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

by Jeffrey Pfeffer

from coup attempts. But no one in a position of power is completely immune from palace revolts. Patricia Seeman, a Swiss executive coach and adviser to numerous high-ranking executives, particularly in the financial services industry, told me that in the typical senior management team, all the people reporting to the CEO believe they could hold the CEO position, many think they could do better than the incumbent, and most direct reports aspire to their boss’s job. Some people are going to be willing to take their turn and hope that they will be chosen when the incumbent steps down, but others will be more proactive in their efforts to move up. Therefore, for CEOs to survive in their jobs, they need to be able to discern who is undermining them and be tough enough to remove those people before they themselves lose the power struggle. What’s true for CEOs is also true for other senior-level executives with ambitious subordinates. Ross Johnson, formerly CEO of Nabisco, is justly famous for his role in the first huge leveraged buyout, the RJR Nabisco transaction described so well in the book Barbarians at the Gate.14 But where Johnson really excelled was maneuvering himself into CEO jobs and eliminating rivals who naively trusted him. When Johnson engineered the merger of Standard Brands, where he was CEO, into Nabisco, the huge cookie and cracker manufacturer, he was ostensibly in the number two role and faced numerous internal Nabisco rivals. One was Dick Owens, Nabisco’s ch...