Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [20]
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 senior-level 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