Embed code. In most instances, I have used their real names—in some instances they are public figures and some of the material comes from public sources. However, in a few cases, at the request of my sources, I have changed the names of people and, less frequently, other identifying information to protect their anonymity. You can get yourself into a high-power position even under the most unlikely circumstances if you have the requisite skill. Coming out of business school, Anne wanted to lead a high technology start-up.
But Anne had no technology background. She was an accountant and had neither studied nor worked in the high-tech sector. Not only that, prior to her business education she had practiced public-sector accounting—she had been a senior accountant working in an important agency in a small foreign country and she was now focusing her aspirations on Silicon Valley in California.
Nonetheless, Anne was able to accomplish her goal by making some very smart power plays. Success began with preparation. While most of her compatriots took the entrepreneurial classes offered in the business school, Anne took a class in the engineering school on starting new ventures.
With that one move she altered the power dynamics and her bargaining leverage. In the business school class, there were about three MBAs for every engineer, while in the engineering school course, there was only about one MBA for every four engineers. She explained that MBAs were unwilling to walk all the way over to the engineering building.
Not only did she want to improve her bargaining position, Anne wanted to take a class closer to the laboratories, where technology was being developed and where she was more likely to run into interesting opportunities. Because of the pressure from the professor and the venture capitalists who judged the business plans that were the central part of the course to get MBA skills reflected in that work, Anne had bargaining leverage in her chosen environment.
After interviewing a number of project teams, Anne joined a group that was working on a software product that improved existing software performance without requiring lots of capital investment in new hardware.
She had not developed the technology, of course, and joined the team notwithstanding some disdain for her skills on the part of her engineering colleagues.
Having found a spot, Anne was then very patient and let the others on her team come to recognize her value to them. The team—she was the only woman —initially wanted to target the product at a relatively small market that already had three dominant players.
The presentation got creamed by the venture capitalists. As a result, the engineers began to think that Anne might know something of actual value.
When the course was over, the team continued to work on their idea and got a small seed grant from a venture capital firm to develop the business over the summer. Anne, the best writer on the team, took the lead in putting together the funding pitch. Anne was graduating with an offer from a major consulting firm. She told her team about the offer, thus letting them know she had much higher paid options so they would appreciate her and realize that she could make a credible threat to quit.
Anne used her accounting and business expertise to review the articles of incorporation for the new company and the funding documents for its financing. Meanwhile, she gathered lots of external information and, being more social than the engineers, built a strong external network in the industry they were set to target.
Her outside contacts helped the team get funding after the summer was over and the initial seed grant had run out. Anne had more than business skills—she was also politically savvy and tough.
When classes were over and the team was setting up the company, there was one other competitor for the CEO position. To show she was serious and to gain further leverage, she had her colleagues meet with other MBAs who might be possible replacements for her. Because she had spent lots of time working with the team, eating lots of pizza and bad Mexican food, the group felt much more comfortable with Anne. In the end she became co-CEO and found funding for the product at a hedge fund.
Although there is no guarantee the business or product will be successful, Anne achieved her goal of becoming the leader of a promising high-tech start-up less than a year after graduating from business school, overcoming some significant initial resistance and deficits in her background along the way.
In contrast to Anne, you may have lots of job-relevant talent and interpersonal skills but nevertheless wind up in a position with little power, because you are unwilling or unable to play the power game. Beth graduated from a very high status undergraduate institution and an equally prestigious business school about 20 years ago. When I caught up with her she had just left the nonprofit she was working for after a new executive director took over. He saw her competence as a threat and was willing to pay her a decent severance to get her out of the way.
She has yet to attain a stable leadership position in her chosen field, even though she has held senior jobs in government—on Capitol Hill and in the White House. People mostly look out for their own careers, often at the expense of the place where they work.
The self-promoters get rewarded. For instance, one study investigated the primary motivations of managers and their professional success. One group of managers were primarily motivated by a need for affiliation—they were more interested in being liked than getting things done.
A second group were primarily motivated by a need for achievement—goal attainment for themselves. And a third group were primarily interested in power. The evidence showed that this third group, the managers primarily interested in power, were the most effective, not only in achieving positions of influence inside companies but also in accomplishing their jobs.
Research on 35 school administrators in the midwestern United States and branch managers of a national financial services firm showed that people who had more political skill received higher performance evaluations and were rated as more effective leaders. It can be a tough world out there and building and using power are useful organizational survival skills. There is a lot of zero-sum competition for status and jobs. Most organizations have only one CEO, there is only one managing partner in professional services firms, only one school superintendent in each district, only one prime minister or president at a time—you get the picture.
With more well-qualified people competing for each step on the organizational ladder all the time, rivalry is intense and only getting more so as there are fewer and fewer management positions. Some of the individuals competing for advancement bend the rules of fair play or ignore them completely.
You can compete and even triumph in organizations of all types, large and small, public or private sector, if you understand the principles of power and are willing to use them. Your task is to know how to prevail in the political battles you will face. My job in this book is to tell you how. You need to be thoughtful and strategic, resilient, alert, willing to fight when necessary. Why not just eschew power, keep your head down, and take what life throws at you?
First of all, having power is related to living a longer and healthier life. When Michael Marmot examined the mortality from heart disease among British civil servants, he noticed an interesting fact: the lower the rank or civil service grade of the employee, the higher the age-adjusted mortality risk.
However, Marmot and his colleagues found that only about a quarter of the observed variation in death rate could be accounted for by rank-related differences in smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure, obesity, and physical activity. In fact, how much job control and status people had accounted for more of the variation in mortality from heart disease than did physiological factors such as obesity and blood pressure.
So being in a position with low power and status is indeed hazardous to your health, and conversely, having power and the control that comes with it prolongs life. The leading thinker on the topic of power, Pfeffer here distills his wisdom into an indispensible guide. In refreshingly candid prose, Jeff Pfeffer offers brilliant insights into how power is successfully built, maintained, and employed in organizations. This book shows why. His book on Power will likely make you equally uncomfortable.
Read it and reflect on its wisdom. It will make you more self-aware and give you an understanding of the political dynamics of organizations large and small — all critical to making you a more effective leader for change. Political skill, not just talent, is central to success in every field.
In Power, this leading scholar comes down to earth with practical, even contrarian, tactics for mastering the power game. Almost every year I teach sections of a class called The Paths to Power. Each year I wrestle with how to make the material and ideas in the class more accessible and engaging and also how to better inspire people to actually act on what they are learning.
Power represents my third and best effort to help people understand why power is important, how to understand and diagnose power dynamics, and most importantly, what they can do to act on this knowledge to make themselves more influential and effective.
My objective in the class and in this book is simple: to provide people with the information that will enable them to avoid ever having to leave an organizational position involuntarily.
Relatively few people come to Stanford business school and even fewer take the two sections of this class that I offer each year. But anyone can read this book and obtain much of the information and ideas from the course. The book summarizes the social science concepts that can help people understand power and act more effectively to obtain more influence and then I illustrate these principles with numerous examples of people at all organizational levels and from many different countries and cultures.
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