Transcription
Why don't people have power? And having answered that question now, approximately a billion times, I am pretty well ready to answer it for you. Which is, the biggest barrier I think for us having power is, of course, ourselves. We are our biggest barrier to having power. We are often times not willing to do what it takes or to make the tradeoffs required to have power. Uh, we limit ourselves by being afraid to take chances or to fail. Uh, so many of my friends graduate from Stanford Business School, and they follow the well-trod paths of their predecessors. Uh, you know, which has never made much sense to me. Which is, why would you go to the same firms that hire all of the best and brightest from all the same schools that you're graduating from? Go find a niche. Isn't that what they teach you in competitive strategy? But, you know, so we, we often times aren't willing to take the chances required. Uh, we worry excessively about what others, particularly peers, think about us. We want to be liked by everybody, or loved, even. And therefore, you know, and it's a very interesting fine line that you want to walk. Obviously, you want to be liked and you want to be popular. But on the other hand, uh, what I try to teach the students and what I try to get them to understand is that if you think about it in a very simple, common-sense way, your peers, your direct hierarchical peers, are also your competitors. If you think about it, you know, you're going to start off day one, class of associates in a law firm, uh, class of uh, people at Goldman or Morgan Stanley, class of people at McKinsey, uh, Bain, BCG. All of these firms have an upper out. And even if they don't have an upper out, sooner or later, some of you are going to get promoted to the next level, and some of you won't. So, it is, in fact, the case that your peer peers are also your competitors. And so maybe, you know, need to think about them in a variety of different ways.
We're reluctant to accept status and hierarchical differences. My friend and colleague Deb Gruenfeld, who teaches here, will tell you, we live in a hierarchical world, and we're often times uncomfortable with hierarchy. Many of us are counterdependent. Certainly describes me, which is why I've got a good job at Stanford Business School. We don't like to have people telling us what to do. Many of us, so we, so we rebel against, you know, our, we rebel against hierarchical authority. Other people get in positions of power, and they say, "Why do I have the right to tell people below me what to do?" And they try to give up their power. So, I think we're uncomfortable in hierarchy, even though we live in hierarchies all the time.
We see the world as fair and just, and therefore we are less vigilant and strategic than required. One of the common things when I teach people the cases that I teach them about is, I often get this comment, "Well, you know, these people will get it in the end." >> [snorts] >> "So, I don't need, I don't have anything to learn from them because sooner or later, their bad behavior will catch up with them." In fact, because the world is not a just and fair place, every religious tradition that I know has some account balancing scheme >> [laughter] >> to deal, to deal with it, you know, later on. Uh, you know, in some cases, it's heaven and hell. In some cases, it is reincarnation. In some cases, it's karma. Every, and every religious tradition has this for the same reason. Because it isn't, you know, it isn't a just and fair world. And so, how do we make sense of this except by having some account balancing scheme? But this makes us, I think, because we believe in a just world, we often times don't pay attention uh to the more interesting people in the organization.
In the early 1980s, I visited at Harvard Business School and taught their version of this class, which, by the way, is not nearly as good. Called power >> [laughter] >> called power and influence with my dear friend and colleague John Kotter. And John would say to the students, and I think he was completely right. He'd say, "You know," he'd say, "'You all want to learn from the people who look brilliant and have amazing levels of interpersonal skill and have succeeded.'" He said, "The people you really ought to learn from are the people who look to you like they have no skill whatsoever, either interpersonally or in business, but have nonetheless have made it to the top. They have something else." And, and it would be interesting in some ways to learn what that is and how they have maneuvered. His point being that anybody can succeed if you are a genius and fabulous and successful and interpersonally competent, but it takes real political skill uh to succeed when you have none of those attributes. >> [laughter] >> And he, by the way, is right. And the insight is important, to be able to learn from all kinds of people and to be able to accept all kinds of people, which I think, you know, we don't, cuz we see the world as just and we are become way too judgmental.
Um, we are willing to make the tradeoffs required to acquire power, being liked all the time versus getting things done. Um, I think that's, you know, I can still recall being on a dean search committee many years ago, and there was a comment that the pre-preceding dean was a nice person, but we weren't going anywhere. And as I pointed out, the nice thing about being dead in the water is that no one could complain about the direction. And that as soon as you start the boat, metaphorically speaking, someone will say, regardless of the evidence and the data, "This isn't how I think we should be going." And so, there is this issue of, you know, as if you, you want to be liked by everybody, don't do anything. As soon as you make a decision, some people will like it, and some people won't.
How we spend our time and focus our attention. Strategic versus fun interactions and relationships. Are you willing to pay the price of having power? And there's an enormous price uh for having power. My dear friend Rudy Crew has been through at least two, maybe three marriages. Uh, you know, he works all the time. Most successful people that I know have to work very, very hard. And that's true whether you're running a nonprofit or a for-profit. You look at the people who go into government, and the one thing you can say, you may like their policies or not like their policies, uh, they're all working enormously long and hard hours. To be in a position like this, uh, you have to, you have to pay a price. You have to decide, am I willing uh to work this hard and to interact with people who I need to interact with uh rather than the people uh who I perhaps want to interact with. Um, and, you know, so I like to tell people I'm in a job with relatively low interdependence. I can have lunch with my friends. Uh, if you want to have power, you need to figure out who you need to have lunch with, metaphorically, strategically, in order to get things done and build the relationships uh that will make you successful.
The Blueprint for Black Power. Chapter 1. What is power? Pages 5 through 26. The definitions of power are various and conflicting. This is due mainly to the multifarious nature of power itself rather than due to its unreality or ephemeral spirit. Few, if any of us, doubt the reality of power and the tangible effects its its application engenders. Our confusion as to exact definition more likely flows from the fact that power, depending on context and circumstance, assumes ubiquitous shapes and forms, varying degrees of transparency and visibility. Power is a chameleon. It takes on the texture of its environment. It is not our purpose here to untangle the web of power definitions. It is not necessary for us to do so. However, a review of a number of definitions and of several forms of power will provide an intuitive understanding of its essential meaning, which is all that is necessary for our mission.
Power comes with being interactive, existence with being alive. It is the essence of life and the motive force of growth and development of the adaptability of living things and the environmental changes and demands. Power refers to the ability to do, the ability to be, the ability to prevail. Beingness and aliveness originate with power. To be powerless is to be will is to be willless, impotent, and lifeless, without effect or influence, to be nothing of no account. Thus, we concur with Rollo May with Rollo May when he contends that power is essential for all living things. Man in particular, cast on this barren cast on this barren crust of earth eons ago with the hope and the requirement that he survive, finds he must use his powers and confront opposing forces at every point in the struggle with the earth and with his fellows. The unimplied intentionality of living systems, including especially human beings, is self-realization and self-actualization, the fulfillment of genetic potential or possibilities. This intentionality must be empowered and realized. Thus, to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, wherever we find we will, wherever we find the will to live, there we will, there we find the will to power. Power is essential to our existence and the most influential factor in determining our quality of life. As Wandering contends, power is one of the central phenomena of human social life. And, and as Parenti argues, all sorts of interpersonal, and we may add, intergroup relationships can be seen as involving power, including between lovers or between parent and child. Power, there is no escaping its presence in some form. There's no escaping its use by others to influence in some of our, in some of our person, our minds and behavior, and our own use of it to influence the person's mind and behavior of others. We deny the ubiquity of power to our peril. It does not vanish from reality or lose its influence by our refusal to acknowledge its existence. Therefore, we are behooved to recognize its permanent reality and make the best of it. Control it and use it to good purpose.
Power in and of itself can be both a detrimental or a bene- or beneficial aspect of social relationships and can be made to play the negative as well as the positive role. In the const- in the constitution, in the human social, in the constitution of human social life, power can be utilized to achieve personal, social, political, and material ends if it is appropriately developed, organized, and applied. The question of whether power is beneficial or harmful can only be answered in regard to this, to the specific use to which it is put in a particular situation. Many in our audience will find this discussion of power disturbing or dis- easing, having been victimized by the abuse and misuse of power when crushed by the powers that be. The reader who identifies himself as among the powerless or as a member of a relatively powerless group, i.e., an African American, will be more perturbed by our discussion. The oppressed and downtrodden have been traumatized by the abuse or by the abuse of power by their powerful oppressors, often come to perceive power itself as inherently evil, as by nature corrupting, and therefore as something to be excused, denied, and renounced. The pursuit of power is viewed as unworthy of virtuous persons, and the desire of, and, and the desire to possess it is sinful. Therefore, many among the powerless and poor feel compelled to find their powerlessness and poverty the emblematic signs of their godliness and redemp- their salvation. How convenient a precept for rationalizing and maintaining the power of the haves over the have-nots. As a result of their ideological manipulation by the powerful and their own reactionary misinterpretation of reality, the poor and powerless have been made to perceive the pursuit, possession, and application of power in their own behalf as unbecoming to themselves. This is even more the case where through their native acceptance and, excuse me, through their naive acceptance of self-serving deceptive propaganda perpetuated by the powers that be, their own reactionary self-negation, and their nursing of their internalized inferiority complexes, the poor huddled masses perceive the possession and exercise of power as the inherent and exclusive uh prerogative of the ruling classes or races. There are many blacks who have been convinced by racist propaganda that supreme power is divinely deeded to dominant whites. They therefore suffer anxiety attacks and feel as they, and feel as they are blasphemous rebelling against God himself if they even for a moment seriously dare consider conspiring to wrest power from the hands of their oppressors. More unfortunate than this sorely mistaken theological perception is the self-abnegating perception by many blacks that they are inherently incapable of mounting a successful campaign against white oppressive power and therefore must sulkingly seek the least, the least onerous accommodation to it. This perception of and orientation toward power on the part of African people is but a prescription for their unending subordination, exploitation, and untimely, when it is convenient to the purposes of their oppressors, their genocidal demise. Therefore, if they are to survive, the proper, if they are to survive and prosper in freedom, then like it or not, African people must come to terms with power. We must be ever conscious of the fact that the establishment, whatever regard, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary, maintain its control and eliminate us.
Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. Happy Monday. Welcome back to On the Shoulders of Giants. I am Joseph Ward, and I am beginning my reading of Dr. Amos Wilson's landmark book, The Blueprint for Black Power, a moral, political, and economic imperative for the 21st century. Chapter 1, What is power? Pages 5 through 26. And I just started there on chapter 1 on page 5. And so, in, you know, we're getting into what is power. So, I started with a video from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the title of that video is Power, Why Some People Have It and Others Don't. And the gentleman, Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, was speaking about the role power plays and how sometimes hard work doesn't necessarily equal success. So, giving that, giving groundwork of what power is, defining what power is, coming out to understand what power is, how power works, how one can get power, how one can lose power, and is power good, is power bad, all those different things. But also, one of the things that Dr. Amos Wilson is getting at is how black people in America have been taught to perceive power. And because going back to what we learned, um, in our previous readings, especially our last reading, uh, The Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, because God has the image of our oppressor, then it's almost like the oppressor is supposed to have power, and we're not supposed to have power. Trying to wrestle power away from your oppressor is kind of like wrestling power away from God, which is blasphemous, like we read.
So, Blueprint for Black Power, What Is Power? Pages 5 through 26. So, right? This opening chapter, right, establishes the central concept of the entire book, power. Dr. Wilson argues that the condition of black people in America cannot be understood or changed without first understanding how power operates in society. He emphasizes that the struggle between groups is fundamentally a struggle over power, resources, and a control of reality. So, in this chapter, the central argument of chapter 1 is, power is the ability of a group to define reality and make others accept that definition as if it were their own. Groups that control power can shape institutions, knowledge, culture, economics, and political structure in ways that serve their interests. He contends that African American conditions is not primarily the result of individual failure, but rather a structural lack of power relative to the dominant white society. And how can you disagree with that? We don't have power as a group of people in America, or relatively anywhere around the world. We don't have real power. And if we're going to contend with white supremacy and even think to replace it one day, then we must gain power. And we must come to terms, like he said, come to terms with power and how power can be used as a benefit to us.