Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [36]
When President Barack Obama selected Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state, she was a U.S. senator from New York and Governor David Patterson had to appoint her successor in the senate. Initially, virtually everyone thought they knew who was going to be selected—Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the assassinated former president John F. Kennedy and a longtime New Yorker who had been actively involved in the New York City schools and in a variety of public-service activities such as serving on nonprofit boards. Kennedy had tried to live as normal a life as possible up until that time and was unprepared for the limelight and the scrutiny that came with it. She was also surprisingly unprepared for the rough-and-tumble competition for the job and reluctant to engage in the campaigning—self-promotion—required to secure it. Although there are many reasons Kennedy eventually decided to take her name out of consideration for the post, Lawrence O’Donnell, a political analyst for the television network MSNBC and a personal friend of Kennedy’s, commented: “Most of us have modesty impulses—you don’t want to brag—and you have to learn to defy these basic human impulses and say, ‘I’m the greatest, and here is why you need me for this job,’ and do it without any hesitation or any doubt.”8
Many people believe that they can stand out and be bold once they become successful and earn the right to do things differently. But once you are successful and powerful, you don’t need to stand out or worry about the competition. It’s early in your career when you are seeking initial positions that differentiating yourself from the competition is most important.
When Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Prize–winning secretary of state and national security adviser, joined the Harvard undergraduate class of 1950 as a sophomore in 1947, he was surrounded by talented peers. As Walter Isaacson described in his biography, Kissinger sought the sponsorship of William Elliott, a pillar of the Government Department. On the basis of his grades, Kissinger was entitled to have a senior faculty member as his tutor, but Elliott brushed him off as he did many others, giving him 25 books to read and telling him not to return until he had completed a difficult essay assignment. Kissinger read the books, completed the essay, and got Elliott to take him under his wing. Elliott’s sponsorship proved important in his academic career. Later, Kissinger wrote an undergraduate honors thesis of some 383 pages, resulting in a rule that specified that, in the future, no undergraduate thesis could be more than 100 pages and informally known as the “Kissinger rule.” Once in the doctoral program in the Government Department, Kissinger carried himself as if he were a senior faculty member. He made appointments as if his time were very precious, and invariably arrived fifteen minutes late. Although such behavior and his apparent arrogance did not endear him to his fellow students, he built a reputation for his brilliance in part on the basis of his intellectual capacity but also on the basis of behavior that differentiated Kissinger from his colleagues.9
But does this strategy of standing out work in cultures that are not as focused on the individual and as brash as the United States? Absolutely. In Japan, where I first heard the aphorism about the nail being hammered down, Akio Morita, the cofounder of Sony Corporation, defied convention as an eldest son by not going into the family’s sake business, broke from the mold as a father by sending his children out of Japan