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PHYSICAL LOCATION AND FACILITIES
The importance of office location leads to an often-expensive shifting and redoing of offices as political fortunes wax and wane.
POSITIONS—ON COMMITTEES AND IN SENIOR MANAGEMENT
And it is not just positions, but also the composition of powerful committees—such as the executive committee—that can tell you the power of various departments. Paying attention to what departments are represented in powerful positions provides an important clue as to where the power lies.
THE TRADE-OFF: A STRONG POWER BASE VERSUS LESS COMPETITION
Many people moved from the CCT to other important roles within SAP—something that was intended from the beginning, since one of the department’s defined objectives was to be an entry point for talented people from different academic disciplines.
you would be well served to try to understand not just what today’s powerful departments are, but where you think the power is going.
it’s important to know where you want to go—the
launching or relaunching your career requires that you develop both the ability and the willingness to ask for things and that you learn to stand out.
You need to get over the idea that you need to be liked by everybody and that likability is important in creating a path to power, and you need to be willing to put yourself forward. If you don’t, who will?
Both Reginald Lewis and Keith Ferrazzi understood that the worst that could happen from asking for something would be getting turned down. And if they were turned down, so what? They would not be any worse off than if they had not asked in the first place. If they didn’t ask or if they were refused, they would not receive what they sought, but at least with asking, there was some hope. Some people do believe that worse things could occur: that their bold behavior could offend those exposed to it and they could develop a “bad reputation.” Probably not, and the risk of standing out is well worth
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Asking Works, but People Find It Uncomfortable
people are pretty bad at predicting the behavior of others.
asking people for small favors makes the requesters very uncomfortable.
Gupta’s strategy for getting these people’s help was simple: determine who he wanted to be involved in the project and then ask them in a way that enhanced their feelings of self-esteem.
Asking for help is inherently flattering, and can be made even more so if we do it correctly, emphasizing the importance and accomplishments of those we ask and also reminding them of what we share in common.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO STAND OUT AND BREAK THE RULES
the rules tend to favor—big surprise—the people who make the rules, who tend to be the people who are already winning and in power.
if you are still traversing your path to power, take all this conventional wisdom and “rule-following” stuff with a big grain of salt.
LIKABILITY IS OVERRATED
there are two important caveats. First, most of the studies examined situations of relatively equal power where compliance with a request for assistance was largely discretionary. Second, as Machiavelli pointed out 500 years ago in his treatise The Prince, although it is desirable to be both loved and feared, if you have to pick only one, pick fear if you want to get and keep power.
nice people are perceived as warm, but niceness frequently comes across as weakness or even a lack of intelligence.15
Likability Can Create Power, but Power Almost Certainly Creates Likability
because they want to be close to your power and success.
people—to bask in the reflected glory of the powerful.
people’s support for you will depend as much on whether or not you seem to be “winning” as on your charm or ability.
What’s Likability Got to Do with Anything?
had he hired Ferrazzi to do marketing consulting for his company in the online publishing space? The answer: “Certainly. What’s liking got to do with hiring someone to help you build your business? The question is, ‘Can they be helpful to you?’”
Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, which argues that people seek to avoid inconsistency, and one way of accomplishing that is to adjust their attitudes to be consistent with their behaviors.20 What this implies is that if we interact with
People Forget and Forgive
Hay system used to determine salary ranges consider the number of direct and indirect reports you have, as well as the amount of budget you can spend without higher-level authorization, as measures of your responsibility and consequently the economic value of your job. Getting control of resources is an important
Her wisdom and experience hadn’t changed—the only difference was her soon-to-be-diminished control over investment resources and positions in the venture capital firm.
they could also be working to transition and honoring be decision to retire and nt want to burden her with their requests as shes no longer in the game
one of the big mistakes I see people make is to think that they can’t build a resource base from their current position—they need to be higher up.
Provide Attention and Support Sometimes building a relationship so that others will help you requires nothing more than being polite and listening. One of the most amazing things about Willie Brown’s rise to power in the California Assembly was that he originally got the job because of the support of numerous conservative Republican legislators who were elected after a tax-cutting initiative and swept into power with President Ronald Reagan. Brown received this support even though he was best known for promoting legislation to relax the penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana and
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His strategy? Making himself indispensable by working as hard as he could to find as much information as possible about any and every topic of possible interest to senior CBS management—such
take the initiative to do a relatively minor task and do it extremely well, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to challenge you for the opportunity.
Build a Resource Base Inside and Outside Your Organization
Leverage Your Association with a Prestigious Institution
there are often natural monopolies created by those who move first.
taking initiative to create resources by finding speakers, organizing meetings, making connections, and creating venues where people can readily meet others, learn interesting things, and do business brings appreciation for your efforts, even as you create the resources to help you on your path to power. Bringing
the networks you create are an important resource for creating influence,
some jobs are mostly about networking and everyone can benefit from developing more efficient and effective social networks and honing networking skills.
a good definition of networking: “Behaviors that are aimed at building, maintaining, and using informal relationships that possess the (potential) benefit of facilitating work-related activities of individuals by voluntarily gaining access to resources and maximizing…advantages.”
There are many leadership tasks where the essence of the work is bringing people and organizational units with different competencies and perspectives together to complete a task or consummate a transaction.
lmost a definition of emergency managemnt
salience.
The effect of mere exposure on preference and choice is important and well demonstrated.
Networking makes you more visible; this visibility increases your power and status; and your heightened power and status then make building and maintaining social contacts easier.
Another possibility is that some people find the activity distasteful because they believe it is insincere to build relationships with people for instrumental purposes.
me
weak ties.
For weak ties to be useful, however, two things must be true: casual acquaintances must be able to link you into diverse networks and they must be willing to do
