I just finished A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir by Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister from 2017 to 2023. At a moment when the political world feels particularly bleak, Ardern’s book feels different. It’s full of hope (and good decisions). Her tenure as New Zealand’s Prime Minister shows us that a person can hold the highest office in a country and still be, unmistakably and unapologetically, a human being, a woman, and a mom.
If you’re sick of news about politicians who run for power, money, and greed, you’re in for a treat. Some politicians actually care about their people. (Shocking, I know!)
Who Jacinda Ardern Is and Why She’s Different
Ardern grew up in small-town New Zealand, the daughter of a police officer. By her own account she was plagued by self-doubt for most of her early life and career. She did not fit the mold of a political leader. Ardern was not strategic or calculating in the way we’ve come to expect from people who reach the top of government. She was, instead, something more rare: genuine.
The Washington Post described her memoir as “a clear and compelling case for compassion — an implicit repudiation of the strongman style of leadership that has taken hold around the world.” I think that’s exactly right. And that implicit repudiation is what makes this book feel so necessary right now.
Christchurch: Leadership When It Mattered Most
An important turning point in Ardern’s career was the Christchurch mosque attacks on March 15, 2019. A white supremacist gunman opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch, killing 51 people and injuring many others.
Ardern’s response was immediate and unequivocal. “I just remember that feeling — feeling like being punched,” she said. “The idea that someone was able to come in and legally obtain such weapons that were so obviously designed to cause a mass loss of life, to me was all the evidence that we needed to change our laws.”
There is a paragraph in this book where she says that within seventeen days of this attack, her parliament, in a nearly anonymous vote, banned semi-automatic and assault rifles throughout the country. They put together an amnesty program to buy back these weapons and everyone went on living their lives afterwards. I cried for five minutes after reading that short paragraph. I had no idea how good it would feel to see a country actually doing something about its gun violence.
And Ardern cared deeply about the people and families affected. When she donned a headscarf and comforted victims’ families after the shooting, it resonated globally. She would later describe it as a spontaneous gesture of respect to the Muslim community. It wasn’t a photo op. It was a person showing up the way a person would. She demonstrated time and time again that she has compassion for everyone in her country.
COVID: Honesty as a Leadership Strategy
Ardern shepherded New Zealand through the COVID-19 pandemic with one of the lowest mortality rates of any country. Twenty-five people died in New Zealand due to COVID-19 and she knew nearly all of their stories and their families. Her approach was built around something almost radical in modern politics: transparency.
“People knew we didn’t have the answers,” she said. “Our response was to share everything we knew and be honest about what we didn’t know.”
Ardern held regular press briefings where she answered questions directly. She communicated with citizens on Facebook Live from her home, sometimes in casual clothes after putting her daughter to bed. She treated the public as adults who deserved honest information rather than managed messaging. And New Zealand trusted her in ways that saved lives.
It helps that New Zealand is an island nation and it’s far easier to shut down borders than in countries like the United States. Still, I kept thinking as I read this section about how different the experience might have been for all of us had more leaders taken this approach. Honesty, it turns out, is not a political liability. It’s a foundation for trust. And trust, as Ardern demonstrates throughout this book, is the thing that makes effective leadership possible.
Leading a Country and Raising a Baby at the Same Time
Here’s something I did not fully realize about Jacinda Ardern until I read this book: she learned she was pregnant at almost exactly the same moment she became Prime Minister.
The book opens with her sitting in her bathroom, anxiously waiting on two things simultaneously, the election results that would tell her whether she’d become the youngest female head of government in the world, and a pregnancy test that would tell her years of trying and fertility treatments had somehow paid off. She won the election. The test was positive. Only a working mother can fully appreciate and respect what came next for Ardern.
Ardern became the second elected world leader to give birth while in office, after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto in 1990. She took six weeks of maternity leave and then returned to running New Zealand. She brought her daughter, Neve, along on official travel, which is how, in September 2018, a three-month-old baby attended the United Nations General Assembly in New York, sporting a mock UN diplomatic ID card that classified her as “New Zealand First Baby.”
The image of Ardern kissing Neve in the UN assembly hall before stepping to the podium to address world leaders made me cry big tears of joy. How had this not happened before? Because we don’t have enough moms in power. The UN spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said it perfectly: “Prime Minister Ardern is showing that no one is better qualified to represent her country than a working mother.”
“Prime Minister Ardern is showing that no one is better qualified to represent her country than a working mother.”
– UN Spokesman, Stephanie Dujarric to USA Today
The real magic of this book, for me, was how Ardern expressed the exhaustion, guilt, decision-making, and pride of being a working mom. As a retired Tech Executive and mom myself, it resonated so well with me. She’s been there, she’s done that, and she’s not particularly proud of every decision that she made, but she stands by them and she earned the respect of her daughter, Neve, by being a powerful working woman.
Ardern writes about her time as the Prime Minister with candor and fluency, taking us through every major decision and even her pangs of guilt. What I liked best about Ardern’s account is her refusal to let that guilt become a referendum on whether women can lead. As she told NPR: “Nor was I going to send a message to any woman that you can’t do both [be a mom and work]. You can. Because actually the mother guilt that I have now that I’m around more is just the same as what I had then. It doesn’t go away. It’s the price you pay of being a parent.”
That is one of the most honest things I have read about working motherhood in a long time. The guilt doesn’t go away when you work less. It just changes shape.
What She Built: A Government That Cared About People
Beyond the crises, Ardern’s record in office reflects a consistent governing philosophy: that the purpose of government is to improve the actual lives of actual people, and that traditional economic metrics often miss what matters most.
Early in her role, she introduced the Wellbeing Budget, an initiative that shifted the focus from GDP to measures of well-being, mental health, and environmental sustainability, redefining how success was measured at the national level. This was a genuine policy innovation, the first budget of its kind in the world and one I’d like to see many others adopt.
Under her government, the Zero Carbon Act was passed, setting New Zealand on a path to carbon neutrality by 2050. She achieved 50% female representation in Parliament and introduced laws aimed at pay equity and extended paid parental leave.
This is a record. Accomplished in five and a half years, while also leading a country through a terrorist attack, a volcanic eruption (yes, really, check out the book to learn more), a global pandemic, and raising a child in the public eye.
Why She Left and Why That Matters Too
Another very striking part of the book is Ardern’s account of her resignation. I happened to be in New Zealand the day she announced her resignation and I was very sad to hear it. On January 19, 2023, she announced she would resign, explaining that she knew when she was “the right person to lead, and also, when she was not.”
“This has been the most fulfilling five and a half years of my life. But it has also had its challenges. I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It is that simple.”
In a political world where leaders cling to power long past the point of effectiveness, this kind of self-awareness is remarkable. She didn’t leave because she was forced out. She left because she was honest with herself about her own limits. And she was clear that her decision to leave was not about motherhood. It was not a message that women can’t do both. It was a message that she, specifically, at that specific moment, was done. There’s a difference, and she insisted on it.
That is incredibly moving and inspiring. Because we need more of this self-awareness, not less. We need more people willing to step aside so the next generation of leaders can come forth. I did this at Singlewire Software, and I am so proud of the people who have stepped up in my place.
We Need More Arderns
I’ve been thinking about this book alongside Bernie Sanders’ It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, another recent read about a political figure who leads with values rather than strategy, who says what they mean, and who believes government should work for people rather than the other way around.
What both books share is a vision of political leadership as fundamentally about service, not power, not legacy, not self-preservation, but the actual, unglamorous, difficult work of making things better for people who need them to be better.
That vision feels urgent right now. It feels, in the current political moment, almost countercultural. Which is exactly why I think books like this one matter.
We need more leaders who bring their babies to the UN, then step to the podium and do the work. More leaders who wear headscarves to comfort grieving families. Who go live on Facebook in their pajamas to answer questions honestly. Who pass gun legislation quickly. More leaders who step down when they’re out of gas rather than holding on for their own sake. Who build budgets around wellbeing instead of GDP. Who achieve 50% female representation in their parliament and then keep going.
We need more Jacinda Arderns. We need them in every country and at every level of government. And we need a political culture that makes space for them, that rewards empathy and honesty rather than punishing it. That understands, finally, that the mother guilt doesn’t disqualify you. It just makes you human. And being human, it turns out, is a feature of great leadership, not a bug.
We need more Jacinda Arderns. We need them in every country. We need them at every level of government. And we need a political culture that makes space for them, that rewards empathy and honesty rather than punishing it.
A Different Kind of Power is a #1 New Zealand and Amazon bestseller, a New York Times bestseller, and winner of the Best First Book Award at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It’s available now wherever books are sold. Read it. Then think about what kind of leaders you want to support.
What did you think of Jacinda Ardern’s leadership? And if you’ve read the book, what resonated most with you? I’d love to hear in the comments.
