Moms Demand Action Founder on What It Takes to Lead Change

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Whether you're a manager trying to move your organization in a new direction, an entrepreneur seeking to fix a consumer pain point, or a non-profit leader working to improve society, it can be hard to turn your and others' passion for a cause into meaningful change. Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun safety advocacy group, shares how she channeled her anger over U.S. school shootings into an organization with more than 10 million supporters and a string of policy victories. She explains how to know when your desires, values, and skills align to tackle a challenge, how to build a coalition, and how to keep people motivated, Watts is the author of the book Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we begin, we have a couple of questions.
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0:17.6	We want to make the show even better, but we need your help to do that. So head to
0:22.2	HBR.org slash podcast survey. Thank you.
0:27.2	I'm Alison Beard.
0:38.8	And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR Ideacast.
0:49.0	Adi, we are going to talk today about how to make change, whether it's in your organization or a problem
0:56.2	that you see out in the world that you want to fix as an entrepreneur or something that you'd
1:00.8	like to see happen differently in society. You were a senior leader for a really long time,
1:06.8	but I think even from that perch, affecting change is really hard, right?
1:12.6	Yeah, look, I love this topic.
1:14.2	As a senior leader, I learned that to drive a new initiative, to introduce something dramatically new, I had to really own it.
1:22.2	I had to really drive it.
1:23.6	And most importantly, I had to sustain it.
1:25.9	It's easy to get that initial passion and that initial buy-in, but you need processes
1:30.5	and continuing energy to really keep something going for the long term where it makes a difference.
1:35.8	And so our guest today has lots of personal experience with this.
1:39.3	She is Shannon Watts, the founder of Mom's Demand Action, which is the nonprofit organization in the United
1:45.6	States that pushes for gun safety legislation. She didn't consider herself to be a leader or a changemaker
	...

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