Power: Why someone has it, while others don’t

此书乃职场“九阴真经”，读后起到的效果取决于读者的心性。心性不足者看后会如梅超风一般连成职场“九阴白骨爪”而达到双输的效果，心性甚高者会学会后如同郭靖一般对社会带来价值。

“九阴真经”的一大缺点就是阴气过重，容易误导读者。不知职场的青出于蓝的“九阳真经”这一本书。

在心性不足时看此书切记“害人之心不可以，防人之心不可无”。如果想更近一步，可以考虑“利人之心不可无”。

摘要

1. It takes more than performance

The lesson from cases of people both keeping and losing their jobs is that as long as you keep your boss or bosses happy, performance really does not matter that much, and if you upset them, performance won’t save you.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that good performance — job accomplishments — is sufficient to acquire power and avoid organizational difficulties. Consequently, people leave too much to chance and fail to effectively manage their careers. If you are going to create a path to power, you need to lose the idea that performance by itself is enough. And once you understand why this is the case, you can even profit from the insight.

What this research means is that job performance matters less for your evaluation than your supervisor’s commitment to and relationship with you.

Salaries in companies were strongly related to age and organizational tenure than they were to job performance. Performance ratings were weakly tied to actual productivity and that people with more educational credentials were more likely to be promoted even if they weren’t the best employees.

Doing great doesn’t guarantee you a promotion or a raise, and it may not even be that important for keeping your job.

You need to be noticed, influence the dimensions used to measure your accomplishments, and mostly make sure you are effective at managing those in power — which requires the ability to enhance the ego of those above you.

Your first responsibility is to ensure that those at higher levels in your company know what you are accomplishing. And the best way to ensure they know what you are achieving is to tell them.

Research shows that repeated exposure increases positive affect and reduces negative feelings, that people prefer the familiar because this preference reduces uncertainty, and that the effect of exposure on liking and decision making is a robust phenomenon that occurs in different cultures and in a variety of different domains of choice.

In order for your great performance to be appreciated, it needs to be visible. But beyond visibility, the mere exposure research teaches us that familiarity produces preference. Simply put being memorable equals getting picked.

No one is going to perform equally well on all the dimensions of their work. What you can do is consistently emphasize those aspects on which you do well.

It is much more effective for you to ask those in power on a regular basis, what aspects of the job they think are the most crucial and how they see what you ought to be doing. Asking for help and advice also creates a relationship with those in power that can be quite useful, and asking for assistance, in a way that still conveys your competence and command of the situation, is an effective way of flattering those with power over you. Having asked what matters to those with power over you, act on what they tell you.

The surest way to keep your position and to build a power base is to help those with more power enhance their positive feelings about themselves.

The lesson: worry about the relationship you have with your boss at least as much as you worry about your job performance. If your boss makes a mistake, see if someone else other than you will point it out. And if you do highlight some error or problem, do so in a way that does not in any way implicate the individual’s own self-concept or competence — for instance, by blaming the error on others or on the situation. The last thing you want o do is be known as someone who makes your boss insecure or have a difficult relationship with those in power.

One of the best ways to make those in power feel better about themselves is to flatter them.

This chapter has emphasized managing up — both the importance of doing so and some ways of being successful at the task. That’s because your relationship with those in power is critical to your own success.

2. The personal qualities that bring influence

Three obstacles:

1. You must come to believe that personal change is possible.
2. You need to see yourself and your strengths and weaknesses as objectively as possible.
3. You need to understand the most important qualities for building a power base so you can focus your inevitably limited time and attention on developing those.
   • How to coach?

   Instead of giving people feedback about what they have done right and wrong in the past, he focuses on “feedforward”, which emphasizes what people need to do to get ready for the subsequent positions and career challenges they will confront. The idea is this: when people focus on what they need to get to the next stage of their careers, they are less defensive.

People without the requisite knowledge to perform a task successfully also lacked the information and understanding required to know they were deficient, and in what ways.

• Seven important personal qualities the build power
  • Ambition: help people overcome the temptation to give up or to give in to the irritations.
  • Energy: Energy does three things that help build influence. 1) Energy is contagious. Your hard work signals that the job is important; people pick up on that signal, or its opposite. And people are more willing to expend effort if you are too; 2) Energy and the long hours it permits provide an advantage in getting things accomplished; 3) People often promote those with energy because of the importance of being able to work hard and also because expending great energy signals a high degree of organizational commitment and, presumably, loyalty.
  • Focus: Three dimensions: 1) specialization in a particular industry or company, providing depth of understanding and a more substantial web of focused relationships; 2) Concentration on a limited set of activities or functional skills; 3) Concentrate on those activities within your particular job or position that are the most critical.
  • Self-knowledge: There is no learning and personal development without reflection.
  • Confidence: Formal job titles and positions can provide influence and power. But in many situations, you will be working with peers or with outsiders who may not know your formal status. Because power is likely to cause people to behave in a more confident fashion, observers will associate confident behavior with actually having power. Coming across as confident and knowledgable helps you build influence.
  • Empathy with others: Training in negotiation often includes advice to negotiate over “interests” rather than “positions”. Far from diverting you from accomplishing your objectives, putting yourself in the other’s place is one of the best ways to advance your own agenda.
  • Capacity to tolerate conflict: If you can handle difficult conflict-and stress-filled situations effectively, you have an advantage over most people.
  • Intelligence: Intelligence seldom accounts for much more than 20 percent of the variation in work performance in any event, and the relationship between performance and attaining power is equally weak.

3. Choosing where to start

Where you begin your career affects your rate of progress as well as how far you go. People starting in more powerful units moving up more rapidly.

The most common mistake is to locate in the department dealing with the organization’s current core activity, skill, or product — the unit that is the most powerful at the moment. This turns out to not always be a good idea because the organization’s most central work is where you are going to encounter the most talented competition and also the most well-established career paths and processes. Moreover, what is the most important function or product today may not be in the future. So if you want to move up quickly, go to underexploited niches where you can develop leverage with less resistance and build a power base in activities that are going to be more important in the near future than they are today.

Unexpected paths to power

1. Have advanced degrees and elite credentials from leading universities.
2. The analytical orientation and the numbers the group produced provided at least the appearance of rationality and certainty to a troubled company.
3. The finance people talked the language of Wall Street and the financial markets, which seemed important.
4. The finance people were conservative when it came to spending money, and the money they weren’t spending was company’s money.
5. Perhaps the most important source of the finance group’s success was their centrality in consequential decisions.

Diagnosing department power

• Relative pay: Both starting salaries and the pay of more senior positions in departments connote relative power.
• Physical location and facilities: Being physically close to those in power both signals power and provides power through increased access.
• Positions — on committees and in senior management: Look at who, besides the CEO, is the insider most likely to serve on a company’s board of directors.

The trade-off: a strong power based vs. less competition

Being in a powerful department provides advantages for your income and your career. But for that very reason, lots of talented people want to go to the most powerful units.

Your answer to this dilemma depends on the extent to which you are an organizational entrepreneur and risk taker. It also depends on whether you are satisfied being carried along by a powerful tide or you want to get ahead of the wave or create your own pond where you can stand out.

4. Getting in: standing out and breaking some rules

Asking works, but people find it uncomfortable

Asking often works. The problem is that people underestimate the chances of others offering help. That’s because those contemplating making a request of another tend to focus on the costs others will incur complying with their request, and don’t emphasize sufficiently the costs of saying no.

Asking is flattering

One reason why asking works is that we are flattered to be asked for advice or help — few things are more self-affirming and ego-enhancing than to have others, particularly talented others, seek our aid.

Determine who he wanted to be involved in the project and then ask them in a way that enhanced their feelings of self-esteem.

People love to give advice as it signals how wise they are, and we should package the request brilliantly.

Research shows that people are more likely to accede to requests from others with whom they share even the most casual of connections.

The book Influence illustrates how effective flattery can be in getting others on our side. Asking for help is inherently flattering, and can be made even more so if we do it correctly, emphasizing the importance and accomplishments of those we ask and also reminding them of what we share in common.

Don’t be afraid to stand out and break the rules

Your success depends not only on your own work but also on your ability to get those in a position to help your career, like your boss, to want to make you successful and help you in your climb. You need to build your personal brand and promote yourself, and not be too shy in the process.

The concept of standing out to become memorable is called “brand recall”, which is an important measure of advertising effectiveness. What works for products can work for you too — you need to be interesting and memorable and able to stand out in ways that cause others to want to know you and get close to you.

Likability is overrated

Research found that the two virtually universal dimensions used to assess people are warmth and competence. To appear competent, it is helpful to seem a little tough, or even mean. Nice people are perceived as warm, but niceness frequently comes across as weakness or even a lack of intelligence.

Likability can create power, but power almost certainly creates likability

People will join your side if you have power and are willing to use it, not just because they are afraid of your hurting them but also because they want to be close to your power and success.

What’s likability got to do with anything?

If we interact with powerful people because we need them to do some task or to help us in our career, over time we will come to like them more or at least forgive their rough edges.

People forget and forgive

We forgive the slights and woulds inflicted by others, and are particularly likely to forgive people if we are in contact with them. And we are more likely to remain in contact if they are powerful. Over time, even the most contentious adversaries can become close friends.

5. Making something out of nothing: creating resources

Having resources is an important source of power only if you use those resources strategically to help others whose support you need, in the process gaining their favor.

Most talented people want to work with those with the most power and resources, so those with access to important resources have advantages in hiring precisely the sorts of smart hard-working individuals who can further their success.

There are two simple but important implications of resources as a source of power. The first is that in choosing among jobs, choose positions that have greater direct resource control of more budget or staff. Your power comes in large measure from the position you hold and the resources and other things you control as a consequence of holding that position.

Creating something out of almost nothing

• Provide attention and support: Sometimes building a relationship so that others will help you requires nothing more than being polite and listening. Being nice to people is effective because people find it difficult to fight with those who are being polite and courteous. If you don’t have much power, you probably have time. Use that time to befriend others and o to events that are important to them.
• Do small but important tasks: People appreciate help with doing some aspect of their job, and they particularly appreciate assistance with tasks that they find boring or mundane — precisely the kinds of tasks great for beginning to build a power base. Taking on small tasks can provide you with power because people are often lazy or uninterested in seemingly small, unimportant activities. Therefore, if you take the initiative to do a relatively minor task and do it extremely well, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to challenge you for the opportunity. Meanwhile, these apparently minor tasks can become important sources of power.
• Build a resource base inside and outside your organization.
• Leverage your association with a prestigious institution.

6. Building efficient and effective social network

Some jobs are mostly about networking and everyone can benefit from developing more efficient and effective social networks and honing networking skills.

A definition of networking and networking skills

Behaviors that are aimed at building, maintaining, and using informal relationships that possess the potential benefit of facilitating work-related activities of individuals by voluntarily gaining access to resources and maximizing…advantages.

1. Building internal contacts

   e.g., I use company events to make new contacts.

2. Maintaining internal contacts

   e.g., I catch up with colleagues from other departments about what they are working on.

3. Using internal contacts

   e.g., I use my contacts with colleagues in other departments in order to get confidential advice in business matters.

4. Building external contacts

   e.g. I accept invitations to official functions or festivities out of professional interest.

5. Maintaining external contacts

   e.g. I ask others to give my regards to business acquittances outside of our company.

6. Using external contacts

   e.g. I exchange professional tips and hints with acquaintances from other organizations.

Networking jobs

There are many leadership tasks where the essence of the work is bringing people and organizational units with different competencies and perspectives together to complete a task or consummate a transaction.

The ability to network is important in most job

Many studies show that networking is positively related to obtaining good performance evaluations, objective measures of career success such as salary and organizational level, and subjective attitudes assessing career satisfaction.

Competencies did affect career advancement as measured by both salary progress and promotions. The study showed that networking was the second most important competency, following only the use of technology in importance in explaining how well these managers did.

Effective networking creates a virtuous cycle. Networking makes you more visible; this visibility increases your power and status; and your heightened power and status then make building and maintaining social contacts easier.

Spend sufficient time

If networking is so helpful for people’s job performance and career success, the obvious question is, why do some people devote insufficient time and attention to the activity?

1. The effort required.
2. Some people find the activity distasteful because they believe it is insincere to build relationships with people for instrumental purposes.
3. People undervalue the importance of social relationships and overvalue other aspects of job performance in thinking about what produces career success.

Networking actually does not take that much time and effort. It mostly takes thought and planning.

Because networking does entail some effort, you ought to be strategic about your networking activities Make a list of people you want or need to meet and organizations where some personal connection might be helpful. Work your way down that list, figuring out ways to build social relationships with a wider and more diverse set of individuals.

Another barrier that seems to stand in the way of networking is that people naturally fall into habits, and one habit is interacting with the same set of people all the time. You get comfortable with them, you come to trust them, and it is easier and more pleasant to interact with people you already know than to build relationships with strangers. So go out of your way to meet new people.

Network with the right people

Social ties were important in the job-finding process and the more one used social ties, as contrasted with less personal mechanisms such as formal applications, the better the job the individual found.

What was surprising was the type of social ties that mattered in the job-finding process: weak ties. Strong ties are typically with family, friends, and close associates at work and involve frequent interaction. Weak ties are with casual acquaintances, people you hardly know and with whom you have fairly infrequent interactions.

For weak ties to be useful, however, two things must be true: casual acquaintances must be able to link you into diverse networks and they must be willing to do so.

Consequently, an optimal networking strategy is to know a lot of different people from different circles, have multiple organizational affiliations in a variety of different industries and sectors that are geographically dispersed, but not necessarily to know the people well or to develop close ties with them.

Create a strong structural position

Being in a position to control communications within the department is particularly important to being promoted.

Network position matters a great deal for your influence and career trajectory.

One way of building centrality is through physical location.

Centrality provides power within a network, but it is also important to have power through connections across diverse networks.

7. Acting and speaking with power

Acting with power

Authority is 20 percent given, 80 percent taken.

If you are going to take power, you need to project confidence. You need to project assurance even if — or maybe particularly if — you aren’t sure what you’re doing.

First, after a while, what started out being an act becomes less so. Over time, you will become more like you are acting — self-assured, confident, and more strongly convinced of the truth of what you are saying. Attitudes follow behavior, as much research attests. Second, the emotions you express, such as confidence or happiness, influence those around you — emotions are contagious. Third, emotions and behaviors become self-reinforcing.

The researchers found that in negative situations, participants believed that high-status people would feel more angry than sad or guilty and that low-status people would feel sad or guilty instead of angry. A second experiment demonstrated that angry people were seen as high-status while sad and guilty people were viewed as low-status.

Some experimental research supports the view that women may benefit less than men by acting angry.

If you have to choose between being seen as likable and fitting in on the one hand or appearing competent albeit abrasive on the other, choose competence. Self-deprecating comments and humor work only if you have already established your competence.

Everyone can standup rather than slouching, and can thrust their chest and pelvis forward rather than curling in on themselves. Moving forward and toward someone is a gesture that connotes power, as does standing closer to others, while turning your back or retreating signals the opposite.

Moving your hands in a circle or waving your arms diminishes how powerful you appear. Gestures should be short and forceful, not long and circular. Looking people directly in the eye connotes not only power but also honesty and directness, while looking down is a signal of diffidence. Looking away causes others to think you are dissembling.

Sometimes you will be called upon to display emotions you don’t feel. To display the emotion you need to show, go within yourself to a time and event when you did feel the emotion you need to project at that moment.

It is always desirable to be prepared to make an important presentation. But there will be times when a question or comment blindsides you or when you find yourself in a situation without preparation. Breathe and take time to collect yourself — you will be much more effective than if you just rush into the situation.

Speaking powerfully

Interruption

One source of power in every interaction is interruption. Those with power interrupt, those with less power get interrupted. In conversation, interrupting others, although not polite, can indicate power and be an effective power move.

Contest the premises of the discussion

There are three faces of power:

1. The ability to win in direct contests.
2. Who sets the agenda, and in the process determine whether a specific issue will even be discussed or debated at all?
3. Who determines the rules for interpersonal interactions through which agendas and outcomes are determined.

Persuasive language

1. Use us-versus-them references.
2. Pause for emphasis and invite approval or even applause through a slight delay.
3. Use a list of three items, or enumerations in general.
4. Use contrastive pairs, comparing one thing to another and using passages that are similar in length and grammatical structure.
5. Avoid using a script or notes.

8. Building a reputation: perception is reality

One important strategy for not only creating a successful path to power but also maintaining your position once you have achieved it is to build your image and your reputation.

Those who were able to create a favorable impression receive higher ratings than did people who actually performed better but did not do as good a job in managing the impressions they made on others.

You get only one chance to make a first impression

1. People start forming impressions of you in the first few seconds or even milliseconds of contact.
2. These fast first impressions are remarkably accurate in predicting other more durable and important evaluations.
   1. The process of attention decrement argues that because of fatigue or boredom, people don’t pay as close attention to later information as they do to information that comes early, when they first form judgments.
   2. A second process entails cognitive discounting — once people have formed an impression of another, they disregard any information that is inconsistent with their initial ideas. This process is particularly likely when the decisions and judgments are consequential.
3. People engage in behavior that helps make their initial impressions of others come true.

There are two important implications of the durability and rapid creation of first impressions.

1. If you find yourself in a place where you have an image problem and people don’t think well of you, it is often best to leave for greener pastures. This is tough advice to hear and heed — many people want to demonstrate how wonderful they are by working diligently to change others’ minds and repair their image. But such efforts are seldom successful, for all the reasons just enumerated, and moreover they take a lot of effort. Better to demonstrate your many positive qualities in a new setting where you don’t have to overcome so much baggage.
2. Because impressions are formed quickly and are based on many things, such as similarity and “chemistry” over which you have far from perfect control, you should try to put yourself in as many different situations as possible — to play the law of large numbers. If you are a talented individual, over time and in many contexts, that talent will appear to those evaluating you. But in any single instance, the evaluative judgment that forms the basis for your reputation will be much more random. This advice is consistent with that offered on network building, where again the best practice is to widely disperse your network building, where again the best practice is to widely disperse your network building efforts and build many weak ties. Don’t get hung up on making a favorable impression in any single place, but instead find an environment in which you can build a great reputation and keep trying different environments until this effort succeeds.

Build your image in the media

Building strategy even at the beginning of your career. Consider getting public relations help early on. Reach out to the media and academics who write cases and articles, and write your own articles or blogs that enhance your visibility.

Writing articles because it helps you clarify your thinking. It does that, but writing can also be a way to build visibility and create an image, helping you find a good job.

Overcome the self-promotion dilemma

When people don’t advocate for themselves and claim competence, others believe they must be either incompetent or unskilled in handling such situations. When you tout your own abilities and accomplishments, you are not going to be as believable as presumably more objective outsiders; and research shows that people who engage in blatant self-promotion are perceived as arrogant and self-aggrandizing, which causes others not to like them.

Get others, even those you employ such as agents, public relations people, executive recruiters, and colleagues, to tout your abilities.

The upside of some negative information

Displaying some negative characteristics, as long as they aren’t so overwhelming as to preclude your selection, actually increases your power because those who support you notwithstanding your flaws will be even more committed to you and your success.

9. Overcoming opposition and setbacks

Overcoming opposition: how and when to fight

Conflict is just an opportunity for another person’s education, for exploring why people think the way they do, and for sharing perspectives so the parties to the conflict can learn about and from each other. Particularly in a leadership position, it is irresponsible to avoid people with whom you have disagreements and to duck difficult situations.

Try a little tenderness and leave people a graceful out

You can turn enemies into allies, or at least people who are indifferent to you and not in your way, through strategic outplacement — getting them a better job somewhere else where they will not be underfoot.

“Face is important for people’s self-esteem. Giving adversaries something to make them feel better works to your advantage, particularly if the move doesn’t cost you that much. You make it easy and pleasant for your opponents to depart, they will. By contrast, once people have nothing left to lose, they will have no inhibitions or constraints on what they will do to fight you.

Don’t cause yourself unnecessary problems

Conflict arouses strong emotions, including anger, and these strong feelings interfere with our ability to think strategically about what we are really trying to do.

Don’t take things personally — make important relationships work

After you reach a certain level, there comes a point in your career where you simply have to make critical relationships work. Your feelings, or for that matter, others’ feeling about you, don’t matter. To be successful, you have to get over resentments, jealousies, anger, or anything else that might get in the way of building a relationship where you can get the resources necessary for you to get the job done.

Be persistent

Persistence works because it wears down the opposition. Much like water eroding a rock, over time keeping at something creates results. In addition, staying in the game maintains the possibility that the situation will shift to your advantage. Opponents retire or leave or make mistakes. The environment changes.

Move first — seize the initiative

If you move quickly, you can often catch your opponents off guard and secure victory before they even know what is happening.

Make your objectives seem compelling

You path to power is going to be easier if you are aligned with a compelling, socially valuable objective.

No one owns a position, everyone works in the interests of the shareholders, who own the right to put whoever is most effective in the job.

Coping with setbacks

Don’t give up

The best way to overcome the embarrassment is to talk about what happened to as many people as possible as quickly as possible. You will probably learn that you have more support than you think, and that others, rather than blaming you, will want to come to your aid. Also, the more you tell the tale, the less the telling will stimulate strong emotions in you.

Continue to do what made you successful

When you face a setback, don’t take the advice of those who advocate finding another area of work. Your experience and contacts are all context-specific — you have human and social capital in a particular job domain. Moving to something else, whatever else the virtues of that new career path, will rob you of the resources and competence you have built doing what you do.

Act as if — projecting power and success

People want to associate with winners. As the very moment when you have suffered a reversal in fortune and most need help, the best way to attract that help is to act as if you are going to triumph in the end. This advice does not mean that you should not tell people what happened and enlist their aid. It does mean you need to show enough strength and resilience that your potential allies will not believe their efforts to help you will be wasted.

10. The price of power

• Visibility and public scrutiny

  Holding a position of power means that more than your job performance is being carefully watched — although that happens, too. Every aspect of your life, including how you dress, where you live, how you spend your time, who you choose to spend time with, what your children do, what you drive, how you act in completely non-job-related domains, will draw scrutiny.

  Under the pressure to “look good”, people and companies are reluctant to take risks or innovate, opting to do what seems safe.

• Loss of autonomy

• The time and effort required

  Building and maintaining power requires time and effort, there are no two ways about it. Time spend on your quest for power and status is time that you cannot spend on other things, such as hobbies or personal relationships and families. The quest for power often exacts a high toll on people’s personal lives.

  Research shows that being married and having children has either no effect or a positive effect on men’s careers, while most studies show a negative impact on the careers of women from being married and having children.

• Trust dilemmas

  The higher you rise and the more powerful the position you occupy, the greater the number of people who will want your job. Consequently, holding a position of great power creates a problem: who do you trust? Some people will be seeking to create an opportunity for themselves through your downfall, but they won’t be forthcoming about what they are doing.

  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 vs. rivals — is yet another cost of occupying a job that many others want.

• Power as an addictive drug

  People have a heightened risk of death in the period immediately after they lose their job — and not just because of greater financial stress or the absence of medical insurance.

  One reason there is a connection between not working and health is because being out of work represents loss of a social role and all the things that go with it.

  In a power-and celebrity-obsessed culture, to be out of power is to be out of the limelight, away from the action, and almost invisible. It is a tough transition to make.

11. How and why people lose power

Overconfidence, disinhibition, and ignoring the interests of others

The obsequious and less powerful flatter the powerful to remain on their good side. Those with power have their wishes and requests granted. They get used to getting their way and being treated as if they are special. Although the powerful may be conscious that the special treatment comes from the position they occupy and the resources they control, over time these thoughts fade.

Overconfidence and insensitivity lead to losing power, as people become so full of themselves that they fail to attend to the needs of those whose enmity can cause them problems.

Misplaced or too much trust

One way to figure out how much to trust people is to look at what they do. As the saying goes, “actions speak louder than words.”

People lose patience

People get tired

If you fell yourself getting tired or burned out and you hold a position of substantial power, you might as well leave. There are going to be others who will be willing to wrest your position from you. With reduced energy and vigilance, you won’t be able to resist very well in any case.

The world changes, but tactics don’t

Leave gracefully

Leave before the party’s over, and to do so in a way that causes others to remember you fondly. You cannot always completely control how much power you maintain, but you can leave your position with dignity and thereby influence your legacy.

12. Power dynamics: good for organizations, good for you?

If organizations aren’t worrying about you and you can lose your job in a political struggle or on a whim, why should you worry about them? Reciprocity works both ways.

So don’t worry about your efforts to build your path to power are affecting your employer, because your employer is probably not worrying about you. Neither are your coworkers or “partners,” if you happen to have any — they are undoubtedly thinking about your usefulness to them, and you will be gone, if they can manage it, when you are no longer of use. You need to take care of yourself and use whatever means you have to do so — after all, that has been the message of companies and business pundits for years. Take those admonitions seriously.

Power and hierarchy are ubiquitous

The higher you go in organizations, the more political the climate becomes. One of the reasons why power moves and political dynamics are so common is that hierarchy is ubiquitous in animal societies.

Influence skills are useful for getting things done

1. Do excellent quality work, which entails hiring and effectively leading outstanding talent.
2. Understand the organizational dynamics — how different people perceive things, what their interests are, how to make a persuasive case, and how to get along with people and build effective personal relationships.

Political influence versus hierarchy in decision making

There are only two ways to resolve the inevitable disagreements about what to do and how to do it:

1. Through the imposition of hierarchical authority in which the boss gets to make the decision.
2. Through a more political system in which various interests vie for power, with those with the most power most affecting the final choices.