Power: Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't

That may all be true, but the evidence suggests that you are more likely to acquire power by narrowing your focus and applying your energies, like the sun’s rays, to a limited range of activities in a small number of domains.

Furthermore, intelligence, particularly beyond a certain level, may lead to behaviors that make acquiring or holding on to influence less likely. People who are exceptionally smart think they can do everything on their own and do it better than everyone else. Consequently, they may fail to bring others along with them, leaving their potential allies in the dark about their plans and thinking.

Instead, he attributed his success to extensive reading—he read at least one nonfiction book a week—and to his practice of structured self-reflection.

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.

Second, this belief that the world is a just place anesthetizes people to the need to be proactive in building a power base.

? It is important to be able to learn from all sorts of situations and people, not just those you like and approve of, and certainly

Armand Hammer, the CEO and creator of Occidental Petroleum, put in a long-term incentive compensation system for himself with a ten-year payout—when he was in his nineties.

When Robert Nardelli was CEO of Home Depot, he ran a shareholders’ annual meeting like a despot, with other board members absent and shareholders denied an opportunity to voice questions or concerns as their microphones were turned off

In one of the more well-known and interesting studies of the effects of power, the Berkeley cookie study

Initially, she didn’t even have an office, working instead at a round table near Ellison’s…. A senior executive from the Oracle unit that sells to the federal government arranged a meeting with Catz to figure out what she did. “I’m here to help Larry,” Catz said, according to an attendee.