7 Rules of Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer

How strongly I recommend this book: 8 / 10

Date read: January 27, 2024

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Summary

Below is a short summary of the 7 rules of power outlined in this book:

1. Get out of your own way. The single biggest barrier to having power is ourselves. Sometimes imposter syndrome holds us back, and one of the ways to get over it is to push ourselves into situations where we are uncomfortable.
2. Break the rules. Rules tend to favor the already strong. An easy way to break rules is by asking for things.
3. Appear powerful. There is behavior that can be learned and adopted that can be associated with power. One key takeaway for me was the psychology behind apologizing. Read notes below for more details.
4. Build a powerful brand. Having a narrative for your work and building a brand around it is important. This chapter is absolutely worth it just for the story of how Deborah Liu (now CEO of Ancestry) sold her vision and plan to Mark Zuckerberg.
5. Network relentlessly. The highlight of this chapter was the finding from the study that stated how casual acquaintances (weak ties) were more useful for finding a job than strong ties such as family and close friends. Meet a wide variety of people.
6. Use your power. Power is not some scarce, limited resource that becomes depleted. The more someone uses their power to get things done, the more power they will acquire.
7. Success excuses (almost) everything. Hard to swallow this pill of human nature – your connections will protect you when you have success, but similarly, when you have suffered setbacks, people assume you must have done something to deserve it.

Give this book a read! It has so many examples and stories that tie into each rule to reinforce the principles behind that rule.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

In the Beginning: The Challenge of Power

• Fortunately, my ideas about the building and use of power can be effectively captured in seven rules, which constitute the chapters of this book. The seven rules are: 1.Get out of your own way. 2.Break the rules. 3.Appear powerful. 4.Build a powerful brand. 5.Network relentlessly. 6.Use your power. 7.Success excuses almost everything you may have done to acquire power.
  • I believe the seventh rule to be one of the more important, as it can cause people to act rather than worry needlessly about consequences.
• My explicit goal, stated in my Paths to Power course outline, is to provide people with the knowledge that, if implemented, can help them never have to leave a job involuntarily. Although I have not achieved that goal, as I still see too many people being ousted, the goal remains relevant and important.
  • Teaching people how to put the seven rules of power into practice can help them achieve that objective.
• Change requires power. If change were going to happen without power and influence, it would have already. The first step to making change is to get yourself(and your allies) into positions of leverage—a word I am going to use a lot in this book—so that your efforts have disproportionate effects in accomplishing things.

Introduction: Power, Getting Things Done, and Career Success

• Most importantly, she understood the first rule of power: to get out of her own way—to not expect a just or fair world, and certainly not to play by rules that would leave her disadvantaged, but instead to make her own rules and play her own game.

• Job performance is important, but if no one notices that performance, it is for naught. Power and performance together will get you much further ahead than either one separately.

• A study relating people’s sense of power(e.g.
  • “I think I have a great deal of power”) to their satisfaction with life(e.g.
  • “In most ways my life is close to my ideal”) and to their positive and negative affect(i.e. their perceived mood and emotions) found that, even after gender and other personality dimensions were statistically controlled, power predicted wellbeing.

• Political skill also reduces the adverse effects of workplace stressors;27 experiencing less stress helps people get things done by giving them more energy and permitting them to focus better.

• Two problems arise from making judgments of others. First, to get things done, critical relationships need to work.

• Second, judgment is a source of unhappiness and discontent, because in comparing what is with what we think should be, the almost inevitable observed discrepancies lead to frustration and negative affect. That is why there are many recommendations to be less judgmental.
  • Mother Teresa famously said,“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”34 The American poet Walt Whitman advised,“Be curious, not judgmental.”35
• Much better to be less judgmental and instead work from a place of equanimity, accepting(or at least understanding) organizational power and politics while becoming much more psychologically prepared to deal with them.

Rule 1 | Get Out of Your Own Way

• “As part of a vicious cycle. imposters feel more prone to failure, may become less productive, and are characterized by insecurity and procrastination.”2

• One way of getting over imposter syndrome is to focus on others in high-level positions and their differences from you, if any. Many of them are no more qualified than you are; success is sometimes the result of luck or being born to the right parents.
  • Another way to move past imposter syndrome is to do what this woman and other people sometimes do: push or force themselves, even in situations where they are uncomfortable, to present and sell themselves. With experience comes more comfort as well as skill. Getting over imposter syndrome is a first step on a person’s path to power.
• Mastering imposter syndrome, and describing yourself in positive rather than self-deprecating ways, is critical for achieving power and success. If you do not think of yourself as powerful, competent, and deserving, it is likely that, in subtle and possibly not-so-subtle ways, you will communicate this self-assessment to others.
  • Others are not likely to think more favorably of you than you do of yourself. Colleagues expect that you will, at least to some extent, self-advocate and self-promote—and if you don’t, that behavior will be held against you.
  • In a paper I coauthored with the famous social psychologist Robert Cialdini, we wrote,“There is evidence that not to make positive assertions about oneself or one’s work can be taken as a negative signal.”3
• Here’s a practical exercise that you can do and then repeat occasionally as part of your personal development. Write down the adjectives you use to describe yourself, both to yourself and to others. Check with friends to see if your list is correct. Then ask yourself what descriptors you need to get rid of in order to project yourself in a more powerful way.
  • Ask yourself what positive adjectives about yourself—language that gives credit to your accomplishments and credentials—you underutilize in your interactions with others.
• A related exercise: record yourself as you interact in professional settings throughout a day or week. Then analyze how many times you begin an interaction by apologizing for intruding, for interrupting, for taking the other person’s time, for offering your ideas.
  • Ask friends and colleagues how often you actively participate in discussion and forcefully offer your opinions, and how often you begin interactions by apologizing for offering them.
• And here’s a third exercise you can and should do. As you describe yourself to others, as you articulate a narrative of your career so far, as you create a personal brand—a topic we will explore in more detail in Rule 4—do you talk about your accomplishments, your credentials, or what you have done successfully?
  • Or do you attempt to appear modest and self-effacing, downplay your achievements, positions you have held, honors you have achieved, and your talents? Using these exercises, figure out how you are going to change your self-image and self-presentation in ways that reduce how frequently you get in your own way by being too modest and thereby hinder your ability to project—and achieve—power. Change

• Consequently, an individual can increase their confidence by acting more confidently, and can build their sense of their own power by describing themselves in a more powerful fashion.

• People often worry about their organizational competitors for advancement, about what their bosses think of them, about their relative skills. All of these things are important. But possibly the single biggest barrier to having power is ourselves. Therefore, the first rule of power is to get out of your own way.

• Changing the Narrative About Oneself

• BE WILLING TO DO WHATEVER IT TAKES—DON’T RUN AWAY FROM POWER

• In the book Soccernomics, Simon Kuper wrote,“The long refusal of English players to dive may have been an admirable cultural norm but they might have won more games if they had learned from Continental Europeans how to buy the odd penalty.”

• The Importance of Persistence and Resilience

• If you want power, you need to toughen up and become able to persist in the face of opposition and persevere even when confronted by setbacks.

How Low Power Perpetuates Itself

• Peter Belmi believes that one(but not the only) reason social class predicts willingness to use political-power-seeking behaviors is that there is considerable evidence that lower social class is associated with a more collective versus an individualistic orientation.
  • This difference means that people from lower-class origins are less likely to be comfortable with doing things that they see as just furthering their own interests.
• Nobody wants to see your true self. A decade ago, the author A. J. Jacobs spent a few weeks trying to be totally authentic. He announced to an editor he would try to sleep with her if he were single and informed his nanny that he would like to go out on a date with her if his wife left him. He told his in-laws their conversations were boring. You can imagine how his experiment worked out.
  • “Deceit makes our world go round,” he concluded.
  • “Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.”
• “Decades of research on self-disclosure suggest that the act of making oneself vulnerable by sharing personal information about the self typically promotes liking and feelings of closeness.”29 However, research also reveals the downsides of disclosing weaknesses, particularly in the case of task-oriented interactions for people in higher-status leadership roles.
  • As the authors summarized,“In three laboratory experiments, we found that when higher status individuals self-disclosed a weakness, it led to lower influence. greater perceived conflict. less liking. and less desire for a future relationship. by attenuating the status of the discloser.”30

• Regardless of someone’s view of authenticity, it is important to understand that the rules of power don’t ask you to change your personality. Power skills and behaviors are just that—skills and behaviors that can be learned and practiced selectively as situations demand.

• You can increase your strategic social interactions without becoming an extroverted networker. You can show up appearing confident even if you don’t feel that way.

• She commented that“learning, by definition, starts with unnatural and often superficial behaviors that can make us feel calculating instead of genuine and spontaneous.”33

• Isn’t Deception Eventually Uncovered?

• People are motivated to believe that others think well of them and have their interests at heart, and are conversely quite unmotivated, except in unusual circumstances, to seek to uncover deception. This is one reason why lying is so often effective. And when people perceive these others to be acting in their interest, they will have even less or no motivation to uncover any other reality.

• The combination of motivated cognition and people’s generally poor ability to discern deceit means that inauthentic behavior is unlikely to be uncovered—and even if it is, sanctions are likely to be either nonexistent or minimal.

• Be True to What Others Want You to Be

• Leaders need allies and supporters; one of the primary tasks of a leader is to recruit both. This task is more readily accomplished if the leader is true not to themselves but instead to the needs and motivations of those they seek to recruit.

• If you want to have allies—always a good thing if you want influence—you obviously need to provide others with something so they will support you.
  • Maybe it is the perception of similarity—for instance, Johnson could deepen his southern accent when he talked to Southerners, and could present himself as having views consistent with those of liberal Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey and conservative Georgian Richard Russell as the occasion required.
  • If you want others to support you, you need to be able to answer the question: What’s in it for them if they do?
• What is true in politics is true in organizations of all types. The people with whom you work have agendas, insecurities, problems, needs. So stop focusing on trying to figure out who you are. Instead, focus on who your allies and potential allies are. Become a student of the people whose support you need.
  • The sooner you do, the faster you will develop the information and insights necessary for strategically building the alliances you need to succeed.

The Paradox Of“Likability”

• Social psychologist Robert Cialdini’s work on influence argues that being liked is a source of power.40 Possibly even more importantly, most people are taught from an early age to get along with others and cultivate warm interpersonal relationships. But worrying about being liked, being overly concerned with what others think about us, can get in the way of becoming powerful.

• Here’s one problem with pursuing the goal of being liked: you may be seen as less competent. Princeton

• Social psychologist Robert Cialdini’s advice in a conversation with me is to first demonstrate competence. Then, if and when you show warmth, people will not see it as a sign of weakness but as something unexpected from a person with power.

• There is a second problem with prioritizing likability. Particularly as people rise to higher levels in organizations, they are evaluated on their ability to get things done, not so much on how nice they are.

• The authors found that the negative relationship between agreeableness and salary was larger for men than for women, although it held across studies for both, partly because women were expected to be nicer than men in general, and so received a smaller penalty for being so.
  • In exploring what mechanisms might produce these results, the study noted that people worried about appearing agreeable might prioritize maintaining social harmony over career advancement, thereby possibly sacrificing some positive career momentum. Further,
• They found that disagreeableness had no effect on subsequent power—it neither helped nor hurt. That was because disagreeableness led to two patterns of behavior that had offsetting effects on achieving power. On one hand, disagreeable people engaged in more dominant-aggressive behavior, a type of behavior that Anderson and others consistently have found positively predicts power.
  • On the other, disagreeable people also engaged in fewer generous and communal behaviors, which negatively affected attaining power.46 If disagreeableness, which their study defined in a way that clearly described someone completely unconcerned about their impact on others and willing to be reasonably nasty, had no effect on power, it seems evident that most people are too concerned much of the time about being liked.

• She noted that achieving success required a combination of humility to get others on your side, and also hubris.

• Adams also talked about letting go of worrying about every relationship and what others thought.

• The first rule of power is about acknowledging and accepting who you are but not letting that identity define who you will be forever. It is about understanding the importance of social connection but not letting the need for acceptance overwhelm what you want to get done, and the necessity of pursuing your own interests and agenda.
  • It is, in short, about getting out of your own way and getting on with the task of building the power base that will provide you the leverage to accomplish your goals.

Rule 2 | Break the Rules

• Breaking the rules in this second example meant fundamentally taking the initiative—not waiting to obtain permission or, for that matter, even asking for anyone’s approval, but just creating things—in this case, an event. By

• A study in Social Psychological and Personality Science concluded,“When people have power, they act the part. Powerful people smile less, interrupt others, and speak in a louder voice. The powerful have fewer rules to follow.”1

• Norm violators who are not sanctioned gain power from their ability to violate the rules, signaling they are different from and more powerful than people who(presumably must) adhere to social expectations. This passage helps to explain why Donald Trump’s lying has not caused him more difficulties.
  • Lying, which violates the social norm to tell the truth, is frequently not sanctioned, and because it also violates expectations, actually increases perceptions of the person’s power.
  • There are obviously limits to the positive effect of norm violations on perceptions of power, but the idea that violating rules and social conventions might increase someone’s power is a principle that ought to be taken seriously.

• Rule Breaking Surprises Others

• Because most people follow the rules most of the time, people who don’t can and often do catch their interaction partners off guard.

• Calacanis walked into people’s offices without an appointment, thereby breaking the rules of how you interact with powerful people—or maybe expectations of how you should approach anyone. Caught off guard and surprised by his audacity, the admissions director was impressed enough with Calacanis’s drive to get him admitted to Fordham.
  • And the dean, surprised and lacking a plan for how to handle Calacanis’s financial situation, reacted on the spot by connecting him with the business school computer lab, where he then more than doubled his wages. Surprise works not only because it catches people off guard but also because it affects people’s cognitions and emotions. Tania
• In a radio interview with PRI, Luna noted that surprises cause“humans to physically freeze for 1/25th of a second. Then they usually trigger something in the brain. a moment that causes humans to generate extreme curiosity in an attempt to figure out what is happening.
  • Surprises also intensify emotions.”7 Surprises cause people to pay more attention to satisfy their curiosity—and if you want to be remembered, having people pay closer attention to their interactions with you is probably a good thing.

• It Is Easier—and More Effective—to Ask Forgiveness Than Permission

• In practical terms for exercising power, this means that resistance to what you want to do is likely to be less than you expect because people will be reluctant to confront you and risk a difficult interpersonal conversation.
  • Therefore, it is easier and often more successful to just do what you want and to ask forgiveness for something that you have done instead of seeking permission for it beforehand. Once
• Rules Tend to Favor the Already Strong •
  • The Dilemma: To Fit In Or Stand Out
• The lesson of this chapter is that, notwithstanding these numerous forces pushing rule following and conformity, many paths to power entail parting with expectations, disregarding conventional wisdom, and breaking rules—except the rule of this chapter, which is to break the rules.

Break The Rules By Asking For Things

• But people want to offer help. First of all, it is consistent with social expectations to be cooperative. Also, asking for help is flattering.
  • In asking for the advice or assistance of another, the requestor implicitly elevates the status of the target, who is in the position of bestowing a favor, earning gratitude, and most importantly, demonstrating their importance to the requestor by complying with the request. Consequently, in the spirit of rule breaking, and consistent with the Flynn and Lake results, people should ask for more.

• Get used to asking, being turned down, and asking again, or for different things from different people. Asking does break some rules, but it works. Flynn

• Rules and social conventions are made by those in power, mostly to ensure that their power is perpetuated. Therefore, some of the rules, some of the social norms and expectations, may be sensible, but many are probably not—at best they are arbitrary, at worst seriously harmful to those with less power.

• If existing power arrangements are going to change, people are going to have to break those rules and violate social norms to create a different social order.

• Simply put, if you are going to win given the rules in place, by all means follow and advocate for those rules. For everyone else less guaranteed of inevitable success, rule breaking, the second rule of power, provides an empirically validated—and virtually the only feasible—path to success.

Rule 3 | Appear Powerful

• How you“show up” is important, maybe even determinative, of your career trajectory, how much power and status others accord you, and whether you keep your job.

• Therefore, if you want to attain and maintain power, the third rule of power is to appear powerful, because others will treat you and make decisions about you depending on how you show up, and those decisions will often act in ways to make the initial impressions become true.

• Research going back decades has demonstrated that(1) eye contact increases speakers’ credibility and the perception of their honesty;4(2) the duration of eye contact affects observers’ judgments of someone’s potency, including their leadership;5 and(3) eye contact affects people’s perceptions of the speaker’s self-esteem and causes others to rate the speaker more favorably.

• The first recommendation about showing up in a powerful way: don’t use notes or a lot of other props or cues, particularly things that would cause you not to make eye contact with the person or people you are speaking with.

• These empirical results are why it is fair and accurate to say that in numerous ways, and in many different contexts and settings, appearance matters and predicts career outcomes and attributions of power.

• A recent meta-analysis of sixty-nine studies concluded that, compared to people with average attractiveness, highly attractive individuals earn 20 percent more and are recommended for promotion more frequently.

• UNDERSTAND WHO YOUR AUDIENCE REALLY IS—AND WHAT THEY WANT AND NEED FROM YOU

• Every day, or at least occasionally, people around you are going to ask that question: Why do you have a senior role? What gives you the right to be in a position of power and influence? Part of the answer comes from your actual job performance, from your skills and competence.
  • But a big part of the answer derives from how you act and speak—how you show up—and if you show up in a way that inspires confidence in your capabilities.

• Although we like to think people root for the underdog, when it comes to their own identity, they would prefer to be with the winners.

• Certain emotional displays convey strength; others do not. Therefore, it is important to convey powerful emotions and avoid expressing those that signal lower status.

• In this regard, many people find it counterintuitive that anger is a powerful emotion and that displaying it is often a smart power move—even when, or possibly particularly when, someone has made a mistake or has been uncovered in some malfeasance.
  • By contrast, expressing sadness or remorse and apologizing conveys much less power—and therefore should be avoided under conditions when appearing powerful and competent is important, which is more frequently than most people think.

• If the powerful are permitted to display anger more readily than the less powerful—because displays of anger fall outside customary norms for behavior, and only the more powerful are permitted to violate social expectations—then displays of anger can create perceptions of higher status.

• Social psychologist Larissa Tiedens noted that“people expressing anger are seen as dominant, strong, competent and smart” and that“people believe individuals with angry facial expressions occupy more powerful social positions than do individuals with sad facial expressions.”25

• There are three important downsides to apologizing that ought to cause someone to think very carefully before doing it.
  • The first and most obvious downside is that apologizing“inherently associates a transgressor with wrongful behavior.”27 Responsibility for a bad outcome might have been ambiguous or contested, but once someone apologizes, the association of that person or organization with the negative action or outcomes is unambiguously established.

• Second, someone who apologizes incurs psychological costs, as apology can affect people’s self-perceptions.

• Therefore, not apologizing is consistent with people’s(and organizations’) desire for consistency and self-affirmation—powerful, effective, good people and organizations don’t engage in wrongdoing, so they don’t have anything to apologize for.

• Third, and possibly most importantly, apology affects not just the social actor that apologizes, by implicating credit and blame and affecting people’s feelings about themselves. Apology also affects what others believe about that social actor.
  • Because apology is a low-power behavior, others will see entities that apologize as possessing less influence, status, and prestige—and this will influence those perceivers’ behavior as a consequence. Thus, apologizing reduces the likelihood that the apologizer will benefit from the perception of being powerful and prestigious.

• “Transgressors who apologize in situations in which competence is relevant suffer a negative impact on their perceived competence. To the extent that thanking and apologizing are considered polite speech, research has found that the use of polite communication reflects negatively on the speaker’s perceived dominance, power, and assertiveness.”

• When a social entity cannot separate itself from an action—to use an example from Tiedens’s experimental study materials, Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky—the issue of how to respond changes. Associated with the action, apology tends to lead to both a perception of weakness and to further arguments about responsibility and what should have been done to prevent the problem.

• Because people want to feel proud of what they are involved with and to believe that they and their colleagues will be successful, one of a leader’s most important tasks is to project confidence. When someone projects confidence, others are more likely to follow and support them—and for that matter, to hire and promote them.
  • Moreover, if a leader projects confidence, then, following the ideas of contagion, others are likely to feel more confident and act accordingly.
  • The importance of projecting confidence is why the first rule of power, in chapter one, was to lose the scripts, language, and(relevant to this chapter) body language that suggests anything other than self-confidence and potency, even if that confidence is unwarranted by objective reality.
• In one study that used a geography knowledge task, the researchers found that not only did a person’s overconfidence predict their task partner’s rating of their competence and, therefore, the status accorded them, overconfidence“had as strong a relationship with partner-rated competence as did actual ability.”
  • A second study showed that the effect of overconfidence on perceptions of confidence and the according of status persisted after seven weeks, demonstrating that the phenomenon was not ephemeral.
• Anderson and colleagues used another experiment to ascertain the specific behavioral cues people were using to infer competence.
  • They found that the percentage of time someone spoke; the use of a confident, factual vocal tone; providing information relevant to the problem; adopting an expansive posture; exhibiting a calm and relaxed demeanor; and offering answers were all positively related to observers’ perceptions of competence.
• This finding is consistent with the argument made throughout this book that it is behaviors—ones that can be learned and adopted—that matter for the acquisition of power. It is not that personality does not matter at all, but behaviors often are more important.
  • For instance, with respect to confidence and power, one study had participants randomly assigned to adopt an expansive(high-power) or closed(low-power) pose and then present a two-minute speech in a simulated job interview. People who adopted the high-power pose were more likely to be assessed as employable and have their performance rated higher.
• The recommendations to display confidence and anger contradict the conventional wisdom that advises people to display vulnerability as a way of connecting to others, to be soft in how they show up as a way of encouraging others to come to their side to offer comfort and assistance.
  • What to do depends on which motive is stronger in a given situation—the motive to associate with strength and success, or the motive to offer help and feel close with someone who has expressed vulnerability.
  • Both are possible, but my reading of the evidence suggests that it is generally better to bet on the motive of being associated with strength and winning, and then to bask in the glory of the powerful.
• “Self-disclosure is becoming an increasingly relevant [and common] phenomenon in the workplace.”
  • The authors conducted three experiments to ascertain the consequences of self-disclosing any form of weakness.
  • They found, in the context of task-oriented relationships,“that when higher status individuals self-disclosed a weakness, it led to lower influence. greater perceived conflict. less liking. and less desire for a future relationship.”38 These negative effects did not occur when the individual self-disclosing weakness was a peer in terms of status.
  • My conclusion: it is particularly important to demonstrate confidence—and competence—in task-oriented settings, especially when you hold a higher-status position and others expect you to provide leadership and reassurance. So, yes, you can express vulnerabilities and insecurities among friends, or when you hold a position in which you are not a leader.
  • But in high-status and task-relevant positions, you are much better off keeping any insecurities to yourself.

• More gestures More open body posture Less interpersonal distance(placing oneself closer to others) More controlled arm and hand gestures Louder voice More successful interruptions of others More speaking time Longer gazing time Higher visual dominance ratio(look + talk > look + listen) More disinhibited laughs

• Powerful speech has several characteristics. First, it is simple. Powerful speech consists of mostly one-syllable words and no complex sentence constructions with subordinate clauses. Powerful speech is easy to understand, which is one reason it is powerful.
  • Powerful speech also does not impose large cognitive burdens on the listener, but rather draws their conclusions for them in simple, easy-to-understand words.
• A second feature of powerful speech is the absence of hedging words such as“sort of” or“kind of” and few hesitations such as“um” or“er,” as well as a lack of polite forms. Powerful speech uses powerful words—words that evoke vivid images and arouse people’s emotions—words such as“injured,”
  • “Death,” and“problem.”
• Powerful speakers make declarations instead of asking questions. Powerful speech takes into account the fact that the final words in a sentence are important—you want to end strong. Such speech uses pauses and variations in pacing for emphasis and to hold the audience’s attention. Most importantly, powerful speech repeats ideas and themes.
  • Evidence shows that“people are more likely to judge repeated statements as true compared to new statements, a phenomenon known as the illusory truth effect.”43 Two experiments demonstrated that“people were more misled by—and more confident about—claims that were repeated, regardless of how many [sources] made them.
• Because of the operation of confirmation bias and the power of first impressions, appearance(i.e. impressions created through speech and how one presents oneself) matters a great deal.

Rule 4 | Build a Powerful Brand

• Brand was important because, as Chau notes,“in order to succeed at a fund, you need to do the best deals possible. In order to do the best deals possible, you need to maximize your chances of actually seeing those deals. There’s only so much you can do one on one, and brand felt like an incredible way of marketing, where you were able to be top of mind for people.”

• One way to build a powerful brand is to associate with other people and organizations that are themselves prestigious.

• HAVE A NARRATIVE—AND TELL IT REPEATEDLY A brand needs coherence. At its best and most effective, a brand brings together aspects of someone’s personal and professional life in a way that makes it clear why they are uniquely qualified for some position or to found a company in a particular industry.

• Everyone needs a brand. Your task: think of a short(two-or three-sentence) way of describing yourself and your accomplishments that brings together your expertise, your experience(what you have done), and a way of integrating that with some aspect of your personal story.

• If you have a job at a prestigious organization, go beyond just adding it to your résumé and public profile. Leverage that association to obtain connections to other high-status positions and organizations and build even more personal brand equity.

• Part of brand building and creating a positive reputation is ensuring that you get credit for your work. That entails being willing to tell your story and eschewing any false sense of modesty or the belief that your work will speak for itself. Your bosses and colleagues are busy and often focused on their own objectives. Don’t expect them to necessarily notice or credit your accomplishments.

• I told everyone I met,“We’re going to solve mobile monetization, and here’s how we’re going to do it.”

  • Our core team was like five people—three engineers, a borrowed data scientist, and myself. But I posted about what we were doing everywhere internally. I wrote decks and strategies. I went to Mark [Zuckerberg] and I pitched him on it. I did everything I could to get the work out because we had so few resources. Everybody wanted to help.
  • Partnerships leads from Europe said,“I’ll take this product to market for you.”
  • And they went and met with developers and explained how it worked and set them up to test this new type of ads. It was about telling the story over and over. Not only did everyone know about this product, but then people started spreading the word for us. The executives mentioned the product in an earnings call.
  • By telling the story and connecting it to the biggest problem in the company, we got dozens of people to help us in their spare time. People wanted to be part of something that was going to address an acute need. They heard the story and wanted to be part of writing it.
  • Even to this day, many years after we gave up the product, the story is told of a small team that did something incredible at a time that was critical to the company. Today, the product is a leader in its space, but it is small relative to the scale of Facebook. But the narrative has become a touchpoint that inspired other teams that want to do something big.
  • Deborah Liu wound up getting more credit for a smaller product achievement than she did for something of greater economic significance, because she had created and told a narrative—repeatedly—that possessed all of the elements of what people want to hear.

Rule 5 | Network Relentlessly

• The old saying“it’s not what you know but who you know” has at least some truth. Who you know, and how many people you know, matters for your influence and for your career. Therefore, Rule 5 of the seven rules of power is to network relentlessly.
  • Your networking may not permit you to hit the proverbial lottery like Omid Kordestani did, or to write best-selling books and build a consulting firm like Keith Ferrazzi, or to become a successful real estate investor like Ross Walker. But networking and building social relationships will, as much evidence demonstrates, build power and accelerate your career.
• When people think of it [networking] as a task, it’s something you do and then you sort of deposit it away. You know, you don’t think, when you’re actually taking the trash out, what’s the set of elements I could do that would make me better at it. I think a lot of people think of networking as a task. And I think that he’s [Ross Walker’s] taken it to a level of skill.
  • And when you are trying to build a skill, you are much more apt to be strategic or analytical about how you get better at it.10
• A longitudinal field study of 112 employees assessing career success after three years found that“networking was the most robust predictor of career success.”
  • Another longitudinal study observed an effect of networking on both concurrent salary and the growth rate of salary over time as well as a relationship between networking and career satisfaction.11 A study of 510 employees at a professional services firm found that networking was positively related to both in-role and extra-role performance.12 Yet another study examining 191 employees in a wide range of occupations found that networking ability dominated other aspects of political skill in its ability to explain career outcomes including total compensation, promotions, and career and life satisfaction.13

• The surprising finding was that the ties that were most useful for finding a job were not the strong ties with family, friends, and close work colleagues, but instead the ties with casual acquaintances—so-called weak ties.19

• Research done since Granovetter’s study has examined the relationship between weak ties and emotional and psychological wellbeing. A study of 242 undergraduate college students found that the more classmates they interacted with, the happier they were and greater their feelings of belongingness.

• The straightforward message of weak ties’ importance: don’t spend too much time with people who are close. Instead, ensure that you are meeting a wide variety of people in a wide variety of organizations and industries. You never know when one of them will have information important to your job performance or career prospects.

• The practical implication: network structure matters. People’s careers—and their job performance—are enhanced if they can find positions or jobs where they can perform brokerage and bridge structural holes—connecting units, people, or organizations that would mutually benefit from being exposed to different ideas, information, opportunities, and resources.

• Centrality affects visibility. More people will know and know about people who are more central, and that visibility will often work to those people’s advantage for becoming the focal point for information and opportunities. Centrality also affects access to information.
  • The first network studies demonstrated that people in central positions saw more information—because more communication flowed through them—and had greater direct contact with more people. The implication: when people evaluate jobs and roles, one dimension they should account for is the centrality that will accrue to them from occupying that job or position.
  • Other things being equal, choose more central jobs.

• Help also binds people together through liking; people like those who help them more than those that don’t. And providing value to others through social relationships transforms networking from something dirty or transactional to something viewed much more positively by everyone, including the networker. It is now more about serving and being of service to others.

• It is important to recognize that sustaining a relationship, particularly a weak tie, does not require intense or deep connections. Casual updates, sharing an interesting article about a topic of mutual interest, or letting people know you are thinking about them is often sufficient.

• Any master connector will eventually hit a point where they will have to make a very tough but very important decision: how to balance network growth with generating utility from the network. Most people are good at one or the other or sometimes neither. It is the extremely rare person who has properly solved the network growth to network value extraction ratio.
  • But those few that have rise to the top very fast—and stay there.

• Balancing network growth with network value extraction, and spending more time on people being cultivated than those who are already part of one’s social circle, are two other ways—along with leveraging technology and maybe building a staff(after all, hiring help is often not that expensive)—to become more time efficient in networking.

• Consider how you spend your time, maybe by looking at your calendar, asking others, or some combination. Are you devoting enough time to building social relationships and engaging in social interactions? And with whom are you spending your time? Are you building brokerage relationships—connecting people or organizations who could benefit from such connections?
  • Are you associating often enough with high-status others? Are you spending your time in professionally useful ways, at least on occasion?
• Networking, like other power skills, can be taught and learned. It is important to master this rule of power.

Rule 6 | Use Your Power

• WHEN VICE PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON ASSUMED the presidency following John Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, he appointed Jack Valenti as a White House aide that night. Valenti, who subsequently served for thirty-eight years as head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said that Johnson immediately decided to use his power vigorously.

• Johnson understood three things. First, when a person is new in a position, they have time, before their opponents get a chance to coalesce, and while the incumbent is in sort of a honeymoon period, to get a lot done. This includes actions that will help perpetuate their power on the basis of their accomplishments and the changes they make to institutionalize their power.
  • Second, enemies tend to last longer and keep grudges more than friends remember favors. This means that, practically speaking, the longer someone is in a powerful role, the more opposition they will accumulate, the more precarious their position will become, and the more difficult it will be to get things done.
  • Thus, because their time in a powerful role will be limited, people need to act quickly to accomplish their agenda.

• Third, and the principal theme of this chapter, is the idea that power is not some scarce, limited resource that becomes depleted by being used. Instead, the more someone uses their power to get things done—including structuring the world around them and changing who works with and for them in ways that support themselves and their objectives—the more power they will have.

• Using power signals that you have it, and because people are attracted to power, the more you use your power and demonstrate that you are powerful, the more allies you will accumulate.

• Making positive change by using power encourages people to come over to your side and enhances your performance before people can do anything to sabotage your efforts.

• Making changes quickly and improving outcomes increases a leader’s power because it provides a rationale for others to support them. And using power is often necessary, as organizations are generally beset with varying degrees and forms of inertia, so improvement requires altering existing ways of doing things.
  • Existing people and processes usually have some investment in the status quo, so it requires power to accomplish improvements. Successfully using power to make changes increases the incumbent’s power, while waiting to use power or not using it at all leaves the status quo in place, thereby reducing power. Power, used effectively, increases its wielder’s power.

• Replacing people, then, has two positive effects on your power. First, it staffs the organization with people who have aligned perspectives and the competence to execute effectively, and that increased performance will help cement your power. And second, it provides you with allies in situations that are often challenging and politically fraught.

• Another way is to send one’s“problems” to a different and maybe even better position elsewhere, removing them from the immediate environment where they can cause difficulties while earning their gratitude for helping their careers. I have come to call this method“strategic outplacement.”

• It is important to demonstrate that the leader will remain in their role and will constitute a force to be reckoned with—thereby demonstrating toughness and a willingness to do what it takes to keep one’s position and do whatever they want.
  • In this regard, I am reminded of the famous quote from Machiavelli’s The Prince on the usefulness of fear for projecting power:“It is much safer to be feared than loved because. love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage, but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”15 Machiavelli also appropriately noted that the first responsibility of a leader was to hold on to their position, because if they lost it, they would no longer be able to get much accomplished.

• Because Moses was willing to wield his power and do so aggressively—his most famous quotation is“Those who can, build. Those who can’t, criticize”19—people,

• Because perception helps create reality, wielding power in ways that demonstrate power, doing things that signal power, helps to ensure that power will be perpetuated.

• It is possible to hold multiple overlapping roles that make it difficult for rivals to get rid of someone because that person would need to be removed from multiple positions in order to remove their power—a much more difficult task. Robert Moses exemplifies this principle. At one point, Moses held twelve positions

• Not all use of power will be met with unalloyed approval, so leaders need to be willing to incur some level of social disapproval—recall that the first rule of power is not being overly concerned with being liked. Moreover, there is inevitably some risk in scheming to remove rivals and establish rules that help perpetuate power.
  • However, because most people are usually averse to conflict, it is surprising how much one can accomplish by seizing the initiative. And because people tend to sidle up to power once it is established, foes can become friends, enemies neutralized, and power secured.

Rule 7 | Success Excuses (Almost) Everything: Why This Is the Most Important Rule of All

• Of course, holding a high-level position often generates jealousy. People envy success and status, not powerlessness. But power also increases others’ desire to be close to and associate with the power holder. Having power increases people’s visibility and the scrutiny of their actions, thereby increasing the likelihood of their facing criticism as a result of the greater attention.
  • But power also increases people’s willingness to overlook a powerful person’s misdeeds,
• Cumulative advantage arises from many social forces. The more powerful and successful someone is, the more likely it will be that talented people will want to work with them—and the ability to attract more and better talent increases the chances of subsequent success. Likewise, the more powerful and successful someone is, the greater the odds that others will want to invest in and with them.
  • This advantage in attracting resources increases the likelihood of future success and higher performance.
• If you are successful, rich, powerful, and have many powerful and rich friends—a great social network—then that success and those connections will likely protect you(notice I used the word likely, not inevitably) from falling from power and grace, almost regardless of what you do.
  • Simply put, once you are on top, at least in some sense of that term, what you did to get there will be forgotten, forgiven, or possibly both.
• Individuals love a feeling of certainty and influence over their environments. Believing in a just world means: follow the rules and you will prosper; break the rules—or laws—and you will suffer. What some people do not recognize is that the reverse logic also operates.
  • The belief that people get what they deserve implies that individuals who have suffered setbacks or reversals must have done something to deserve those things—a phenomenon that can slide into blaming the victim. Conversely, people who have prospered presumably deserve their good fortune—and this search for justifications for good(or bad) fortune extends to outcomes that occur purely by chance.

• The aphorism that success has many parents but that failure is an orphan can be accurately restated as: when you are powerful and successful, you will have more friends than you ever knew you had; when you lose power, no one will know you.

• One motivation for people to hang on to positions of power, like CEO roles, is their recognition that once they are no longer in that role, the motivation for others to be associated with them diminishes dramatically, and therefore they can find themselves with much-reduced status—and personhood.
  • A friend of mine, a former CEO of a large organization who then was in a very senior(but not top) role in yet another mammoth company in a different industry and now is running a start-up he founded, sent me this email:“I hope your experience has been different, but I have found that enduring friendships are hard to maintain as I get older. I truly value ours.”
  • I believe the issue this person confronted is not so much about aging; rather it reflects the consequences for interpersonal interactions arising from moving out of high-status/high-power roles into a position with less formal power and control over vast resources. And yes, many people are much less interested in someone at that point.
• Reinterprets them in ways favorable to them. By writing their own story, the powerful can highlight those aspects of their careers that create a favorable image while ignoring incidents that would portray them in a less-than-desirable light. If they succeed in getting their stories widely promulgated, these become the“official” account of their life—which can further perpetuate their power.

Coda: Staying on the Path to Power

• The first word of advice: learn about power, and then relearn what you have learned again and again, because the material, while easy to understand, is apparently more difficult to implement than it should be.

• At a certain level, everybody is smart and has approximately the same technical knowledge. If doing power were easy or natural, it would not be such an important differentiating factor in people’s ability to achieve higher positions or their objectives. If almost everyone could easily and readily implement the rules of power, doing so would provide an advantage to almost no one.

• The moral of the story: find a coach who will nicely, constructively, but firmly push you outside of your comfort zone, and get you to think hard about your choices and your actions—the only things over which you have control—so you can prevail in power struggles.

• List what you want to do, what you want to learn, who you need to meet.

• Figure out who can be helpful to you and reach out to them, practicing the idea of Rule 5. Build a powerful brand—Rule 4—by developing a concise statement of who you are and why you are uniquely qualified to be doing what you’re doing. Act and speak with power—Rule 3—by understanding and then implementing the ideas of how to convey power through your facial expressions, body language, and words.

  • Get out of your own way—Rule 1—by not holding yourself back and unnecessarily worrying about what everyone else is thinking about you. And break the rules—Rule 2—to surprise others by being resourceful in your power strategies and tactics.