THIS BOOK IS about how ordinary people make extraordinary change. It’s not about politicians or CEOs of large companies who are already bestowed with enormous power and responsibility. It’s about how your teammates, your neighbors, and you yourself can mobilize the people around you to bring your visions to life. So how does that happen?
FIVE MINUTES AFTER nineteen-year-old Manal Rostom switched seats with her cousin on a bus from Cairo to the Red Sea, the bus blew a tire and swerved into the desert, rolling over three times. Manal was okay, but her cousin, Mohammed, was instantly paralyzed. He died three weeks later. This shook Manal to her core. Her faith helped her cope with her grief and trauma, and though she had been only moderately religious before the accident, the experience strengthened her relationship to Islam. Two years later, although it wasn’t necessarily expected by her family, Manal decided to wear the hijab, a traditional Muslim head covering. “It was a way to say thank you to God,” she told me, “for giving me a second chance to live.”
Manal wore the hijab for the next fourteen years. While she faced some criticism from Westerners who were either unfamiliar with the hijab or believe it is oppressive to women, she generally felt accepted in Egypt and Kuwait. And then something changed. More and more women she knew stopped wearing the hijab, anti-hijab articles started appearing in the media, and in Dubai, where she lived, Muslim women in hijab faced criticism and were not allowed into some public spaces. Manal didn’t judge others negatively for choosing not to wear the hijab, but she felt that for herself and many other women, wearing the hijab provided a sense of connection to their faith. “I had a moment of epiphany,” she said. “If I was to give in and just follow the crowd, then how would anything change? I felt like a dead fish who was just going to ‘go with the flow,’ but then I decided I wanted to go against the current. I wasn’t a dead fish.”
In 2014, Manal started a community of women to support each other through a group on Facebook called “Surviving Hijab,” a name she chose because that’s what she felt she was trying to do. That night in April, she invited eighty women, mainly her friends and family, into the group. When she woke up, she found that the group already had five hundred members. Within months, the community had grown to more than forty thousand women who supported and encouraged one another to be proud of wearing the hijab. Today, just three years later, Surviving Hijab is nearing five hundred thousand women from around the world and clearly fills a need for hijabi women to have a supportive community. Manal’s desire to take action has created a movement.
With so many supporters behind her, Manal knew that more was possible. In addition to her job at a pharmaceutical company and her role leading this community, Manal is also an athlete—an avid runner. She faces even more criticism as a hijabi athlete, with people constantly asking her things like, “Won’t you be hot running in all those layers?” She is often the only hijabi runner in races she competes in, and has seen it as an opportunity to help reduce stereotypes of Muslim women. But she wanted to do more. On the recommendation of a friend, and with the support of all the women in Surviving Hijab behind her, Manal wrote a letter to Tom Woolf, the head coach for Nike in the Middle East, titled “Nike Middle East—Veiled Women Runners :)” In it, she described her community of women and how she wanted to empower them to be active and do sports, even in the hijab. “The reason why I’m contacting you is because I have noticed that all pics featuring the Nike Club runners have no veiled women in them!” she wrote. “It’s the Middle East, shouldn’t we have some?” When she hit send, she was terrified.
But her terror was unjustified. Not only did Tom reply, he said, “Thank you for your email. Its timing is perfect and I have been having similar conversations with the Nike team here. How are you set to meet . . . at three p.m. tomorrow?” Of course, Manal agreed. And just two months later, in January 2015, Manal became the first hijabi woman featured in a Nike ad campaign. In March 2015, Nike invited Manal to become the first coach of an all-women’s running club in Dubai. And finally, in March 2017, Manal was invited to Nike headquarters in Dubai for a big surprise—the company announcing Nike Pro Hijab—a line of athletic wear for hijabi women that would launch in early 2018. When she heard the news, Manal says she broke down in tears for every struggle that she’d read about on Surviving Hijab. “It was magical,” she told me. “It was the first time that a multinational brand said they would cater to this segment of Muslim women. That swoosh gives us power.”
Nike highlights on its website how Manal and other Muslim female athletes tested prototypes of the product for features like fit and breathability and also gave important cultural feedback, like the fact that it had to be completely opaque. And though Nike was not the first company to make a hijab for Muslim women athletes, having such a big brand behind her gave Manal an enormous sense of accomplishment. She felt that she and others in Nike Pro Hijab gear could be role models for young girls, who would now see that it’s possible to both support your faith and achieve all that you want to do in the world. Manal learned that shared purpose can help a community overcome stereotypes and drive change.
NEIL GRIMMER STILL describes himself as a misfit and a punk rocker. Though he has held senior positions at IDEO and Clif Bar, his early life as an artist and as a musician in a punk band plays a huge role in informing who he is today. And when Neil became a dad, it was the misfit in him—the questioner of authority—who rebelled against the options available to parents to feed their children. There were no organic baby foods on the market, so Neil and his wife, Tana Johnson, cooked their own baby food. As two working parents with a toddler and a newborn, they were knee-deep in caring for their kids, often staying up late at night to cook baby food and pack healthy lunches for their older daughter in daycare. After ten o’clock one night, while they were pureeing the “vegetable du jour,” Neil thought, “There has to be a better way. There must be a way for working parents to feed their kids healthy food, without having that trade-off between convenience and health.” He committed to find a solution that could fit into busy parents’ lives. With that inspiration, Neil used his creative and entrepreneurial spirit to create Plum Organics—a company built to help parents raise healthy kids with healthy food.
That purpose informed every aspect of the company—from product creation to team building and hiring to how they ran their weekly meetings—and helped them get through even difficult times. It wasn’t always easy; Neil told me how he and his cofounder, Sheryl O’Loughlin, sometimes felt as if they were on an island surrounded by sharks. They had never started a company and were learning on the job. It felt as though there were many hazards, from which investors to work with to how to run manufacturing, and later to personal health issues that can arise from the stress of running a startup. They weren’t sure whom they could trust. At the same time, the company’s clear purpose to help families be healthier allowed them to build a close, intimate connection with everyone who worked at the company, the people on their island. Their faith and hard work paid off. Millions of parents bought Plum’s food, catapulting Plum Organics to become the number one organic baby food company in the United States.
Plum sales grew to $80 million in six years and received enormous interest from strategic partners and private equity firms. After a key meeting with Campbell Soup CEO Denise Morrison, with whom Neil felt a strong connection, he and his board decided to sell Plum Organics to Campbell Soup in 2013. Campbell’s delivered on its promises both to invest resources in Plum and to stay true to its mission: that same year, Campbell’s allowed Plum to continue its conversion to a public benefit corporation (PBC), a type of legal incorporation for social enterprises that compels them to serve stakeholders as well as shareholders. At the time, Plum was the only wholly-owned subsidiary of a public company to legally become a PBC. Not only has Plum Organics continued to grow, but it also was at the forefront of an enormous trend driving gains in the organic baby food category. Due to the growing concern parents have about the safety of the foods their children eat, the organic prepared baby food segment is expected to account for nearly 76 percent of the total baby food market by 2020. As Neil saw, a sense of shared purpose can be incredibly powerful fuel to help a new idea catch fire.
MEGAN GRASSELL WASN’T even a senior in high school in 2014 when she founded Yellowberry, a company that makes age-appropriate bras for tween and teen girls. On a frustrating shopping trip to look for a first bra for her thirteen-year-old sister, they spent hours going to different stores but couldn’t find a single bra that wasn’t highly sexualized, padded, or push-up. That’s when Megan decided to make her own—even though she had no idea how to start a business or create an undergarment from scratch. She told me, “I had this epiphany: Why couldn’t I make this product and create a brand to make this an empowering time that every girl goes through in her life?”
She became obsessed with the idea and jumped in right away, even though she wasn’t familiar with all the details. Some things went well from the start and others didn’t. She thought, “Okay, to make a bra, I guess you need fabric,” so she shopped for material on the Internet, choosing fabrics by color and not realizing that she had chosen sailboat canvas material, which didn’t make a great first prototype. She was ultimately able to find a seamstress to work with her to create several different prototypes and used the bulk of her savings to hire a manufacturer to make the first four hundred bras, which was all she could afford.
After creating that first set of bras, Megan realized she needed more funds to help get the company off the ground. So she did what thousands of cash-strapped entrepreneurs do: she launched a Kickstarter campaign. It got off to a slow start. For the first few months, she raised only about $200—especially embarrassing because her friends and classmates could track her Kickstarter online and see that she had raised less than 1 percent of her $25,000 goal. Instead of giving up, Megan started looking online for companies or people who might support her product. She sent cold e-mails explaining her mission and her story to about two hundred people, and although just one of them responded, it worked. A company called A Mighty Girl posted about Yellowberry on its website and Facebook page after receiving Megan’s message. Less than twenty-four hours later, her Kickstarter campaign had raised $25,000. Getting these early influencers on board as supporters of her movement was critical to its success.
Ultimately, Megan raised over $40,000 in her Kickstarter campaign, and her first line of products—with style names like Bug Bite, Tiny Teton, and Tweetheart—sold out quickly. Her commitment goes beyond just business success; she put her college career on hold and even gave up dreams of competing in the Olympics (she was a nationally ranked competitive ski racer) to continue to fight against the sexualization of young girls. She had a clear sense of her vision from the beginning, wanting to be a brand that could develop alongside girls, supporting and inspiring them and letting them know it’s okay to grow up at their own pace.
She called the company Yellowberry as a nod to how important it is to give girls time to develop—to have “yellow” stages before becoming a red berry. The vision for Megan’s movement is to “support girls through each stage of their journey to become confident and extraordinary young women.” And her movement is growing, as large retailers like Nordstrom carried Yellowberry bras, popular brands like Aerie partnered with Megan to spread Yellowberry’s message, and sales grew all over the world. As Yellowberry expanded, Megan was widely applauded: she was featured in the 2014 lists for Time magazine’s 25 Most Influential Teens and the Huffington Post’s 14 Most Fearless Teens, and the 2016 list of Forbes’s 30 Under 30.
Megan’s customers love Yellowberry, and you can see their deep appreciation in messages they post to the company on Facebook, with comments like, “FANTASTIC bras for my girls. Just got our first order and we are thrilled. I’m thinking about hosting a trunk show to pass this wonderful product along to my friends,” and pictures of girls enjoying wearing their Yellowberries (all taken from the back, which is the company’s mission-aligned approach to taking photos of young girls in their bras, “standing behind them to support them as they take on the world”). This appreciation from her customers reaffirms her purpose and propels Megan; as she described in a Forbes interview in 2017, “One of my absolute favorite things is that we have a lot of people in our community who write incredibly heartfelt messages to us about their experience with Yellowberry and how their daughter feels now that she wears Yellowberry products. To this day, it’s a really easy way for me to get teary. I respond personally to each and every one that I can, and I am forever grateful for not only their business but for their support in our mission.” Megan realized that tapping into a community’s shared purpose could help make her dream a reality.
WHY IS IT that Manal, Neil, and Megan succeeded when many other entrepreneurs and activists with equally noble goals failed? Is it because they were effective leaders with good ideas that came at the right time? Perhaps. But if you look closer, they all have one thing in common—what they did was start movements.
Movements happen when many people unite around a common purpose. Manal, Neil, and Megan each mobilized people around a purpose they were passionate about—whether it was to change stereotypes about hijabi women, make healthy food available to babies, or fight the sexualization of teenagers. They built their movements by empowering people around them both to serve the purpose and to spread the movement even further.
Why are movements so powerful? Purpose is contagious. Movements grow and spread with a force of their own to create communities of people, each burning to make the change happen. While movements are often sparked by the actions and conviction of an effective leader, they succeed when those movement starters build up other leaders within the community and everyone plays a role in driving change.
It may sound simple to do. But to get an idea of how powerful movements are, think about your daily life. Many of us lead our busy lives without stopping to think about what drives us and what’s truly important to us. We manage our jobs and personal lives—and perhaps also our teams at work—skillfully, but often without connecting them to our beliefs and core values. Much has been written about the difference between managers and leaders, but most agree that managers focus more on tactics and day-to-day operations, while leaders inspire others to follow in their footsteps.
I propose a new view of leadership. As I’ve learned in my career spanning companies from Facebook and Google to Change.org, the most effective leaders are movement starters. Movement starters take leadership a step further. They don’t just persuade people to follow them; people join and support movement starters to generate positive change. People like Manal, Neil, and Megan start with purpose and broadcast it far and wide to find support. These leaders aren’t powerful because of the titles on their business cards; they are powerful because they have their mission and values front and center, and their clarity of purpose and strength of conviction inspire others to join them—to start a movement.
I’ve seen that this is true throughout my career, in both the business and activism worlds. In my role as the head of Groups at Facebook, I support millions of people who start communities that mobilize billions of other people around shared passions and experiences. As the former president and COO of Change.org, I witnessed regular people starting more than 1,000 petitions a day on the causes that mattered to them, and those petitions drove real change, with more than a dozen campaigns on Change.org now winning every day, achieving the change they wanted. And from my vantage point in Silicon Valley, I have spent nearly twenty years working with people whose ideas helped to build companies that make our world better. These are regular people—just like you and me—who stand up and do something about the problems they see in the world. People who are committed to ending bullying and violence against women. People who want others to have access to better education, excellent medical treatment, and cleaner water. People who want to improve the lives of people with disabilities, bring safety and equality to the LGBTQ community, and so much more.
If you’ve assumed that these ideas apply only to activists—just wait. One of the things that surprised me most after I joined Change.org in 2013—and what may surprise you as well—was how similar the leadership skills were between movement starters in the social change world and those in the business world. The fact is that leadership skills don’t discriminate. Successful leadership requires you to create a clear vision of what you want to achieve, inspire other people to work with you toward that vision, often persuade people in power (decision-makers) to do things you want them to do, overcome obstacles that may arise, and then just not give up until the vision is achieved. These skills are the common thread of leadership among movement starters in all sectors, all causes, and all industries. Those leaders who frame their work as movements with passionate followers will ultimately build the strongest teams and have the most success, whether working to change policies and laws, creating new brands or companies, and anything in between.
ONE OF THE top social organizers in the world, Sara El-Amine, who was the executive director of President Obama’s Organizing for Action and is now the director of advocacy at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said at the Broadbent Institute’s 2016 Progress Summit in Ottawa, “Change doesn’t happen inside the halls of power. Change happens at kitchen tables, in living rooms, in training sessions like this one, but it doesn’t happen in the White House, the United Nations or the halls of Parliament.”
So if people are what matter—if individuals create change, not big institutions like governments or corporations—then what holds us back and keeps us from doing something, anything, to get an idea started? The biggest reason I’ve seen is fear that our actions don’t matter, and that they won’t measure up to the change instigated by huge and historically significant movements like the civil rights movement in the 1960s or the movement for marriage equality. But the truth is that what matters to the person or people who start any movement defines its scope. Just because the movements we traditionally think of are the largest ones, like the Arab Spring or Black Lives Matter, doesn’t mean that changes people make in their small towns, their schools, or their workplaces aren’t movements, and crucial ones at that. People are protecting local parks and monuments, they are persuading companies to recycle, they are making policies fairer at their schools, and so much more.
In fact, you should never discount the power of small actions; sometimes they are precisely the thing that prompts larger future actions, both in yourself and in others. A landmark study from 1966, “Compliance without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique,” by Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser of Stanford University, showed that by first asking people to do something small enough that’s easy to say yes to, people were more likely to say yes to a larger request later. This technique works based on the principle that people want to appear consistent in their behaviors.
In social organizing, this technique is referred to as a “ladder of engagement”; you start by asking for a lightweight action—a signature, a “like” on a Facebook page, watching a short video, etc.—and then move people up the ladder to higher engagement actions, like sharing, donating, or volunteering. Sometimes petition signatures on Change.org, for example, are criticized as “slacktivism,” or being too easy a way to get involved, but people often neglect to see that a signature may be a first step toward something bigger. And, in fact, people who take the small action of signing are then later more likely to take follow-on actions like sharing, commenting, calling or tweeting a decision-maker, donating money, or showing up in person at an event. More than 47 percent of people who sign petitions on Change.org go on to take at least one further action.
Every small action is important, and they all add up. If you look at winning campaigns on Change.org, 40 percent of them have fewer than two hundred signatures. Sometimes change doesn’t require millions of people to make it happen; it just requires the right set of relevant people speaking up. And when some changes require mass mobilization, we should remind ourselves that movements that start small can grow into larger national or global ones, as we’ve seen with causes like the banning of plastic bags and the push for cage-free eggs.
Business ideas can become enormous movements as well. Sometimes one insight starts a revolution, as companies like Lyft, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit reimagine how work is done; entrepreneurs at companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Tesla push to make the world more connected, easier to navigate, better for the environment, and massively more convenient; and PBCs that “benefit the public” like Plum Organics, Change.org, Method, and Kickstarter show that it’s possible to be financially successful and to improve the world.
And while purpose-driven businesses are more effective at driving change, it turns out that they also get better results by other measures. According to John Kotter and James Heskett, authors of Corporate Culture and Performance, purposeful companies had consistently higher stock prices—by a factor of twelve—than non-values-driven organizations. The Business Case for Purpose, a report from Harvard Business Review Analytics sponsored by the EY Beacon Institute, contends that companies that “harness the power of purpose to drive performance and profitability enjoy a distinct competitive advantage”—58 percent of companies with a clearly articulated sense of purpose in their corporate mission reported growth of more than 10 percent during the three years they were followed, as compared with 42 percent of companies that don’t prioritize purpose. And shared values also drive brand relationships: 64 percent of consumers say that a company’s values are the main reason they choose to do business with a brand. Within companies, purpose has benefits like increased productivity, employee retention, and innovation. Reid Hoffman, executive chairman and cofounder of LinkedIn, has said, “Now, more and more professionals look for positions at companies where they can create meaningful impact and experience personal growth. Companies that understand the increasing emphasis of purpose in today’s professional landscape improve their ability to attract such employees and also their ability to retain them for longer periods of time.” In a wide range of organizations, I have personally seen countless times in my own experience that a sense of being part of something meaningful leads people to feel more engaged, to be more creative, and to create stronger working relationships with colleagues, all leading to better results.
Whether in business or in more traditional activism, movements start with just a few individuals and then ripple outward. We each may believe that some ideas have more or less merit than others. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter. It’s about what matters to you. If you are willing to step up and say, “Why not me? Why shouldn’t I be the one to solve that problem or propose that change?” and if you can use the lessons from this book to help inspire others to join you, then you are well on your way to starting your own movement, whatever it may be.
BEYOND OUR OWN personal fulfillment, there’s an even more important reason to start and lead a movement—the world needs hope.
We live in a world that is increasingly divided, angry, and scared, torn apart by war, political division, and rising racism and bigotry. A world where nuclear proliferation is again an increasing threat; where climate change places entire species, cities, and ultimately our planet at risk; where young girls are being denied education, trafficked, and sold into marriages; and where it seems like we are more divided in our worldviews than ever before. All of these challenges can be overwhelming.
The thing is, I believe we already have hope. It lives within all of us and appears in what we do and say, and how we treat each other. It’s vibrant in some of us and more dormant in others, but at our core, the hope we so desperately need already exists within us. We are the leaders the world needs right now. Look past the heartbreaking headlines of violence and intolerance, and you’ll find stories of profound kindness, generosity, and courage, stories like Manal’s, Neil’s, and Megan’s.
These stories have inspired me to start my own movement—to spread the idea that we can all start movements—and I hope that they will encourage you to start your own as well. This book will walk you through the steps that successful leaders take on their path to building movements, whether they are activists or entrepreneurs, as told through the stories of real people, and sometimes surprising people, who have already done it. And some of the stories in the book are from my own experience—starting and leading a nonprofit and later a tech company, working as a tech exec at Yahoo!, Google, Change.org, and now Facebook, and also in my role as mother, sister, daughter, and wife—including my failures and triumphs along the way. This chapter covers the power of purpose and provides some examples of different kinds of movements, showing that anyone is capable of starting one. In Chapter 2, we’ll talk about how movements get started and about finding the courage to step up to the plate and lead. Chapter 3 pushes you to clarify and articulate your vision and highlights techniques to get your first supporters on board. Chapter 4 covers skills and tips to effectively influence decision-makers. In Chapter 5, we’ll discuss how to inspire people who join your movement and keep them motivated as part of your team. Chapter 6 talks about how to handle criticism, which often increases as your movement builds, and Chapter 7 explains how to manage obstacles and leverage failure to your advantage. This book is not a tactical primer—it won’t walk you through detailed steps of how to stage a rally, or create a product road map, or even start a petition—there are plenty of other sources available to do those things. Instead, it is meant to give you the tools to become the leader of a movement, to create vision, to inspire people, to persuade those in power, to manage through seemingly insurmountable obstacles—to lead change.
We all have the power to make a difference. Maybe you’ll start your own campaign and see it through to victory, overcoming obstacles and mobilizing supporters. Or maybe you’ll join someone else’s movement, adding your voice to a chorus that proclaims, “This matters.” You might start a community of passionate people who can then mobilize to create change. Or maybe you’ll propose a new idea that could make your workplace better or start a new business that solves a big problem. Whatever you do, action, creativity, and passion count. Now more than ever.
And you already have most of the tools you need. In fact, we all have the power to inspire people and spark movements around issues that matter. Whatever your movement or your cause, you have the ability to affect people’s lives. This book is intended to share stories of other movement leaders—including some unlikely ones—to inspire you and practical tips to empower you so that you, too, can create hope in the world and live a purposeful life. Whereas managers accept the world as it is, movement starters burn with the passion to make it more just, equitable, and engaging. We all need to make a choice: Are we managers or movement starters?