The stark truth about management and power

 Stefan Stern in The FT

 

“If you want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.” 

This quotation is usually attributed to Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University’s graduate school of business. Pfeffer himself is more modest about its origins. He cites it at the beginning of his new book — more on this later — but describes it simply as “a quote attributed to me”. 

This slightly sheepish opening sums up an intriguing paradox about the man. He tells stark truths about management and power and what it takes to get to the top, which some may find unsettling. But, fundamentally, his purpose is compassionate. The challenge embedded in his famous aphorism is this: it is little use criticising the excesses of terrible leaders but then being too squeamish to engage with and win power yourself. 

When I call Pfeffer at his Californian home he sounds a bit distracted, for reasons that become noisily apparent. “I need to move my car,” he says. “My garage is about to be . . . I’m having some construction work done . . . I’ll be back in a minute.” 

He is true to his word, and proceeds to offer a tutorial on the realities of power, revealing why his course on the subject at Stanford, where he has taught for more than 40 years, is so popular with students. 

“Exercising power and being a leader is not about winning a popularity contest,” he says. “It was Gary Loveman [former chief executive of the Caesars casino business] who said: ‘If you want to be liked, get a dog. A dog will love you unconditionally.’ 

“A lot of leaders are not necessarily nice people,” he adds. “Many of the things that leaders have to do are not necessarily nice . . . There is very little overlap — I mean, almost none — between companies on the ‘best places to work’ list and companies led by leaders who are on the ‘most admired leaders’ list,” Pfeffer says. 

His new book, published this summer, is called 7 Rules of Power: Surprising — but True — Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career. His seven rules are: 

Get out of your own way — that is, speak with confidence and do not undersell yourself. 

Break the rules — do the unexpected. 

Show up in powerful fashion — with conscious body language and actual language. 

Create a powerful brand. 

Network relentlessly. 

Use your power — do not be afraid to wield power once you have it. 

And, finally, remember that “success excuses (almost) everything” — the powerful attract and retain support. 

These rules are not simply plausible-sounding assertions but are in fact based on deep research and decades of social science experiment and observation. These are “the realities on the ground”, as Pfeffer says. 

While clearly not a fan of former US president Donald Trump, Pfeffer notes that he was a skilful follower of these rules. “He was seven for seven,” he says. He describes the winning Trumpian mentality in these terms: “You tell me what I need to do to win, and I’ll do it. I will say anything, I will do anything. The question is: are you willing to do what it takes?” 

This may sound Hobbesian and bleak. But note, too, that Pfeffer’s last book was called Dying for a Paycheck, and was a strong attack on the worst forms of modern management and the harm it can do both to employee health and company performance. An earlier book was called “The Human Equation: building profits by putting people first”. There is a touching passage in the book’s acknowledgements about the author’s late wife, Kathleen, who died last year and to whom the book is dedicated. 

Our call is once again interrupted by an off-stage crash. “Pardon the background noise — they must be doing something serious here — they should be, for what I’m paying them . . . ” 

In this latest work, Pfeffer writes: “One reason why people fail to achieve their objectives or lose out in competitions for high-status positions is their unwillingness to do what is required to prevail.” 

This is his reality check for aspiring leaders and those who want to get on in the organisation. You have to take responsibility and put yourself in a position where professional advance is possible and likely. “Happy talk”, or “leadership BS” (the title of another of his books), will not get you there. 

“I don’t think anybody is going to say that Elon Musk is sweet,” Pfeffer says, “or that Jeff Bezos is sweet, or Steve Jobs was nice, or Jack Welch was going to be picked by anybody to be stranded on a desert island with. Many leaders are narcissists,” he adds, “although their ‘autobiographies’ say that they are lovely human beings . . . ” 

Pfeffer looks power in the eye and does not flinch. He tells it like it is. Can we handle the truth? If we want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.

It takes more than a stroke of genius to become a true champion

Dominic Lawson in The Independent

When does talent become genius? We all have a view; but when asked to be precise, it's hard not to sink into the hopelessly circular argument that we know what genius is when we see it. Yet anyone who watched Roger Federer's forensic dismantling of Andy Murray in the men's final at Wimbledon would have no problem in identifying the Swiss as a genius, and that simple fact as Murray's nemesis.

Thus a familiar-sounding headline on one report of the match was: "Only one winner when talent meets genius." Familiar sounding, because it repeats what was written the last time the two met in a grand slam final, the 2010 Australian Open: "Federer's genius alone beats Andrew Murray". Murray cried after that one, too. Well, it must be frustrating when you push yourself to the limits and beyond, and the opponent wins with apparently effortless ease.

Except it isn't like that at all. Although we tend to think of genius as something akin to magic, a kind of short-cut to mastery of the elements, it is nothing of the sort. A proper investigation of the careers of the supreme achievers, whether in sport or other fields, reveals that they are based above all on monomaniacal diligence and concentration. Constant struggle, in other words. Seen in this light, we might define genius as talent multiplied by effort. In cricket, this would be true of Sachin Tendulkar; in chess, Bobby Fischer.

I was at a dinner with that supreme raconteur among philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, when he was asked how he would sum up genius. He immediately recalled the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who was questioned about how he managed to leap in the way he did. The Russian replied that most people, when they leapt in the air, would come down at once, but: "Why should you come down immediately? Stay in the air a little before you return, why not?" That effortless ease defined genius, said Berlin. To watch Federer at his greatest is to see something similar to Nijinsky's description: the movement of his body appears to defy the laws of gravity, as if hovering above the surface of the planet, free of all weight or friction. Yet in logic we know that this cannot be. He is constructed of the same matter as the rest of humanity, with nothing remotely abnormal or other-worldly in his skeleton or musculature.

In a wonderful 2006 essay entitled "Federer as Religious Experience", David Foster Wallace wrote that "Roger Federer appears to be exempt from certain physical laws... a type that one could call genius or mutant or avatar, a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light." Yet this is nothing more than an illusion – one which the performer will be keen to encourage, both to thrill the public and to intimidate his opponents. Nijinsky, for example, must have known very well that his astounding entrechats and grands jetes were the product of thousands upon thousands of hours of excruciating practice, without which his talent could never have evolved beyond dilettantism.

By the same token, the greatest talents of our age appreciate that in a brutally competitive world, to skip a day of such rigorous training is to risk decline and even mediocrity. If you saw the film [Itzhak] Perlman in Russia – about the supreme violinist's 1990 tour of that country – you will probably have been struck by his great discomfiture when asked to perform a piece spontaneously on a visit to the Moscow Conservatory. "But I haven't practiced today," Perlman says; and yet when you watch the Israeli play in concert, he can make even the most appallingly difficult pieces seem like a bit of fun, or as easy as drawing breath. It is, as the saying goes, the art that disguises art.

Perhaps the idea of the effortless genius is partly born of the need to reassure ourselves in our relative laziness: if genius is simply something innate, God-given and unimprovable, then perhaps we can also do as well as we are able without making extraordinary efforts. Unfortunately, this is not so: and we must recognise that what the greatest musicians and sportsmen have which the rest of us lack is not just an aptitude, but a fierceness of desire and a commitment to self-improvement which we can scarcely begin to comprehend. Nowadays, Federer seems a serene spirit, but as a young, up-and-coming player, he was a noted racquet hurler, with no less of an inner rage to succeed than, for example, John McEnroe.

In the purely cerebral sport of chess, the one living player most often described as a genius is the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen – who at 19 became the world's highest-ranked grandmaster. Yet his father Henrik told me that what had first alerted him to Magnus's possibilities was the fact that as a toddler he would spend hours doing 50-piece jigsaw puzzles; the very young Magnus had an astonishing capacity for hard work and concentration– which is, after all, the very essence of learning.

Francis Galton, the slightly creepy founder of eugenics, sought to define genius by reference to an inherited form of intelligence, which he thought could be measured via the analysing of a person's reaction time and sensory acuity: this Galton referred to as "neurophysiological efficiency". You might think that, within sport, the activity most requiring preternaturally quick reactions would be Grand Prix motor-racing. Yet viewers of the BBC1 series Top Gear might recall Jeremy Clarkson engaging in a competitive test of reaction times with Michael Schumacher,: the lumbering Clarkson demonstrated that his reactions in a hand slapping contest were the equal of the then Formula One champion's.

This is actually what one should expect: we all have the same basic reaction times, which are determined by the nervous system rather than the brain – as evidenced by the fact that we all pull our hand away from a flame with identical suddenness. The difference between us and the champions is that they have trained their minds to process information with astonishing speed in situations requiring complex assessment. Watch how Federer reacts in the less than half a second it takes for a first serve from Murray to reach the opposing baseline and you see just what a special talent honed by obsessive determination and hundreds of thousands of hours of practice can achieve.

Conducting the on-court interview after his victory, Sue Barker began: "Genius tennis?" "Yes," Federer replied, deadpan. If only it were so simple; and the fact that it looks so simple is the strangest thing of all.