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Kindle Notes & Highlights
John Kotter told me that he thought for many people, the biggest obstacle to success was not talent or motivation but the fact that they were in the wrong place—that the power and influence requirements of their job did not fit their personal aptitudes and interests.
You need to be realistic about the political risks, not just to you but to those to whom you are tied, if you want to build a path to power.
Don’t Give Up Your Power
Most important, you need to claim power and not do things that give yours away.
amazing to me that people, in ways little and big, voluntarily give up their power, preemptively surrendering in the competition for status and influence.
mostly spent their time managing up and did not provide the support to the news-gathering field operations
i think some of my folks feel this way. maybe wjth some legitimacy, but they are doubtpess missing tht i am wlrkomg to shape the agency's future and security
if the targets of your behavior are those with power, your good feelings will be quite temporary as the consequences of your actions unfold.
not trying guarantees failure to win the competition for power and status.
we are frequently our own biggest barriers to having as much power as we would like simply because we don’t make sufficient effort to build ourselves up. When
Don’t Expect Justice
People who are complicit in their own beheading don’t garner much sympathy or support.
Therefore, although self-promotion and fighting for your interests can seem unattractive, the alternative scenario is invariably much worse.
individuals often neglect the small steps they can take that can provide them with control over vital resources, visibility, and the opportunity to build important relationships.
Organizational politics is everywhere. You may wish it weren’t so, but it is.
So seek power as if your life depends on it. Because it does.
Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001).
Max Atkinson, Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body-Language of Politics (New York: Routledge, 1984).
ALSO BY JEFFREY PFEFFER The External Control of Organizations Managing with Power Competitive Advantage Through People New Directions for Organization Theory The Human Equation The Knowing-Doing Gap Hidden Value Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense What Were They Thinking?
It was applied to the leadership literature that same year by Terence R. Mitchell, James R. Larson, and Stephen G. Green, “Leader Behavior, Situational Moderators, and Group Performance: An Attributional Analysis,” Defense Technical Information Center, Accession No: AD1021285. The fundamental idea—that positive attributes will be construed as occurring together even if they don’t, undergirds the argument in Phil Rosenzweig, The Halo Effect (New York: Free Press, 2007).
Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld and Andrew J. Ward, Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).
this is a must read
Robert I. Sutton and D. Charles Galunic, “Consequences of Public Scrutiny for Leaders and Their Organizations,” in Barry M. Staw and Larry L. Cummings, eds., Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 18 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1996), 201–250.
Deborah Sontag, “Who Brought Bernadine Healy Down? The Red Cross: A Disaster Story Without Any Heroes,” New York
