title: The Power of Persuasive Leadership with Gina Bianchini
author: Pfeffer on Power
publication: Pfeffer on Power
published: 2024-08-28T14:00:00
source_url: https://audio4.redcircle.com/episodes/6eaf734b-579a-47b1-9ef7-f946f40ab176/stream.mp3
word_count: 4189
I'm your host, Jeffrey Feffer, a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, an author of 16 books on a range of topics, including the topic of my oversubscribed MBA class and this podcast, Power. Every other week, I talk to someone about their path to power and provide you with practical guidance about how to accelerate your career. Today's guest is the famous good friend, Gina Bianchini. Gina, I have known since she took my class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and graduated in the year 2000. I like to say I described Gina as someone who was into entrepreneurship before entrepreneurship was cool. Gina now runs a company where she founded called Mighty Networks. Prior to that, Gina was involved and I started with Marc Andreessen called name and Gina, even though most people don't know this, along with Sheryl Sandberg, Gina was extraordinarily instrumental in founding the organization Lean In and starting Lean In Circles, which we're going to talk about a little about that also. Welcome to the Feffer on Power Podcast. Gina, it's a pleasure to see you. Thank you so much for having me, but you forgot the most important aspect of my bio, which is that I am a registered fan girl of all of your books and your teachings and I think have regularly sought you out since graduating from the GSB to have lunch or dinner to talk about the applications of power in real life, which I think what's been so interesting to me is how relevant your principles are and how much of any GSB class that I took, I think about them. And in my role as fan girl, I actually have a couple of questions for you. Okay, so before we try to ask you questions, you can ask me a question. Okay, so one of the things that you talk a lot about and you have used is stories of people like LBJ, Lyndon Johnson. You've used stories of politicians and corporate leaders, and we're sitting in what feels like a very interesting moment in terms of the two people at the top of the two political parties in the United States both have flaws, both feel like, because the other person that you also talk a lot about and I totally remember is the founder of CBS and the dynamic between Paley and Frank Stanton and like him holding onto power for a really long time. So as you are looking as the professor of power at the current situation that we're in, what is your take on not so much like whether Biden should drop out or Trump or anything, but just from a power lens, what the heck is going on? Well, we could have a long podcast just on that. I know. So since you asked, I will try to give you a succinct answer. I think there's several things in play. Number one, leaders, and you know, we're going to actually talk about this with respect to you. One of the jobs of a leader is to communicate. And one of the jobs of a leader is to inspire confidence. One of the things that you and I have talked about as a startup founder, startup founders have face setbacks, startup founders face things that don't go smoothly. And one of the things that startup founders have to do, and which I think you have done extraordinarily effectively, is to communicate confidence, even if they don't necessarily know every answer, even if, and for those of you who can't see you, Gina's nodding her head, yes, yet to inspire confidence and to be able to motivate and energize your team and your customers, and your investors, even if you don't know what you're doing, even if you're not sure things are going to be successful. So communication is a fundamentally essential part of leadership. And therefore, the ability to communicate with force and effectiveness and energy is important. I think Biden's debate performance was bad, but Biden had problems energizing the crowd, even prior to the debate and independent of the debate. And I think Trump illustrates another principle, which is we respond, my colleague, Bob, a show will tell you this, we respond primarily on the basis of emotion. And emotion is important. And the content of what we say, my friend Deborah Goonfeld, who's also been on this podcast, Deborah Goonfeld will tell you that in communication, how you look is important, how you sound is important, and the content of what you say is by far the least important. That may be sad, but it is also true. So another person who's been on this podcast, Dana Carney, Dana Carney is writing a book on body language. Body language is important. Posture is important. Your gestures are important. All of these things, and how you sound is important. So all of these things are very, very important. And I think that helps to explain part of what is going on in the world and why Biden is not coming across properly, because he does not feel energetic, you know, and I think his voice is not as good as it used to be and so on and so forth. So I think seven rules of power, the book I wrote, if you were to read that book and think about it, how does this apply to Donald Trump versus Joe Biden? I think you will actually come up with a good answer. Do you have any other questions for me or can I ask you some questions? You can now ask me questions. That's fine. That was a good answer, too. Thank you. I was going to say, if you've actually studied this for a very long time. All right. So let's talk about your career. Tell me about your current organization, how long it's been around and what its purpose is. It's called Mighty Networks. It was originally called Mighty Bell. It was the company before it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So tell me about your entrepreneurial journey with Mighty Networks. What it is doing and why you found it and what it's about. Yeah. So going back to the prior company I worked on called Ning, what I realized was every single thing that I had done from being just a little girl until the moment I sort of figured out that I wanted to work in technology that enables communities. I feel led to this moment and specifically, I have such clarity that my mission is to live in a world where everybody on the planet has the opportunity to join and be a part of not one but multiple absolutely amazing communities for their professional opportunities and goals in network for their personal aspirations, for their interests, their passions, their goals. And if I do my job right and my team, thankfully, is hard at work on this and believes in this vision as well, which is how do we create the conditions through software, which actually scales to everybody on the planet with a phone, with a computer, with access to the digital network of the internet. How do we actually use software to make those connections so that anybody can join a community and instantly feel welcome, instantly meet the most interesting people and certainly the people who are the most relevant to what they want to accomplish or the transition that they're in and navigating that transition that's our vision. And so what we do at Mighty Networks is we offer a software platform that anybody can show up and create a Mighty Network and choose a community courses, events, challenges, being able to bring those different things together that ultimately create a network that gets more valuable to every member with each new person who joins and contributes. So if you've ever heard of Shopify and what Shopify has done for e-commerce, putting the creator or the brand first, really allowing software that you own and you can build your stuff out on, we want to take that model and do it for community, for courses, for challenges, for events. And in Silicon Valley, this is called a network effect, which happens to be the most valuable thing that you can build. And what's interesting to me is you think about the creators, the tens of millions of creators all over the world, they're all building content to build audiences. And it's like the thing we've known in Silicon Valley going back 50 years is you don't want an audience if you can have a network and specifically a network effect that grows itself, which is the foundation of everything from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter to YouTube and more. So that's what we do at Mighty. It really comes from a place of passion and belief in there is so much that technology is going to be able to do. There we're in the process of building right now to not just help people have valuable relationships and achieve goals that they never thought were possible, but also if we do our jobs right, hopefully help people make the best friends of their lives. So one of the things that you want to discuss over the years is what is the difference between Mighty networks and other organizations, which I believe would say though I don't think they necessarily do the same thing. So people will tell you that a Facebook group has essentially the same objective or LinkedIn, has some of the same objective, which is to connect people with similar interests. What is the difference between Mighty networks and some of these other organizations? That's a great question. So the best way to think about it is when you create a Facebook group, 99% of the people that are experiencing your Facebook group are experiencing it one post at a time, threaded through everything else they're doing on their newsfeed. And what we do at Mighty networks is actually create a separate entity all together on your own branded apps on your own branded website all integrated into one experience such that you essentially go to that Mighty network and again it can be for a specific purpose under a specific brand. And the connections that you're making in that environment were the only platform that actually is invested in how do people who don't know each other actually meet. So it doesn't mean that you can't use a Facebook group to try to get there, but it's a little bit like trying to write a bicycle across the United States. You can do it, but it's a lot harder when you can actually just fly on a plane. So I think the best way to think about it and again the movement certainly online that people are moving from social media into private communities, into online spaces that are dedicated to a particular interest. That is a movement that's happening. But if you want to set up a store, do you want to set it up on Amazon? Totally valid way of doing it or do you want to set it up on Shopify where it's under your brand it's yours. There are pros and cons to both. We happen to think that there's a lot more pros to the model where you have your own network of fact that you can brand as your own and you can create the relationships between members away from the clutter, the noise, the chaos, the toxicity of social media platforms. But I think that's probably the best way to think about it is like, do you want to smell on Amazon or do you want to have your website? I like that answer. Okay. So when I think back about you and what I think our listeners can learn from you, you I think have many of the attributes I associate with power. So when you after you had found the name with Mark Andreessen and of course has gone on to run this big VC firm and is known for his work starting one of the first websites and platforms, I still remember you telling me the story of you going up and down Sandhill Road even though you had been associated with Mark and with Eng, which had been a relatively large organization and everybody looked at you and said, who the hell are you? And so one of the qualities that I think you exemplify is in fact resilience and persistence. I think resilience and persistence is important because everybody does face disappointments and setbacks. Speak a little about how you have built disability to overcome rejection, overcome people saying, who are you or why would I invest in you or whatever, but you have persisted. I think mining networks has been not always the easiest thing to get off the ground, but you got that off the ground. Talk about how you did that. Yeah. So I think one of the most important realizations that I had and I continue to re-learn this, which is life is not fair. Life is not fair. And I think that the frustration comes in the moments where you think that life should be fair. And then it's not. And the analogy that I've used is if you go through life thinking that it's about what is fair or not fair, it's like putting a bag of rocks on your back and trying to like walk at altitude with a super heavy, sometimes unnecessary bag on you and you're like dragging it along. So I feel like once I figured out that life is not fair and that nothing is owed to me, that made the whole thing. And especially like I still do sales. Like that's kind of your job. I mean, you and I've talked about this. And for some reason, it's invoked now to use this term founder-led sales. And it's like, well, there's never a moment in time where you're not the most important salesperson in the company. But I think that it's when I have assumed that something should be fair or easy, it's never going to be easy. And so that was actually really helpful. And then the other thing that I would say is from a pretty early age, I had things happen. And it's not, you know, my dad was killed when I was 11. And it was such a before and after in my life. And actually, it was a moment in a time where my community around me in Cupertino really came together to support me, support my family. And I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in the place that I grew up at the time and moment I did. So as I think about that experience, thinking about playing sports, thinking about seeking out higher and higher challenges or bigger and bigger challenges in my life, like I don't mind hard work. I'm not afraid of the grind. I am very comfortable choosing a very hard path. And it doesn't mean that I don't have days where I'm just like, this is not fair or I'm working too hard or like, why have I made the life choices that I have made? But I think what has really kept me going in the context of mighty networks is I very much want to live in this world. I want to live in a world where every creator, every brand, every person who wants this incredibly powerful asset to be able to make a living, to have an impact, to help people. It's too important to be set back. And it's too important to leave it up to the people that would otherwise do it. And is there ego involved in that? Probably. That's okay. Like, if that's what allows me to get up tomorrow morning and move this forward, then I embrace it. I think it's important to check it. But I think to be a successful entrepreneur, you really do have to be somewhat difficult and somewhat stubborn. And I think that that's a lot easier to do when you have and you make time for that clarity of, this is the world I want. This is the future I want to live in. This is what I want to contribute. And I think by doing that, if anything, I feel like I've created a little bit of a portfolio of tools that I use to stay energized, focused, resilient as challenges show up. The other thing that I would also say is I know enough entrepreneurs and I've been doing this long enough that whoever says that they're like drinking out of a fire hose of awesome. And the biggest problem they have is that they have too much success. I know it's a lot of BS. And I think that that's helpful in just remembering not everybody should do this. This path is not for the faint of heart. I appreciate the fact that I've chosen it. I have committed to getting good at it. And I have a clear picture of the future I want to live in. Okay, that's a great answer. One of the other challenges that you and I have talked about, and I'm not sure if you're going to be comfortable talking about it today or not, is the fact that you're a woman in tech. The tech has not always been embracing of women. And so one of the other qualities I think that has served you extraordinarily well is not taking things personally. You're famous in my class for coming to class once and saying people accuse women in tech of sleeping their way to the top. And your quote was, if women were sleeping their way to the top, there'd be a hell of a lot more women on top. And I don't know if you recall saying that, but I thought it was very clever. But one of the things I think that you have also built in addition to the persistent resilience is an ability to let comments roll off you to not worry about whether you're a man or a woman or worry about, you know, how many women there are in tech or how many women aren't in tech or what is going on that you a reasonably, I think thick skin in the sense of not taking stuff personally. Right. Is that a fair comment? I think that's a fair comment. I would tweak it a little bit, which is just I was very fortunate in whether it was high school or college or certainly like my first job out of school. The women that I was friends with, especially my first job out of school friends who are still my friends today. You know, not only where we comfortable like when things hurt, crying in the bathroom, but we also had a sense of humor about it. I think it is an absolutely underappreciated talent or muscle to really look at things with an eye towards the absurdity of it. And the absurdity of it is so hilarious that you really like nine out of 10 things you can't make up. They're so ridiculous. And so I do think that you're making a really interesting point that I hadn't really crystallized, which is if you take every slight, I mean, I actually had this happen to me recently. I was in a meeting. I was like a fancy meeting without giving away too many details, but somebody had like literally taken an idea that I had and used it as their own without acknowledging me and I was in the room. And so I like knew what was happening. And so I had this moment where I was like, if you don't actually have a sense of humor about how ridiculous things are, you're going to get exhausted. And so I can absolutely see the criticism of this point of view, which is, but these things are serious. And are you letting them go? If you think they're funny, as opposed to like tackling them head on. And I think it's one of the reasons why I've always appreciated the study of power and the way that you have framed it, which is something that I've had to ask myself a lot, which is, would I rather be right or effective? And I'm very clear that within a boundary of integrity and a boundary of my values and ethics, I'd rather be effective. I would rather build something that people use. And I would rather win than be right, but bitter. I don't want to be right and bitter. I want to be effective. I want to unlock opportunity for people. I want to bring something new into the world. And I actually want to have fun doing it. So I know I'm going to ask you one final question. And I know you have served on the board of a variety of publicly traded media companies. You are today on the board of Tegna prior to that. I think you're on the board of scripts. Tell me about how your public board service fits in to your life and your career and how you think about doing that. Yeah. So I actually think that there are two things about being on a public board that I've really enjoyed. Number one is sometimes it's really nice to get on a plane, go to somebody else's headquarters, see totally different people and tackle a business and their challenges and what they do. And then fly back and show up the next day with just a different perspective and fresh perspective. That has been incredibly fun and valuable. And if I do my job right, hopefully I'm bringing value to the boards that I have or do sit on. I sort of think that is like so far so good. The second thing is that it is really fun to be in a board dynamic where you're meeting all these other cool people. So when I get really clear about, you know, again, why I do what I do and what I like the best and how I define success. So beyond kind of having my basic needs met, money is interesting to me, but it's not my main motivator. As I've said, my main motivator is I want to live in this world where we have brick by brick, bit by bit created this future where people are members of amazing communities that are powered by software and AI that was not even possible six months ago. And how I define success is being surrounded every day with people who are interesting, curious, ambitious, and bring to the picnic something I can learn from. And again, hopefully create experiences that bring joy and bring new ideas and creating things that haven't been created before. So sitting on boards where I get to know people that come at things very differently than I do has just been a tremendous gift. And it's great. I will say that I think there's been this sort of holding up boards, especially for sort of women and people of color is like, that's the goal. Like that's the pinnacle of success is that you're on public boards. And I'm like, it's pretty cool. I like it. I'm glad that I've done it. It's not the only way to have impact. It's not the only way to have success. And I think that the more that the conversation and definition of how we describe and look to what success means, I think there's more opportunity for broader definitions. Thank you. Gina has been an interesting conversation. And I very much appreciate your wisdom and insights. Well, right back at you, I'm glad we started off with like my burning question about how do you look at this moment through the lens of power dynamics, especially as it relates to like the people around them. And there's so much to dissect. And it's a great reason to go back and read the seven seven rolls of power. To me, it's always like the yellow cover book or the blue cover book. I like that. There you go. That's how I do it. All at school. Thank you. This episode we have talked to the famous good friend Gina Bianchini. Thank you, Gina, for being with us. My pleasure. This has been the Fefferon Power Podcast. Where every other week we talked to an accomplished individual about their path to power and the practical lessons for you. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the podcast on any of your favorite sources and buy my most recent book on power, seven rules of power. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Jeffreyfeffer.com. Fefferon Power is a production of Stanford University and University FM.