Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [37]
From another Japanese, Kiich Hasegawa, who built the consulting company Proudfoot into one of the larger consulting companies in Japan, I learned the wisdom of standing out, even in, or possibly particularly in, places where it is “not done.” Proudfoot put on unconventional marketing events, such as a lavish reception with a beautiful female Japanese violinist. Hasegawa often employed a brash style, speaking frankly to customers and even potential customers about their organization’s problems. When I asked him about his unusual approach, he described his marketing strategy as almost seducing people to come to you and your company to see what you are about. One way of doing that was by doing things differently, which intrigued others and piqued their interest. He argued that he and Proudfoot had been successful precisely because they did things differently from the expected Japanese way of doing things.
In advertising, the concept of standing out to become memorable is called “brand recall,” which is an important measure of advertising effectiveness. What works for products can work for you too—you need to be interesting and memorable and able to stand out in ways that cause others to want to know you and get close to you.
This advice, and much other advice in this book, although based on solid research findings, seems to defy conventional wisdom and break the rules of how you are supposed to behave. Of course it breaks the rules! As Malcolm Gladwell has insightfully noted, the rules tend to favor—big surprise—the people who make the rules, who tend to be the people who are already winning and in power. Gladwell described research that shows how playing by the rules—following conventional wisdom—in arenas ranging from sports to war favors the already more powerful, while doing things differently and following an unconventional strategy permits even heavily outresourced underdogs to triumph. In every war in the last 200 years conducted between unequally matched opponents, the stronger party won about 72 percent of the time. However, when the underdogs understood their weakness and used a different strategy to minimize its effects, they won some 64 percent of the time, cutting the dominant party’s likelihood of victory in half. As Gladwell noted, “When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win.”11 So, if you have all the power you want or need, by all means not only follow the rules but encourage everyone else to do so too. But if you are still traversing your path to power, take all this conventional wisdom and “rule-following” stuff with a big grain of salt.
LIKABILITY IS OVERRATED
People are sometimes afraid to ask for things and to pursue strategies that cause them to stand out because they are concerned they won’t come across as likable. Research generally shows that people are more likely to do things for others whom they like, and that likability is an important basis of interpersonal influence,12 but there are two important caveats. First, most of the studies examined situations of relatively equal power where compliance with a request for assistance was largely discretionary. Second, as Machiavelli pointed out 500 years ago in his treatise The Prince, although it is desirable to be both loved and feared, if you have to pick only one, pick fear if you want to get and keep power.
Machiavelli’s advice anticipated research in social psychology about how we perceive others. That research found that the two virtually universal dimensions used to assess people