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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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A Different Kind of Power summary
Jacinda Ardern
A Memoir
16 mins
Brief summary
A Different Kind of Power delves into Jacinda Ardern's leadership style, emphasizing empathy and compassion. The book highlights her unique approach to power, prioritizing social justice and community-driven solutions over traditional political strategies.
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A Different Kind of Power
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A sensitive child
Jacinda Ardern’s political career has been extraordinary. The second youngest prime minister in New Zealand’s history, she was the first to give birth in office. (Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto is the only other elected head of state in the world who can say the same.) When Ardern became leader of the Labour Party in 2017, it was on course for a historic defeat. Seven weeks later, it was in government. Most leaders are forced out by scandal or defeat; Ardern resigned voluntarily.
But nothing about her early life suggested she was destined for her country’s top job.
Born in 1980, Ardern grew up in a modest house in an unassuming town on the North Island, one of the two main islands that make up New Zealand. Her family was Mormon. Her father was a cop; her mother, a homemaker; they drove a Toyota Corona. She had an older sister and a rescue cat called Norm. Her prized possession was a green Raleigh bike.
Ardern was well-behaved: the worst you could say about her was that she called her sister a “cow” a little too often. At school, she was diligent rather than exceptional. She was sensitive, though: her parents’ quiet worries about money and the mortgage became her own, and she had persistent stomach-aches as a child because of it. Like many Mormons, the family went door to door, sharing their beliefs with neighbours. This turned out to be excellent training in polite persistence and the ability to read strangers – skills which politicians depend upon.
Ardern’s faith was shaken when she was in her mid-teens: the Almighty’s supposed benevolence was hard to square with the suicide of a friend’s brother. It collapsed entirely a few years later when she watched a movie about a gay missionary who gave up God for love.
Ardern developed a passion for debating in her final years at high school. She was good at it, too. The topics she picked – and the sides she argued – prefigured the causes she’d champion as a politician: gay rights, children’s welfare, environmentalism, and social justice. Politics, she was realising, had a profound ability to shape communities, for good and for ill. The town in which she’d grown up was a case in point. Once a bustling byword for middle New Zealand, it’d fallen into disrepair – and a kind of despair. The cause: swingeing cuts administered by a 1980s government aping Reagan’s neoliberal revolution in the United States. The deficit had been reduced, but thousands of lives had been ruined. No one, it seemed, cared about that cost.
There had to be some way of undoing that damage and improving the lot of ordinary folk. And Ardern discerned that the clearest path to that goal was politics.
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What is A Different Kind of Power about?
A Different Kind of Power (2025) is Jacinda Ardern’s account of her time in office. It traces her path from small-town New Zealand onto the world stage and through the crises that tested her government: a terror attack, natural disasters, a pandemic, and the backlash that followed. It’s also a manifesto for a different politics – one grounded in compassion rather than toughness.
Who should read A Different Kind of Power?
- Readers drawn to compassionate, human-centred political leadership
- Aspiring leaders curious about empathy in high-stakes decision-making
- Fans of behind-the-scenes insights from modern female politicians
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