Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don't

by Jeffrey Pfeffer

1. Use us-versus-them references. “It is widely known that the need to resist an external threat, whether real or imagined, has always been an extremely effective rallying cry when it comes to strengthening group solidarity.”27 When United Airlines entered the California market in 1994, Herb Kelleher, then CEO of Southwest Airlines, sent his employees a video describing United as a “war machine” aimed to strike at Southwest and imploring his people to stick together to provide great customer service all over the system. Steve Jobs, cofounder and CEO of Apple Computer, focused first on IBM as the enemy—for instance, in Apple’s famous “1984” commercial—and later on Microsoft as he used a common threat to energize Apple’s