Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [77]
Your path to power is going to be easier if you are aligned with a compelling, socially valuable objective. That doesn’t mean you are cynically using some social cause for your own gain—just that to the extent you can associate your efforts with a socially desirable, compelling value, you increase your likelihood of success.
Opposing Laura Esserman’s efforts at UCSF was tantamount to turning one’s back on breast cancer and its victims and their families. Rudy Crew would invariably talk about the hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren being left behind in New York and then Miami-Dade County by the current educational arrangements, and note that his initiatives were designed to remedy real problems with schools. Robert Moses ruled New York for decades because to oppose him was to oppose parks, and, as he put it, to be on the side of parks was to be on the side of the angels.
Power struggles inside companies seldom seem to revolve around blatant self-interest. At the moment of crisis and decision, clever combatants customarily invoke “shareholders’ interests.” As in, “It would be in the shareholders’ interests to have a new CEO,” or a “new board member,” or for that matter, new executives in other senior roles. Gary Loveman’s rationale, as he removed people after he became COO? “They could not do the new jobs expected of them” under a strategy of data-based marketing necessary to enhance Harrah’s performance. For example, the marketing executive who won the chairman’s award for excellence the preceding year was a great advertiser and photographer of crab legs and properties: this man was great at what used to be the essence of his job, but he could not do the analytical work required to leverage a large customer database to build share of wallet. Loveman often frequently notes that no one owns a position, not even him—everyone works in the interests of the shareholders, who own the right to put whoever is most effective in the job. Loveman is sincere and he has certainly delivered for the shareholders—a stock price of about $16 when he arrived at Harrah’s in 1998 became $90 a share when he completed the last of the big leveraged buyouts before the crash in the fall of 2007. But this talk about shareholder sovereignty is also a framing that works to portray his power at the gaming company in a socially desirable and acceptable fashion.
If you are going to do good—for educational systems, public works, breast cancer, or shareholders—you are going to need to be in power. Otherwise, you won’t be able to accomplish as much. The lesson: place your own objectives in a broader context that compels others to support you.
COPING WITH SETBACKS
Most successful people have encountered setbacks along the way, and survived. In entrepreneurship, people expect that not every venture is going to succeed. John Lilly, CEO of Internet browser company Mozilla, was much less successful with his first venture. Reed Hastings, the highly successful founder and CEO of Netflix, had a much less successful experience with his first software start-up, Pure Software, where he tried to fire himself twice. Bad things sometimes happen to good people. The issue becomes how and if they recover.
On the evening of December 1, 1997, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Emory University School of Business, responded to a message from the campus police and went to the police station, thinking it was a prank. It wasn’t. The police accused Sonnenfeld, who had built a leadership institute at the university and was famous for his CEO college that brought together leading chief executives and leaders from the public sector, of vandalizing the new business school building. They said they had videotape evidence and got Sonnenfeld to sign a letter of resignation from his tenured full-professor position on the spot, promising they would not arrest him if he quit. Since Sonnenfeld was leaving after the first of the year to become dean of the business school at Georgia Tech anyway, he didn’t care about the Emory position, and he was afraid the possible