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

by Jeffrey Pfeffer

the title of executive vice president and appointed to the board of directors. “Whatever Owens wanted, Johnson got him. He approved a steady stream of Owens’s requests for new aides…. In Johnson’s warm embrace, Owens’s financial fiefdom grew greatly.” That is, until Johnson went to the CEO and told him that Owens had built too large and too centralized a financial empire. Owens was then replaced for a time by Johnson himself.15 Next, Johnson gracefully pushed the CEO aside, doing it with flattery and kindness. Johnson had Nabisco endow a chair in accounting at Pace University in the name of the CEO, Robert Schaeberle. He ensured that the board named the new Nabisco research center building after the CEO. Soon, Johnson was the CEO of Nabisco. As Johnson’s allies realized, “a man who had his name on a building…might as well be dead.”16 When you are in power, you should probably trust no single person in your organization too much, unless you are certain of their loyalty and that they are not after your job. The constant vigilance required by those in power—to ensure they are hearing the truth and to maintain their position vis-à-vis rivals—is yet another cost of occupying a job that many others want.