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investigated the primary motivations of managers and their professional success. One group of managers were primarily motivated by a need for affiliation—they were more interested in being liked than getting things done. A second group were primarily motivated by a need for achievement—goal attainment for themselves. And a third group were primarily interested in power. The evidence showed that this third group, the managers primarily interested in power, were the most effective, not only in achieving positions of influence inside companies but also in accomplishing their jobs.1 In another example, Gerald Ferris of Florida State University and colleagues have developed an eighteen-item political skills inventory. Research on 35 school administrators in the midwestern United States and 474 branch managers of a national financial services firm showed that people who had more political skill received higher performance evaluations and were rated as more effective leaders.2

So welcome to the real world—not necessarily the world we want, but the world that exists. It can be a tough world out there and building and using power are useful organizational survival skills. There is a lot of zero-sum competition for status and jobs. Most organizations have only one CEO, there is only one managing partner in professional services firms, only one school superintendent in each district, only one prime minister or president at a time—you get the picture. With more well-qualified people competing for each step on the organizational ladder all the time, rivalry is intense and only getting more so as there are fewer and fewer management positions.

Some of the individuals competing for advancement bend the rules of fair play or ignore them completely. Don’t complain about this or wish the world were different. You can compete and even triumph in organizations of all types, large and small, public or private sector, if you understand the principles of power and are willing to use them. Your task is to know how to prevail in the political battles you will face. My job in this book is to tell you how.

WHY YOU SHOULD WANT POWER

Obtaining and holding on to power can be hard work. You need to be thoughtful and strategic, resilient, alert, willing to fight when necessary. As Beth’s story illustrates, the world is sometimes not a very nice or fair place, and while Anne got the position she wanted, she had to expend effort and demonstrate patience and interpersonal toughness to do so—to hang in with people who initially didn’t particularly respect her abilities. Why not just eschew power, keep your head down, and take what life throws at you?

First of all, having power is related to living a longer and healthier life. When Michael Marmot examined the mortality from heart disease among British civil servants, he noticed an interesting fact: the lower the rank or civil service grade of the employee, the higher the age-adjusted mortality risk. Of course many things covary with someone’s position in an organizational hierarchy, including the incidence of smoking, dietary habits, and so forth. However, Marmot and his colleagues found that only about a quarter of the observed variation in death rate could be accounted for by rank-related differences in smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure, obesity, and physical activity.3 What did matter was power and status—things that provided people greater control over their work environments. Studies consistently showed that the degree of job control, such as decision authority and discretion to use one’s skills, predicted the incidence and mortality risk from coronary artery disease over the next five or more years. In fact, how much job control and status people had accounted for more of the variation in mortality from heart disease than did physiological factors such as obesity and blood pressure.

These findings shouldn’t be that surprising to you. Not being able to control one’s environment produces feelings of helplessness and stress,4 and feeling stressed or “out of control” can harm your health. So being