Henry Timms
Institutional authority is eroding faster than most leadership teams can adapt. Customers, employees and stakeholders expect to participate in decisions that were once made behind closed doors, and refuse to grant legitimacy by title alone. The tension: how to retain the discipline of a serious institution while building the participatory muscle that now determines influence, loyalty and trust.
Henry Timms is the CEO of Brunswick Group, co-author of “New Power,” and the co-founder of GivingTuesday, and he helps senior leaders run legacy institutions in an age where authority is increasingly networked rather than owned.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Henry Timms
- He has operated at the top of two of the most scrutinised cultural institutions in the United States, Lincoln Center and 92nd Street Y, and can speak to legacy transformation from inside the seat, not from a consulting deck.
- “New Power,” co-written with Jeremy Heimans, was a Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year finalist and is now one of the standard references for leaders thinking about participatory influence. Buyers get the author, not a secondary interpreter.
- He built GivingTuesday from a single idea at 92Y into a movement operating in 100 countries that has generated over $13 billion in giving. That is hard evidence of how the framework works in practice.
- As CEO of Brunswick Group, he now advises global boards and CEOs on exactly the reputational and influence problems the framework was built to address, which keeps the material current rather than retrospective.
Biography highlights
- Chief Executive Officer, Brunswick Group (2024 to present)
- President and CEO, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (2019 to 2024); oversaw the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall
- Co-founder of GivingTuesday (2012), active in 100 countries
- Co-author, “New Power” (2018, Doubleday), Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year shortlist
- Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to the arts and to philanthropy (2022)
- Hauser Leader, Harvard Kennedy School; Senior Fellow, Stanford University and the United Nations Foundation; member, Council on Foreign Relations
Biography
Most legacy institutions are not structured for participation. They are structured for authority that flows one way, from the board and the executive outward, and that structure is now breaking in public. The problem Henry Timms works on is what leaders do about it.
Timms and Jeremy Heimans gave the shift a name in their 2018 book “New Power,” shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Old power, in their argument, is held like a currency: hoarded, closed, pushed down. New power operates like a current: open, participatory, shaped by the many. The point is not that one replaces the other. It is that serious leaders now have to run both systems at once.
He has done this in practice. At 92nd Street Y he co-founded GivingTuesday in 2012, a movement that now operates in 100 countries and has generated over $13 billion for charitable causes. At Lincoln Center, where he was President and CEO from 2019 to 2024, he oversaw the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall and repositioned one of America’s most visible cultural institutions for a more participatory era.
As CEO of Brunswick Group, he now advises global boards and CEOs on reputation, influence and institutional trust, with affiliations at Harvard Kennedy School, Stanford, Oxford and the Council on Foreign Relations. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2022 for services to the arts and to philanthropy.
Key speaking topics
- New power and the shift in how influence operates
- Leading legacy institutions through transformation
- Building and scaling participatory movements
- Reputation and trust in a networked era
- AI and the future of institutional authority
- Philanthropy, purpose and stakeholder engagement
Ideal for
- CEOs and boards of legacy institutions facing relevance or trust challenges
- Chief communications, marketing and brand officers rethinking stakeholder influence
- Foundation and nonprofit leadership teams designing participatory programmes
- Senior leadership offsites on culture, reputation and institutional change
Audience outcomes
- A working vocabulary for distinguishing old power and new power inside their own organisation
- Named examples of how global institutions have built participatory strategies without surrendering discipline
- A clearer read on where their organisation’s authority is eroding and where it can be rebuilt
- Practical reference points from GivingTuesday, Lincoln Center and Brunswick client work
Talks
How digital connectivity has rewired influence, and what senior leaders have to change about how they run their institutions.
Key takeaways:
- Why traditional levers of institutional authority are producing diminishing returns
- How to blend old power structures with new power instincts inside the same organisation
- What legacy institutions can learn from movements built natively on participation
The core framework from the book, applied to the strategic choices a leadership team faces now.
Key takeaways:
- The distinction between power as currency and power as current
- How to read the power dynamics of a specific industry or institution
- Where to invest to build participatory capacity without destabilising the core business
What employee engagement, culture and internal communication look like when the workforce expects to co-author the institution.
Key takeaways:
- Why command-and-control retention strategies are losing ground
- How senior leaders can rebuild internal legitimacy in a participatory workforce
- Specific design choices that strengthen culture without collapsing into consensus