7 Rules of Power E-Book

Jeffrey Pfeffer

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 333

Beschreibung

If you want to 'change lives, change organizations, change the world,' the Stanford business school's motto, you need power. Is power the last dirty secret or the secret to success? Both. While power carries some negative connotations, power is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Don't blame the tool for how some people used it. Rooted firmly in social science research, Pfeffer's 7 rules provide a manual for increasing your ability to get things done, including increasing the positive effects of your job performance. With 7 Rules of Power, you'll learn, through both numerous examples as well as research evidence, how to accomplish change in your organization, your life, the lives of others, and the world.

Leseprobe

Praise for 7 Rules of Power

“In one word—incredible! Dr. Pfeffer has written the ultimate book on power that avoids the traps of conventional theories on leadership, and instead dives into the techniques that really change your life and career. Beautifully written and full of poignant stories and examples, 7 Rules of Power is my recommended read for anyone looking to radically change the trajectory of their life for good.”

—Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers 50 #1 Executive Coach and New York Times bestselling author of Mojo and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

“Like a rousing slap of truth in the face, Pfeffer’s tough-minded, capstone book on power identifies 7 research-based, reality-revealing rules for hierarchical success. Anyone hoping to rise within an organization needs to obtain power and, therefore, needs to read this brilliant book.”

—Robert Cialdini, New York Times bestselling author of Influence and Pre-Suasion

“7 Rules of Power delivers easy-to-digest, practical tips for how you can be more powerful in your own life. Using real-life examples of individuals altering their lives by following his rules, Pfeffer delivers his message with humor and humanity. Pfeffer shows us how often we give away our power and how we can reclaim it. I was so inspired by Pfeffer’s writing and his class that I wrote a book, Take Back Your Power, for women in workplaces not always set up for them. It is a tribute to all I have learned from Professor Pfeffer as both a mentor and coach over the past decade.”

—Deborah Liu, author of Take Back Your Power; CEO, Ancestry.com; board member, Intuit; former VP, Facebook; and founder, Women in Product

“Jeff Pfeffer’s latest leadership masterpiece is as brilliantly insightful as it is refreshingly candid and pragmatic, anchored in cutting edge scholarship. Pfeffer is the current Leonard Bernstein of leadership studies. There is simply no competitor to the highly readable, smart, wide-ranging take on power in 7 Rules of Power.”

—Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, founder and CEO of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute; Lester Crown Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies, Yale School of Management

“Dr. Pfeffer’s 7 Rules of Power is a must read and highly useful for anyone at any stage of their career. The book offers a balanced, thoughtful view on what is an often uncomfortable topic for many people, especially women. Pfeffer is clear and to the point with practical, research-based steps for owning your power your way. It will stir your thinking and truly change your perspective.”

—Stacy Brown-Philpot, former CEO, TaskRabbit; Board Member, HP, Inc., and Nordstrom; Forbes 40 under 40; former head of Google’s online sales and operations in India

“Jeff Pfeffer is the most honest teacher I’ve ever had. He is unafraid to say it like it is—a rare quality where people maintain pleasantries at the expense of the truth. The lessons from 7 Rules of Power will take a lifetime to fully implement. The book provides the lens through which I view the decisions and behaviors of those around me. Most importantly, Pfeffer has taught me that to win the game, changing the rules trumps raw effort.”

—Vivas Kumar, CEO and co-founder, Mitra Chem, Stanford GSB 2021

“When I started reading 7 Rules of Power, I had a long list of assumptions about leadership and building influence. With each chapter, more pieces of the power puzzle fell into place. By trying the strategies from the book, I founded a consulting company where I leveraged my 20+ years of professional experience to provide research, innovation, and strategy advice. I am building my own brand as an effective executive coach. Through relentless networking, I have found powerful allies to break the rules and pursue a power-related Ph.D. My mantras are “Why not me? “Why not now?” Most importantly, “How can you tell whether something will work for you if you haven’t tried it?”

—Monika Stezewska-Kruk, CEO, Corvus Innovation; Executive Coach and Facilitator; Stanford LEAD program graduate

“7 Rules of Power will shoot you to the moon and beyond. This book changed my life. A Nigerian woman, I work as a geoscientist in an Italian multinational energy company. Performance got me in, but power kept me ahead. I used principles from the book to build influence outside of my company. I built networks and became central. I received international awards and invitations to speak at top leadership forums. I was named among the most influential persons of African descent. I created a unique brand for myself, and now I represent my organization abroad. Usually the only black woman in the room, 7 Rules of Power gave me an edge.”

—Tosin Joel, Stanford LEAD; MIT Sloan Fellow; Director, Hack for Inclusion; founder, GTBOOL; Project Head, Eni

“Ideas from 7 Rules of Power helped me design and live my dream career as a digital health expert. This book is a must-have for minorities and people seeking to have social impact, because we tend to shy away from the concept of power. 7 Rules reframes power and provides tactical, practical tools to actually change the world!”

—Marta Milkowska, Stanford GSB 2020; Consultant at Boston Consulting Group; Interim CEO, Reveri Health; founder, Dtx Future; first Stanford platform on digital therapeutics

“The thing about power is that it will always exist. After a lifetime of being the collaborator, team player, and ‘nice’ person, Pfeffer’s 7 Rules of Power taught me that power is not about control or greed—it is about effectiveness. Gaining and using power allows us to effect the change we want in building a career, organization, or a world that aligns with our personal values. The lessons have been transformational in my venture capital career and continue to guide my personal and professional path.”

—Laura Chau, Stanford GSB 2018; Partner, Canaan Partners; Forbes 30 Under 30, Board Member, Ollie Pets and Clutch

Also by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Dying for a Paycheck

Leadership BS

Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t

What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (with Robert I. Sutton)

The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Robert I. Sutton)

Hidden Value: Achieving Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People (with Charles A. O’Reilly)

The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First

Competitive Advantage Through People

New Directions for Organization Theory

Organizations and Organization Theory

Managing with Power

Power in Organizations

The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (with Gerald R. Salancik)

Organizational Design

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by BenBella Books, Inc 2022 First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

Copyright © Jeffrey Pfeffer 2022

The right of Jeffrey Pfeffer to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Copyediting by James Fraleigh Proofreading by Michael Fedison and Lisa Story Text design and composition by PerfecType, Nashville, TN

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800751262 eISBN: 9781800751279

To the Amazing Kathleen, the Love of My Life, Whose Death Left a Hole in My Heart & Soul

CONTENTS

In the Beginning: The Challenge of Power

Introduction: Power, Getting Things Done, and Career Success

Rule 1 | Get Out of Your Own Way

Rule 2 | Break the Rules

Rule 3 | Appear Powerful

Rule 4 | Build a Powerful Brand

Rule 5 | Network Relentlessly

Rule 6 | Use Your Power

Rule 7 | Success Excuses (Almost) Everything: Why This Is the Most Important Rule of All

Coda: Staying on the Path to Power

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

IN THE BEGINNING

The Challenge of Power

If you want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.

—A quote attributed to me.

I REGULARLY SUFFER A FORM of what might be called intellectual whiplash. On the one hand, people—even a good friend and insightful editor—tell me my ideas about power don’t fit the prevailing zeitgeist with its emphasis on collaboration, being nice, and enacting politically correct behavior. On the other hand, I get emails like the one from an individual enrolled in my online class on power. That person told me and his classmates that he learned that performance is not enough. Rather, he now knew he had to ask people in power in his company for what he wanted and needed to advance his career and achieve his job objectives and to flatter higher-ups; to believe in himself and act and speak with power; to build a network and support system; and, when confronting opposition and conflict, to be smart in how and when to fight his battles. And oh, by the way, he would miss my final live session because his network-building and “get noticed” efforts had resulted in his being on the corporate plane with two C-level officers to make an international market visit at the same time as the session.

So, what to believe about power? How to act—what to do? 7 Rules of Power captures my current thinking and the most recent social science research to help you answer those questions.

WHY THIS BOOK, NOW?

I thought I would never write another book on power. I have written three,1 four if you count a prequel2 that confronts leadership aphorisms that are mostly untrue and unhelpful, like recommendations to be modest, authentic, and truthful. My last two books on power have done reasonably well, being used in classes literally worldwide; why this book, and why now?

Four things changed my mind. First, I have continued my efforts to convey material on organizational power and politics ever more effectively. I have the privilege of doing so for some of the most talented people in the world, both online and in person. This activity has deepened my insights about how to simplify, clarify, and articulate more clearly the ideas behind rules of power—how and why people can take actions that, very practically and often quickly, will alter their career trajectories and their lives.

Students have shown me how learning the rules of power and their application can have profoundly positive and immediate effects. A recent, not unusual email:

Thank you for all the lessons from your . . . class. It helped me start my own department, get a salary and title I never considered at my age, and today it got me praise from two ministers during an international signing ceremony. What’s the secret? I simply asked for things. I also took your advice of strategically placing myself in places where my . . . degrees and AI knowledge are considered very rare instead of common. Lastly, I invested in putting myself out there, networking with those at work, and building a name for myself.

None of what this individual, a Saudi national working for Aramco, described is rocket science, although all of what they did is consistent with social science evidence—and all too infrequently implemented. That this example comes from a different country and culture suggests what research evidence says: the rules of power are quite general and hold across cultures. Because of the positive effects of this material, I thought I should share my expanding capability to teach about organizational power and, more broadly, my most recent insights about helping people on their path to power.

The Magic Number Seven

After observing my former students as well as political and business leaders (particularly successful ones), and reviewing the relevant social science, I concluded that there were basically seven rules of power. Organizing lessons about power into these seven fundamental rules is an effective way to teach people what they need to do to have more influence and success.

Seven turns out to be a good number of rules. In 1956, George Miller wrote an influential article arguing that “the unaided observer is severely limited in the amount of information he can receive, process, and remember,” with seven elements or ideas, plus or minus two, constituting most people’s capacity.3 A more recent analysis of Miller’s argument noted that “the number 7 occurs in many aspects of life, from the seven wonders of the world to the seven seas and seven deadly sins.”4 Further research has consistently confirmed the validity and robustness of Miller’s original insight about cognitive limitations once one gets much beyond seven items.

Fortunately, my ideas about the building and use of power can be effectively captured in seven rules, which constitute the chapters of this book. The seven rules are:

1. Get out of your own way.

2. Break the rules.

3. Appear powerful.

4. Build a powerful brand.

5. Network relentlessly.

6. Use your power.

7. Success excuses almost everything you may have done to acquire power.

I believe the seventh rule to be one of the more important, as it can cause people to act rather than worry needlessly about consequences.

Explaining the Current Leadership Landscape

The second factor that changed my mind was the observable reality of contemporary political and business leaders, including but certainly not limited to people like Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, and Elon Musk, that I find people do not understand. Many people consider these individuals and their behaviors anomalies, but fail to recognize that as they exemplify the rules of power, these leaders offer important lessons about contemporary—yes, contemporary, not ancient—successful leadership behavior.

Trump surely follows the seven rules of power I outline in this book. In fact I originally intended to write about the leadership lessons of Trump. I decided against it because he is such a polarizing figure that people find it hard to objectively watch what he does and evaluate it outside the context of Trump himself. However, in thinking about why Trump has been so unexpectedly successful in politics and other domains, I developed insights into not only the social science foundations that help explain his success, but also the behavior and outcomes achieved by many other corporate leaders and politicians in the United States and elsewhere.

Because people do not understand the behavioral realities of power, they are continually surprised by both what happens and the effectiveness of actions that seemingly violate conventional wisdom about leadership—mostly because much of this wisdom is largely untethered from research on the social psychology of human behavior. Sometimes the surprise is accompanied by unanticipated career setbacks that arise because people are unprepared for the realities of social life.

My hope is that this book will help people better understand the everyday dynamics and political truths of organizations of all types, public and private. My explicit goal, stated in my Paths to Power course outline, is to provide people with the knowledge that, if implemented, can help them never have to leave a job involuntarily. Although I have not achieved that goal, as I still see too many people being ousted, the goal remains relevant and important. Teaching people how to put the seven rules of power into practice can help them achieve that objective.

Power Is Not a “Dark” Art; It’s the Key to Success

My third motivation for writing this new book: all too frequently I encounter people, either by email or in my courses, who initially express resistance, skepticism, discomfort, challenges, and similar feelings with the ideas I teach. Not because they doubt the ideas’ existence in the world or maybe even their validity founded on social science research or what they observe. To use the word of one recent email correspondent, they find the principles and research findings “depressing”—or, quoting my friend and colleague Bob Sutton, “dark.” Consequently, people eschew opportunities to make things happen and accelerate their careers as effectively as they might.

I figured that one way to fight these perceptions was to provide people seven rules that, if they used them, would make them more powerful. Once people had more power, they would be much less depressed and experience the world as less dark, because they would be considerably more effective at getting things done as they navigated that world. They would also be physically and mentally healthier, because research shows that health is related to job control and one’s position in the social hierarchy,5 and happier, because power is associated with increased happiness.6

Have the Principles—the Rules—of Power Changed?

Fourth, I wanted to address directly the frequent narrative that today everything is different—fundamentally changed by new values, new generations (and their own new values), and new technologies, particularly social media—and therefore old ideas about power and influence are no longer relevant. That argument is why it is not surprising that people feel ambivalent about my class and writings, given the current attitude in business schools and other programs in leadership and administration. Power—and possibly even more so, organizational (or maybe all) politics—is on the outs.

Many books and research studies that are ostensibly about power are fundamentally ambivalent about embracing techniques to make people more powerful. Many commentaries on power, while optimistic and uplifting and often quite popular, are, in their Panglossian views of human behavior and the social world, remarkably untethered from the empirical realities of social life. By neglecting or actively rejecting the fundamental, enduring realities of power and human behavior, such commentators’ earnest and well-meaning attempts to make things better—and different—are almost certainly doomed to fail, just as attempting to build a rocket without adhering to the laws of physics and thermodynamics is unlikely to succeed. Here are a few of the many examples of writings on power that I find disconnected from the data about actual power in the world.

Moses Naim wrote The End of Power,7 about how powerful people in powerful roles are experiencing greater limits on their power. Naim notes how many people with fancy titles had confided in him about the perceived (or claimed) gaps between the power others attributed to them and both what they could get done and their own self-expressed perceptions of their power. When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame launched a book club, he named this book his first selection.8

I trust you appreciate the irony. As I write this, Zuckerberg is recentralizing his control over Facebook, and of course Facebook, like many of its Silicon Valley peers, has a supermajority voting structure that assures, as New York Times technology columnist Kara Swisher has aptly noted, that Zuckerberg cannot be fired regardless of what he does.9 Some people may face the end of power or limits on their power, but certainly not Zuckerberg; a lot fewer people have tenuous power than claim to.

In this same book, which I often hear about as an example of how theories and realities of power have fundamentally changed, Naim asks what globalization was doing to economic concentration. The presumption was that the globalization of business—and therefore, competition—would disperse economic power. He asked that question in 2013. By now the answer is clear, and it is not what many expected. Not only in the US but around the world, antitrust authorities are girding for battle because globalization has increased the concentration of power and wealth, particularly in technology multinationals but in other industries as well, such as telecommunications and even retail (perhaps you have heard of Amazon?). Following the 2008–2009 financial crisis, banks that were criticized as being too big to fail got—bigger. The story of nonexistent antitrust enforcement and increasing concentration of economic power is one often empirically told.10

Then there are Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, authors of New Power.11 Their thesis is that power wasn’t ending, but that power and its bases and use were being fundamentally transformed by things like the internet, social media, and new communication modalities. The result of this social and technological change was to be greater democratization, a word they use often, as the ideas of new power would make power less concentrated and available to more people. Their basic argument, expressed by numerous others, was that the ability of many individuals to readily acquire a communications platform (think blogs and accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and to easily access the world’s information (think Google) would lead to a proliferation of innovation and social movements. Much like the oft-discussed but ultimately unsuccessful Arab Spring, there would be, to take a phrase from the 1960s, more power to the people, including those lacking formal positions of power.

Unfortunately, reality intruded, and the most successful users of the new communication methods and social media platforms turned out to be those who already held political and economic power. According to one Philippines-based observer of the media scene, “Power is consolidating power” almost everywhere in the world, as independent news groups are eliminated, enabling the voice “with the loudest megaphone” to shape reality.12The Economist Intelligence Unit, which since 2006 has compiled a democracy index, noted that “democracy is in retreat . . . The global score of 5.44 out of ten is the lowest recorded since the index began.”13 Or maybe you prefer the Human Freedom Index, published by the conservative Cato Institute since 2008. Since that time, overall freedom in the world has decreased, with 61 countries increasing their ratings and 79 decreasing.14

To take some examples of the consolidation of power from the political realm, in China, Xi Jinping has officially made himself ruler for life, as, in effect, has Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Authoritarian rule is on the rise in numerous other European and Asian countries, including Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and the Philippines. Hong Kong’s special status has mostly eroded with China increasingly circumscribing its rights. In the United States, Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 first by effectively harnessing “new power communication modalities” such as Facebook, then—according to the fact checkers at the Washington Post—by telling numerous falsehoods,15 with the Republican Party ultimately falling in line behind him. Although he (barely) lost reelection in 2020, Trump received the second most votes in the history of presidential elections, exceeding his 2016 tally.

In short, power is not ending, nor are many of its manifestations new. To effectively lead in a world that has not changed as much as many think or expect, people need to understand the basic principles—the rules—of power.

USING ANALYSIS AND DATA TO CREATE A MORE POWERFUL YOU

Maybe these facts and many like them are “depressing” or “dark.” But to reprise the quote with which I opened this chapter, if power is to be used for good, more good people need power. And if they are going to get that power, they need to understand the well-established social science verities that will permit them to succeed in a world where power has neither disappeared, nor become less concentrated, nor changed in its determinants and strategies. Simply put, people need to embrace the rules of power, not run from them. My job in this book is not to make you happy or tell you stories that uplift your spirits. All the same, I consider myself not a cynic but a pragmatist and a realist.

Since 1979, I have taught as a full professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. My course on power in organizations is one of the most popular electives, not because of my charm or charisma and certainly not because the material fits the prevailing ethos. It has succeeded because, as one student put it, “your class actually helps us understand the world we continually encounter,” and does so in a way that makes many people demonstrably more effective and successful. The school’s motto is “Change lives, change organizations, change the world.” Change requires power. If change were going to happen without power and influence, it would have already. The first step to making change is to get yourself (and your allies) into positions of leverage—a word I am going to use a lot in this book—so that your efforts have disproportionate effects in accomplishing things. If you want happy talk, this is not the place for you.

My reading material reflects this mindset. Among the books sitting on my desk are one titled How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize;16Cheaters Always Win: The Story of America;17 and Cheating,18 by my late Stanford law school colleague Deborah Rhode. All of them are worth reading for their deep understanding of the realities of history and human behavior. Their message: life is not always fair, even though people “cling to the idea that people generally get what they deserve.”19 People are seduced by and attracted to narcissists and despots and wind up voting for or working for them, frequently with bad outcomes. Honesty is not automatic or inevitable, but needs institutional structures and sanctions—unfortunately, often missing—to organize social life and reduce cheating and deception. You get the point.

Sociologist Murray Edelman wrote several books on political language. One has a line that I particularly appreciate.20 Paraphrased, it goes: it is often the case in politics that one side gets the rhetoric, the other the reality. Despite all the talk about the changes in power dynamics, new power, the end of power, and so forth, much as magicians wave their hands so you aren’t as likely to see their tricks, people are diverted from the fundamental understandings that can make them more successful and effective. If you read this book and follow its advice, you will not be one of those people.

I offer one other recommendation. When you hear people—leaders, academics, “gurus” (a term I detest)—provide advice and tell their stories, do a modicum of due diligence. You possess access, through online databases and other sources, to a wealth of information. Go online and see how many lawsuits have been filed against these people, what various websites say about their leadership styles. Better yet, track down those who have worked with and for these wonderful leaders and teachers, and talk to them about the realities of their organizations and behavior. Or seek out stories journalists have written about them. Simply put, engage in some critical thinking and investigate. You will soon see that, to paraphrase Shakespeare with the line “Methinks the lady doth protest too much” from Hamlet, often the people who most forcefully advocate authenticity and transparency are the least likely to possess those qualities. No, you don’t need to believe me and the welter of social science evidence I will provide about the rules of power. You can believe your own eyes—as long as you bother to keep your eyes open.

INTRODUCTION

Power, Getting Things Done, and Career Success

ON MAY 10, 2019, RUKAIYAH ADAMS received the Tapestry Award from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The award honors African American alumni “who have woven inspirational leadership, intellectual excellence, and service to others through their professional and personal life.”1 Today Adams is chief investment officer of the $750 million Meyer Memorial Trust, headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Previously she chaired the board that oversees $100 billion in public pensions and other assets for Oregon. A former student in my class who has a law degree as well as an MBA, Adams faced a horrible job market when she graduated in 2008 and had difficulty landing a suitable position. She was a Black woman in an industry (asset management) that had few African Americans or women; a recent study reported that of the $69.1 trillion in global financial assets, women and people of color managed less than 1.3 percent of them.2 Adams quickly had to figure out how to turn what could have been a problem—being different—into a strength. She said, “Clearly these organizations are not going to impart power and opportunity on me, so I have to make it myself.” She found a position at a hedge fund where she became a trusted confidante. Adams commented:

What once was a position of an outsider, being black and female, became an information conduit. People told me things they wanted raised, but they were too fearful to raise themselves because they were so deeply invested in their need to support their families, and most of them had spouses who didn’t work . . . I was young and single and as far as they were concerned, a total outsider already. They felt that they could tell me things and raise issues. Then the executive team began to pivot to me when they needed information . . . I was in a position of power. That turned into a promotion to the COO seat, and once I was in that seat, the investors turned to me to tell them the truth during really different times.

By 2012, Adams was managing six trading desks and $6.5 billion in assets for a Portland financial services company.

Rukaiyah Adams mastered the lessons from the class I teach. She understood the importance of being central in communication networks, a topic we will revisit when we look at the importance of networking in chapter five. Most importantly, she understood the first rule of power: to get out of her own way—to not expect a just or fair world, and certainly not to play by rules that would leave her disadvantaged, but instead to make her own rules and play her own game.

I would love to say that Adams’s success was because of my class—which she mentioned in her award speech—but Adams graduated near the top of her MBA class and has two professional degrees. Power is seldom the most important source of success, but what it can do, as it did for Rukaiyah Adams, is help leverage your performance and talent. Job performance is important, but if no one notices that performance, it is for naught. Power and performance together will get you much further ahead than either one separately. Adams both embraced the principles of power and understood how she could use them to reach positions of influence, from which she could achieve both personal goals and her objective of advancing a set of social causes. She noted, “I think I was drawing on the kind of power that Black women have to improvise and survive.”

Not everyone embraces the rules of power as Adams did. I well understand the psychological barriers some people confront in accepting material on power and, even more importantly, putting it into use. People typically go through various stages of resistance as they take the class—or for that matter, as they read my books on power. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to get you through any skepticism and resistance more quickly, so you can get on with your learning and, even more importantly, put it to use and improve your circumstances as much and as swiftly as possible.

POWER IS A TOOL PUT TO MANY USES

Most fundamentally, power is a tool. Like many or maybe most tools, power, once mastered, can be used to accomplish great things, horrendously terrible things, and everything in between. The point: Don’t confuse or conflate your reactions to “power” with your reactions to how, or for what, it has been deployed—particularly if it has been deployed successfully against you. Don’t resent the inevitable ubiquity of power in social life; instead, master it.

Here’s one example (among many) of seeing power and then learning about its use, not evaluating it by its results. In 1985, the late John Jacobs,3 then a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford for the year and a student in my class, and who later became the chief political reporter for the McClatchy newspapers, gave me a book that he had coauthored. The inscription inside: “To Jeff Pfeffer, who no doubt would appreciate this man’s power base.” The book: Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People.4 Before leaving the US and inciting mass murder and suicide in Guyana, Jones had very effectively insinuated himself into the San Francisco political power structure by using many of the techniques I teach.

Jones cultivated a relationship—to cite Rule 5, he networked—with Dr. Carlton Goodlett, one of the more powerful African Americans in San Francisco, who published a newspaper that provided Jones favorable coverage. Jones sent presents to politicians and invited them to Peoples Temple events and dinners, thus activating the norm of reciprocity—a norm so powerful that people repay favors even if they know the favor-doer won’t know if they reciprocated.5 Jones had Peoples Temple members volunteer to work in the political campaign of soon-to-be mayor George Moscone and a liberal slate of candidates for the 1975 city election, and bundled contributions that supported the liberal takeover of city politics that year. Jones made sure the recipients knew where the money and volunteer labor hours were coming from, not simply relying on reciprocity, but also signaling to the politicians that Jones controlled valuable monetary and human resources, so they would be well served to have Jones on their side. After Moscone won, Jones asked for and received an appointment to the San Francisco Housing Authority, thereby obtaining an aura of legitimacy for him and his organization as he received favorable press coverage that helped him build a positive brand.6

Just because Jim Jones used many techniques found to be effective in acquiring power does not make those behaviors bad or wrong. Jones used them for malign purposes, but they can also be used for good. To be clear, my task in this book is to teach you as much as I can about the rules of power and how to use them. It is up to you to decide the ends or purposes to which you will apply this knowledge. This idea of teaching you the rules of power in a value-neutral way—much as one might teach about the physics of atomic energy—is a “different” approach from the one many colleagues take.

Several people in the leadership education business have decided that their real role is as lay preachers—to teach you ethics, values, and ideals, along with maybe some social science, particularly if that social science conforms to those ideals. They may decide to shield you from research on topics such as narcissism7 or the frequency of lying and the absence of consequences for doing so8 if they think such subject matter would be disturbing. This is a position I completely reject. Not that ideals, values, and so forth aren’t important. Of course they are. But there are three problems with conflating “principles” (as in moral or ethical principles) with learning about the skills and tactics of leadership.

First, the evidence on whether even teaching ethical principles actually increases ethical behavior is decidedly mixed, notwithstanding research paradigms designed to find an effect, such as putting people into hypothetical situations or measuring their knowledge of appropriate behavior rather than their actual behaviors. For example, a matched-pairs study (where people are matched on important demographics and other characteristics and then one person is given the treatment—in this case some ethics training—and the other, the control, is not) of undergraduates at an Australian university concluded that “ethics education has limited impact on students’ responses to ethical dilemmas.”9 A study of students’ cheating behavior found no effect of education or training on actual cheating.10 A review of the effect of teaching classes on business and society and business ethics concluded that any improvement “appears to be short-lived.”11 A reasonably comprehensive review of corporate-based ethics training noted that the evidence on its effectiveness was inconclusive. This article noted that “incorporating the principles of responsible management into training does not automatically lead to behavioral change among practicing professionals because cognitive growth alone does not produce the ability and readiness to act responsibly at work.”12

Second, it is far from clear that anyone other than someone’s family or clergy has the right—or even the obligation—to tell others what their goals and objectives in their lives should be. We can tell people what we know about individual and organizational behavior, and we can help them think through how to make decisions. But what people want to achieve with that knowledge is, in my view, up to them.

Third, there is the fundamental issue of the relationship between means and ends, a topic endlessly debated in philosophy.13 If the goals are lofty and deserving, should there be constraints (and if so, what limits) on the tactics—the means—used to achieve those goals? Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York City and one of the most powerful people of the twentieth century, someone who wielded enormous influence over the physical development of New York for four decades, famously said, “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?”14 (You’ll learn more about Moses in my discussion of Rule 2, “Break the Rules.”)

One reason why people fail to achieve their objectives or lose out in competitions for high-status positions is their unwillingness to do what is required to prevail. In fact, the first rule of power, covered in the next chapter, is for people to get out of their own way, including the many constraints they impose on themselves that render them less effective. Deciding what means to employ in pursuing one’s goals is a personal choice. But to make that choice, I believe you need to understand as much as possible about what works, and what doesn’t, and why. And you also need to understand that some of your rivals may not have the same reluctance to go “all in” and to play the game to win.

DOES POLITICAL SKILL INFLUENCE CAREER OUTCOMES?

A woman from Nigeria who took the online version of my power class in a program called LEAD emailed me:

The reason I applied to LEAD was because I felt totally powerless. I was alone as a woman in a male-dominated geoscience and engineering world. My former boss, 20 years older than me, practically bullied me day in and day out. It was a very difficult moment. When I started the doing power project and using the advice—not answering immediately, speaking with power [the topic of chapter three], networking and building influence [she created nonprofit organizations that connect up-and-coming women and other young professionals], now he and all the other colleagues have lined up behind me. They respect me but the beautiful thing is that I don’t need to worry about them anymore as I am now one-on-one with C-suite executives in my company. I live a stress-free life, running my own thing, helping others and shining my light around the world. I never thought that it was possible to live like this. Having power is a must. It changes the narrative.

Following the rules of power changed her life, in less than eight weeks. That’s because power changes how others relate to people, often in a positive fashion, while providing its wielders with more autonomy and control over their lives. And because power makes people like my Nigerian student more independent and successful, it also makes them much happier.

Research shows that feeling powerful is associated with higher levels of subjective well-being. A study relating people’s sense of power (e.g., “I think I have a great deal of power”) to their satisfaction with life (e.g., “In most ways my life is close to my ideal”) and to their positive and negative affect (i.e., their perceived mood and emotions) found that, even after gender and other personality dimensions were statistically controlled, power predicted well-being.15 “Participants with high . . . power were 16% more satisfied with their lives, and experienced 15% more PA [positive affect] and 10% less NA [negative affect], than participants with low . . . power.”16

Of course, success (and, for that matter, happiness and wellbeing) means different things to different people. I cannot speak to any of that as I am not a moral philosopher, nor do I offer life advice or coaching. But as a social scientist, I—and you—can access the research literature and ask, with respect to specific measures that index aspects of career success, what seems to predict the attainment of those outcomes. To take this book about the rules of power seriously, the first and most fundamental questions have to be: Does possessing political skill in developing and wielding power actually matter? Do people who engage in power-relevant actions fare better?