Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [76]
MOVE FIRST—SEIZE THE INITIATIVE
If you move quickly, you can often catch your opponents off guard and secure victory before they even know what is happening. In 2005, Jagmohan Dalmiya stood for reelection as president of the BCCI. Modi, coming out of nowhere as a leader of the Rajasthan Cricket Association, hired numerous lawyers to pursue allegations of corruption and mismanagement against Dalmiya and ran an overtly political campaign to oust him. “Dalmiya could not believe the effort being put in by his opponents. He was caught totally unaware.”7 After winning the election and installing himself as vice president and an ally as president of the association, Modi moved quickly to remove opponents and sell TV rights and merchandise sponsorships at high prices to bring in the resources and show people that siding with him was very much in their economic self-interest.
This dynamic plays out all the time in board of directors and CEO struggles. If the CEO can move first to rid the board of opponents, he can usually be successful and save his job. If the board organizes while the CEO is away on vacation or distracted, the members can often mobilize the support to unseat the CEO before he can mount a counterattack. The lesson: Don’t wait if you see a power struggle coming. While you are waiting, others are organizing support and orchestrating votes to win.
USE REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS TO SHAPE BEHAVIOR
Serving on a publicly traded company’s board of directors provides prestige and money. At one medical device company, the chair of the compensation committee got into conflict with the CEO. The board member felt that the company was underperforming, not attaining the profit margins that had been projected as sales grew, and the stock price was stagnant. Meanwhile, the CEO retained outside counsel to help him in his negotiations for a larger compensation package. When the board acquiesced to his demands, the CEO had won. Soon, the compensation committee chair was off the board. Coincidence? Possibly. But a lesson to other board members, nonetheless: if you want to keep your position, go along.
The late John Jacobs, political reporter at the time for the San Francisco Chronicle and later the McClatchy chain, told me that when as a young reporter he wrote negative articles about the new speaker of the assembly, Willie Brown, he was told he could be barred from the floor of the assembly. That might make doing his job as a political reporter more difficult. When he wrote a favorable article about something Brown had done, he received a gift basket. The lesson: there would be consequences from the relationship Jacobs developed with Brown.
In companies, in government, even in nonprofits, people who have any resource control use it to reward those who are helpful and punish those who stand in their way. When the charming, gentle, and scrupulously honest John Gardner, founder of Common Cause and a man of distinction, was HEW secretary in the Johnson administration, a time when the programs in health, education, and social welfare were greatly expanded under the Great Society rubric, he told people that it was firmly within their right to oppose what he was doing, but he wanted them to know there would be “consequences.” If using power in this way seems tough, it may be. But get over your inhibitions, because many of the people you will meet on your path to power will have less hesitation about rewarding their friends and punishing those who oppose them.
MAKE YOUR OBJECTIVES