Last week, I was talking with with Jeff Pfeffer, my friend and frequent co-author, about power in organizations. Jeff is author of Managing With Power, a great book, which is a standard text for management classes on organizational power and politics throughout the world. I had just finished reading the first draft his new book on power, and I asked him "You write about many ways to gain power, but don't actually use most of them in your life. Why is that?" For example, Jeff recommends spending time having lunch and the like with powerful people you don't know and also identifying potential enemies and spending time getting them to like you. He provides empirically sound steps (often based on his own research) about how people who want power should identify the most powerful people and groups, and try to join those groups, to pick an office location that will put you in constant contact with as many powerful people as possible, and a host of other things that I've rarely seen Jeff do.
Jeff's answer, which I've heard from him before and shows much wisdom, was something like "You can have influence or you can have freedom, but you can't have both. I prefer freedom, my book is for people who prefer to have a lot of influence in an organization." Indeed, a key implication of Jeff's research, is that if you want to have power, you need to spend your life around lots of other people, often people you don't necessarily like or would choose to socialize with otherwise, and to constantly be thinking of ways to wield influence over them to your advantage. I've written about this before, and in fact, it is in my list of 15 things I believe on the left of this post (it is #3).
But it really struck for some reason the other day. It also reminded me of something that the unhappy wife of one of the most successful rainmakers at a large law firm once said to me. She was complaining about how all consuming her husband's job was, and in particular "We don't have any real friends, we just have one dinner after another with clients and potential clients. When they are no longer clients, I rarely see them again, even if I like them because we are off with other clients."
Interesting stuff. It is also astounding how well-crafted Jeff's writings are on power, especially given it is something he usually doesn't want for himself. His new book will need to go through the editing process and all that, and doesn't have a title yet — but I found it compelling, extremely useful (for people who want to hold or get power), and as always with Jeff, evidence-based.
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