Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [7]
Third, the learning process—in school and in the rest of life, too—is frequently too passive to be as helpful as it might be. There is only one way to become more effective in building power and using influence: practice. So don’t just read this book and think about the examples—try some of the things you learn and see how they work. Model the behaviors of some of the effective people you read about. Turn knowledge into practice—it is the best way to develop the skills that make becoming powerful second nature.
I have organized this book as my colleagues and I organize the course we teach—using a path or developmental metaphor. The introduction and chapter 1 provide some orienting thoughts to help you reconsider taken-for-granted assumptions about the sources of power and success. Chapter 1 considers the evidence on job performance and power and how you can define job performance criteria in ways that are beneficial to you. Chapter 1 also provides a conceptual framework—some simple ideas—you can use to guide your reading of the subsequent material.
Chapter 2 treats the personal qualities you might develop that produce power. Many of these attributes are not inborn but learned. As such, you can diagnose your strengths and weaknesses and build a personal development plan to strengthen those personal characteristics that both research and logic argue are related to obtaining influence. Chapter 3 considers how to decide where to begin your career, the organizational locations most favorable for successfully launching your journey to power. Chapter 4 provides some advice on how to obtain the initial positions you want at the place where you want to begin—how to land a place on the first rung of the ladder to power.
The next chapters explore the sources of power and how to develop them. These power sources include resources (chapter 5), social networks and network position (chapter 6), the ability to act and speak in ways that both convey and produce power (chapter 7), and building a reputation as a powerful individual—a reputation that actually can become self-fulfilling and an important source of power (chapter 8).
Regardless of how successful and effective you are, sooner or later you will encounter opposition and setbacks. Chapter 9 analyzes how, and when, to fight and other ways to cope with opposition. It also provides some insight on the inevitability of reversals of fortune and how to cope. Power brings visibility—public scrutiny—and other costs as well. Chapter 10 treats the downsides, the costs of being in a powerful position. Power tends to produce overconfidence and the idea that you can make your own rules, and these consequences of having power often cause people to behave in ways that cost them their power and their position. Chapter 11 explores how and why power is lost and what you might do to better maintain positions of influence once you have attained them.
Implicit in virtually all of the discussion in this book is the idea that you are creating your own personal path to power. Many people wonder about the connection between such material and organizational effectiveness, the topic of chapter 12. Chapter 13, the last chapter, provides examples of people who have implemented the principles of this book with some measure of success. Its goal is to convince you that you can actually acquire power—not by becoming a new individual but by doing some things slightly more strategically and differently. Just like the principle of compound interest, becoming somewhat more effective in every situation can, over time, leave you in a very different, and much better, place.
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It Takes More Than Performance
IN 2004, the Miami-Dade County, Florida, school board hired former New York schools chancellor Rudy Crew as superintendent to help improve a typical urban school district struggling with both budget and failing