasion, why people believe in gods, etc. by a certain age, you will probably never get it and this book will make no sense to you anyway. This book is just another in a long line of verbose books about why people do things whether it relates to employment, purchases, child development, etc. There are three or four that hit the bestseller list ever year. I sent the book back. As a 37 year old with average intelligence, I have better stuff to do then read about the history of power. I have also quit Zuck's Book Club.

The questions that Moises Naim raises in “The End of Power” have repercussions to people from every country. Some believe that politicians and big business leaders control the world, while others feel that the democratization brought about by the internet has shifted domination from the traditional leadership model into the hands of the masses. Moises Naim studies this change in terms of three revolutions that he describes as “More, Mobility, and Mentality.” The writing occasionally gets more technical than most readers might prefer, but it’s clear that Naim has a somewhat radical thesis that he needs to prove, and he’s determined to provide as much evidence as possible to verify his arguments. The bottom line appears to be that leaders of today are overburdened by the ability of individuals to call them to task over every policy disagreement or personal foible. Though supporters of personal freedom and individual rights support this diversification of power, Naim concludes that without the ability to cause major changes in the world through the use of massive power, world leaders lack the tools necessary to fight major world problems like global warming and terror. He makes a few too many assumptions, like whether strong politicians could solve the global warming problem, and, for that matter, whether the problem itself isn’t just a construct of world leaders trying to find a rallying cause that will help them to retain power. In the section, “Is the glass half-full or half empty?”, he makes the reader consider whether the end of power is, in fact, a positive turn for humanity. Naim feels that the decay of power might be stopped, but “For this to happen, we need something that is very difficult: an increased disposition in democratic societies to give more power to those who govern us. And that is impossible unless we trust them more. Which is even more difficult. But also indispensible.” Why is it indispensible? Naim has set up a straw man argument, suggesting that the only way to solve our problems is to find politicians that we can trust. That’s as likely as finding a fair opinion piece on CNN. I’d remind readers of the first concept they probably learned in a political science class: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Giving great power to potentially corrupt leaders is not the formula for solving world problems. Leaders should only be there to protect the rights of people; that’s why we gather together as a society. As a believer in the amazing potential of every human being for greatness, I would hope for a radical decrease in the amount of power held by the few and instead allow for democracy and capitalism to liberate billions of people on the planet to pursue their dreams in safety and with the benefits of a fair playing field. Unfortunately, we are not there yet. We need some more radical changes in the fabric of society. As Naim correctly points out, “disruptive innovation has not arrived in politics, government, and political participation.” But when it does, get ready for incredible development in humankind as the dreams, aspirations, skills, and determination of billions of people is set loose to build an even better world.

I always read with great skepticism the endorsements that famous people give to their friends' books. I did not believe a word of what Clinton, Soros, or Arianna Huffington wrote on the back cover of Naim's book. Still I was intrigued because I had read Naim's previous book Illicit and liked it a lot. So I bought and read The End of Power. And to my surprise, I found that in this case the celebrities are right. This book does change the way one looks at the world. Power is a big subject that can get very complicated and hard to read. Not here. Naim does a masterful job in observations, surprising data, and great examples. It is an engaging read that nicely persuaded me he is onto something big and that the trends he discusses are right. Some of the parts of the book are a bit complicated but those can be skipped and most of the book is hard to put down. I especially liked the way he explained why power is now easy to get, harder to use, and easier to lose. He argues that the barriers that protect the powerful from the attacks of challengers have become easier to surmount. Why? Becuase Naim explains that there are three massive forces--the More (abundance), Mobility, and Mentality revolutions--that help contestants for power overwhelm, circumvent, and undermine the barricades that protect the powerful. The book provides ample evidence of how this is happening with mighty armies, entrenched dictators, big companies, or even Chess grandmasters or the Vatican. Anyone who has power or wants it (or is under the domination of a powerful individual or organization) should read this book. You will be very entertained.

Kings, queens, presidents and dictators can imagine themselves as powerful not only because of their accoutrements but also because of the misguided support of sycophantic historians who are eager to ascribe importance to their actions and plans. Managers in government and industry fall into the this trap also, believing that because they are given titles and positions of "power", their plans and orders, whether in writing or expressed verbally, are being obeyed to the letter. But their "underlings" can have their own ways of performing these tasks and when completing them, managers can believe that it was because of conformance to their ideas and plans, and a false self-imputation of wisdom occurs. The "underlings" can with a sometimes sardonic grin let them live this illusion, and continue on with relative autonomy and very confident of their abilities, despite their "lowly" status.

Henry Kissinger referred to power as being the greatest aphrodisiac, evidently convinced that he possessed something called power and not entertaining the fact the he really did not. His connection of "power" with sexual orgasm follows the paradigm of the need for "powerful" people for ceremonies, customs, trappings, and traditions to legitimate themselves. Kissinger was on to something however, for he connected emotional responses to the quantity of possessed power, but he failed to grasp, as so many of the "powerful", that power maybe be purely this emotional concoction, that is, it is merely an occurrence of neuronal synapses in the pleasure centers of the brain, which can evidently work wonders for people like Kissinger who are desperate in obtaining it, somewhat like people who are unable to have a sexual orgasm despite their enormous efforts.

The decay of power, at least as expressed by the author of this book, has the immediate consequence that power is quantifiable. The author makes an admirable attempt using concepts from statistical theory to make this quantification meaningful. He is not content to rely on mere opinion, philosophical musings, or anecdotal evidence. He admits early on in the book that power is ill-defined and subjective and as such may not be as entrenched as it is typically believed to be.

Power can be likened to crabgrass momentarily infesting a lawn of fescue, but goes away under the confrontation of the Baumann liquid modernity that does not allow permanence in any ideological or political thought patterns, whether these patterns exemplify "power" or not. In the twenty-first century influence, ideology, attitudes and beliefs seem to be liquid, even gaseous and ephemeral, with the difficulty being the identification of what time scales these ideas will be able to express themselves, before decaying into a conceptual and political vacuum.

The author views power as the ability "to make things happen", but quantitatively, to what extent does the United States president, the president of China, the pope, and the editor of the New York Times, have the ability to wield "immense" power. Do they always have the ability to "make things happen", or to make "other people do things they don't want to do", or does this happen only piecemeal and maybe only randomly? The difficulty is in assessing this ability quantitatively. When a person is labeled as an "autocrat", does this automatically mean this person has the "power" to influence or cause events? What explicit quantitative evidence can be given for this "power"?

The author is aware of the difficulties in measuring power, even stating that it is impossible to measure. But the "limits and latitudes " of power can be assessed he says, and he gives interesting arguments in the book that support his thesis, which makes the book interesting to read and can serve as a prequel to those readers who are very interested in the subject of power, particularly in finding tools to access its presence empirically.

But interestingly, it seems that no one really questions whether power really exists at all. Its status as a real occurrence is taken to be axiomatic and not to be questioned. To an even greater extreme, thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche have even argued as to its primordial and ontological status, as something that drives not only human decisions but the entire nature of things. This book is an impetus to a further study on the reality of power. Is it real or merely a figment of literary, political, and social imagination, or perhaps a mere activity of the brain, with no more legitimacy than any other neuronal activity?

This book was initially meant to be titled: "The Decay of Power". Then an editor came and changed the title to "The End of Power". Maybe the editor thought the word "decay" was too difficult for the general public to understand; maybe she wanted this book to enter the long series of "end of" narratives (The End of History, The End of Democracy, The End of Men...). The result is that the title does not reflect the book's content. This is unfortunate: more than anything else, a title shapes readers' expectations and is supposed to offer a shorthand for the book's main thesis. The argument made by the author in The End of Power is that power is decaying; not that it is coming to an end or that it has disappeared altogether.

Throughout the book, Moisés Naím uses the expression "decay" to describe what is happening to power. He gives to the expression "the decay of power" a precise meaning: barriers to power that protect incumbents from rivals are being overwhelmed, circumvented, and undermined. The means of control are being overwhelmed by the sheer number of people: this is what the author dubs the "More revolution". In addition, the "Mobility revolution" means the end of captive audiences: barriers to power are being circumvented. As a third step, these same barriers are being undermined by the Mentality revolution: people no longer take anything for granted. These three revolutions are directly impacting the way power is exerted - by coercion, obligation, persuasion, and inducement or, to use the author's lingo, by muscle, code, pitch and reward.

Moisés Naím does not herald the end of power, but its transformation. He warns his readers: "by no means is big power dead." But it is on the defensive: new layers are challenging the incumbents, and power has become "unmoored from size and scale". As the book cover proclaims, "being in charge is no longer what it used to be." Power "no longer buys as much as it did in the past." It is becoming "easier to get, harder to use, and easier to lose". Whereas exerting power once mobilized heavy interfaces and complex protocols, it is now easy to plug-and-play into power. Even the army is becoming a massively multiplayer online game. Politicians in government and business executives are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to get things done is decreasing. They are more constrained today than they were in earlier periods; they cannot exert their huge power with the same liberty enjoyed by their predecessors.

Major political parties, large corporations, and military institutions are encountering new competitors no longer held back by traditional barriers to entry. Power is shifting: from empires to states, from despots to democrats, from majorities to minorities, from parties to factions, from capitals to regions, from statesmen to lawyers, from leaders to laymen. The consequences are huge: as Moisés Naím states in the conclusion, "we are on the verge of a revolutionary wave of positive political and institutional innovations." After having transformed the business world, disruptive innovation is now coming to a city hall or a ballot box near you. Politics, government, and international relations will never be the same again.

Moisés Naím's analysis is grounded in economic theory. Simply put, the cost of acquiring or contesting power is going down, and the cost of maintaining order and control is going up. This is his basic intuition. Large organizations were more efficient because they operated with lower costs, thanks to economies of scale; today the reduction in transaction costs favors the nimble, the agile and the innovative. Scarce resources such as commodities, information, human talent, and technologies are becoming easier to access; and it is possible to serve citizens and customers better, from distances near and afar. Moisés Naím makes explicit references to transaction costs theory - which explains the boundaries between firms and markets - and his concept of barriers to power is adapted from the economic notion of barriers to entry, which determines market power. Although his analysis is conducted at a fairly basic level, economists will recognize the fecundity of these notions, which have already transformed the fields of business strategy and industrial organization. What transaction costs and barriers to entry did to economics and management, Moisés Naím intends to do the same to politics and to international relations.

His attempt is not entirely successful, however, and his failure is also due to an editing blunder. The End of Power bundles two books into one. The first is an expanded version of a column titled "Megaplayers Vs. Micropowers" that the author published in Foreign Policy magazine. It makes the economic argument that barriers to power and the associated costs are going down, and that these trends favor the outsiders over the incumbents. The second essay addresses the issue of the decay of power. It is open to social science explanations outside the realm of economics, and makes references to Hobbes' Leviathan and to Max Weber's sociology. The term decay comes with a rich field of associated notions: decadence, ruin, putrefaction, corruption, degenerescence, remnants, rot. It evokes great works of literature, such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is all about the decay of power ("Something is rotten in the state of Denmark").

Moisés Naím, who emphasizes the practical and the quantifiable, could have explored these literary references further. Indeed, he needs not have looked far away to find an alternative paradigm of power, one that emphasizes its dissemination and transformation. In the literary social sciences - anthropology, cultural studies, political science beyond the model of the rational actor -, such a new approach to power has progressively taken hold. Drawing insights from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, this school of thought insists on the diffuse nature of power, its abstraction from individuals and its embodiment in disciplines and machines. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, gazes, and regimes of truth; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. To exert power, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. Foucault's work marks a radical departure from previous modes of conceiving power as an instrument of coercion and repression, and offers a way to analyze power as a necessary and positive force in society.

But Moisés Naím's reference to political philosophy stops with Hobbes and Weber, and he doesn't explore the insights offered by modern social science. Instead of taking risks and developing original concepts, he applies a worn-out formula to writing a popular essay. The recipe for such best-sellers is by now well-known to editors and writers. Take one concept from economics. Apply the didactic tools of business books - the laundry list of dos and don'ts, the capitalized letters, the end-of-chapter summaries. Transpose the whole to the field of politics, while making it relevant to people's everyday concerns. Provide a tsunami of facts and figures to illustrate each chapter. Pepper it with scholarly references. Make sure you quote important people with whom you had casual conversations - the attractiveness comes not from what they say, but from who they are. Provide the garbs of academic scholarship: a long bibliography, an index, footnotes. Impress the crowd with a statistical appendix. Et voila ! Such formulaic books may not make history or change the way we think about important topics such as power, but they will be the talk of the town during the few weeks that follow their launch by a media campaign.

As other readers have pointed out, the book's standard of evidence is problematic. There is a plausible case to be made that today's leaders are more constrained than in the past; that their hold on power is less secure than that of their predecessors; and that their tenures are shorter. These stylized facts are backed up by numbers taken from the political science literature (in passing, I cannot but be dumbfounded by the vacuity of what passes as political science these days. Gone are the days of the broad picture, the vivid portraits and the search for universal laws. Instead, a narrow perspective has taken hold that borrows its tools from economics, but without the empirical relevance and predictive power of the latter discipline). Although I believe in the soundness of the underlying theoretical model, there may be as many key facts and figures that contradict the book's thesis than references that validate them. In this case, it will be "my evidence against your evidence," with no clear winner in sight. Also since the essence of hegemony consists in hiding to others and to oneself the essence of one's true power, statements by statesmen or business leaders about the vanishing nature of power must be taken with a pinch of salt. This reminds me of David Rothkopf's remark in Superclass that according to Davos meeting participants, the "real" Davos must be happening someplace else, where the really powerful secretly convene.

Moisés Naím is (or was) the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, a leading magazine on international relations and diplomatic issues. He should know editors may add value to a book project - first of all, by setting deadlines and providing the impetus to achieve ambitious goals -, but that they should not overplay their role. Great works of nonfiction were written without editing, and editors sometimes bring forth bad books by pushing forward a volume version of what should have remained a magazine article. The End of Power may amount to more than one successful article - it may contain perhaps two or three -, but it does not achieve its goal as a book that changes the content and direction of the conversations we hold about power.

Power, Moises Naim tells us, is everywhere on the decline: whether in the realm of corporations, the effective military reach of the state, or religion - leaders don't have the unquestioned clout they once enjoyed. This presents great opportunities for innovation and creativity. It also presents tremendous peril in that our ability to respond collectively to such challenges as climate change is diminished.

What does the decline of power mean for the courts? Naim doesn't address that issue. Consider fully informed juries.

Power, Naim, a former editor of Foreign Policy tells us, is simply the ability to compel another to do something. States have it. Corporate CEOs have it. Religious leaders have it. The institutions that give shape to our lives collectively and individually have it.

But in The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be, Naim argues power is on the decline. Nation-states confront non-governmental organizations. Corporations fragment. Cults and religious dissent is on the rise.

"The biggest challenges to power in our time come from changes in the basics of life - in how we live, where we live, for how long and how well. What has changed in the landscape in which power operates," he writes. We simply have more affluence, people are far more mobile than they have ever been, and our mentality, our sense of individual efficacy has increased.

In part, this is due to the Internet, and the ease of electronic communication. The world comes more and more to resemble a gigantic flash mob, with enthusiasm and outrage only a key stroke away. Consider the rapid transformation YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have worked in our social consciousness.

Could there have been an Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, the centrifugal force of the Wikileaks disclosures in national security, entertainment, and corporate affairs, without our instantaneous ability to connect at a keystroke with millions?

Gone is the world of the secure hierarchy of top-down command structures. The new boss is us. The social world resembles the spontaneous movement of starlings, turning this way and that, seemingly without apparent direction, but decidedly uniform in purpose.

Naim does a brilliant job of describing the disintegration of coordinated, top-down command structures. Power is on the decline. He worries about the lack of ability to respond collectively to crisis. Politics is, after all, the wedding of aspiration and necessity. What happens when we cannot muster collective will?

His solution is as unimaginative as his analysis is profound: We need to renew trust in political parties, he says. Really? Isn't that like telling a madam that her house would be better organized if she but required her boarders to be virgins?

Naim is simply tone deaf to the poetry of authority - the mysterious process by which we render naked force into the legitimate exercise of power. The crisis we are undergoing is not simply a loss of power; it is a crumbling sense of legitimacy. How Naim misses that is mysterious.

What has this to do with the courts? Plenty.

A standard jury instruction requires jurors to foreswear inquiring about a case on social media. The authority of the court, the legitimacy of the proceedings, is called into question when jurors conduct their own research about the facts, law and personalities involved in a case.

Naively, we assume that a properly instructed jury follows the law. We send jurors home each night where they resume the very habits of mind that inform their daily lives - that will place some of them before keyboards, doing the very thing a judge has told them not to do by trolling for information about the case they are deciding.

I've no doubt this occurs regularly, any more than I doubt the evidence Naim assembles about fragmented power. We bring antiquated concepts of power and authority to the courtroom when it comes to jurors.

Judges, too, have less power to command the participants in the proceedings before them. I suspect there is far more nullification of the law going on in jury rooms than we know - jurors research forbidden topics silently and secretly, I suspect. Judges, like presidents, CEOs, generals and religious leaders don't enjoy the authority they once had.

Is it time to reconsider sequestration of jurors? I can feel judicial administrators shudder at the thought - that would be such a hardship! Imagine, if you can, folks unplugged from the new social world around us for a week or more. They'd be lost!

Precisely. The new crowd-sourced ethos of our time requires instantaneous communication about everything, always. Welcome the new boss; his name is public opinion, his voice the flash mob. We've yet to construct a political philosophy that explains and justifies this power. As Naim illustrates, we're not even close to doing so.