Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [92]
On the seismograph on which Moses recorded public tremors, in fact, the Tavern-on-the-Green protest had barely registered. Twenty-three mothers? He had just finished evicting hundreds of mothers rather than shift a section of his Cross-Bronx Expressway a single block! He was at that very moment in the process of displacing five thousand mothers for Manhattantown, four thousand for Lincoln Center! A parking lot, and a tiny parking lot at that!16
In this instance, there was press coverage and public criticism such as Robert Moses had never faced before. He backed down and put in a playground instead of the parking lot. His reputation for always winning had been tarnished and public scrutiny of his actions was heightened. Some of his confidants said that his ability to get his way was never quite the same after that, even though he held his many positions for more than a decade longer. The problem was that the idea of bulldozers and bulldozing had begun to take on a different connotation in the 1950s and 1960s than it had in the 1920s, when the building of parks and other public works was in its infancy and the improvements were more desperately needed.
People—and companies—fall into competency traps. They are successful because they do certain things in a certain way. The U.S. automakers got rich making minivans and then sport utility vehicles. When the market changed to smaller cars, the car companies didn’t notice the change, and when they did, they had little expertise in moving to the new market segments. General Electric was lionized for its diversified financial structure that provided some risk mitigation because it operated in so many different economic sectors. When conglomerates fell from fashion, GE was stuck. Al Dunlap became a hero for downsizing the companies he ran, and Frank Lorenzo was cheered in various business schools for his battles with the labor unions, first at Eastern Airlines and then when he ran Continental. Both downsizing and union busting were strategies for a certain time and place, but eventually they lost their effectiveness; neither Dunlap nor Lorenzo seemed to notice. Companies and leaders can fail to see the changes in the social environment that can make old ways less successful than they once were. The tendency of power to diminish the power holder’s attention and sensitivity to others with less power compounds this problem. The combination of diminished vigilance and changed circumstances often leads to the loss of power.
LEAVE GRACEFULLY
In the end, of course, everyone loses power. As organizational behavior professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld noted in his book The Hero’s Farewell, some individuals make way for their successors. Others hang on past the time when they are effective. Armand Hammer, the CEO and creator of Occidental Petroleum, put in a long-term incentive compensation system for himself with a ten-year payout—when he was in his nineties.
Some senior leaders prepare successors and leave to do other things. Jack Welch had a number of possible replacements when he stepped down from General Electric, and after his retirement as CEO, he became a columnist, author, and speaker about management issues. Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, went on to a career as a faculty member at Harvard Business School and a writer and speaker on leadership issues.
It is both possible and desirable to, as my wife nicely puts it, “leave before the party’s over” and to do so in a way that causes others to remember you fondly. You cannot always completely control how much power you maintain, but you can leave your