"Power: Why some people have it—and others don't" by Jeffrey Pfeffer

• Systematic empirical research confirms what these two contrasting stories, as well as common sense and everyday experience, suggest: being politically savvy and seeking power are related to career success and even to managerial performance.
• 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.
• There is a lot of zero-sum competition for status and jobs.
• Some of the individuals competing for advancement bend the rules of fair play or ignore them completely.
• Obtaining and holding on to power can be hard work.
• Not being able to control one’s environment produces feelings of helplessness and stress,4 and feeling stressed or “out of control” can harm your health.
• 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.
• Second, power, and the visibility and stature that accompany power, can produce wealth.
• Third, power is part of leadership and is necessary to get things done—
• To be effective in figuring out your path to power and to actually use what you learn, you must first get past three major obstacles. The first two are the belief that the world is a just place and the hand-me-down formulas on leadership that largely reflect this misguided belief. The third obstacle is yourself.
• STOP THINKING THE WORLD IS A JUST PLACE
• Many people conspire in their own deception about the organizational world in which they live. That’s because people prefer to believe that the world is a just and fair place and that everyone gets what he or she deserves. And since people tend to think they themselves are deserving, they come to think that if they just do a good job and behave appropriately, things will take care of themselves.
• The belief in a just world has two big negative effects on the ability to acquire power. First, it hinders people’s ability to learn from all situations and all people, even those whom they don’t like or respect.
• It is important to be able to learn from all sorts of situations and people, not just those you like and approve of, and certainly not just from people you see as similar to yourself.
• Second, this belief that the world is a just place anesthetizes people to the need to be proactive in building a power base.
• The just-world hypothesis holds that most people believe that “people get what they deserve; that is, that the good people are likely to be rewarded and the bad to be punished.
• The next obstacle you will need to overcome is the leadership literature.
• Most books by well-known executives and most lectures and courses about leadership should be stamped CAUTION: THIS MATERIAL CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL SURVIVAL. That’s because leaders touting their own careers as models to be emulated frequently gloss over the power plays they actually used to get to the top.
• There is no doubt that the world would be a much better, more humane place if people were always authentic, modest, truthful, and consistently concerned for the welfare of others instead of pursuing their own aims. But that world doesn’t exist.
• For most leaders, the path to power bears little resemblance to the advice being dished out.
• But leaders are great at self-presentation, at telling people what they think others want to hear, and in coming across as noble and good. This ability to effectively self-present is why successful individuals reached high levels in the first place.
• Those in power get to write history, to paraphrase an old saw.
• one of the best ways to acquire and maintain power is to construct a positive image and reputation, in part by coopting others to present you as successful and effective.
• lots of research shows evidence of a particular manifestation of the just-world effect: if people know that someone or some organization has been successful, they will almost automatically attribute to that individual or company all kinds of positive qualities and behaviors.
• People distort reality.
• Watch those around you who are succeeding, those who are failing, and those who are just treading water. Figure out what’s different about them and what they are doing differently.
• People are often their own worst enemy, and not just in the arena of building power. That’s in part because people like to feel good about themselves and maintain a positive self-image. And ironically, one of the best ways for people to preserve their self-esteem is to either preemptively surrender or do other things that put obstacles in their own way.
• How you behave and what you should do needs to fit your particular circumstances—the organizational situation and also your own personal values and objectives.
• except for certain laws in the physical sciences, we live in a world of probabilities.
• the learning process—in school and in the rest of life, too—is frequently too passive to be as helpful as it might be.
• There is only one way to become more effective in building power and using influence: practice.
• Regardless of how successful and effective you are, sooner or later you will encounter opposition and setbacks.
• Power brings visibility—public scrutiny—and other costs as well.
• Power tends to produce overconfidence and the idea that you can make your own rules, and these consequences of having power often cause people to behave in ways that cost them their power and their position.
• Just like the principle of compound interest, becoming somewhat more effective in every situation can, over time, leave you in a very different, and much better, place.
• Not only doesn’t good performance guarantee you will maintain a position of power, poor performance doesn’t mean you will necessarily lose your job.
• The lesson from cases of people both keeping and losing their jobs is that as long as you keep your boss or bosses happy, performance really does not matter that much and, by contrast, if you upset them, performance won’t save you.
• One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that good performance—job accomplishments—is sufficient to acquire power and avoid organizational difficulties.
• If you are going to create a path to power, you need to lose the idea that performance by itself is enough.
• The data shows that performance doesn’t matter that much for what happens to most people in most organizations.
• job performance matters less for your evaluation than your supervisor’s commitment to and relationship with you.
• Not only may outstanding job performance not guarantee you a promotion, it can even hurt.
• Thus, great performance may leave you trapped because a boss does not want to lose your abilities and also because your competence in your current role does not ensure that others will see you as a candidate for much more senior jobs.
• Doing great doesn’t guarantee you a promotion or a raise, and it may not even be that important for keeping your job.
• You should not assume that your boss knows or notices what you are accomplishing and has perfect information about your activities.
• The importance of standing out contradicts much conventional wisdom.
• For you to attain a position of power, those in power have to choose you for a senior role.
• In advertising, one of the most prominent measures of effectiveness is ad recall—not taste, logic, or artistry—simply, do you remember the ad and the product? The same holds true for you and your path to power.
• Research shows that repeated exposure increases positive affect and reduces negative feelings,12 that people prefer the familiar because this preference reduces uncertainty,13 and that the effect of exposure on liking and decision making is a robust phenomenon that occurs in different cultures and in a variety of different domains of choice.14
• The simple fact is that people like what they remember—and that includes you! In order for your great performance to be appreciated, it needs to be visible.
• Simply put, in many cases, being memorable equals getting picked.
• You can’t select what you can’t recall.
• One of the reasons that performance matters less than people expect is that performance has many dimensions. Furthermore, what matters to your boss may not be the same things that you think are important.
• It is much more effective for you to ask those in power, on a regular basis, what aspects of the job they think are the most crucial and how they see what you ought to be doing.
• You can almost always tell at least one aspect of your job performance that will be crucial: do you, in how you conduct yourself, what you talk about, and what you accomplish, make those in power feel better about themselves?
• The surest way to keep your position and to build a power base is to help those with more power enhance their positive feelings about themselves.
• The lesson: worry about the relationship you have with your boss at least as much as you worry about your job performance.
• If your boss makes a mistake, see if someone else other than you will point it out.
• The last thing you want to do is be known as someone who makes your boss insecure or have a difficult relationship with those in power.
• One of the best ways to make those in power feel better about themselves is to flatter them. The research literature shows how effective flattery is as a strategy to gain influence.
• Most people underestimate the effectiveness of flattery and therefore underutilize it.
• your relationship with those in power is critical to your own success.
• The people responsible for your success are those above you, with the power to either promote you or to block your rise up the organization chart.
• It is performance, coupled with political skill, that will help you rise through the ranks. Performance by itself is seldom sufficient, and in some instances, may not even be necessary.
• First, you must come to believe that personal change is possible; otherwise, you won’t even try to develop the attributes that bring power—you will just accept that you are who you are rather than embarking on a sometimes difficult path of personal growth and development.
• Second, you need to see yourself and your strengths and weaknesses as objectively as possible.
• And third, you need to understand the most important qualities for building a power base so you can focus your inevitably limited time and attention on developing those.
• Just as people learn to play musical instruments, speak foreign languages, and play sports like golf or soccer, they can learn what personal attributes provide influence and they can cultivate those qualities.
• If you are going to develop yourself, you need to begin with an honest assessment of where your developmental needs are the greatest—where you have the biggest opportunity for improvement.
• get advice from others who are more skilled than you and will tell you the truth about yourself.
• The two fundamental dimensions that distinguish people who rise to great heights and accomplish amazing things are will, the drive to take on big challenges, and skill, the capabilities required to turn ambition into accomplishment.
• The three personal qualities embodied in will are ambition, energy, and focus.
• The four skills useful in acquiring power are self-knowledge and a reflective mind-set, confidence and the ability to project self-assurance, the ability to read others and empathize with their point of view, and a capacity to tolerate conflict.
• Success requires effort and hard work as well as persistence. To expend that effort, to make necessary sacrifices, requires some driving ambition.
• Ambition—a focus on achieving influence—can help people overcome the temptation to give up or to give in to the irritations.
• That’s because energy does three things that help build influence. First, energy, like many emotional states such as anger or happiness, is contagious.14 Therefore, energy inspires more effort on the part of others.
• Your hard work signals that the job is important; people pick up on that signal, or its opposite. And people are more willing to expend effort if you are, too.
• Second, energy and the long hours it permits provide an advantage in getting things accomplished.
• Research on genius or talent—exceptional accomplishment achieved in a wide range of fields—consistently finds that “laborious preparation” plays an important role.
• Obviously, having the energy that permits you to put in long hours of hard work helps you to master subject matter more quickly.
• And you are more likely to have energy if you are committed to what you are doing, so in that sense, energy goes along with ambition.
• Focus turns out to be surprisingly rare.
• the evidence suggests that you are more likely to acquire power by narrowing your focus and applying your energies, like the sun’s rays, to a limited range of activities in a small number of domains.
• There is no learning and personal development without reflection.
• Because power is likely to cause people to behave in a more confident fashion, observers will associate confident behavior with actually having power.
• Coming across as confident and knowledgeable helps you build influence.
• This ability to put yourself in another’s place is also useful for acquiring power.
• Because most people are conflict-averse, they avoid difficult situations and difficult people, frequently acceding to requests or changing their positions rather than paying the emotional price of standing up for themselves and their views.
• If you can handle difficult conflict-and stress-filled situations effectively, you have an advantage over most people.
• The research shows that intelligence is the single best predictor of job performance.
• Being recognized as exceptionally smart can cause overconfidence and even arrogance, which, as we will see in more detail later, can lead to the loss of power.
• WHERE YOU begin your career affects your rate of progress as well as how far you go.
• We intuitively know that not all career platforms are equal in value as a path to power, and research supports that intuition.
• The most common mistake is to locate in the department dealing with the organization’s current core activity, skill, or product—the unit that is the most powerful at the moment. This turns out to not always be a good idea because the organization’s most central work is where you are going to encounter the most talented competition and also the most well-established career paths and processes. Moreover, what is the most important function or product today may not be in the future.
• So if you want to move up quickly, go to underexploited niches where you can develop leverage with less resistance and build a power base in activities that are going to be more important in the near future than they are today.
• It is always useful to be able to diagnose the political landscape, whether for plotting your next career move or for understanding who you need to influence to get something done.
• Skill at diagnosing power distributions is useful.
• Both starting salaries and the pay of more senior positions in departments connote relative power.
• Being physically close to those in power both signals power and provides power through increased access.
• One way of seeing the power of finance is to look at the salary of the head of that function. But another would be to look at who, besides the CEO, is the insider most likely to serve on a company’s board of directors.
• Paying attention to what departments are represented in powerful positions provides an important clue as to where the power lies.
• Being in a powerful department provides advantages for your income and your career. But for that very reason, lots of talented people want to go to the most powerful units.
• People often don’t ask for what they want and are afraid of standing out too much because they worry that others may resent or dislike their behavior, seeing them as self-promoting.
• You need to get over the idea that you need to be liked by everybody and that likability is important in creating a path to power, and you need to be willing to put yourself forward.
• Asking often works.
• One reason why asking works is that we are flattered to be asked for advice or help—few things are more self-affirming and ego-enhancing than to have others, particularly talented others, seek our aid.
• People love to give advice as it signals how wise they are,
• Asking for help is inherently flattering, and can be made even more so if we do it correctly, emphasizing the importance and accomplishments of those we ask and also reminding them of what we share in common.
• Your success depends not only on your own work but also on your ability to get those in a position to help your career, like your boss, to want to make you successful and help you in your climb.
• It’s early in your career when you are seeking initial positions that differentiating yourself from the competition is most important.
• In advertising, the concept of standing out to become memorable is called “brand recall,” which is an important measure of advertising effectiveness.
• What works for products can work for you too—you need to be interesting and memorable and able to stand out in ways that cause others to want to know you and get close to you.
• As Malcolm Gladwell has insightfully noted, the rules tend to favor—big surprise—the people who make the rules, who tend to be the people who are already winning and in power.
• to appear competent, it is helpful to seem a little tough, or even mean.
• There is lots of evidence that people like to be associated with successful institutions and people—to bask in the reflected glory of the powerful.
• Research shows that attitudes follow behavior—that if we act in a certain way, over time our attitudes follow.
• Standing out helps you get the jobs and power you may seek.
• Asking for what you need and being less concerned about what others are thinking about you can help in launching your path to power.
• IN VIRTUALLY all organizational domains, controlling access to money and jobs brings power.
• Resources are great because once you have them, maintaining power becomes a self-reinforcing process.
• People with money or with control over organizational money get appointed to various for-profit and nonprofit boards where they are in contact with others who have business and investment ideas and social and political influence.
• It’s an old but accurate and important story: power and resources beget more power and resources.
• There are two simple but important implications of resources as a source of power.
• The first is that in choosing among jobs, choose positions that have greater direct resource control of more budget or staff. That generally means preferring line to staff positions, since line positions typically control more staff hiring and more budgetary authority.
• Most headhunters will tell you that when they seek candidates for senior general management positions, including the CEO job, they look to people who have had responsibility running operations, and the larger the division or operation the potential candidate has run, the better, other things being equal.
• Getting control of resources is an important step on your path to power.
• The second straightforward implication is that your power comes in large measure from the position you hold and the resources and other things you control as a consequence of holding that position.
• A resource is anything people want or need—money, a job, information, social support and friendship, help in doing their job. There are always opportunities to provide these things to others whose support you want.
• Being nice to people is effective because people find it difficult to fight with those who are being polite and courteous.
• So here’s some simple and practical advice: most people like to talk about themselves—give them the opportunity to do so. Being a good listener and asking questions about others is a simple but effective way to use a resource everyone has—time and attention—to build power. And here’s some more advice: if you don’t have much power, you probably have time. Use that time to befriend others and go to events that are important to them.
• People appreciate help with doing some aspect of their job, and they particularly appreciate assistance with tasks that they find boring or mundane—precisely the kinds of tasks great for beginning to build a power base.
• Taking on small tasks can provide you with power because people are often lazy or uninterested in seemingly small, unimportant activities. Therefore, if you take the initiative to do a relatively minor task and do it extremely well, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to challenge you for the opportunity. Meanwhile, these apparently minor tasks can become important sources of power.
• If you’re in a place that has status, you can use that status to your advantage.
• Power accrues to people who control resources that others cannot access.
• Networking skills are important and the networks you create are an important resource for creating influence,
• some jobs are mostly about networking and everyone can benefit from developing more efficient and effective social networks and honing networking skills.
• In general, jobs high in networking content require bridging separate organizations, brokering deals, and relationship building to influence decision making.
• Inside companies, the job of project or product manager entails getting disparate groups to cooperate in making information technology projects work and in managing consumer products successfully.
• There are many leadership tasks where the essence of the work is bringing people and organizational units with different competencies and perspectives together to complete a task or consummate a transaction.
• Although your social network—sometimes referred to as social capital—is more or less important depending on the specifics of your job, the evidence shows that networking is important for people’s careers, period.
• The effect of mere exposure on preference and choice is important and well demonstrated.
• Networking makes you more visible; this visibility increases your power and status; and your heightened power and status then make building and maintaining social contacts easier.
• The evidence shows that networking is important in affecting career progress, and you need to get over qualms about engaging in strategic behavior to advance your career—and that includes who you are in touch with.
• Networking actually does not take that much time and effort. It mostly takes thought and planning.
• So go out of your way to meet new people.
• Not everyone is going to be equally useful to you and you should account for that fact in how you spend your networking time.
• managerial jobs were more likely to be found through personal contacts rather than through more formal means such as responding to newspaper advertisements or making a formal application, whereas lower-level or even well-paid but technical jobs tended to rely on more formal means of hiring.
• Providing any information lets the provider feel good about herself and is consistent with social norms of benevolence.
• One way to acquire status is to start an organization that is so compelling in its mission that high-status people join the project and you build both status and a network of important relationships.
• The fact that status hierarchies are stable means not only that it is difficult to move up but also that it is difficult to move down. Once you have achieved power and status through the network of your relationships, you will be able to maintain your influence without expending as much time and effort.
• People like to bask in reflected glory and associate with high-status others.
• Power and influence come not just from the extensiveness of your network and the status of its members, but also from your structural position within that network. Centrality matters.
• Network position matters a great deal for your influence and career trajectory.
• If virtually all information and communication flows through you, you will have more power.
• One source of your power will be your control over the flow of information, and another is that people attribute power to individuals who are central.
• One way of building centrality is through physical location.
• Centrality provides power within a network, but it is also important to have power through connections across diverse networks.
• by connecting units that are tightly linked internally but socially isolated from each other, the person doing the connecting can profit by being the intermediary who facilitates interactions between the two groups.
• Social capital, measured by how many structural holes an individual bridges, positively affects promotions, salary, and organizational level attained.
• You have to do the network “work” yourself if you want to accrue the benefits.
• The research literature typically divides knowledge into two types: explicit, codified knowledge such as that represented in diagrams, formulas, or “recipes” for task performance; and implicit, tacit knowledge such as that possessed by good clinicians who understand not only the scientific basis of job performance but also know, based on their experience, when to do what.
• We choose how we will act and talk, and those decisions are consequential for acquiring and holding on to power.
• the secret of leadership was the ability to play a role, to pretend, to be skilled in the theatrical arts.
• Differences in the ability to convey power through how we talk, appear, and act matter in our everyday interactions, from seeking a job to attempting to win a vital contract to presenting a company’s growth prospects before investment analysts.
• To come across effectively, we need to master how to convey power. We need to act, and speak, with power.
• Authority is 20 percent given, 80 percent taken.
• If you are going to take power, you need to project confidence,
• You need to project assurance even if—or maybe particularly if—you aren’t sure what you’re doing.
• Attitudes follow behavior,
• the emotions you express, such as confidence or happiness, influence those around you—emotions are contagious.
• emotions and behaviors become self-reinforcing:
• If acting is important as a leadership skill and for acquiring power, it is important to know how to perform. One principle is to act confident.
• You are on stage more than you think, and not just as a senior leader.
• Sometimes you will work with peers and colleagues of about equal rank whom you want to influence. Sometimes your actual power will be ambiguous. In such situations, displaying anger is useful.
• Research shows that people who express anger are seen “as dominant, strong, competent, and smart,” although they are also, of course, seen as less nice and warm.
• If you express anger, not only do you receive more status and power and appear more competent but others are reluctant to cross you.
• But if you have to choose between being seen as likable and fitting in on the one hand or appearing competent albeit abrasive on the other, choose competence.
• Self-deprecating comments and humor work only if you have already established your competence.
• There is evidence that taller people earn more and are more likely to occupy high power positions.20 There is also ample evidence that physical attractiveness results in higher earnings.
• Get professional help in enhancing the influence you convey by how you look.
• Moving forward and toward someone is a gesture that connotes power, as does standing closer to others, while turning your back or retreating signals the opposite.
• Moving your hands in a circle or waving your arms diminishes how powerful you appear. Gestures should be short and forceful, not long and circular.
• Looking people directly in the eye connotes not only power but also honesty and directness, while looking down is a signal of diffidence. Looking away causes others to think you are dissembling.
• Settings can convey power and status.
• One reason people don’t come across as forcefully or effectively as they might is that they begin to speak while they are flustered or unsure of the situation.
• Breathe and take time to collect yourself—you will be much more effective than if you just rush into the situation.
• The language people use and how they construct presentations and arguments help determine their power.
• One source of power in every interaction is interruption. Those with power interrupt, those with less power get interrupted.
• Language that influences is able to create powerful images and emotions that overwhelm reason.24 Such language is evocative, specific, and filled with strong language and visual imagery.
• Use us-versus-them references.
• Pause for emphasis and invite approval or even applause through a slight delay.
• Use a list of three items, or enumerations in general.
• Use contrastive pairs, comparing one thing to another and using passages that are similar in length and grammatical structure. The contrast is strategically chosen to make a point.
• Avoid using a script or notes.
• Humor is disarming and also helps create a bond between you and your audience through a shared joke.
• Sentence structure is also important for making language persuasive.
• one important strategy for not only creating a successful path to power but also maintaining your position once you have achieved it is to build your image and your reputation.
• if you have a stellar reputation, companies will be fighting to hire you.
• The fundamental principles for building the sort of reputation that will get you a high-power position are straightforward: make a good impression early, carefully delineate the elements of the image you want to create, use the media to help build your visibility and burnish your image, have others sing your praises so you can surmount the self-promotion dilemma, and strategically put out enough negative but not fatally damaging information about yourself that the people who hire and support you fully understand any weaknesses and make the choice anyway.
• people start forming impressions of you in the first few seconds or even milliseconds of contact.
• these fast first impressions are remarkably accurate in predicting other more durable and important evaluations.
• Research has identified several processes that account for the persistence of initial reputations or, phrased differently, the importance of the order in which information is presented.
• One process, attention decrement, argues that because of fatigue or boredom, people don’t pay as close attention to later information as they do to information that comes early, when they first form judgments.
• A second process entails cognitive discounting—once people have formed an impression of another, they disregard any information that is inconsistent with their initial ideas.
• Third, people engage in behavior that helps make their initial impressions of others come true.
• Impressions and reputations endure, so building a favorable impression and reputation early is an important step in creating power.
• First, if you find yourself in a place where you have an image problem and people don’t think well of you, for whatever reason, it is often best to leave for greener pastures.
• Second, because impressions are formed quickly and are based on many things, such as similarity and “chemistry” over which you have far from perfect control, you should try to put yourself in as many different situations as possible—to play the law of large numbers.
• The best way to build relationships with media people is to be helpful and accessible.
• Reach out to the media and academics who write cases and articles, and write your own articles or blogs that enhance your visibility.
• People benefit, or suffer, from the self-reinforcing aspect of reputations.
• A great reputation can help you achieve great performance and vice versa.
• Seeking to dominate the conversation and the decision making and totally control the situation may work on some of your adversaries, but probably not too many. Most will seek to push back, very hard—they will react to your attempts to overpower them by doing things to maintain their power and autonomy.
• To be successful, you have to get over resentments, jealousies, anger, or anything else that might get in the way of building a relationship where you can get the resources necessary for you to get the job done.
• The ability to not take opposition or slights personally, think about whose support you need and go after it, regardless of their behavior toward you or your own feelings, and remain focused on the data and impartial analysis requires a high level of self-discipline and emotional maturity. It is a rare skill. But it is crucial in surmounting and disarming opponents.
• Persistence works because it wears down the opposition. Much like water eroding a rock, over time keeping at something creates results. In addition, staying in the game maintains the possibility that the situation will shift to your advantage. Opponents retire or leave or make mistakes. The environment changes.
• If you move quickly, you can often catch your opponents off guard and secure victory before they even know what is happening.
• Don’t wait if you see a power struggle coming. While you are waiting, others are organizing support and orchestrating votes to win.
• In companies, in government, even in nonprofits, people who have any resource control use it to reward those who are helpful and punish those who stand in their way.
• Your path to power is going to be easier if you are aligned with a compelling, socially valuable objective.
• The best way to overcome the embarrassment is to talk about what happened to as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
• CONTINUE TO DO WHAT MADE YOU SUCCESSFUL
• Situations are often ambiguous.
• One of the ways others are going to ascertain how things turned out is by how you present yourself.
• This is why developing the ability to act in ways that you may not feel at the moment, described in chapter 7, is such an important skill. You want to convey that everything is fine and under your control, even under dire circumstances.
• People want to associate with winners. At the very moment when you have suffered a reversal in fortune and most need help, the best way to attract that help is to act as if you are going to triumph in the end.
• An important lesson: if you are going to misbehave in any way, do so before you achieve a high-level position that makes you the object of constant attention by peers, subordinates, superiors, and the media.
• holding a position of power means that more than your job performance is being carefully watched—although that happens, too. Every aspect of your life, including how you dress, where you live, how you spend your time, who you choose to spend time with, what your children do, what you drive, how you act in completely non-job-related domains, will draw scrutiny.
• Another cost of visibility is distraction of effort. People are interested in their reputation and image. Consequently, they spend time on impression management.
• Building and maintaining power requires time and effort, there are no two ways about it.
• Research shows that being married and having children has either no effect or a positive effect on men’s careers, while most studies show a negative impact on the careers of women from being married and having children.
• Put simply, you can’t have it all, and the quest for power entails trade-offs, including in one’s personal life.
• Here’s a simple truth: the higher you rise and the more powerful the position you occupy, the greater the number of people who will want your job. Consequently, holding a position of great power creates a problem: who do you trust?
• the higher you rise in an organization, the more people are going to tell you that you are right. This leads to an absence of critical thought and makes it difficult for senior leaders to get the truth—a problem both for the company and its leaders, as you can’t address problems if you don’t know about them.
• When you are in power, you should probably trust no single person in your organization too much, unless you are certain of their loyalty and that they are not after your job.
• In the center of frenetic energy and attention, it is difficult not to lose one’s identity and values.
• Power is addictive, in both a psychological and physical sense.
• The CEO position, particularly in the United States, has become extremely powerful.
• The old saying “Power corrupts” turns out to be mostly true, although “corrupt” is probably not quite the right word.
• One lesson from the growing number of studies on the effects of power is how little it takes to get people into a power mind-set where they engage in all kinds of disrespectful and rude behavior.
• Overconfidence and insensitivity lead to losing power, as people become so full of themselves that they fail to attend to the needs of those whose enmity can cause them problems. Conversely, not letting power go to your head and acting as if you were all-powerful can help you maintain your position.
• Having a position of formal authority or even being right is not going to win you the support of those whose mistakes you have called out.
• When you are powerful and successful, you are overconfident and less observant—and one specific manifestation of such tendencies is to trust what others tell you and rely on their assurances. As you become less vigilant and paranoid about others’ intentions, they have the opportunity to take you out of your position of power.
• One way to figure out how much to trust people is to look at what they do. As the saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words.”
• It’s easier to lose your patience when you are in power—power leads to disinhibition, to not watching what you say and do, to being more concerned about yourself than about the feelings of others. But losing patience causes people to lose control and offend others, and that can cost them their jobs.
• If you feel yourself getting tired or burned out and you hold a position of substantial power, you might as well leave.
• People—and companies—fall into competency traps.
• The combination of diminished vigilance and changed circumstances often leads to the loss of power.
• You cannot always completely control how much power you maintain, but you can leave your position with dignity and thereby influence your legacy.
• there is lots of data to suggest that organizations don’t care very much about you.
• Research shows what common sense suggests is true: political struggles are more likely to occur and to be more fierce and power is used more often when resources are scarcer and therefore there is more struggle over their allocation.
• The lesson is clear: you should always watch your back, but be particularly wary and sensitive to what is occurring during times of economic stress. That is when political turmoil and the use of power are likely to be at their peak.
• The employer-employee relationship has profoundly changed over the past several decades, not just in the United States but in many countries. In ways big and small, both implicitly and explicitly, employers and their leaders have told their employees that they themselves are responsible for their own careers and, in many instances, their own health care and retirement.
• You need to take care of yourself and use whatever means you have to do so—after all, that has been the message of companies and business pundits for years. Take those admonitions seriously.
• The prestige and power that come from achieving a senior position will generalize to some extent to other contexts, providing you with status there as well.
• Getting things done under circumstances where you lack direct line authority requires influence and political skills—a knowledge of organizational dynamics—not just technical skills and knowledge.
• There are only two ways to resolve the inevitable disagreements about what to do and how to do it—through the imposition of hierarchical authority in which the boss gets to make the decision, or through a more political system in which various interests vie for power, with those with the most power most affecting the final choices.
• Building power does not require extraordinary actions or amazing brilliance. Instead, as comedian, actor, and movie director Woody Allen has noted, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
• Once you engage in activities, including activities involved in acquiring power, those things become part of your identity and repertoire of skills.
• It’s important for you to find the right place given your aptitude and interests. Some jobs require more political skill than others.
• As decades-old research in social psychology illustrates, conformity pressures are strong. And so are the pressures of informational social influence: if everyone else is doing something, it must be because that is the right or smart thing to do. For you to do something else is to turn your back on their collective wisdom.
• to pick the right place for yourself, you must be objective not only about yourself but about the job and its risks and opportunities.
• Because we see what we want to see, we may not accurately assess the political risks of a job—and suffer the consequences.
• You need to be realistic about the political risks, not just to you but to those to whom you are tied, if you want to build a path to power.
• You need to be in a job that fits and doesn’t come with undue political risks, but you also need to do the right things in that job. Most important, you need to claim power and not do things that give yours away.
• If you feel powerful, you will act and project power and others will respond accordingly. If you feel powerless, your behavior will be similarly self-confirming.
• one of the ways in which you can claim power is through your demeanor and voice—how you come across.
• When we tell ourselves that our problems are caused by others, we spend time on why we can’t be successful. When instead we focus on what we can do, we spend time on being successful.”
• People give away their power by not trying. If you don’t try, you can’t fail—which protects your self-esteem. But not trying guarantees failure to win the competition for power and status.
• I am convinced that we are frequently our own biggest barriers to having as much power as we would like simply because we don’t make sufficient effort to build ourselves up.
• Taking care of yourself sometimes means acting in ways that may seem selfish.
• People align with who they think is going to win. If you don’t stand up for yourself and actively promote your own interests, few will be willing to be on your side.
• Throughout this book we have seen that it’s often the little things that matter.
• The people who pay attention to these small things have an edge in creating power.
• Stop waiting for things to get better or for other people to acquire power and use it in a benevolent fashion to improve the situation. It’s up to you to find—or create—a better place for yourself. And it’s up to you to build your own path to power.
• So seek power as if your life depends on it. Because it does.
• Each year during the winter quarter I teach a class titled “The Paths to Power.” The course outline is publicly available. Go to my personal home page, http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/pfeffer/. There is a link on the left-hand side of the page that will take you directly to the most recent version of the course.