Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [32]
At Cisco, as in many companies, acquisitions fell under the purview of business development. Volpi moved to further enhance the business development unit’s power by building the skills inside that unit that could diminish its reliance on external advisers, such as investment bankers. Mike Volpi and his colleagues gained considerable power at Cisco in a short period of time. By the early 2000s, Volpi was among the four most senior executives at the company even though he was relatively young and inexperienced with technology. There were other executives, some with banking or consulting backgrounds, who joined the business development group early on in its rise to power and participated in its success. Seizing that opportunity required understanding the company’s need to acquire technology externally and to take seriously its initial steps down the path to becoming a serial acquirer of existing businesses. Joining Cisco’s business development unit in 1994 when it had two people, as Mike Volpi did, put him in a rapidly expanding strategic business function with enormous visibility to senior management and the board of directors that ultimately discussed and approved all acquisitions. Joining much later provided comparatively fewer career advantages.
In this chapter, we have seen how and why power varies across departments, with implications for developing your power base. In the next chapter, we consider how, once you decide where you want to be, you can get the job or opportunity that you want.
4
Getting In: Standing Out and Breaking Some Rules
WHEN KEITH FERRAZZI, now a best-selling author, marketing maven, and star of the lecture circuit, graduated from Harvard Business School in 1992, he had offers from two consulting companies, McKinsey and Deloitte. Pat Loconto, the former head of Deloitte Consulting, recalled that before accepting the offer, Ferrazzi insisted on seeing the “head guys,” as Ferrazzi called them. Loconto met Keith at an Italian restaurant in New York City, and “after we had a few drinks at this restaurant, Keith said he would accept the offer on one condition—he and I would have dinner once a year at the same restaurant…. So I promised to have dinner with him once a year, and that’s how we recruited him. That was one of his techniques. That way, he was guaranteed access to the top.”1
Not many people would have the audacity to ask to speak with the head of the firm where they were being hired, and even fewer would ask that individual to have dinner with them once a year. They would be afraid of being turned down, of seeming arrogant or audacious, of creating waves, and plus, that’s not how things are done in the typical recruiting scenario. In chapter 3 we saw that it’s important to know where you want to go—the department you want to be in and the path to power you see for yourself. It’s even more important to be able to get what you want. As the Ferrazzi story and research discussed in this chapter show, launching or re-launching your career requires that you develop both the ability and the willingness to ask for things and that you learn to stand out. People often don’t ask for what they want and are afraid of standing out too much because they worry that others may resent or dislike their behavior, seeing them as self-promoting. You need to get over the idea that you need to be liked by everybody and that likability is important in creating