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IN 2004, the Miami-Dade County, Florida, school board hired former New York schools
chancellor Rudy Crew as superintendent to help improve a typical urban school district
struggling with both budget and failing schools problems. While Crew was in charge, the
district was a finalist for the Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2006, 2007, and 2008,
improved its bond rating, achieved improvements in student academic performance,
and built thousands of classrooms to ease overcrowding.1 Recognizing this
performance, in the spring of 2008, the American Association of School Administrators
named Rudy Crew the National Superintendent of the Year, bolstering his reputation as
an innovative school administrator. His reward? By September 2008, less than six
months after being named the best school leader in the country, Crew was negotiating
his severance package with a school board that had voted to get rid of him.
If you think it’s just in the domain of public education where success fails
to guarantee job security, think again. At the Veterans Health Administration, Ken Kizer,
appointed by Bill Clinton in 1994, inherited an antiquated, inefficient health-care system.
The VA faced changes in its client population, the competitive health-care environment,
and modalities for delivering care.2 In just five years, Kizer instituted an electronic
medical record system, made structural changes to enhance efficiency and quality of
care—with 20,000 fewer employees, the VHA went from serving 2.9 to 3.5 million
veterans—changed the culture to be more receptive to change, and according to a cover
story in BusinessWeek, laid the foundation for making the VHA the purveyor of “the best
medical care in the U.S.”3 In 1999, facing stiff Congressional opposition to his
reappointment, Kizer relinquished his post. Balancing politics and medical care turned
out to be difficult—“in particular, the closure of VHA hospitals in certain key
Congressional districts had created acrimony in Congress.”4
And it’s not just in the public sector where there is a weak link between
job performance and career outcomes. The world of business offers numerous cases,
too. Although few may remember, Jamie Dimon, the now-celebrated CEO of financial
powerhouse JP Morgan Chase, left Citibank when his onetime mentor and boss, Sandy
Weill, turned on him. Arthur Blank and Bernard Marcus founded the large and successful
home improvement company Home Depot after they were fired in the late 1970s from
Handy Dan Home Improvement Centers by a boss who didn’t like them. John Scully
forced Apple cofounder and technology visionary Steve Jobs out of the company in the
1980s. And that’s just a small sample from a very long list.
And it’s not just at the highest levels or just in the United States where
performance doesn’t guarantee success. A marketing executive in India asked her CEO
to formally recommend her for a list of “high potential leaders” in the organization, which
would be accompanied by getting paid more than 30 percent higher than peers at the
same level and becoming eligible for assignments more likely to advance her career.
This request came just after she had been instrumental in turning around a distressed
brand, had been nominated for an internal marketing award, and after she won an
external advertising award at the Indian equivalent of the Cannes film festival. Her
request was refused, past outstanding performance notwithstanding.
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.
Michael Jeffery maintained his position as CEO of LECG Corporation, a global expert
services and consulting firm, for three years even though the company was almost never
profitable during his tenure and in just the two years prior to the announcement he was
voluntarily stepping down, the stock price declined 80 percent, much more than did
competitors’. His prior relationship with the non-executive chairman of the company and
his ability to “manage” the board and blame the company’s problems on his
predecessor (who had actually built the company) ensured his survival—for a while. Or
consider the CEO of a medical device company who has presided over nearly a decade
of flat stock price, a growth in sales that did not translate into a corresponding growth in
profits, and turnover in the senior executive ranks that left the company with no inside
successor. Notwithstanding this weak job performance, his salary has increased rapidly
and his job is secure—because of his close relationship with the non-executive board
chairman and with a majority of the board of directors. 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. Consequently, people leave too much to chance and fail to
effectively manage their careers. If you are going to create a path to power, you need to
lose the idea that performance by itself is enough. And once you understand why this is
the case, you can even profit from the insight.
THE WEAK LINK BETWEEN PERFORMANCE AND JOB OUTCOMES
There is a lot of systematic evidence on the connections between job performance and
career outcomes. You need to know the facts if you are going to intelligently plot a
strategy to acquire power. The data shows that performance doesn’t matter that much for
what happens to most people in most organizations. That includes the effect of your
accomplishments on those ubiquitous performance evaluations and even on your job
tenure and promotion prospects.
More than 20 years ago social psychologist David Schoorman studied
the performance appraisal ratings obtained by 354 clerical employees working in a
public sector organization.5 Employees were categorized by their supervisors’
involvement in their hiring. In some cases, managers “inherited” employees—they were
there when the manager took on the supervisory role. In other cases, the boss
participated in the hiring decision and favored the job candidate now being evaluated. In
still other instances, the supervisor participated in the hiring or promotion decision but he
or she was overruled by others involved in the final choice. In this latter case, managers
found themselves supervising an employee they had not favored hiring. The simple but
important question Schoorman asked was: how does a supervisor’s mere involvement
in the hiring process affect the performance evaluations subsequently given to
subordinates?
As you might guess, supervisors who were actively involved in hiring
people whom they favored rated those subordinates more highly on performance
appraisals than they did those employees they inherited or the ones they did not initially
support. In fact, whether or not the supervisor had been actively engaged in the selection
process had an effect on people’s performance evaluations even when objective
measures of job performance were statistically controlled. Supervisors evaluated people
hired over their opposition more negatively either than those whom they had favored in
the hiring or those they had inherited. David Schoorman’s study shows the effects of
behavioral commitment—once someone has made a positive or negative judgment
about a potential job candidate, that judgment colors subsequent performance
appraisals. What this research means is that job performance matters less for your
evaluation than your supervisor’s commitment to and relationship with you.
Extensive research on promotions in organizations, with advancement
measured either by changes in position, increases in salary, or both, also reveals the
modest contribution of job performance in accounting for the variation in what happens
to people. In 1980, economists James Medoff and Katherine Abraham observed that
salaries in companies were more strongly related to age and organizational tenure than
they were to job performance.6 Ensuing research has confirmed and extended their
findings, both in the United States and elsewhere. For instance, a study using data from
Dutch aircraft manufacturer Fokker reported that white-collar workers who received
performance ratings of “very good” were only 12 percent more likely to be promoted than
colleagues rated “good.”7 Meanwhile, many studies have documented the influence of
numerous factors, ranging from educational credentials to race and gender, on careers,
with performance often having a statistically significant but substantively small effect on
advancement. For instance, a study of more than 200 employees from a variety of
companies found that managers considered job tenure, educational credentials,
overtime work, and absence as well as job performance in determining internal mobility
for employees.8 A study of federal civil service employees, an excellent setting because
of the extensive measures captured in the database, noted that performance ratings
were weakly tied to actual productivity and that people with more educational credentials
were more likely to be promoted even if they weren’t the best employees.9
Not only may outstanding job performance not guarantee you a
promotion, it can even hurt. Consider the case of Phil. A talented young executive
working in a large financial institution, Phil had the uncanny ability to bring complex
information technology implementation projects in on or ahead of schedule and under
budget. His boss, a very senior executive in the bank, profited mightily from Phil’s
performance. He was willing to reward Phil financially. But when Phil asked his boss
about broadening his experience by moving to other jobs in the bank, the answer was
immediate: “I’m not going to let you go because you are too good in the job you are
doing for me.” And while Phil’s boss was quite willing to expand Phil’s scope of
responsibility for IT implementation in his division, he was completely unwilling to do
anything that would bring Phil to the attention of others and thereby risk losing him.
A slightly different variant of this same story comes from “Glenda.” A
Scottish manufacturing executive with an extraordinary ability to bond with front-line
employees, Glenda had worked for her employer for more than a decade, moving
around the world to accomplish almost miraculous turnarounds in troubled plants. Her job
evaluations were great and she received performance bonuses and regular raises for
her work. But there were no promotions in Glenda’s recent past with her employer nor,
she told me, in her future. Glenda figured out the problem: the senior executives in her
company saw her as extremely effective in her current position. But they did not want to
lose her abilities in that role, and they did not see her as senior executive material—as a
great candidate for much more senior jobs in the company. 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. Most studies of job tenure examine
CEOs, because CEOs are highly visible and that’s the position for which there is the
best data. Performance does affect job tenure and its obverse, getting fired, but again
the effects are small. According to one study, CEOs who presided over three straight
years of poor performance and led their firms into bankruptcy only faced a 50 percent
chance of losing their jobs.10 Whether or not poor performance led to dismissal
depended on the CEO’s power. Executives who had power because of their own
ownership position, because other ownership interests were dispersed, or because
there were more inside board members—executives who reported to the chief executive
—were more likely to retain power even in the face of bad business results. A study of
the top five executive positions in almost 450 companies found the sensitivity of turnover
to company performance was even smaller for those jobs than it was for CEOs. Turnover
in senior executive ranks was affected by CEO turnover, particularly when an outsider
came in. That’s because CEOs like to put loyalists in senior positions—regardless of
what past incumbents have accomplished.11
So great job performance by itself is insufficient and may not even be
necessary for getting and holding positions of power. You need to be noticed, influence
the dimensions used to measure your accomplishments, and mostly make sure you are
effective at managing those in power—which requires the ability to enhance the ego of
those above you.
GET NOTICED
People in power are busy with their own agendas and jobs. Such people, including those
higher up in your own organization, probably aren’t paying that much attention to you and
what you are doing. You should not assume that your boss knows or notices what you are
accomplishing and has perfect information about your activities. Therefore, your first
responsibility is to ensure that those at higher levels in your company know what you are
accomplishing. And the best way to ensure they know what you are achieving is to tell
them.
The importance of standing out contradicts much conventional wisdom.
There is a common saying that I first heard in Japan but since have heard in Western
Europe as well: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Many people believe this
statement and as a consequence seek to fit in and not do anything to stand out too
much. This rule may make sense in some places and at some times, but as general
career advice, it stinks.
For you to attain a position of power, those in power have to choose you
for a senior role. If you blend into the woodwork, no one will care about you, even if you
are doing a great job. As one former student commented:
I am the guy you notice when he is gone, but necessarily while he is there. I call this
phenomenon becoming “the foundation guy.” The foundation is necessary for the
house and all goes to hell without it, but it is buried underground and works just fine
about 95 percent of the time. It usually goes unnoticed. Quiet work, or heads-down
work, which is efficient and effective—but never flashy—usually fails to get noticed.
You can make a great career as a middle manager doing quiet work, but can you
gain a lot of power? The answer is most definitely, “no.”
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. That’s because of the importance of
what is called “the mere exposure effect.” As originally described by the late social
psychologist Robert Zajonc, the effect refers to the fact that people, other things being
equal, prefer and choose what is familiar to them—what they have seen or experienced
before. 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. But beyond visibility, the mere exposure research teaches us that familiarity
produces preference. Simply put, in many cases, being memorable equals getting
picked.
An Italian executive who has worked in numerous large multinational
corporations and has risen quickly through the ranks is an outspoken and provocative
individual. Consequently, he sometimes irritates people. But as another manager told
me, “decades from now I will remember him, while I will have forgotten most of his
contemporaries.” It is obvious whom that manager would choose to fill a position—the
memorable Italian leader. You can’t select what you can’t recall.
DEFINE THE DIMENSIONS OF PERFORMANCE
Tina Brown served as editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker before founding Talk
magazine and more recently starting the popular website The Daily Beast. A great editor
and arbiter of popular culture who was able to garner tremendous amounts of publicity,
Brown increased Vanity Fair ’s circulation fourfold to almost one million during her eightyear
tenure. At The New Yorker , newsstand sales increased 145 percent and the
magazine won almost two dozen major awards.15 The year before Talk folded in 2002,
ad revenues grew 6 percent even as the overall economy languished. But Brown
apparently never earned a profit at any of these magazines, partly because increasing
circulation, timeliness, and “buzz” can only be achieved at considerable expense.
Tina Brown’s performance as a magazine editor depends on what
criteria you choose to evaluate her work. She presided over great growth in advertising
revenue and circulation. She garnered press attention for herself and the magazines. But
there was no economic profit. That might not have mattered to S. I. Newhouse, the
billionaire whose Advance Publications owned The New Yorker and Vanity Fair . The
absence of profit apparently mattered more to the Hearst Corporation, co-owner of Talk.
No one is going to perform equally well on all the dimensions of their
work. What you can do is consistently emphasize those aspects on which you do well.
When Matt Lauer of the Today television show interviewed Tina Brown right after Talk
folded, he pressed her to admit that she had a flawed business model. Her constant
refrain—that the magazine had great content and that advertising was growing even in
the midst of the recession.
Chris was the CEO of a human capital software company selling a
hosted service focused on selecting hourly employees. His venture-funded company
operated in an increasingly competitive market and some rivals offered similar products
at much lower pricing. One way to compete would have been to offer an increasing
range of services to manage employees over the life cycle from hiring through career
development to retirement. But Chris’s company had an inferior technology platform and
Chris was no technologist, so he could not lead a technology enhancement effort.
To lock in customers to make the company more salable, Chris and his
management team offered reduced pricing for customers who renewed their contracts in
advance of expiration. In his presentation to the board, Chris maintained that this
strategy was a great way to grow the amount of deferred revenue on the books, ensure
customer continuity, and make the company more valuable by preempting competitive
threats. The presentation diverted the board’s attention away from why reduced prices
were required to lock in business.
It was a board member who provided data showing Chris’s company
was losing market share to competitors. But Chris had defined performance criteria in a
way that made him look good. After the company was sold at a multiple of revenue about
one-third that of competitors, with Chris nonetheless pocketing about $4 million, the new
buyer lost customers—defections had been delayed but not prevented.
There are limits to what you can do to affect the criteria used to judge
your work. But you can highlight those dimensions of job performance that favor you
—and work against your competition.
REMEMBER WHAT MATTERS TO YOUR BOSS
When Rudy Crew ran Miami’s schools, the district budget was about $4.5 billion and the
school system employed more than 55,000 people. Crew may have thought his job was
to improve school performance, but with vast resources at stake, some school board
members were interested in who was getting the contracts and the jobs. Fraught with
divisions along racial and class lines, the school board apparently cared a lot about the
ethnic composition of the senior staff. As one person, providing public comment at the
school board meeting that began Crew’s dismissal, stated, if Rudy Crew’s last name
had been “Cruz,” perhaps he would have kept his job, given the large Latino population
in Miami. And, of course, school board members cared about their egos, and Crew was
not nearly deferential enough to earn some members’ endearment.
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. Jamie Dimon lost his job at Citigroup
when he got into a tussle with Sandy Weill’s daughter, who also worked for the company.
Weill cared about his family, not just about the financial results of Citigroup.
Many people believe that they know what their bosses care about. But
unless they are mind readers, that’s probably a risky assumption. 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. Asking for help
and advice also creates a relationship with those in power that can be quite useful, and
asking for assistance, in a way that still conveys your competence and command of the
situation, is an effective way of flattering those with power over you. Having asked what
matters to those with power over you, act on what they tell you.
MAKE OTHERS FEEL BETTER ABOUT THEMSELVES
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.
Most people, not just those who are somewhat insecure, like to feel
good about themselves. They are motivated to self-enhance—to seek out positive
information and avoid negative feedback—even though, objectively, people may learn
more from mistakes and learning what they have done wrong. People overestimate their
abilities and accomplishments—a phenomenon called the above average effect—with
way more than half of surveyed respondents reporting they are above average on
positive attributes such as intelligence, sense of humor, driving ability, appearance,
negotiating ability—pretty much anything and everything.16 And because people like
themselves, people prefer others who are similar, because what is more self-enhancing
than to choose someone who reminds you of—you! A large literature documents the
importance of similarity in predicting interpersonal attraction.17 For instance, people are
more likely to marry others whose first or last names resemble their own and, in
experiments, are more attracted to people whose arbitrary experimental code numbers
were similar to the participants’ actual birthdays. And because people like those who are
similar to them, they also favor their own groups and disfavor competitive groups—an
effect called ingroup bias and outgroup derogation18—and also prefer people from their
own social categories, for instance, of similar race and socioeconomic background.
One sure way to make your boss feel worse is to criticize that individual,
and this criticism is going to be particularly sensitive if it concerns an issue that the boss
feels is important and where there is some inherent insecurity. A talented manager
working at a large credit card organization in the valuation and decision infrastructure
group—a department that creates predictive models of customer payment as well as
modeling customer acquisition and retention—was seeking accreditation as a credit
officer. The chief credit officer in the company was a big fan of hers. But then “Melinda”
talked to him when she was angry about one of his subordinates’ bad behavior at a
meeting. She told the chief credit officer that his subordinate’s bad behavior reflected on
his own leadership style, which sometimes entailed screaming at people himself.
Because leadership was one of his areas of personal insecurity, he reacted badly to the
criticism. He then held up Melinda’s accreditation for a while—just to show her who was
boss and in a form of revenge.
“Brent” was a reporter for the Associated Press, covering stories all
over the world, literally putting his life on the line to be where the news was happening.
Even though he covered one of the biggest stories of 2006, North Korea’s underground
nuclear test, he received a poor performance evaluation that year. The evaluation
commented on Brent’s contentious relationships with editors, who he felt were adversely
affecting the news product—a feeling he shared with his bosses.
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. And if you do highlight some error or
problem, do so in a way that does not in any way implicate the individual’s own selfconcept
or competence—for instance, by blaming the error on others or on the situation.
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.19 Flattery works because we naturally come to like people
who flatter us and make us feel good about ourselves and our accomplishments, and
being likable helps build influence. Flattery also works because it engages the norm of
reciprocity—if you compliment someone, that person owes you something in return just
as surely as if you had bought the individual dinner or given a gift—because a
compliment is a form of gift. And flattery is effective because it is consistent with the selfenhancement
motive that exists in most people.
The late Jack Valenti, for some 38 years head of the Motion Picture
Association of America and prior to that an aide to President Lyndon Johnson,
understood both the power of flattery and how to do it. In advice written to Johnson in
1965, Valenti noted, “What I am suggesting is that the President fasten down support for
his cause by resorting to an unchanging human emotion—the need to feel wanted and
admired.”20 Valenti himself flattered Johnson by showing him loyalty and consistently
agreeing with him. In a speech to the American Advertising Federation Convention in
June 1965, Valenti said, “I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently
because Lyndon Johnson is my President.”21 Valenti also flattered the studio heads for
whom he worked for more than 30 years. In fact, he understood and used the power of
flattery almost continuously. When I wrote him a note after he visited my class, he sent
back a handwritten message on the note complimenting me on my thank-you.
In his autobiography, written when he was in his eighties and published
after his death, there is no dishing of dirt or unflattering portraits of anyone mentioned.22
A practice of flattering the other, begun decades earlier as Jack Valenti began his path
to power, persisted even to the end of his life. And although the autobiography did not
win reviewer plaudits because of its generally genial tone and a consequent absence of
nitty-gritty details of the important events he had witnessed, no one who read the book
would think ill of Valenti because of anything he had written about them.
Most people underestimate the effectiveness of flattery and therefore
underutilize it. If someone flatters you, you essentially have two ways of reacting. You can
think that the person was insincere and trying to butter you up. But believing that causes
you to feel negatively about the person whom you perceive as insincere and not even
particularly subtle about it. More importantly, thinking that the compliment is just a
strategic way of building influence with you also leads to negative self-feelings—what
must others think of you to try such a transparent and false method of influence?
Alternatively, you can think that the compliments are sincere and that the flatterer is a
wonderful judge of people—a perspective that leaves you feeling good about the person
for his or her interpersonal perception skill and great about yourself, as the recipient of
such a positive judgment delivered by such a credible source. There is simply no
question that the desire to believe that flattery is at once sincere and accurate will, in
most instances, leave us susceptible to being flattered and, as a consequence, under
the influence of the flatterer. So, don’t underestimate—or underutilize—the strategy of
flattery. University of California–Berkeley professor Jennifer Chatman, in an unpublished
study, sought to see if there was some point beyond which flattery became ineffective.
She believed that the effectiveness of flattery might have an inverted U-shaped
relationship, with flattery being increasingly effective up to some point but beyond that
becoming ineffective as the flatterer became seen as insincere and a “suck up.” As she
told me, there might be a point at which flattery became ineffective, but she couldn’t find
it in her data.
This chapter has emphasized managing up—both the importance of
doing so and some ways of being successful at the task. That’s because your
relationship with those in power is critical to your own success. Best-selling author and
marketing guru Keith Ferrazzi says that, contrary to what most people think, they are not
responsible for their own careers. As he noted, your driving ambition and even your great
performance are not going to be sufficient to assure success in a typical hierarchical
organization. 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. And there are
always people above you, regardless of your position. Therefore, your job is to ensure
that those influential others have a strong desire to make you successful. That may entail
doing a good job. But it may also entail ensuring that those in power notice the good
work that you do, remember you, and think well of you because you make them feel
good about themselves. 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.
2
The Personal Qualities That Bring Influence
RON MEYER, the president and chief operating officer of Universal Studios since
1995, is the longest serving head of a major motion picture company. A powerful figure
in the film industry, Meyer also provides an example of a life transformed. Ron Meyer
dropped out of high school when he was 15 and a couple of years later joined the U.S.
Marines. After leaving the Marines he got a job at a talent agency as a chauffeur, a
position that permitted him to learn a lot about the entertainment business as he listened
to the conversations of clients. After working as an agent for the William Morris Agency,
Meyer and some friends founded the Creative Artists Agency, a position that helped
establish him as a power broker in Hollywood.1
Meyer, like many successful people, profoundly changed over the
course of his life. He developed qualities that permitted him to obtain and hold on to
influence. If you are going to do likewise, you need to successfully surmount three
obstacles. 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. This is difficult because in our desire to selfenhance—
to think good things about ourselves—we avoid negative information and
overemphasize any positive feedback we receive.2 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.
CHANGE IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE
People often think that whatever qualities are needed for building a path to power, either
you have them or you don’t, at least by the time you are an adult. But the biographies of
Ron Meyer and scores of other figures in political and business life belie that idea. Willie
Brown, the longest-serving speaker in the history of the California Assembly, two-time
mayor of San Francisco, and one of the most powerful and effective figures in American
politics, lost his first election for the Assembly and also lost the contest the first time he
tried to become speaker. Over time, Brown developed more patience and empathy with
others and honed his ability to forge interpersonal relationships.3 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. It may be easier when you are younger, but it is never too late.
John, a business school student, was uncertain whether or how he could
become more effective in acquiring power. In a class on power, he saw the material as
something to be used later in life, when he was “higher in the food chain,” as he put it.
Nonetheless, John decided to run a small personal experiment as he looked for a job, to
see if he could act differently and what the results would be.
John understood he needed to project confidence and self-assurance,
even though his personal history and family background did not always leave him feeling
as if he “belonged.” Girding himself for the arrival of on-campus recruiters, John dressed
in a stylish fashion to stand out while still fitting in and projected himself forcefully during
his interviews while still being respectful of the other person. “I would stand and
approach the interviewer as they approached me, making eye contact, shaking their
hand before they shook mine, sitting in a slightly dominant position through the course of
the interview,” he said. “All of this was done to convey that I had some level of power in
the room.”
John received seven job offers from his seven interviews. And he
attributed his success to the way he had presented himself, in part because a number of
those offering him jobs commented on how he stood out from his peers through his
behavior.
You can change, too. Choreographer Twyla Tharp, the winner of two
Emmy Awards and a Tony, in talking about creativity, made a comment that also rings
true for developing power and political skill:
Obviously, people are born with specific talents…. But I don’t like using genetics as
an excuse…. Get over yourself. The best creativity is the result of habit and hard
work.4
Of course people have personalities and individual attributes that come
from some combination of genetics and upbringing. But strategically changing individual
attributes to become more personally effective is both possible and desirable. When
one man I interviewed, Paul, questioned his ability to develop and use the qualities that
produce power, I asked him this:
PFEFFER: Did you learn to ski?
PAUL: Sure.
PFEFFER: Was skiing a natural act?
PAUL: No.
PFEFFER: You learned to ski, and you just admitted that the skills involved in skiing
weren’t natural. If you learned those skills, you can also develop the qualities that will
make you more powerful.
DO AN OBJECTIVE SELF-ASSESSMENT
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. Such an assessment poses a big motivational challenge. In
the first place, because we like to think well of ourselves, we overestimate our own
abilities and performance. We avoid people who are critical of us and our work and
frequently try to downplay any negative information about ourselves. We tell ourselves
that our past success shows evidence of our talents, so we can just keep doing what we
have always done. Marshall Goldsmith recognized the challenge of overcoming
defensiveness about our abilities and behaviors in his best-selling book based on his
many years of work as an executive coach.5 If, as you progress through your career, you
need to develop new ways of thinking and acting, and such development requires effort,
you must be sufficiently motivated to expend the effort. But to admit you need to develop
new behaviors and skills seems to require admitting you are not as perfect as you would
like to believe.
Goldsmith, in his work with high-level executives, who mostly have huge
egos, has tried to develop coaching techniques that mitigate the natural human tendency
to first avoid and then reject any information about our deficiencies. For instance,
instead of giving people feedback about what they have done right and wrong in the
past, he focuses on “feedforward,” which emphasizes what people need to do to get
ready for the subsequent positions and career challenges they will confront. The idea is
this: when people focus on what they need to get to the next stage of their careers, they
are less defensive. This is very clever: focusing on what you need to change to
accomplish future personal goals can be much more uplifting than going back and
reviewing past setbacks or considering areas of weakness. I don’t care what you do or
how you do it, but just as improving the décor of a house when you stage it for sale
requires a walk-through in which you and others assess what needs to be changed,
enhancing your own skills requires the same sort of evaluation of your own areas for
improvement.
Here’s a suggestion. After considering the personal qualities described
later in this chapter, do a self-assessment exercise. Grade yourself on a scale of 1 (“I
don’t have this quality at all”) to 5 (“I have a lot of this quality and can readily use it”) on
each of the attributes. Better yet, have others grade you as well. And then, either by
yourself or with a friend, develop a specific action plan for building those qualities where
you scored the lowest. Regularly review your progress, and make sure you are
continuing to develop those personal qualities that help build power.
And recognize a second challenge in your self-assessment. Even if you
are willing to do the emotionally tough work of being clinically objective about your
strengths and weaknesses, you may not have the requisite expertise to know how or
what to improve. Simply put, knowing what you’re doing wrong requires already having
some level of knowledge and skill—and if you had the knowledge and skill to recognize
your mistakes, you probably wouldn’t be making them in the first place!
I get asked for various kinds of help all the time—questions about the
business literature, requests to meet and provide career advice or to assist people
facing political difficulties inside their companies. I am sure many people receive such
requests, often out of the blue and frequently over the Internet because there is so little
anonymity these days. In most instances, the reason the person is having a particular
problem is evident in how the request is made: no attempt to provide any sort of
evidence of similarity or social connection; no understanding of the other’s perspective
as the recipient of such a request; no explanation as to how I, as the target, was
selected. And if the question is school-or project-related, there is often no familiarity with
or mastery of the subject matter. Later in this book we will meet Ray, an effective, booksmart
human resources executive and leadership trainer who lost his job to
organizational politics. Talking to Ray convinced me that although he was tremendously
knowledgeable about designing leadership training, and a hard worker with great
values, he understood little about the political dynamics inside companies—and
because of that, he did not know what he did not know.
This situation is not unusual. Cornell social psychologists Justin Kruger
and David Dunning did pathbreaking research about a decade ago showing that people
without the requisite knowledge to perform a task successfully also lacked the
information and understanding required to know they were deficient, and in what ways.6
For instance, people who scored in the 12th percentile on tests of grammar and logic
thought they were in the 62nd percentile. Not only did they overestimate their own
performance; they also had difficulty assessing what they had answered correctly and
where they had made mistakes, and they could not accurately recognize the relative
competence of others.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this problem: get advice from
others who are more skilled than you and will tell you the truth about yourself.
Unfortunately, asking for this sort of help sometimes feels like weakness and people are
reluctant to admit what they do not know—that self-enhancement thing again. Ironically,
therefore, those who admit ignorance are more likely to improve—in all domains,
including understanding power dynamics inside companies—than those who either don’t
know their deficiencies or are afraid to admit them to others. As Confucius said, “Real
knowledge is to know the extent of one’s own ignorance.” And to be able to improve
requires sharing this information with others who can help remedy the lack of
knowledge.7
As for the third obstacle, it is possible to both identify what personal
skills and qualities produce power and then work to develop them. Here I highlight seven
of the most important qualities you need to traverse a path to power.
SEVEN IMPORTANT PERSONAL QUALITIES THE BUILD POWER
Although there is a growing research literature on power in organizations, there is less
systematic evidence than I might like on the personal attributes that produce power. In
part that’s because such research is inherently difficult. Asking about the qualities of
people already in power can confound whether the qualities created the influence or
whether they were a consequence of holding power. What research there is,8 plus my
own analysis of scores of political and business biographies and observing literally
hundreds of leaders in all walks of life, leads me to emphasize two fundamental personal
dimensions and seven qualities that are both logically and empirically associated with
producing personal power.
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. After describing each attribute, I will
discuss a quality often associated with power but one that I think is, beyond some level,
highly overrated—intelligence.
Ambition
Success requires effort and hard work as well as persistence. To expend that effort, to
make necessary sacrifices, requires some driving ambition. The late Richard Daley,
former mayor of Chicago and considered one of the 10 best mayors in American history,
did not run for that office until he was 53 years old. “Daley realized early in life that he
did not run for that office until he was 53 years old. “Daley realized early in life that he
desired power, and he was willing to wait patiently for the opportunity to exercise it. He
spent three decades toiling quietly at the routine jobs of urban machine politics.”9 Doris
Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Abraham Lincoln emphasized
Lincoln’s driving ambition as one of the most important qualities that produced his
success in political life. Lincoln’s drive enabled him to overcome an impoverished
background, early political setbacks, and personal slights.10
And what is true in politics is also true in business. Jill Barad, who rose
to become CEO of toy company Mattel, possessed unquenchable ambition. She often
wore a bumblebee pin. “The bee is an oddity of nature. It shouldn’t be able to fly, but it
does. Every time I see that bee out of the corner of my eye, I am reminded to keep
pushing for the impossible.”11
Organizational life can be irritating and frustrating and can divert
people’s effort and attention. Ambition—a focus on achieving influence—can help
people overcome the temptation to give up or to give in to the irritations. As Melinda, a
vice president in a large credit card organization, told me, the relentless focus on a goal
permits her to put up with the annoying, stupid, frustrating situations she encounters—to,
in her words, not get hung up with the imperfect in the moment. Her desire for career
success helps her control her emotions and continue to work to achieve her objectives.
And Melinda’s efforts to stay focused on the outcomes she is seeking and not get hung
up on the people and their idiosyncrasies have been an important factor in her rapid
career progress in the credit card company where she works.
Energy
Laura Esserman, director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University
of California–San Francisco, and a person who has led remarkable changes in medical
practice both locally and nationally from a position of little formal power, got her MBA
degree while practicing medicine full-time and having her first child. As she once said to
me, “You don’t change the world by first taking a nap.” The late Frank Stanton, president
of CBS and a huge influence in the news and broadcasting world, worked prodigious
hours including on the weekend and typically got five hours of sleep a night.12 Rudy
Crew, the school system leader, is an insomniac, often up at three in the morning. Crew
was typically the first person to arrive in the New York City chancellor’s office, where he
made the coffee.13 I know of almost no powerful people who do not have boundless
energy.
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. As a young congressional
secretary working for Representative Richard Kleberg in the early 1930s, future U.S.
president Lyndon Johnson worked his two aides mercilessly. But because he worked
alongside them with just as much effort, they didn’t complain.15 Your hard work signals
that the job is important; people pick up on that signal, or its opposite. And people are
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. Social psychologist Dean Keith Simonton has
spent more than a quarter century studying the determinants of genius. He writes,
“individual differences in performance in a wide diversity of talent domains can be
largely attributed to the number of hours devoted to the direct acquisition of the
necessary knowledge and skill…. Some investigators have even suggested that the
notion of talent or innate genius may be pure myth.”16 Obviously, having the energy that
permits you to put in long hours of hard work helps you to master subject matter more
quickly.
Third, people often promote those with energy because of the
importance of being able to work hard and also because expending great energy
signals a high degree of organizational commitment and, presumably, loyalty. As
Melinda, the credit card executive, commented, if there are two people and one is willing
and able to work 16 hours and one just 8, it is clear who will be chosen for a promotion
opportunity.
People can develop more energy and get by on less sleep. Laura
Esserman credits her surgical training and having to go long hours without sleep during
her internship and residency with helping build her endurance. This suggests that there is
a practice or training effect in developing energy. Kent Thiry, the CEO of kidney dialysis
company DaVita, and someone known to do backward somersaults at employee
meetings, has his personal assistant schedule exercise time for him—a lifestyle
influence on energy that implies that even people who have demanding jobs and travel a
lot can eat and exercise in ways that enhance their capacity for hard work. 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
Put some dried grass out in the sun and nothing happens, even on the hottest day. Put
the dried grass under a magnifying glass and the grass catches on fire. The sun’s rays,
focused, are much more powerful than they are without focus. The same is true for
people seeking power.
There are several dimensions to focus. One is specialization in a
particular industry or company, providing depth of understanding and a more substantial
web of focused relationships. From an early age, Bruce Cozadd knew he was interested
in the drug industry. His bachelor’s degree from Yale was in science. After he received
his MBA, he took a job with ALZA, a pharmaceutical company, rapidly rising to become
the chief financial officer and then executive vice president and chief operating officer.
After Johnson and Johnson purchased ALZA, Cozadd consulted for several
pharmaceutical companies before founding Jazz Pharmaceuticals. He serves on the
boards of two other companies—both in biotechnology. Unlike many of his peers,
Cozadd stuck with one company, ALZA, for the first 10 years after business school and
has remained in the same industry throughout his career. He argued that this focus has
provided him with more detailed knowledge of the industry, its technology and
management issues, and also a denser network of contacts within the industry than if he
had a more diffuse background.
Melinda has worked for the same credit card company since 2002. She
noted that one advantage of staying in one place is that you get to know more people in
a single organization, and this deeper knowledge permits you to better exercise power
because of the stronger personal relationships you form and your more detailed
knowledge of the people you are seeking to influence. Although there is a lot of talk
recently about increased career mobility, it remains the case that it is often easier to
acquire positions of influence as an insider. A recent profile of CEOs of S&P 500
companies found that the median tenure with their company was 15 years.17
A second dimension of focus is concentration on a limited set of
activities or functional skills. If, as much research suggests, genius requires a large
number of hours to achieve outstanding levels of competence, it is true, by definition,
that you can acquire those hours in less elapsed time if you focus your attention more
narrowly.
A third aspect to focus is to concentrate on those activities within your
particular job or position that are the most critical—that have the most impact on getting
work done and on others’ perceptions of you and your effectiveness. Vernon, a rapidly
rising executive at Barclays Bank, has impressed his peers with his laserlike focus on
the things that matter most to the company, whether it is some presentation to a seniorlevel
executive or an information technology project. Vernon argues that this focus on the
5 to 10 percent of all the possible job duties that actually have the most leverage allows
him to manage his time more effectively and also permits him to allocate the resources
of his team for greatest effect.
Focus turns out to be surprisingly rare. People are often unwilling or
unable to commit themselves to a specific company, industry, or job function. Particularly
talented people often have many interests and many opportunities and can’t choose
among them. Moreover, they often feel that diversification in their work roles provides
some protection against making the wrong choice. That may all be true, but 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.
Self-Knowledge
A few years ago while conducting some executive training inside Fireman’s Fund, a $12
billion insurance company owned by the German financial services conglomerate Allianz,
I met Joe Beneducci, who was chief operating officer at the time. In 2007, when he was
39 years old, Insurance and Technology magazine named him one of the tech-savvy
CEOs of the year. When I inquired about how he had reached such a high level at such a
young age, Joe assured me that it was not his educational background—he had done
well in his studies but had not gone to an elite school. Instead, he attributed his success
to extensive reading—he read at least one nonfiction book a week—and to his practice
of structured self-reflection. After every significant meeting or interaction, he would make
notes in a small notebook. He would write down what had gone well and what hadn’t,
what people had said and done, and the outcome of the meeting. That notebook
captured his thoughts about what had transpired so that he could make future
interactions more effective; and the discipline of writing fostered reflection and also
imprinted the insights more forcefully into his consciousness.
Dr. Modesto “Mitch” Maidique, a Cuban American who served as the
president of Florida International University for 23 years and previously ran two
companies and served as a partner in the investment banking firm Hambrecht and Quist,
has had a distinguished career in both the profit and nonprofit world. When I asked him
what leadership habits he thought made him effective, his response was immediate:
making notes about decisions, meetings, and other interactions and reflecting on what
he had done well or poorly so that he could improve his skills.
There is no learning and personal development without reflection. Andy
Hargadon, a business school professor at University of California–Davis, has noted that
many people who think they have 20 years of experience really don’t—they just have one
year of experience repeated 20 times. Structured reflection takes time. It also requires
the discipline to concentrate, make notes, and think about what you are doing. But it is
very useful in building a path to power.
Confidence
Two decades ago, I watched Dr. Frances K. Conley, the first female full professor of
neurosurgery, in action. On one occasion she met with her surgical fellows and then with
a patient with a malignant brain tumor. Even today, treatments for cancerous brain
tumors aren’t often successful, and some 20 years ago, the treatment options were even
more limited. With her trainees, Dr. Conley exhibited uncertainty about what to do and
asked for their thoughts. But when she walked into the patient’s room, she became a
different person. Without denying the seriousness of the situation or glossing over the
prognosis, Dr. Conley spoke confidently about what she recommended as a course of
treatment. When I later asked her about her changed demeanor, Dr. Conley replied that
there is some placebo effect as well as an effect of attitude and spirit on the course of
disease; therefore, she did not want the patient to give up or become depressed. Had
she expressed self-doubt, the patient might have left to seek treatment elsewhere, from
people or facilities less qualified to provide state-of-the-art care.
Formal job titles and positions can provide influence and power. But in
many situations, you will be working with peers or with outsiders who may not know your
formal status. And in any case, observers are going to try and figure out if they should
take you seriously or not. Consequently, you need to seize control of the situation. In
making decisions about how much power and deference to accord others, people are
naturally going to look to the other’s behavior for cues. 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.
Amanda was a middle-aged, talented executive sent by her large,
successful consumer products company to get a master’s degree in management. The
very fact that the company sent her and paid her salary and her tuition during the oneyear
program signaled they had great expectations. The question was, could she
leverage the opportunity? In the spring, Amanda began thinking about her organizational
reentry. She drafted an e-mail she was going to send to her company sponsors, but
fortunately decided to run it by a friend, a woman executive from another company. That
friend strengthened the tone of the message, making it clear that Amanda aspired to the
senior executive ranks and was looking for a career path that would get her there and
stating much more explicitly the type of position she expected on her return. Although she
was initially reluctant to send what she viewed as a presumptuous message, Amanda
did forward it and was pleasantly surprised by the response. Her company colleagues
liked her confident approach and her expressions of ambitious career aspirations. And
why not? That’s how senior executives behave, and Amanda had shown she was just like
them.
Showing confidence seems often to be a particular issue for women,
who are socialized to be deferential and less assertive. But that behavior causes
problems. Research by social psychologist Brenda Major shows that women work
longer and harder for the same amount of money, award themselves lower salaries, and
have lower career-entry and peak-earnings expectations than men.18 One implication of
this research is that because women don’t think they are worth as much, they are
disadvantaged in salary negotiations, which is one reason why there are persistent
male-female earnings differentials.
The consequences of not being confident and assertive apply to
everyone, not just to women, and not just in salary determination. If you aren’t confident
about what you deserve and what you want, you will be reluctant to ask or to push, and
therefore you will be less successful in obtaining money or influence compared to those
who are bolder than you.
Empathy with Others
Training in negotiation often includes advice to negotiate over “interests” rather than
“positions.” Through a process of mutual concessions, both parties may end up better
off, but in order to succeed at such an approach, you need to understand where the other
is coming from. This ability to put yourself in another’s place is also useful for acquiring
power. One of the sources of Lyndon Johnson’s success as Senate majority leader was
his assiduous attention to the details of his 99 colleagues, knowing which ones wanted a
private office, who were the drunks, who were the womanizers, who wanted to go on a
particular trip—all the mundane details that permitted him to accurately predict how
people would vote and figure out what to give each senator to gain his or her support.
University of Texas psychologist William Ickes has studied empathic
understanding. He notes:
Empathetically accurate perceivers are those who are consistently good at “reading”
other people’s thoughts and feelings. All else being equal, they are likely to be the
most tactful advisors, the most diplomatic officials, the most effective negotiators, the
most electable politicians, the most productive salespersons, the most successful
teachers, and the most insightful therapists.19
What sometimes gets in the way of putting ourselves in the shoes of
others is too much focus on the end goal and our own objectives and not enough
concern for recruiting others to our side—or at least curtailing the likelihood of their
opposition. When Laura Esserman was pushing for changes at the breast care center at
UCSF, she also agreed to raise funds for a mammography van to provide access to
these diagnostic services in the poorer sections of San Francisco. Meanwhile, the
department of surgery, where she held her primary appointment, was running a deficit,
and the department chair wondered why a radiology service was being supported out of
surgery; the medical center’s chief financial officer was worried about the bond ratings
for the debt required to build a new medical school campus in the Mission Bay section
of San Francisco; and many administrators were concerned about treating more
Medicaid patients, given the inadequate reimbursement rates, in the event that the
mobile diagnostic unit turned up lots of poor women with breast cancer.
Initially focused on saving lives, providing treatment to disadvantaged
women, and “doing the right thing,” Esserman ignored the others’ concerns. But then one
day she realized that mammography was not even a diagnostic modality she was
interested in pushing and that she was diverting her efforts into an enterprise that only
provoked opposition. So she called her department chair and said, “I understand your
point of view, I agree, and I will take care of this.” Within two weeks she closed the
service down, and that simple act gained her support from people whose help she
needed. It also conveyed an important lesson: far from diverting you from accomplishing
your objectives, putting yourself in the other’s place is one of the best ways to advance
your own agenda.
Capacity to Tolerate Conflict
There are lots of books and quite a bit of empirical research on the detrimental effects
of workplace bullying—the screaming, ranting, profanity, and carrying on that sometimes
occur in workplaces—on both the people who are the targets and the organizations in
which they work.20 So why does such behavior persist? Because it is often extremely
effective for the perpetrator. 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.
Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff and formerly a very
successful member of the House of Representatives from Illinois who ran the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is known for his temper. “Emanuel
seems to employ his volcanic moments for effect, intimidating opponents…but never
quite losing himself in the midst of battle,” observes Ryan Lizza.21 Former New York City
mayor Rudolph Giuliani, recognized for accomplishing a lot while in office, was someone
who never shrank from a fight: “Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers,”
noted New York Times writers Michael Powell and Russ Buetnner. “But far more than
his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward
ruthlessness and became a defining aspect of his mayoralty.”22
Some people mistakenly believe that this willingness to engage in
conflict is a source of power only in Western cultures, with their higher tolerance for
individualistic behavior and more open, less circumspect style of interaction. But I don’t
see much evidence for this view. In Singapore, a country that runs campaigns promoting
courteous behavior, former long-serving prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, the father of the
country, has been described as someone who was “often rude and contemptuous.”23
Lee came to power by taking on the British, who governed the country, and has shown
no reluctance to back down from fights with political opponents over the ensuing years.
Katsuji Kawamata, who went to work at Nissan in 1947 after a failing career at the
Industrial Bank of Japan, eventually rose to become head of this large auto company
even though he had no experience in the industry. His path to power in this typical
Japanese organization entailed unexpected displays of toughness. As described in
David Halberstam’s book The Reckoning, Kawamata’s rude and coarse behavior had
a purpose: “It was…a power play. ‘What he was telling us—and we did not realize it at
first—was that what interested us did not have to interest him,’ one of them [a Nissan
manager] said years later, ‘but what interested him had to interest us.’”24
INTELLIGENCE
As we have already seen, job performance is not strongly correlated with the ability to
acquire power. But what of intelligence? There is probably no human trait that has been
studied as much. The research shows that intelligence is the single best predictor of job
performance.25 However, intelligence is often overrated as an attribute that will help
people obtain power. That’s because intelligence seldom accounts for much more than
20 percent of the variation in work performance in any event, and the relationship
between performance and attaining power is equally weak.
Explaining career success has been the holy grail for researchers and
practitioners—pursued by, among others, test developers and colleges and graduate
schools that would like to find more valid ways of screening applicants. However, the
goal remains elusive and the importance of general mental ability in understanding who
actually gets ahead is small. A meta-analysis—a statistical summary of existing
research—examining 85 data sets from a variety of countries concluded that the
correlation between intelligence and income was .2, and although this was statistically
significant, it meant that only about 4 percent of the variation in income was explained by
variation in intelligence.26
Many studies of the predictors of career success, focusing on both the
general population and specific subpopulations such as business school graduates,
have found that mental aptitude correlates somewhat with grades in school but has
virtually no ability to explain who rises to the top. That’s because academic performance
is a weak predictor of career success measures such as income.27 To take just one
recent example, Justice Sonia Sotomayor scored poorly on the scholastic aptitude tests
that measure general academic ability and was admitted to Prince ton on the basis of
affirmative action. Nonetheless, she graduated from Prince ton with academic honors
and then reached the highest levels of the law, finally being appointed to the Supreme
Court of the United States.28 The inability of measures of intelligence to account for
much variation in who gets ahead has led to the idea of multiple intelligences and efforts
to develop indicators of constructs such as emotional intelligence that might be more
useful in accounting for various career success measures.29
Furthermore, intelligence, particularly beyond a certain level, may lead to
behaviors that make acquiring or holding on to influence less likely. People who are
exceptionally smart think they can do everything on their own and do it better than
everyone else. Con sequently, they may fail to bring others along with them, leaving their
potential allies in the dark about their plans and thinking. 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. And smart people may think that
because of their great intelligence they can afford to be less sensitive to others’ needs
and feelings. Many of the people who seem to me to have the most difficulty putting
themselves in the other’s place are people who are so smart they can’t understand why
the others don’t get it. Lastly, intelligence can be intimidating. And although intimidation
can work for a while, it is not a strategy that brings much enduring loyalty.
Many books about fiascoes—smart people making poor decisions
—make this very point in their titles: The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam’s study of
Vietnam, for instance, or The Smartest Guys in the Room, McLean and Elkind’s book
about Enron. The late Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the Vietnam War
and a person invariably described as brilliant, told documentary producer Errol Morris in
The Fog of War that the big mistake was not seeing things from the perspective of the
North Vietnamese.30 Enron’s collapse resulted in part because some people thought
they were so smart they denigrated anyone who doubted their approach, and no
alternative viewpoints could survive inside the company. So while intelligence helps in
building a reputation and in job performance, it often holds the seeds of people’s
downfall in creating overconfidence and insensitivity.
Once you set out to develop the attributes that can bring you influence,
your next task is to figure out where best to deploy them. That is the subject of the next
chapter.
3
Choosing Where to Start
WHERE YOU begin your career affects your rate of progress as well as how far you
go. At two University of California campuses, the speed with which professors moved up
a civil service–type salary ladder reflected the power of their academic department
—those in more powerful departments moved up the salary scale more quickly.1 A study
of 338 managers who began their career in a 3,500-employee public utility found that the
power of the unit where people began their careers affected the rate of salary growth,
with people starting in more powerful units moving up more rapidly.2 That study also
found that managers who began their careers in higher-powered departments, such as
operations, distribution, and customer service, were more likely to remain in high-power
units as they changed jobs. Prior to its breakup by the government, the road to the CEO
position at AT&T was through the Illinois Bell subsidiary. If you wanted to be CEO at
Pacific Gas and Electric, the legal department was the best place to build your career.
The shift in power from engineers to lawyers was visible over time: in 1950, only 3 of the
company’s most senior positions were occupied by attorneys; by 1980, the comparable
number was 18.3 For many years, finance was the route to the top at General Motors.4 At
the University of Illinois, where I began my academic career, senior university positions
were often filled with people from the physics department.
At Wells Fargo, prior to the merger with Norwest, senior leaders came
disproportionately out of the management sciences department. This list included Clyde
Ostler, who during his 30-year career was the chief financial officer, head of retail
banking, and head of Internet banking; Robert Joss, who rose to become vice chairman
of Wells Fargo before going on to be CEO at Westpac Bank in Australia and then dean
of Stanford Graduate School of Business; Frank Newman, who also served as CFO at
Wells Fargo before going on to run Bankers Trust; and Rod Jacobs, who served as CFO
and later as president of Wells Fargo. As the management sciences group provided
analysis for many of the bank’s most critical decisions, people in that department had
exposure to the bank’s most senior leaders. At the young age of 23, Ostler did analyses
for Wells Fargo’s investment committee, whose members included the top six decision
makers. Committee members were also part of the bank’s management committee, so
Ostler was soon working with that group and sitting in at their meetings. At a very early
point in his career, Clyde Ostler had an excellent position within the bank’s
communication network, with access to both critical information and key people.
We intuitively know that not all career platforms are equal in value as a
path to power, and research supports that intuition. But people often err in choosing
where to start building their power base. 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. The following two examples
illustrate this idea in action.
UNEXPECTED PATHS TO POWER
You might think that knowing something about cars would be a good way to rise to the
top of an automobile company, or that having a background in software would be
important for having a successful career in one of the world’s largest software firms. But
you’d be wrong in both cases. And in understanding why, you can gain some important
insights into where to launch your career.
By 2009, Zia Yusuf was executive vice president of the Global
Ecosystems and Partner Group for SAP, the $15 billion company headquartered in
Germany that competes fiercely with Oracle in the enterprise resource planning and
database software market. One of the top executives in the multinational company
where he had worked for just nine years, the 41-year-old Yusuf headed a group that was
responsible for SAP’s partner relations, online communities, and customer outreach. But
Yusuf did not seem to have a background that would augur for career success in a hightech,
engineering-dominated company.5
Zia Yusuf was born in Pakistan and educated at Macalester College in
Minnesota, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and international
studies. With an interest in international development, he went to work for a firm doing
development economics consulting and obtained a master’s degree from the
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Yusuf then joined the World Bank,
where he did quite well, becoming a permanent staff member. However, the bank did not
permit Yusuf to move to its private-sector arm, the International Financial Corporation, so
on the advice of his wife, Yusuf decided to go back to business school to strengthen his
private-sector credentials and get a second master’s degree. He obtained his MBA
from Harvard in 1998 and went to work for Goldman Sachs, a position that leveraged his
banking and economics background and was a common destination for HBS grads.
Yusuf did well at Goldman and was particularly skilled at managing client relationships,
but he did not enjoy the banking work.
The late 1990s was the height of the dot-com boom and a time of great
excitement about Silicon Valley; many of Yusuf’s HBS classmates and Goldman Sachs
associates were going west to pursue their careers. One of his colleagues from Harvard
was a board assistant to Hasso Plattner, one of the cofounders of SAP. Yusuf, who had
never even heard of SAP let alone knew what it did, flew to the Bay Area to talk to
Plattner about a position in the company’s Palo Alto office. At the time, he thought this
was a good way to transition to the area—SAP would pay for the move and he could get
a better feeling of the Silicon Valley culture and opportunities at close range.
Yusuf’s first real job at SAP was as chief operating officer of the SAP
Markets group, a separate legal entity wholly owned by SAP that had been established
to build an electronic marketplace—an exchange that brought buyers and sellers
together and made money by taking a small fee on each transaction. Other companies
such as Commerce One were also pursuing this business model, which ultimately turned
out not to be successful. Although the unit in SAP did develop some important software
components used in other SAP product offerings, the 600-person operation was
disbanded.
When SAP Markets closed down, Yusuf got the assignment to build an
internal strategy consulting capability. Hiring talented people both from outside and from
other units inside SAP, Yusuf built a department that had its hand in almost every highlevel
decision that required data collection and analysis—issues such as how to redo the
human resources department, pricing questions, and organizational structure and design
choices. The department, called the corporate consulting team (CCT), became the point
of contact for managing any outside consultants SAP used. When Hasso Plattner
became interested in user-centered design and design thinking, it was natural for Yusuf
and his group to take the lead in making connections with IDEO, the award-winning
product design firm, and with other outside resources that could help SAP build its usercentered
design capability.
After four years as head of the CCT, a unit with offices in Germany and
Palo Alto, Yusuf took on the job of consolidating and developing an ecosystem activity
for the company, reporting to Leo Apotheker, who later became CEO. With favorable
publicity for this activity in BusinessWeek,6 and with increasing revenues and products
coming from partners and the developer and customer community that fell within the
ecosystems domain, Yusuf had already accomplished quite a bit. Moreover, because of
his visibility to customers, partners, and competitors, Yusuf was in the sights of executive
search firms to fill a CEO role in a high-tech company, and many thought that would be
his next move.
Zia Yusuf had gone from being a banker to a senior leadership role in a
large software company and a possible chief executive in a high-tech company in less
than a decade—with no degree in engineering and never even having run an
engineering or sales organization. In late 2009, Yusuf announced he was leaving SAP
—as he told me, to find a COO or CEO role in a smaller company. His resignation
prompted calls from the most senior SAP executives, including Plattner and Apotheker,
who assured him that if he stayed, he would soon be on the executive board, one of the
top seven people in the company.
Zia Yusuf’s successful career had followed the trail developed decades
earlier at the Ford Motor Company—leveraging an analytical staff position into a power
base. Right after World War II, a small group of highly trained, very smart young men who
had worked together in the Pentagon providing analytical support for the war effort
moved as a team to one company where they felt they could have a substantial and
immediate impact. The company they chose, Ford Motor, was led by a young and
inexperienced Henry Ford II and was a mess, with rampant internal corruption, union
troubles, and lax to nonexistent financial controls.7
The so-called Whiz Kids gravitated to the finance, accounting, and
control functions. Their analytical bent was not well suited to the backslapping, harddrinking
world of sales and was particularly out of place in the tumult and grime of the
factories. Plus, none of them knew anything much about manufacturing or, for that matter,
cars. While Tex Thornton, their informal leader, left for Hughes Aircraft and later founded
Litton Industries, others, including Robert McNamara and Arjay Miller, eventually rose to
the top of the company and influenced a whole generation of management in many large
corporations. People from Ford, protégés of the finance group, eventually held senior
positions at Xerox, International Harvester, and other leading companies.
The career success of the Whiz Kids at Ford, and particularly
McNamara, who became the first non–Ford family member to be named president of
the company, depended on several factors. First, they had advanced degrees and elite
credentials from leading universities. Henry Ford II, who had not finished college and
was facing the very difficult task of turning around a faltering Ford Motor Company, was
impressed with the Whiz Kids’ pedigree. Second, the analytical orientation and the
numbers the group produced provided at least the appearance of rationality and
certainty to a troubled company. Third, the finance people talked the language of Wall
Street and the financial markets, which, even in the 1950s, with Ford becoming a public
company, seemed important. Ed Lundy, vice president of finance and a McNamara ally,
would speak authoritatively on what would happen to the stock price if a certain decision
were made and that argument would invariably carry the day. Fourth, the finance people
were conservative when it came to spending money, and the money they weren’t
spending was Ford money. Cutting out waste and internal corruption, McNamara and his
colleagues increased profits, and with this initial success, Henry Ford II became
increasingly risk-averse.
But perhaps the most important source of the finance group’s success
was their centrality in consequential decisions. Was money needed to modernize plants
or invest in new product development? Finance was not only involved in such decisions,
but its criteria and data were the most important considerations. Finance had staff
people ensconced in every plant, gathering information and seeing what was going on,
and to ensure loyalty to finance, those people were regularly rotated back to
headquarters, where, they were told, their careers would be made. Finance moved
talented people into other areas of the company to extend its influence and came to
control the agendas and the flow of information throughout the company. Vice president
of finance Ed Lundy and his group even gained control over the performance evaluation
process and the ratings that determined salary progress and promotions. Not
surprisingly, finance people and those loyal to the finance in-group did better: “The
company’s personnel charts were marked with green tape to designate employees who
were outstanding. An exceptional number of Lundy’s people, because they were smart
but also because they were doing each other’s personnel reports, were graded
outstanding.”8 And because finance produced numbers, not cars, it was largely immune
to criticism. Finance people didn’t have to make or sell anything—just keep Henry Ford II
happy and their opponents on the defensive.
WHAT MAKES SOME DEPARTMENTS MORE POWERFUL THAN
OTHERS
The Whiz Kids and the finance function at Ford illustrate one source of departmental
power—unit cohesion. At Ford’s finance function, there were socialization rituals
—running the overhead projector at meetings, preparing briefing books, gathering
articles and information—that served the same function as training in the military for the
company’s young, up-and-coming executives: imparting some specific skills and
knowledge but more importantly building common bonds of communication and trust that
come through shared experiences. Speaking with one voice, being able to act together
in a coordinated fashion, is an important source of departmental power and
effectiveness.9 That’s why the military evaluates leaders in part on the cohesion of their
units and why coaches of team sports work so hard to build unity of action and purpose.
Another source of departmental power is the ability to provide critical
resources, such as money or skills, or the ability to solve critical organizational problems,
both topics the subject of literally decades of research.10 Naturally, as competitive
exigencies change, creating different pressing issues and changing the sources of
money, so, too, does the locus of power. Berkeley sociologist Neil Fligstein’s historical
study of the backgrounds of large company chief executives nicely illustrates this
process at work.11 Around the beginning of the 1900s, entrepreneurs held the CEO
positions. Then manufacturing and production became the most common backgrounds
for corporate leaders: with the emergence of the large-scale industrial enterprise and
national markets, solving production and engineering issues were the most critical tasks
companies faced. Starting in the 1920s and into the 1930s, CEOs tended to come from
marketing and sales, as selling products and services, rather than producing them,
became a more important challenge. And finally, beginning in the 1960s and then
increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s, CEOs came out of finance. This change reflected
the growing power of the capital markets, the consensus that shareholder value was the
most important measure of organizational success, and the need for companies to build
strong relationships with the financial community.
Both Zia Yusuf at SAP and the finance function at Ford benefited from
being ahead of the changes confronting the two companies. When Yusuf arrived at SAP,
the big issue facing the company wasn’t how to design and build software: the company,
filled with talented engineers and software designers, had already done that. The
problem was that most of the large corporations that were target customers had already
purchased enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems either from SAP or from a
competitor. Therefore, in order to continue to grow, SAP needed to design products that
could be purchased and readily used by small and midsized enterprises—and that
required a new strategy and marketing approach. The CCT, the company’s first
corporate-wide strategy unit, was able to provide strategic focus and data necessary for
the change.
Yet another avenue for growth was to build or sell applications that could
turn the enormous amounts of raw data sitting in these ERP systems into business
intelligence and solutions to specific business problems. Consequently, SAP needed
application developers who, much like companies did with Apple’s iPhone, would build
and sell tailored applications that would use SAP’s platform—hence, the importance of
the ecosystems unit that Yusuf developed and ran. And as the ERP marketplace
became more competitive, pricing and marketing strategy and user-centered design
were all becoming much more critical. All of these changes made Yusuf’s skills and the
departments and connections he built more important. Describing his interactions with
some of his SAP colleagues about his group’s and his own role and their importance to
the company, Yusuf said, “You know about software design and development—good,
two points for you. How are we going to sell and make money off this software? All right,
two points for me.” Indeed, Hasso Plattner had recognized the changing skill sets
needed inside SAP, which is why he had encouraged the company to bring in people
with different, broader backgrounds.
Similarly, when the Whiz Kids arrived at Ford, they found a young CEO
and a company that was out of control. The most critical problem was imposing financial
discipline on this sprawling enterprise. Although it is hard to remember now, in the
1940s, after World War II, people would buy any car that was built; even into the 1950s
and 1960s, the big three U.S. automakers owned the market. Design and engineering
weren’t that critical when innovation was mostly about the size of tail fins, and although
the industry was always cyclical, sales skills were not that critical, either. As the Whiz
Kids arrived, finance and business education were both about to take off on a sustained
period of expansion, and to be an analytically skilled, highly educated person in finance
at Ford was to be almost in the center of this emerging universe. Without for a moment
denying the considerable skills of Yusuf and the finance folks at Ford, both also
benefited mightily from being at the right place at the right time. In Yusuf’s case, this
entailed an element of luck, but Halberstam’s description of the move of the Whiz Kids
to Ford Motor shows a good amount of strategic thinking about which company would
provide the group the best opportunity.12
DIAGNOSING DEPARTMENTAL POWER
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.
UK professor Andrew Pettigrew, studying power dynamics in a decision to purchase a
computer, noted the importance of understanding power distributions for influencing the
decision process.13 Carnegie-Mellon professor David Krackhardt’s analysis of power in
a small entrepreneurial company found that the people within the firm with the most
accurate perception of the power distribution and networks of influence had more
power.14 Skill at diagnosing power distributions is useful.
A single measure or a single indicator of anything invariably has
measurement error. That’s why a good doctor will take more than one reading of your
blood pressure and, in diagnosing an illness, typically uses multiple tests and considers
many symptoms. The same is true for diagnosing departmental power. Any single
indicator may be misleading—but if many such indicators provide a consistent answer,
then your confidence should be greater. Over the years, I have found the following to be
reasonably good clues to which departments have the most power.
RELATIVE PAY
Both starting salaries and the pay of more senior positions in departments connote
relative power. In the public utility study mentioned earlier, the starting salary was about 6
percent higher for people beginning their careers in the departments with higher power.
Although that appears to be a small difference, this was a company that hired new
managers into a relatively standardized training and initial career rotation program, so
any difference would be unexpected. Some years ago, a study of salaries of the most
senior executives (now called “C level,” as in “chief”) in different countries revealed that
in Germany, the head of research and development was the best paid; in Japan, it was
research and development and human resources; while in the United States, it was
finance. These relative pay levels speak to the power of the different departments and
show how that departmental power varies across countries.15
PHYSICAL LOCATION AND FACILITIES
Being physically close to those in power both signals power and provides power through
increased access. Some years ago, a student group obtained floor plans for the Pacific
Gas and Electric Company’s headquarters building over many years. The company
provides electricity and natural gas to much of northern California and portions of
Nevada. Over time, the engineering department moved down in the building as the
lawyers and finance folks moved up. Finally, engineering went to a satellite facility miles
away from headquarters in San Francisco. This was occurring as the proportion of
lawyers and finance types in senior management was increasing.
The importance of office location leads to an often-expensive shifting
and redoing of offices as political fortunes wax and wane. This is particularly true in
highly politicized places such as the White House. As John Dean, counsel to President
Nixon, commented, “Success and failure could be seen in the size, décor, and location
of offices. Anyone who moved to a smaller office was on the way down. If a carpenter,
cabinetmaker or wallpaper hanger was busy in someone’s office, this was a sure sign
he was on the rise.”16 I once visited the office of a friend who had taken over as head of
training for a large bank. His office looked out on some air-conditioning units in a rundown
building several blocks from corporate headquarters. When I arrived he said, “Let
me tell you about the role of training in this bank.” He didn’t have to. The office,
unfortunately, told it all. He soon left for other opportunities as he discovered that training
really didn’t matter at that time at that bank.
POSITIONS—ON COMMITTEES AND IN SENIOR MANAGEMENT
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. In many instances, particularly as boards
have replaced insiders with outsiders, finance is the only internal management function
represented on the board. That signals its relative power.
So, too, does the background of the senior-level team, particularly the
CEO and the COO. One way to sense the shift in power going on at SAP would be to
look at Zia Yusuf’s success. But another would be to note that the most recent appointee
as CEO, Leo Apotheker, came out of a sales background—the first nontechnologist to
lead the company. The changing environment of health care has produced a shift in the
power structure of hospitals: they used to be run by doctors; now they are more likely to
be part of a large chain run by people with business and administrative experience. Neil
Fligstein’s study of CEO backgrounds, discussed earlier in this chapter, is interesting
and important because it reflects the shifting power positions of different business
functions over time. And it is not just positions, but also the composition of powerful
committees—such as the executive committee—that can tell you the power of various
departments. Paying attention to what departments are represented in powerful
positions provides an important clue as to where the power lies.
THE TRADE-OFF: A STRONG POWER BASE VERSUS LESS
COMPETITION
You face a dilemma. 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. The Ford finance department in the 1960s, clearly the road to senior
positions not only at Ford but at other companies that recruited from that department,
could take the best of the best graduates of the leading business schools—which was
great for the department and its ability to maintain its power but not so great for those
individuals facing heightened competition. Early entrants into the corporate consulting
team at SAP, not just Zia Yusuf, benefited from being valued pioneers of an important,
new (for the company) business unit with tremendous visibility at the executive board
level. Many people moved from the CCT to other important roles within SAP—something
that was intended from the beginning, since one of the department’s defined objectives
was to be an entry point for talented people from different academic disciplines. But
after a while, what was novel became routine, and it is far from clear that those entering
SAP today would benefit as much from beginning their careers in the CCT.
This type of trade-off—pioneering a new path and the risk that entails
versus entering an established domain but facing greater competition—occurs at the
business level as well. When Apple introduced the first personal computer in the late
1970s, there was no competition, but, as Steve Jobs frequently noted, the product was
often dismissed by those who thought it was too small to do serious computing. Now the
legitimacy of the small computer product category is unquestioned, but current entrants
confront a highly competitive market with very strong players.
Your answer to this dilemma depends on the extent to which you are an
organizational entrepreneur and risk taker. It also depends on whether you are satisfied
being carried along by a powerful tide or you want to get ahead of the wave or create
your own pond where you can stand out.
Ann Moore became chairman and CEO of Time, Inc., in 2002 and has
been frequently listed by Fortune as one of the 50 most powerful women in business.
Moore graduated from Harvard Business School in the late 1970s, but instead of
following her classmates into consulting or investment banking, she chose her lowestpaying
job offer to join Time’s finance department. After spending one year in the more
typical MBA role of financial analyst, Moore sought a central role within the magazine
group. She moved to Sports Illustrated. At the time, the cable division, which included
HBO, looked like where the action was going to be, as magazines were perceived as a
dying entity. Moore started a sports magazine for children and later moved to People,
where she was named president of the magazine in 1993 and increased People’s
performance from an already high level. Moore’s career success came from her
standout performance in a “dying” unit, and from being a woman in a man’s sports
magazine, which helped provide her visibility. By taking a different path, she helped her
prospects for career success.
Entering the Ford finance function, the University of Illinois physics
department, the cable division at Time, or the consulting unit at SAP even relatively late
in the game would, as long as the department remained powerful, assure you of a good
career both in terms of position and money. But if you want to break out of the pack,
other things being equal, you would be better off in a different department with more new
opportunity. Witness Yusuf’s move to the ecosystem unit and the additional career
success that has provided, and even more recently, his move out of SAP to pursue new
opportunities.
What I have detailed is the risk-return trade-off faced in countless
business arenas. As such, there is no right or simple answer. But whatever your choice,
you would be well served to try to understand not just what today’s powerful departments
are, but where you think the power is going. And that forecasting skill is possible,
although not assured or easy, by paying attention to the unfolding dynamics of the
particular business and its environment.
Cisco, the designer and manufacturer of networking equipment, was
founded by computer scientists from Stanford. The power inside the company originally
resided with engineers and those with the technical expertise necessary to develop and
manufacture the company’s first products. But by 1994, the year Mike Volpi graduated
from business school and turned down offers from McKinsey, Bain, and Microsoft to join
Cisco in its business development function, it was becoming clear that Cisco could not
and would not invent all of the technologies necessary to maintain its market leadership
position. John Morgridge, then running the company, had already made the first large
acquisition, purchasing Crescendo Communications in 1993. Soon, Cisco was busy
making acquisitions—acquiring some 70 companies between 1993 and 2000. The
companies that Volpi and his business development team brought into the fold
contributed 40 percent of Cisco’s revenues by 2001.
At Cisco, as in many companies, acquisitions fell under the purview of
business development. Volpi moved to further enhance the business development unit’s
power by building the skills inside that unit that could diminish its reliance on external
advisers, such as investment bankers. Mike Volpi and his colleagues gained
considerable power at Cisco in a short period of time. By the early 2000s, Volpi was
among the four most senior executives at the company even though he was relatively
young and inexperienced with technology. There were other executives, some with
banking or consulting backgrounds, who joined the business development group early
on in its rise to power and participated in its success. Seizing that opportunity required
understanding the company’s need to acquire technology externally and to take seriously
its initial steps down the path to becoming a serial acquirer of existing businesses.
Joining Cisco’s business development unit in 1994 when it had two people, as Mike
Volpi did, put him in a rapidly expanding strategic business function with enormous
visibility to senior management and the board of directors that ultimately discussed and
approved all acquisitions. Joining much later provided comparatively fewer career
advantages.
In this chapter, we have seen how and why power varies across
departments, with implications for developing your power base. In the next chapter, we
consider how, once you decide where you want to be, you can get the job or opportunity
that you want.
4
Getting In: Standing Out and Breaking Some Rules
WHEN KEITH FERRAZZI, now a best-selling author, marketing maven, and star of the
lecture circuit, graduated from Harvard Business School in 1992, he had offers from two
consulting companies, McKinsey and Deloitte. Pat Loconto, the former head of Deloitte
Consulting, recalled that before accepting the offer, Ferrazzi insisted on seeing the
“head guys,” as Ferrazzi called them. Loconto met Keith at an Italian restaurant in New
York City, and “after we had a few drinks at this restaurant, Keith said he would accept
the offer on one condition—he and I would have dinner once a year at the same
restaurant…. So I promised to have dinner with him once a year, and that’s how we
recruited him. That was one of his techniques. That way, he was guaranteed access to
the top.”1
Not many people would have the audacity to ask to speak with the head
of the firm where they were being hired, and even fewer would ask that individual to have
dinner with them once a year. They would be afraid of being turned down, of seeming
arrogant or audacious, of creating waves, and plus, that’s not how things are done in the
typical recruiting scenario. In chapter 3 we saw that it’s important to know where you
want to go—the department you want to be in and the path to power you see for yourself.
It’s even more important to be able to get what you want. As the Ferrazzi story and
research discussed in this chapter show, launching or re-launching your career requires
that you develop both the ability and the willingness to ask for things and that you learn to
stand out. 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. If you don’t, who will?
The late Reginald Lewis was a successful African American corporate
lawyer and founder of a buyout firm, TLC Group. TLC bought the McCall Pattern
Company in the early 1980s and, under Lewis’s turnaround efforts, returned investors 90
times their money. TLC later bought Beatrice Foods, creating the first black-owned
company with revenues of over $1 billion and making Lewis one of the wealthiest people
in the United States. But back in 1965, Lewis wasn’t someone with a prominent place in
African American business history. He didn’t have an international law program at
Harvard and an African American history museum in Maryland named after him.2 He was
just a young man from a tough Baltimore neighborhood who was graduating from
Virginia State University and had set his sights on going to Harvard Law School. During
that summer he was in a Rockefeller Foundation–funded program at Harvard Law
School for high-potential college students designed to interest them in careers in the law
and help them prepare for the application process. There was just one problem—one of
the rules of the program was that no one who participated could even be considered for
admission to Harvard Law School. Moreover, Lewis had not taken the Law School
Aptitude Test, or even applied to Harvard Law, and he wanted to start the program that
fall.
Even as he was doing well in the summer program by expending
enormous effort and standing out in the mock court trial to such an extent that 30 years
later professors still talked about his performance, Lewis met with a Harvard Law
professor and then with the dean of admissions. With these faculty members he pressed
his case by forcefully arguing “the myriad ways an association between Reginald Lewis
and the law school would be mutually beneficial.”3 At the end of the summer, Reggie
Lewis matriculated at Harvard Law School, becoming the only person in the history of
the school who was admitted before he filled out an application.
Both Reginald Lewis and Keith Ferrazzi understood that the worst that
could happen from asking for something would be getting turned down. And if they were
turned down, so what? They would not be any worse off than if they had not asked in the
first place. If they didn’t ask or if they were refused, they would not receive what they
sought, but at least with asking, there was some hope. Some people do believe that
worse things could occur: that their bold behavior could offend those exposed to it and
they could develop a “bad reputation.” Probably not, and the risk of standing out is well
worth taking, as we are about to see.
ASKING WORKS
Asking often works. After reading the Keith Ferrazzi case, one student in my class
decided to ask the head of the London-based consulting firm recruiting him to have a
meal together once a year. The head of the firm not only agreed but suggested a lunch
once a month and also volunteered to be this former student’s mentor. Another individual,
Logan, was working at Deloitte Consulting while the firm was being reorganized. Logan,
a talented person with a good reputation in the Atlanta office, would be getting a boss
who didn’t know him. The new boss was coming to town to meet with everyone for 30
minutes as part of a get-acquainted visit. Logan called the guy and commented that
since he had to have lunch anyway, why not have lunch together? The new boss agreed
and Logan used the opportunity to start forging a positive, personal relationship with his
new boss.
Asking Works, but People Find It Uncomfortable
Asking for help is something people often avoid. First of all, it’s inconsistent with the
American emphasis on self-reliance. Second, people are afraid of rejection because of
what getting turned down might do to their self-esteem. Third, requests for help are
based on their likelihood of being granted: why ask for something like a meeting or
dinner once a year if you are certain the answer is going to be no? The problem is that
people underestimate the chances of others offering help. That’s because those
contemplating making a request of another tend to focus on the costs others will incur
complying with their request, and don’t emphasize sufficiently the costs of saying no.
Rejecting an appeal for help violates an implicit and socially desirable norm of being
“benevolent.” Would you rather be known as generous or stingy? In addition, turning
down a request made in person is awkward. We are taught from childhood to be
generous, so we are inclined to grant the requests of others almost automatically.
Furthermore, saying yes to a request for assistance reinforces the grantor’s position of
power. To offer mentoring or to open doors for another not only causes someone to
depend on you and reciprocate the favor, perhaps by becoming a loyal supporter in the
future; it also signifies that you can do something for someone else and that you
therefore have power.
Business school professor Frank Flynn and a former doctoral student,
Vanessa Lake, studied how much people underestimate others’ compliance with
requests for assistance in a series of studies that illustrate how uncomfortable asking for
help can be. In one study, participants were asked to estimate how many strangers they
would need to approach in order to get 5 people to fill out a short questionnaire. The
average estimate was about 20 people. When the participants actually tried to get
people to fill out the short questionnaire, they only needed to approach about 10 people
on average to get 5 to comply with the request. Asking for some small help from
strangers was apparently so uncomfortable that about one in five of the study
participants did not complete the task. This dropout rate is much higher than typical in
experiments where almost everyone finishes once they agree to participate.
In another study, people estimated they would need to approach 10
strangers to let them borrow their cell phone to make a short call—the actual number
approached to reach the target of 3 acceptances was 6.2. And people also
overestimated the number of strangers they would need to approach to get someone to
walk them to the Columbia University gymnasium about three blocks away. They thought
it would take 7 asks, but it took just 2.3 on average. Once again, asking people to walk
with the participant to show them the gym was apparently very uncomfortable, as more
than 25 percent of the participants did not complete the task after agreeing to do so.
The Flynn and Lake research demonstrates that people are pretty bad at predicting the
behavior of others. It is hard for us to take the other’s perspective and see the world from
his or her point of view. Their research also shows that asking people for small favors
makes the requesters very uncomfortable.4
Asking Is Flattering
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. When Barack Obama arrived in the U.S. Senate, he built
relationships by asking for help. He asked about one-third of the senators for advice and
forged mentoring relationships with Tom Daschle, the party’s former Senate leader who
had just lost his reelection bid, as well as with Ted Kennedy and Republican senator
Richard Lugar. As an article about Obama in the New York Times noted, “His role as a
good student earned him the affection of some fellow lawmakers.”5 If you make your
request as flattering as possible, compliance is even more likely.
Ishan Gupta is a young man on the move. He cofounded Appin
Knowledge Solutions, a technology training institution in India. I met him when he was in
business school, which he attended after he lost a power struggle at Appin. He was still
in his twenties and about to graduate into the difficult labor market in the recession of
2009 with multiple offers. Gupta had done a great job building networks and branding
himself as an up-and-coming talent, particularly in India, and he did it by writing a book
on entrepreneurship.6 Although India has a number of large and successful high-tech
companies, such as Infosys and Wipro, there is not yet much of a culture of
entrepreneurship. Gupta’s book is interesting not so much for its content as for who it
includes as chapter authors and endorsers. The foreword is by Sabeer Bhatia, the
founder of Hotmail, the free e-mail service purchased by Microsoft in 1998 for a price
rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. On the back cover is a picture of
Gupta and his coauthor on either side of Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, who also wrote an
endorsement that appears on the front cover—Kalam was the president of India at the
time of the book’s publication. Inside are 18 very, very short chapters by leading Indian
entrepreneurs, all of whom now know Ishan Gupta and are at least committed enough to
him to have written something for his book. He told me that of all the people he
approached to write a piece for the book, only four or five turned him down, even though
he knew none of them personally when he first approached them.
Gupta’s strategy for getting these people’s help was simple: determine
who he wanted to be involved in the project and then ask them in a way that enhanced
their feelings of self-esteem. Of course, once some prominent people agreed, those
who were approached later were flattered to be asked to join such a distinguished
group. Gupta focused his pitch on how important the subject of entrepreneurship was to
India’s economic development, how successful the people he approached had been in
building businesses, how much wisdom and advice they could share, and how much
help they could provide to others. He told them that he was a fellow entrepreneur and a
graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology like many of them, that he appreciated how
they had risked striking out on their own, and how unusual and courageous it was to start
a business at that time in Indian society. Gupta then paid them the ultimate compliment,
noting that no one would take a book by someone like him seriously and he might miss
important insights, but with their help, it would be a better and more widely read book.
Gupta also lowered the cost of agreeing to his request by asking the prominent and busy
people he approached to write just a page or two, a few hundred words, with some key
advice. People love to give advice as it signals how wise they are, and Gupta packaged
the request brilliantly.
Gupta had cleverly noted that he was a fellow entrepreneur and an IIT
engineer—albeit one with much less success than the people he was approaching. This
strategy works because research shows that people are more likely to accede to
requests from others with whom they share even the most casual of connections.
Participants in an experiment who believed that they shared a birthday with another
person were almost twice as likely to agree to a request to read an eight-page English
essay by that person and provide a one-page critique the following day. In a second
study, people who believed they shared the same first name as the requester donated
twice as much money when asked to give to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.7
If you are approaching someone to ask for something—help finding a
job, a chapter for a book like Gupta’s, advice on some matter of consequence
—presumably you have selected the person you are asking because of their
qualifications and experience. Show that you understand their importance and how wise
they are in how you frame the request. Research summarized by social psychologist
Robert Cialdini in his best-selling book, Influence, illustrates how effective flattery can be
in getting others on our side. 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.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO STAND OUT AND BREAK THE RULES
There is lots of competition inside organizations—for jobs, for promotions, for power.
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. For someone to hire you or promote you they must notice you. You need to
do some things to stand out. And to do that, you need to get over the idea that “the nail
that stands up gets hammered down” and similar aphorisms I hear over and over again
as well as a natural reluctance to toot your own horn. In other words, you need to build
your personal brand and promote yourself, and not be too shy in the process.
When President Barack Obama selected Hillary Clinton to be secretary
of state, she was a U.S. senator from New York and Governor David Patterson had to
appoint her successor in the senate. Initially, virtually everyone thought they knew who
was going to be selected—Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the assassinated former
president John F. Kennedy and a longtime New Yorker who had been actively involved in
the New York City schools and in a variety of public-service activities such as serving on
nonprofit boards. Kennedy had tried to live as normal a life as possible up until that time
and was unprepared for the limelight and the scrutiny that came with it. She was also
surprisingly unprepared for the rough-and-tumble competition for the job and reluctant to
engage in the campaigning—self-promotion—required to secure it. Although there are
many reasons Kennedy eventually decided to take her name out of consideration for the
post, Lawrence O’Donnell, a political analyst for the television network MSNBC and a
personal friend of Kennedy’s, commented: “Most of us have modesty impulses—you
don’t want to brag—and you have to learn to defy these basic human impulses and say,
‘I’m the greatest, and here is why you need me for this job,’ and do it without any
hesitation or any doubt.”8
Many people believe that they can stand out and be bold once they
become successful and earn the right to do things differently. But once you are
successful and powerful, you don’t need to stand out or worry about the competition. It’s
early in your career when you are seeking initial positions that differentiating yourself
from the competition is most important.
When Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Prize–winning secretary of state and
national security adviser, joined the Harvard undergraduate class of 1950 as a
sophomore in 1947, he was surrounded by talented peers. As Walter Isaacson
described in his biography, Kissinger sought the sponsorship of William Elliott, a pillar of
the Government Department. On the basis of his grades, Kissinger was entitled to have
a senior faculty member as his tutor, but Elliott brushed him off as he did many others,
giving him 25 books to read and telling him not to return until he had completed a difficult
essay assignment. Kissinger read the books, completed the essay, and got Elliott to
take him under his wing. Elliott’s sponsorship proved important in his academic career.
Later, Kissinger wrote an undergraduate honors thesis of some 383 pages, resulting in
a rule that specified that, in the future, no undergraduate thesis could be more than 100
pages and informally known as the “Kissinger rule.” Once in the doctoral program in the
Government Department, Kissinger carried himself as if he were a senior faculty
member. He made appointments as if his time were very precious, and invariably
arrived fifteen minutes late. Although such behavior and his apparent arrogance did not
endear him to his fellow students, he built a reputation for his brilliance in part on the
basis of his intellectual capacity but also on the basis of behavior that differentiated
Kissinger from his colleagues.9
But does this strategy of standing out work in cultures that are not as
focused on the individual and as brash as the United States? Absolutely. In Japan, where
I first heard the aphorism about the nail being hammered down, Akio Morita, the
cofounder of Sony Corporation, defied convention as an eldest son by not going into the
family’s sake business, broke from the mold as a father by sending his children out of
Japan for some of their education, offended many of his business colleagues in Japan
and elsewhere by writing a book highly critical of American business practices, led Sony
to become the first Japanese company to list on the New York Stock Exchange, and
built products that were smaller and more portable than those of his competitors.10
Soichiro Honda, founder of the Japanese automobile company that bears his name,
was famous for his antics, which included hurling tools at workers who did inferior work
and skydiving even when he was in his seventies.
From another Japanese, Kiich Hasegawa, who built the consulting
company Proudfoot into one of the larger consulting companies in Japan, I learned the
wisdom of standing out, even in, or possibly particularly in, places where it is “not done.”
Proudfoot put on unconventional marketing events, such as a lavish reception with a
beautiful female Japanese violinist. Hasegawa often employed a brash style, speaking
frankly to customers and even potential customers about their organization’s problems.
When I asked him about his unusual approach, he described his marketing strategy as
almost seducing people to come to you and your company to see what you are about.
One way of doing that was by doing things differently, which intrigued others and piqued
their interest. He argued that he and Proudfoot had been successful precisely because
they did things differently from the expected Japanese way of doing things.
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.
This advice, and much other advice in this book, although based on
solid research findings, seems to defy conventional wisdom and break the rules of how
you are supposed to behave. Of course it breaks the rules! 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. Gladwell described
research that shows how playing by the rules—following conventional wisdom—in
arenas ranging from sports to war favors the already more powerful, while doing things
differently and following an unconventional strategy permits even heavily outresourced
underdogs to triumph. In every war in the last 200 years conducted between unequally
matched opponents, the stronger party won about 72 percent of the time. However, when
the underdogs understood their weakness and used a different strategy to minimize its
effects, they won some 64 percent of the time, cutting the dominant party’s likelihood of
victory in half. As Gladwell noted, “When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules,
they win.”11 So, if you have all the power you want or need, by all means not only follow
the rules but encourage everyone else to do so too. But if you are still traversing your
path to power, take all this conventional wisdom and “rule-following” stuff with a big grain
of salt.
LIKABILITY IS OVERRATED
People are sometimes afraid to ask for things and to pursue strategies that cause them
to stand out because they are concerned they won’t come across as likable. Research
generally shows that people are more likely to do things for others whom they like, and
that likability is an important basis of interpersonal influence,12 but there are two
important caveats. First, most of the studies examined situations of relatively equal
power where compliance with a request for assistance was largely discretionary.
Second, as Machiavelli pointed out 500 years ago in his treatise The Prince, although it
is desirable to be both loved and feared, if you have to pick only one, pick fear if you
want to get and keep power.
Machiavelli’s advice anticipated research in social psychology about
how we perceive others. That research found that the two virtually universal dimensions
used to assess people are warmth and competence.13 Here’s the rub: to appear
competent, it is helpful to seem a little tough, or even mean. Harvard Business School
professor Teresa Amabile studied how participants reacted to excerpts from actual
reviews of books. Amabile found that negative reviewers were perceived as more
intelligent, competent, and expert than positive reviewers, even when independent
experts judged the negative reviews to be of no higher quality.14 The title of her paper,
“Brilliant but Cruel,” says it all. Other research has confirmed her findings: nice people
are perceived as warm, but niceness frequently comes across as weakness or even a
lack of intelligence.15
Condoleezza Rice served as national security adviser under President
George W. Bush. Before joining the government, Rice was provost at Stanford under
President Gerhard Casper; there she was known for being someone you did not want to
cross. As Jacob Heilbrunn wrote, “Rice slashed the budget and challenged proponents
of affirmative action…earning the enmity of many students and much of the faculty for
her blunt style. Rice’s credo, as she told one protégé, was that ‘ people may oppose you,
but when they realize you can hurt them, they’ll join your side.’”16
Likability Can Create Power, but Power Almost Certainly Creates
Likability
Condoleezza Rice is right: people will join your side if you have power and are willing to
use it, not just because they are afraid of your hurting them but also because they want to
be close to your power and success. 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.
Some years ago, social psychologist Robert Cialdini and some
colleagues did a wonderful study of this effect. Cialdini taught at Arizona State University,
which has a first-class but not dominating football team. In a typical season ASU will win
some but not all of its football games. This created a great opportunity for the ASU
researchers to ask: If the team won the game the previous Saturday, would more
students wear clothes with school insignia the following Monday? Their study found that a
higher proportion of people wore visible items of clothing with the school colors, letters,
name, or other insignia following a victory than following a defeat. They also found that
people were more likely to use the inclusive pronoun “we” to refer to a group following
that group’s success rather than failure.17
What this research implies is that people’s support for you will depend
as much on whether or not you seem to be “winning” as on your charm or ability. When
writer Gary Weiss profiled Timothy Geithner, who was then the up-and-coming president
of the New York Federal Reserve, “some of the nation’s most prominent figures in
government and finance—former Federal Reserve chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan
Greenspan, as well as John Thain, then CEO of Merrill Lynch, and former New York Fed
chief Gerald Corrigan—were only too happy to share fond anecdotes about this youthful
public official.” But things changed in the fall of 2008, when Geithner became Obama’s
secretary of the Treasury and ran into trouble as the financial meltdown unfolded: “When I
approached them [these same prominent figures] again for this article, to get a word of
defense of their beleaguered friend, the reaction was far different.”18
What’s Likability Got to Do with Anything?
At a conference in Florida where I was giving a presentation, I sat next to a Harvard
Business School graduate from the class of 1992 at dinner. I asked if he knew Keith
Ferrazzi, who had graduated that same year. The answer was, “Of course.” He wasn’t a
close personal friend of Keith’s and noted that Ferrazzi was not necessarily very popular
with his HBS classmates. My next question, had he hired Ferrazzi to do marketing
consulting for his company in the online publishing space? The answer: “Certainly.
What’s liking got to do with hiring someone to help you build your business? The
question is, ‘Can they be helpful to you?’”
This instrumental view of personal relationships is not uncommon and
indeed may be necessary for organizational survival. During Clarence Thomas’s wellpublicized
Supreme Court nomination hearings, Anita Hill came forward with
accusations of sexual harassment. The question frequently asked of her was: if she was
so uncomfortable and Thomas had actually behaved inappropriately toward her, why had
she continued to have anything to do with him? In Strange Justice, Jane Mayer and Jill
Abramson provided a possible answer: “Hill chose to stay in touch with Thomas
because it was good for her career. Thomas was one of the most powerful people—and
probably the most powerful African-American—in her field…. Whether Hill liked it or not,
she and Thomas were professionally linked, and it was up to her to either put a good
face on it or allow it to be a festering problem.”19
Research shows that attitudes follow behavior—that if we act in a
certain way, over time our attitudes follow. For example, if we act friendly toward an
adversary whose help we need, we will come to feel more friendly as well. There are
many theoretical mechanisms that account for this effect. One holds that people infer
their own attitudes from their behavior—or as Michigan professor Karl Weick put it, “I
know what I think when I see what I say.” Another is Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive
dissonance, which argues that people seek to avoid inconsistency, and one way of
accomplishing that is to adjust their attitudes to be consistent with their behaviors.20
What this implies is that if we interact with powerful people because we need them to do
some task or to help us in our career, over time we will come to like them more or at
least forgive their rough edges. And in choosing who we will associate with, usefulness
to our career and job loom as important criteria.
People Forget and Forgive
The principle of hedonism underlies many theories of individual behavior, ranging from
economics to psychology—we seek pleasure and avoid pain. This is as true for our
memories and our interpersonal relationships as it is for any other aspect of our lives.
Therefore, over time we will forget the specifics of painful interactions just as women tell
me they forget the pain of childbirth, and although we can remember the fact that we had
pain from a surgery, the intensity and specificity of that memory soon fades. We also
forgive the slights and wounds inflicted by others, and are particularly likely to forgive
people if we are in contact with them. And we are more likely to remain in contact if they
are powerful. Over time, even the most contentious adversaries can become close
friends.
In the 1920s, Robert Moses, New York City’s master builder and urban
planner, was beginning his career as Long Island parks commissioner. He seized some
land called the Taylor estate using a constitutionally questionable process. Kingsland
Macy, a stockbroker and a member of a corporation that had an interest in the estate,
opposed Moses and fought him in court, believing that no one’s home was safe if
Moses’s power was not curtailed. A few years later, Macy’s financial resources were
exhausted by the struggle and he finally gave in. Macy subsequently went into politics
and for decades ruled the Suffolk County Republican organization with an iron hand. The
two formerly bitter adversaries became close friends:
And when after Macy had fought his way to power, Robert Moses, needing his help,
made overtures of friendship, Macy accepted them. Although the strength of their
personalities often made them clash, the two one-time “amateurs in politics” were for
more than thirty years the closest of political allies, allies so close, in fact, that when,
in 1962, cancer-ravaged King Macy knew he was about to die, Moses was the only
person outside his immediate family whom he wanted to see.21
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. But acquiring and wielding power requires the
resources to reward your friends and punish your enemies, the information and access
that can foster your rise in the organization. So let’s explore how to acquire resources,
even if you seemingly have nothing.
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