Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [91]
PEOPLE GET TIRED
It is hard work to keep your ego in check, to constantly be attentive to the actions of others, and obtaining and keeping power requires long hours and lots of energy. After a while, some people get tired; they become less vigilant and more willing to compromise and give in. We always tend to see what we want or expect to see, but as people get burned out, the tendency to project desires onto reality becomes stronger.
Tony Levitan and a classmate, Fred Campbell, knew that they wanted to start a special company with a unique, egalitarian culture. When they graduated from business school in 1993, they began a company that would become eGreetings, which initially sold and then gave away electronic greeting cards on the Internet. Campbell was the CEO, Levitan the co-CEO, but they had a shared leadership model and used unusual job titles—Levitan called himself the creator of chaos—to signal that they wanted to build a place where employees could have fun. Their business, probably ahead of its time given the evolution of the Internet, went public under the symbol EGRT in 1999. The dot-com crash doomed the organization, and it was sold for a modest sum to American Greetings. By the time that all occurred, however, Tony Levitan had already left the company.
The work of launching a start-up is demanding. “I’m the kind of guy that I really just dive into things,” said Campbell. “So I spend seven days a week; if I’m not at work, I’m thinking about it. But it also takes a toll on me, and I eventually burn out.” When he started working with Levitan, he said he was good for about five years.
Levitan was also getting tired from the stress and the grind. When Campbell announced he was going to leave, Levitan did not press the board of directors to become the sole CEO. Instead, the company hired a search firm to seek an outside successor. But it was a tough time to attract good CEO talent, as the Internet bubble was approaching its height. The search itself went on for seven months—not that unusual, as a high fraction of searches are never completed successfully. The long search process further exhausted people at eGreetings. The company finally hired Gordon Tucker, even though Levitan and others had some apprehensions about his fit with the culture and his management style. Tony was tired and the board felt a sense of urgency. Shortly after Tucker’s arrival, Levitan was marginalized and soon left eGreetings. In talking to Tony Levitan about the lessons he learned as a cofounder being forced out of the company he had started, he emphasized that he was just getting too tired to remain on his game, be alert to the maneuverings, and continue to fight.
If you feel yourself getting tired or burned out and you hold a position of substantial power, you might as well leave. There are going to be others who will be willing to wrest your position from you. With reduced energy and vigilance, you won’t be able to resist very well in any case.
THE WORLD CHANGES, BUT TACTICS DON’T
When Robert Nardelli was CEO of Home Depot, he ran a shareholders’ annual meeting like a despot, with other board members absent and shareholders denied an opportunity to voice questions or concerns as their microphones were turned off. He probably thought he was doing nothing unusual. After all, the age of the imperial CEO was in full flower, and ignoring shareholder activists was neither something new nor unheard of. But his behavior provoked outrage and contributed, among other things, to his losing his job. There is much commentary about the leadership skills of the “new” CEO—and among such skills are listening, paying attention to multiple constituencies, and displaying less arrogance than CEOs got away with in the past. For Nardelli, times had changed. He had not figured that out, or if he had, he couldn’t adjust his style.
Nor did New York parks commissioner Robert Moses, who remained in power for almost 40 years, into his eighties,