Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [45]
Leverage Your Association with a Prestigious Institution
If you’re in a place that has status, you can use that status to your advantage. The Sloan program at Stanford is a one-year master’s management program—sort of an MBA for midcareer executives who attend full-time. Some people are sponsored by their employers, and while sponsorship means that your company has invested a lot in your development, it also means you are away for a year and out of the action. Jim, an operations executive from a large computer manufacturer, used the opportunity presented by the prestige of the program to get the highest performance evaluation from his boss, an “exceptional” rating reserved for just 15 percent of all employees, even though he was not even working at his employer’s during the year as he was in school.
In addition to staying in contact with his boss under the guise of sharing his learning, he knew that his boss, let’s call him Ken, wanted to have the opportunity to teach a class at a business school. Fortunately, a case on the allocation of overhead costs that used Jim’s and Ken’s company as the subject was taught in a managerial accounting class. Jim had the perfect opportunity to create resources—to link Ken, who wanted to teach a class in a business school, with the accounting professor, who would be grateful to have someone from the company appear in the class when the company was discussed.
Jim did a great job of convincing Ken that even though he would ask on his behalf and work hard to make the visit happen, there was no guarantee that the professor would want him to help with the class. Jim joked that if he could get Ken a role as a guest speaker in the accounting class, Ken should help Jim get a job working directly for the company’s CEO when his time at school was over. Ken replied, “Absolutely.” The class came to pass and Jim got his excellent performance rating from a grateful Ken.
There are literally scores of examples like these—instances where people were able to create resources almost out of thin air, and some are quite amazing. In 1971 Klaus Schwab was a 32-year-old Swiss university graduate with doctoral degrees in economics and engineering. He might have followed the conventional academic route of doing research and publishing as a career strategy. Instead, he saw an opportunity to organize a meeting, the European Business Forum, made up of European business leaders concerned with the growing American economic success. Out of that modest beginning came the World Economic Forum, an organization with a staff of more than 100 running meetings all over the world, with Schwab at the head. Its budget is over $100 million per year, his wife and son are on the board and involved in the foundation, and because of his leadership of the forum, Schwab has received six honorary doctoral degrees and a number of lucrative positions on corporate boards of directors.8 Although journalists, academics, and nonprofit leaders get in free, companies pay dearly—membership in the World Economic Forum costs $39,000, and there is a charge of $20,000 to attend the large annual meeting in Davos, where there are panel discussions by prominent people from the worlds of government, business, and the arts as well as lots of private meetings and dinners. Schwab recognized that global business and political leaders needed a forum to exchange ideas and do business in one convenient place, the media needed access to these people, and everyone needed ideas about the changing economy and social issues. As a former managing director of the WEF commented, “Contacts ultimately mean contracts.”9
Power accrues to people who control resources that others cannot access. As the examples of the World Economic Forum and, on a less grand scale, Karen’s summits at the Internet company illustrate, there are often natural monopolies created by those who move first. The World Economic Forum