Transcription
[Music]
Why don't people have power? And having answered that question 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 own 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. We limit ourselves by being afraid to take chances or to fail.
So many of my friends graduate from Stanford Business School, and they follow the well-trod paths of their predecessors. 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 the niche. Isn't that what they teach you in competitive strategy? But you know, so we, we oftentimes aren't willing to take the chances required. 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, 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, you know, you're going to start off day one, class of Associates at a law firm, class of people at Goldman or Morgan Stanley, class of people at McKinsey, Bain, BCG. All of these firms have an "up or out." And even if they don't have an "up or 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 Grunfeld, 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. 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 skill to deal with it, you know, later on. You know, in some cases, it's heaven and hell. In some cases, it is reincarnation. And 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 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 P, called Power and Influence, with my dear friend and colleague John Cotter. 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 made it to the top. They have something else." 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 to succeed when you have none of those attributes. 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. Because we see the world as just, we are become way too judgmental.
We are willing to make the trade-offs required to acquire power. Being liked all the time versus getting things done. I think that's, you know, I can still recall being on a Dean search committee many years ago, and it was a comment that the 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, is 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 for having power. My dear friend Rudy Crew has been through at least two, maybe three marriages. 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, they're all working enormously long and hard hours to be in a position like this. You have, you have to pay a price. You have to decide, am I willing to work this hard and to interact with people who I need to interact with, rather than the people who I perhaps want to interact with?
You know, so I like to tell people, I'm in a job with relatively low interdependence. I can have lunch with my friends. 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 that will make you successful. And I, you know, I would come into class and we teach on Monday and Friday, and it became like a joke finally when I would say to the students, I'd say, "Well, how did you spend your weekend?" And they would kind of look at me like, you know, what kind of a doofus is this? We spent our weekend, you know, partying or skiing or doing whatever they do with their close friends, with their roommates, with their colleagues. And I pointed out to them that if you spend all your time with your current close friends, how do you ever make new ones? And in fact, there's a lot of research that shows that the most useful ties that you will develop are the weak ties because your friends travel pretty much in the same social circles you travel in, and therefore they can provide you mostly with redundant information. And if you want non-redundant information, you need to get out of your comfort zone with the people that you normally associate with.
Thank you all for being here and thank you so much for inviting me.
[Applause]