To sell your ideas, you need to master these 3 types of power

Nikolai Tesla was a revolutionary thinker with bold, transformative ideas. Yet it was George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison who shaped how electricity was brought to the world. The personal computer was invented at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), but it was Apple that brought the Macintosh to market. William Coley pioneered cancer immunotherapy, but James Allison made it a reality.

We grow up believing that if an idea is good, it will naturally rise to the top. Yet that’s rarely, if ever, true. To make an impact, you need to understand power and influence. It isn’t about titles, authority, or formal position. It’s about understanding how decisions actually get made, how people get mobilized, and how systems really change.

To do that, you need to master three forms of power: hard power, soft power, and network power. Hard power compels. Soft power persuades. Network power amplifies. Real influence comes from knowing how to combine all three. That’s the difference between having a good idea and building the traction you need to bring about the impact you want to see. 

How a Group of Kids Harnessed Institutional Hard Power to Bring Down a Dictator

In 1998, five young activists met in a café in Belgrade. Still in their twenties, they were, to all outward appearances, nothing special. They weren’t rich, or powerful. They didn’t hold important positions or have access to significant resources. Nevertheless, that day they conceived a plan to overthrow their country’s brutal Milošević regime.

The next day six friends joined them, and together they became the 11 founders of the activist group Otpor. They had some experience with activism, taking part in the protests against the war in Bosnia in 1992 and then in the Zajedno movement in 1996. But those efforts had fallen short, and Milošević continued to rule with an iron hand. 

Yet they had learned from the experience, and an activist introduced them to the Albert Einstein Institution as well as the ideas of Gene Sharp. They found that there are sources of power that support the status quo and these have an institutional basis. As long as these remain in place, nothing will ever change. But if you can shift them, anything becomes possible. Even a seemingly all-powerful dictator needs to control or influence institutions to carry out their will.

So Otpor set out to influence key institutions, such as the media, local businesses, and international organizations, and had a particularly innovative strategy for influencing the police. When Milošević tried to steal the election, people took to the streets, in what is now known as the Bulldozer Revolution. Those institutional shifts proved decisive in bringing down his government. The Serbian strongman would die in his prison cell in The Hague in 2006.

Everyone with an idea is, in some way, like those five kids in the café in Belgrade. If you’re ever going to get anywhere, you need access to hard power. And that means unless you already control institutions that can make decisions, you’re going to have to learn how to influence them. That’s the essence of hard power strategy: shaping decisions by shaping institutions.

The Pervasive Soft Power of Ramanujan

As the story of Otpor shows, influencing the hard power of institutional authority is critical for driving through transformational change. Others—such as the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey—were able to mobilize massive numbers of people, but without institutional influence they were unable to achieve significant progress. 

Still, you can’t just use institutional heft to overpower. You also need to attract people to your cause, and that’s where soft power comes in. Consider the story of Ramanujan, a destitute Indian with little formal education. In 1913, he sent his work to G.H. Hardy, a prominent mathematician working at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, Cambridge University. 

It feels almost strange to ask why Ramanujan reached out to Hardy and not the other way around. As a leading professor at a major center of learning, Hardy carried a lot of institutional clout, while Ramanujan had none. But in the end, it was Hardy who did Ramanujan’s bidding and, in fact, considered it to be one of the greatest privileges of his life to do so. How did that happen? 

Ramanujan was able to harness the three foundational elements of soft power: ethos, pathos, and logos—credibility, emotion, and logic. Ramanujan was, by any measure, one of the greatest mathematical minds the world has ever produced. His story as a poverty-stricken man doing complex mathematical proofs in his spare time was emotionally compelling, and the logic of bringing him to Cambridge was clear and undeniable. 

In other words, for a variety of reasons Hardy found Ramanujan attractive, and that’s at the core of the concept of soft power—it is the power to influence without coercion. Hard power might get people to do what you want, but that can create resentment and backfire. Soft power is how you get people to want what you want, and that can sometimes be more valuable. 

The Power of Tony Soprano’s Networks

As a Mafia boss, Tony Soprano clearly understood hard power and strictly enforced his will. He was also no stranger to soft power, joking and cajoling with his associates. But at the root of Tony’s power were his networks. He was, in gangland parlance, connected, not only to other criminals, but to government officials, religious leaders, and legitimate businesspeople. 

Yet it isn’t only mob bosses who need to be connected. One of the best examples is the Medici Family in Renaissance Florence. The Medici weren’t kings. They didn’t hold official power, but they became one of the most powerful families in Europe. How? Because they sat at the center of multiple overlapping networks. 

Through their bank, they were connected to merchants, princes, and even popes. They built alliances through strategic marriages. They funded artists, scientists, and thinkers. And they acted as bridges—connecting powerful people who wouldn’t otherwise talk to one another. That made them extraordinarily influential. That’s network power.

The same pattern shows up again and again. Bill Gates used network power to weaken IBM and dominate the tech industry for over a decade. Microsoft didn’t own the hardware. It didn’t control distribution. But everyone needed its software. That’s what made the company dominant. That’s network power.

In the 1980s, when home video recorders were just coming to market, Betamax built a better product, but VHS built a better network and came to dominate the market. Next time you make a purchase, think about what you use to pay. Visa, Mastercard, American Express—that’s also network power at work. 

While soft power can persuade and hard power can compel, it is network power that can help you gain scale, expanding access to information and providing the connectivity needed to communicate ideas and actions widely. 

Setting Your Ideas Up for Success

Most of us grow up believing in merit. We’re raised to think that the truth will win out and the best idea will always win in the end. Unfortunately, that’s not really true. As much as we might like to believe that our ideas can stand on their own, the truth is that we need power and influence to put them into action. 

Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches the incredibly popular course Building Power to Lead, defines power as the ability to get things done your way in contested situations, and that gets to the meat of it. People don’t encounter our ideas in a vacuum, but in a sea of other ideas, ambitions, prerogatives, and priorities.  

For people to adopt an idea, it needs to cross their thresholds of resistance, points at which joining in no longer feels risky or costly. To get them over that hump, we need to access power and influence, which comes in three forms: hard power, soft power, and network power. Hard power lowers thresholds by changing incentives. Soft power lowers them by making adoption desirable. Network power builds momentum and propagates the idea forward. 

These don’t work in isolation, but in combination. Hard power can force a decision, but risks resentment. Soft power can win buy-in, but without connection to authority, it can’t deliver results. Network power can get you access, but not action. When you use all three in tandem, however, you don’t just push ideas forward, you pull people in, motivate them to make your cause their own, and encourage others to do so as well. 

So don’t just ask whether your idea is good enough. Think about how you’re going to access the power and influence you need to set it up for success. That, more than anything, will determine whether you succeed or fail.

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