Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [24]
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