Pfeffer on Power

Live Q&A with Jeffrey Pfeffer on Crowdcast and LinkedIn

2024-08-14 · 14:00 UTC ·Pfeffer on Power ·40 min read

Brief

Jeffrey Pfeffer used the live Q&A to translate the Seven Rules of Power into specific, actionable behaviours for listeners across career stages. He emphasizes that power dynamics are not a passing corporate fad but reflect enduring human psychology — citing parallels from chimpanzee politics and Michael Marmot's Whitehall research showing status correlates with health and outcomes. The central prescription is persistent practice: the same behaviours that get people to positions of influence (initiative, visible accomplishments, strategic networking, brand-building, and demonstrating executive presence) must be continually maintained because many leaders lose power when they stop doing what got them there.

Pfeffer paired high-level claims with practical tactics. For presence and performance he recommends coaching and points listeners to Dana Carney, Deborah Gruenfeld, and Amy Cuddy; for networking he recommends John Levy's generosity-based dinners and argues in-person meetings still matter (fly if needed). Specific career tactics include: hiring legal counsel when negotiating exits, seeking counsel and emotional distance when forced out, 'managing up' and flattering or praising key stakeholders, and taking on important but undesirable tasks (recruiting, meeting minutes, business development) to create indispensability — illustrated by Tristan Walker’s rise at Foursquare. He also advises caution about co-founder dynamics (venture investors prefer a clear leader) and gives examples of rule-breaking that paid off (Southwest, Whole Foods, Apple) and rule-breaking that can be dangerous at scale.

Pfeffer addresses the moral paradox of power directly: power can corrupt, but it is also required to enact large-scale solutions (climate, infrastructure, poverty). He reframes power as a tool that needs ethical stewardship and argues that more principled people should seek influence. He offered an informal "eighth rule": attach yourself to someone whose trajectory is rising so you can be carried upward. The session includes recommendations for academics and early-career professionals on marketing research and building a consulting brand, and repeated reminders that networking, visibility, and deliberate rebranding are practical, learnable skills — not just personality traits.

Why it matters

Jeffrey Pfeffer led an 90-minute live Q&A drawing practical lessons from his book Seven Rules of Power and his Stanford course:

Key details

  • [finding] Power dynamics are stable across time and cultures — Pfeffer cites chimpanzee politics and Michael Marmot's Whitehall/Status Syndrome findings to argue hierarchy still matters
  • [advice] Core practices to build durable power: get out of your own way, break rules smartly, network relentlessly, build a visible brand, and keep practicing these behaviours after you 'arrive'
  • [strategy] Concrete tactics: hire an executive coach for presence; hire legal counsel when negotiating exits; take on important tasks others avoid (recruiting, biz-dev, minutes) to gain influence
  • [resource] Recommended sources and exemplars: Dana Carney, Deborah Gruenfeld, Amy Cuddy on executive presence; John Levy (You're Invited) on networking; examples: Deb Liu, Tristan Walker, Benji Fernandez (Nala $40M Series A)
  • [finding] Power has trade-offs — isolation, ethical risk — but Pfeffer frames power as a tool: more good people with power is necessary to solve systemic problems
Source evidence

title: Live Q&A with Jeffrey Pfeffer on Crowdcast and LinkedIn
author: Pfeffer on Power
publication: Pfeffer on Power
published: 2024-08-14T14:00:00
source_url: https://audio4.redcircle.com/episodes/5f0790e7-c69a-486b-8ae0-6ea184251d69/stream.mp3

word_count: 8897

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. All right, so welcome everybody. Thank you for joining the live Q&A session for Feffer on Power, accelerating your career, the podcast. We have Jeffrey Feffer, the host and the professor who leads the path to power course at Stanford. Thank you all for joining the session. My name is Scott Mopin. I'm a producer for the show. You don't hear me on the show, but I'm behind the scenes working to make it sound well and deliver every episode, too. So welcome, Jeffrey, to the show. And thank you for joining us. This session is also going to be turned into an episode of the podcast. So I invite you all to subscribe to the Feffer on Power podcast, where you can hear this as well as some other future episodes and all of our past episodes, which are pretty fantastic. All right, welcome, Jeffrey, to the show. And thank you for being here, everyone. Thank you, Scott. Scott is a fabulous producer and it's a joy to work with you, Scott. You made me a better podcaster, I'm sure. I just wanted to say a couple of words about the Feffer on Power podcast, which is a way for you to get to Stanford education without paying the Stanford tuition. And what I'm particularly pleased about with this podcast is the range of people that we have. We have people at all stages of their career. We have people of all genders and races and nationalities. I have a Austrian woman doing a construction startup. We have women in venture capital. We have Asian American women who are talking about overcoming the obstacles that they faced, including in some cases, some pretty tough prejudice. I have a guy, a former student of mine who's running a fintech startup in Africa called Nala, Benji Fernandez. So we have a wide, wide range of people. And the purpose of the podcast is to try to give you stories about people who have used the ideas from my book, Seven Rules of Power and the classes that I teach both online and on campus at Stanford to bring this material to a wider and broader audience. So that's the purpose of the podcast. And hopefully it is serving that purpose, but in any event, that's what we're doing. And with that, I will turn it over to Scott who is going to interrogate me. It'll be easy, I promise, professor. So we have some questions that have been submitted previous to this. And so we have some of those we're going to go through. I'm going to give them to Jeffrey and we'll get his answers. But during this as well, if you come up with questions or have some for us, there's a question and answer tab you should be able to find where you can submit them. And we will do a live question and answer section after this where we'll invite you to come on and unmute yourself and ask the question. But if you don't want to participate that way, it's okay, you don't have to. I am happy to read them as well, but we'll get to that part. So be putting your questions into that section as we are going through these. But Jeffrey, I got here. It looks like we got some questions about power dynamics and leadership. So the first question for you is going to be, hey, Jeffrey, I love the book. What practices can individuals adopt to build sustainable power that is resilient to changing organizational landscapes and external pressures from Bryant Sasser CPA? Okay. So I think the practices are, in fact, the practices that I outline in seven rules of power. I understand that people are concerned about changing worlds and changing environments and changing organizational landscapes. But the interesting thing about power dynamics is that they are actually quite stable both over time and they're quite unchanging across organizational cultures as well. Because most of the principles of power, like getting out of your own way and networking relentlessly and building a powerful brand and showing up with power, et cetera, are based upon fundamental human psychology, which really doesn't change that much. When Jim Collins left Stanford some years ago under difficult circumstances, actually, Jim gave me a book called chimpanzee politics. And what is amazing about the book chimpanzee politics is it could be seven rules of power. I mean, we see political dynamics even among chimpanzees, which are not that dissimilar from what you see among humanists. So I would say the answer to the question of the building sustainable power is you practice the seven rules of power and you do something that many people in power do not do, which is you never stop doing it. So many people, once they arrive in power, stop doing what got them there and that causes them to lose power. So as long as you maintain the principles that we teach, you'll be fine. All right, practice with the consistency as well. It sounds like, okay, next question we have, this is from Ricardo Abdul. And it is, I wonder how leadership is within open innovation ecosystems. So my answer is going to be, of course, the same. There is this idea or has been an idea floating around that says the internet is changing everything and the new ways of working are changing everything. My observation is that that much has changed. This is certainly the case if you look at the political world, not only in the US, but around the world. But also, if you look at, I mean, Chris Yee, who is a co-author of the famous book, Bloodscaling with the famous Reed Hoffman, and I wrote a post on LinkedIn about what was going on with OpenAI. And we found that the ideas of power that he and I have discussed on our occasional walks on Sawyer Cam Trail, I think explain quite well what on with Sam Altman and OpenAI and the powered dynamics there. Gotcha. All right. Our next question is going to be from Kelly Zhao. Number two, how do empower and be empowered? So I think empowering is, we'll talk about in a second, to be empowered, I mean, this goes back to rule one, the seven rules of power. I don't think you can wait for other people to grant you power, a former baseball commissioner who ran the 1964 Los Angeles Olympics, or maybe it was the 84 or six of Los Angeles Olympics, said powers 20% granted and 80% taken. So I think, you know, if you wait for organizations to empower you, you'll be waiting a long time. You need really to empower yourself. So I think one of the things I try to teach the students is to be proactive. I actually thought that one of the contributions of my class was to teach people social science around power. I actually think the biggest contribution of my class both online and on campus is to get people out of their own way and to cause them to be more ambitious and more proactive than they have been in the past. So empower yourself. I think that's the way to do it. And to empower others, you need to understand what they bring to the table and you need to appreciate their contributions to the work that you're trying to do. Organizations, of course, are interdependent systems. So your ability to get things done depends upon your ability to influence others. And that's one of the interesting points my executive coaches tell me that's one of the places where career derailments occur when you move from being an individual contributor to being someone who's working performance depends upon the contributions of other people. And then you have to figure out how to influence those other people. I'm not sure I would call that empowering them, but you certainly need how to get them to do what you need them to do in order to make your projects and your work successful. All right. Fantastic answer. Next question we got up is from Katarina, President Sova, and we have who is the most powerful person alive in the world in your opinion? Wow. This is definitely a loaded one. I, you know, I think power, of course, is located situationally. So if you were in the Philippines, it would be probably Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. And there's an interesting story about how he became president of the Philippines, in spite of the Marcos history in the Philippines. And I would urge you to watch the documentary, The Kingmaker, about a Mel the Marcos. It's a fabulous documentary. A Mel the Marcos is now in her 90s and has this amazing amount of power. And it describes how she arose to all that high level of power. So I think, you know, I think the most powerful person in the world, I'm not sure who it is. It could be actually Vladimir Putin in the sense that I think the Russian state is not actually the economies and that could not great shape. The technology is not great shape. But he's had an enormous influence on the world has retained power for a long time. So just to be provocative, we'll say Vladimir Putin. All right. We have the answer. Here we go. I don't think we have a slide for this one. But I found it interesting. Can I throw it up for you? Of course. Is career power about hierarchy, decision, or knowledge? And I apologize if this is your question and I'm not attributing it. I don't have the name. But is career power about hierarchy, decision, or knowledge? I'm not sure. I understand the question perfectly. But let me try to provide an answer. So many people believe that the world is becoming less hierarchical. There's no evidence for that. You know, in the sense that there are many more positions at the bottom than there are at the top. There's only one president, only one superintendent of schools in a school district, only one typically CEO of a company for Microsoft or Nvidia or any of the other companies. I tell my students are founding organizations to try to avoid having co-founders, because it's often a very difficult dynamic created by that. So to me, power is really about hierarchy. It is around getting to the top. You see this in a variety of different ways. There's a lot of research. Mr. Michael Marmot, a famous British epidemiologist wrote a book called The Status Syndrome. And he talks about the fact that in his study, they call the Whitehall Studies of the British Civil Service, the higher your rank in the British Civil Service, the less likely you were to die from or suffer from cardiovascular disease. In general, the higher you are in status hierarchies, the healthier you are and you get many other wonderful, I think, positive outcomes. So the world is still hierarchical and it's way better to be at the top than the bottom. Now, I've never heard the avoid co-founders advice. Is that, I guess, that makes sense because you don't have to deal with those struggles later on, but that's that's it. You've got it Scott. That's exactly right. The issue with co-founders is that sooner or later, the venture capitalists are going to say who's in charge because the venture capitalists like to have a person, a point of contact, that's number one. And number two, with co-founders, there will be, as you imply, a power struggle. And so it is certainly true that no founder is going to have every one of the skills that she or he needs to build a successful company, but you can hire people with those skills rather than having this theme dynamic in which oftentimes, there's a lot of energy wasted in struggling over who's going to be the surviving co-founders. There's a fabulous article in the New York Times. I'm going to recommend because I'm fundamentally an academic, to everybody, a bunch of stuff to read. Nick Bilton, B-I-L-T-O-N, wrote an article in the New York Times, All Is Fair and Love and Twitter, which talked about how Jack Dorsey took over Twitter. Jack Dorsey was not the founder. And the article ends with a quote from somebody that says the only thing Jack Dorsey ever created was Jack Dorsey. There's a lovely story in that article about the Silicon Valley myth in which there are co-founders who are written out of the picture. There were three co-founders of Apple, Steve Jobs, wasniac, and a guy named Brad Lane, nobody's ever heard of. Oracle was not founded just by Larry Ellison, and in fact Elon Musk was late to the game at Tesla, and he took over Tesla from the people who actually founded the organization. So there are these interesting dynamics, and so I try to tell people to avoid the power struggles by just founding the company. And hiring the talent that you made. Excellent. All right. Well, we can proceed on a section of questions for overcoming bias, and we've got some questions there. So let me put in if we can get up to the slide. Are we also getting questions in the chat? We are getting questions in the chat. I see a few new ones, and if you want to put ones, remind you again, there's a Q&A section just different from the chat itself, but down there in the Q&A is where we can submit those for later. All right. From Khalil, Goliwala, and we've got what does the path to power for the other look like? Specifically, if they want to overcome the friction of societal bias and prejudice? That's a great question. One of the reasons why to go back to what I said at the very beginning of this, one of the things I've tried to do with the Trevor On Power podcast is to have a wide, wide, wide variety of people. One of the venture capital people is a woman who came from Bulgaria, a very, very, very, very poor background. Nobody in her Bulgarian village, I think, ever went to college or hardly anybody, let alone go to the United States. She's a woman in a man's world. My friend Sarah Buchner from Austria is a woman in the construction industry, very much a male dominated world. We were going to have a thing soon from Christine Heng, a Taiwanese person who went to work for Apple and was the only woman in her organization. So we have women. I have Darren Dodson, who's trying to change the prejudice against African Americans, Blacks, and also women in the financial management industry of the 60 or 70 trillion dollars in investable assets less than 2% are managed by underrepresented minorities and women. He's trying to change that. So one of the things I've tried to do with the Trevor On Power podcast is to give you a ton of examples of, if you will, others are the others. And in general, my answer is that they do the same things that the dominant people do, that the rules of power apply to everybody, and they apply it to everybody equally. And one of the interesting things I would point out is one of the various earliest podcasts for Trevor On Power is Deb Lou. And Deb Lou, I love, she is now the CEO of Ancestry.com, was probably the second highest woman in Facebook after Cheryl Sandberg. Deb Lou, I've gotten to know when she was at Stanford, she did intentionally, did not take my class, or she thought it was like taught by Deb Lou, it was inconsistent with her Christian upbringing. She is now embraced the power book so much so that she wrote her own book called Take Back Your Power. And I highly recommend reading Take Back Your Power. It is the story of an Asian American woman who faced all kinds of prejudice she was raised in the South, where there was all kinds of nasty things said to her. She has succeeded in technology by doing essentially what we talk about. I highly recommend Take Back Your Power. And to use the principles of seven rules of power to make your way in the world. Very nice. And that's Deb Lou is the author for Take Back Your Power. Deb Lou is the author. Take Back Your Power. We have a question in the chat. This is from Carlos, what has been the best experience you've heard from someone breaking the rules and what is the worst? So I would say many of the people on the podcast and many of the people that I've seen both in my online and on-campus classes have been excellent at breaking the rules. One of my favorites because she comes to the class and I think she's on the Fefferon Power Podcast. Season one, Christina Troitino, who broke the rules, went to the Sundance Film Festival, got invited to a dinner with Martha Stewart. She continues to break the rules in her career, Ariel Ziv, ZIV. She's not been on the Fefferon Power Podcast yet, but she broke the rules and created an award. It's Stanford. I think Jason Callicanis, a name that many of you will know because he has this week and startups podcast himself. And I've been on his podcast and he's been on my podcast. I think has broken many of the rules around being an investor and an adventure capital. So I wouldn't highlight one person. I think many of the people who have been successful have done so by basically getting out of their own way and breaking the rules and unleashing their inner power, if you will. And the worst example, I'm not sure I've got a worst example. Maybe the worst example is Donald Trump because he certainly breaks the rules and he's powerful, but he probably has taken it to an extreme. Well, and to be clear, break the rules is one of your seven rules of power, right? It's rule two. It is a very important rule. Get out of your own way number one and break the rules number two. That's right. And by the way, this is true for companies as well. If you think about the most successful businesses, they are often businesses that have defied conventional wisdom in their industry. So Southwest Airlines defied the rule in the airline industry to operate hub and spoke because they understood that the only way you would money was by taking people from one destination to the other and sitting being number 30 for takeoff at Dallas for a worth airport was not actually making you any money. Whole Foods market, I think broke the conventional wisdom in the grocery industry that said your objective is to minimize costs by buying stuff in as much quantity as possible. Whole Foods understood that people would pay more for food that they wanted to eat and that therefore since tastes differ in Boston versus Austin versus San Francisco, you would make more money if you custom tailored your assortments both in the prepared food segment but also in the rest of the store to the taste of the local people who would of course pay more for food they wanted to eat. I could go on with other examples, but in general, businesses that have succeeded have succeeded by defying conventional wisdom. Apple computer, Apple throughout its history has basically forged its own path and so just as companies that are successful forged their own path, I would urge individuals to forge their own path as well. All right well let's shift back to one of the slides we have. Thank you Carlos for that question. Our next one is from Edgar Herrera and it in your experience, how does the concept of executive presence and showing up in a powerful manner influence individual productivity and team performance? Could you share practical steps for developing this presence to maximize both personal efficiency and the effectiveness of one's team? That's a great question because executive presence matters a lot. I still remember going with my dear friend Bob Sutton to visit an auditing firm that had consulting arm and we met the head of the center for business intelligence. Afterwards we talked to the guy who brought us in and we said this guy didn't seem to have very much intelligence and the answer was well he looks good in the suit. So you should not underestimate the extent to which body language and presence matters. I think in order to give you an answer I'm going to give you a reference to an answer. There's a woman named Dana Carney, D-A-N-A, C-T-A-R-N-E-Y. Dana Carney teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. She is writing a book called Tell which is all about executive presence and body language but until the book comes out she also has written articles in the California management review and I highly recommend you looking up Dana Carney and her articles and she talks about body language. And my other friend who teaches about this is Deborah Grunfeld, G-R-U-E-N-F-E-L-D, who teaches a course at Stanford called Acting with Power. Deborah Grunfeld has a YouTube video on this. She talks again about how you show up in a powerful fashion and then finally there's Amy Cutty, C-U-D-Y, who has probably one of the most downloaded YouTube videos. Amy Cutty wrote a book called Presence. So fundamentally if you look at Deborah Grunfeld, Amy Cutty and Dana Carney and follow their advice you will show up in a powerful fashion and it matters a lot. The other thing I will tell you is that executive presence or any of the skills that we're talking about today are skills that are developed. This is not about personality, this is not about being born with this stuff, but just as you learn to play tennis or chess or the French horn you can learn to build executive presence through coaching. One of the most common questions I get asked, which I'm happy to respond to after this session to you as well, is give me the name and an executive coach because we work both in the online class and with the on-campus class with a set of incredibly fabulous executive coaches. And I highly recommend you hire an executive coach. They're not that expensive in many instances and it's in a great investment in your development and the executive coaches can help you get out of your own way. Number one, and number two, show up in a powerful fashion. Excellent. And I'm seeing more questions pop up in the chat. If we don't hit those up, remember we will have the live Q&A session as well. But let me see what the next slide for us is. This is from Edgar as well. So, Professor, in seven rules of power, you discuss the importance of networking and building social relationships as a source of power. Can you elaborate on specific strategies for cultivating meaningful connections that directly enhance productivity within an organization, especially in a remote or hybrid work environment? So it's I think harder to do it in a hybrid or remote work environment. But one of the things that I've seen people do is as long as there's anybody in any office anywhere and as long as airplanes are flying, you can get yourself in front of people. And I would urge you, I've seen many people do this when my friend Sarah Bookner wanted to get a visa to stay in the United States, which is of course hard to do in these days. And she wanted sponsorship from an executive in the construction industry with whom I connected her. She flew to the Washington DC area to talk to him in person. She probably could have done this on a Zoom call. She probably could have done this on a phone call. But I think one of the things that made her more successful was actually going there in person. You know, we say that leadership or management is getting things done to other people, I think that's right. And therefore, the more other people you know and the more other people to whom you are connected, the more likely you are to be able to be effective in your job and to get things done. You know, most people spend an insufficient amount of time building social relationships. And most people don't do it in the right way. Here I would recommend a guest and our podcast who's already done the podcast, John Levy, LVY, who wrote a book called You're Invited, John Levy runs these dinners. And the principle that John Levy talks about is the principle of generosity. So that instead of just saying to Scott, epithetically, I need this from you, can you help me or schmoozing about nothing, which is what many people do at these cocktail parties, is to figure out what is Scott's interest and how can I help him be more effective in his job and how can we connect around similarities and mutual interests. And so if you connect around similarities and mutual interests, if you suggest to the people to whom you're connected, interesting pieces of information or interesting insights that will help them or that they will find intriguing. That's how you build relationships. You build relationships over substance. That makes total sense. All right. I think next we're going to turn to some of the chat questions. So if we can highlight, I see one from Ali Gidecki, what are effective steps for actively rebranding in a powerful fashion, i.e. an individualist seeking to change perceptions and take on a bitter role? That's a great question because the first impressions are extraordinarily durable. I think rebranding requires two things. First of all, it requires you to rebrand yourself. Nobody is going to think of you in a way that is different than you think of yourself. So if you think of yourself as in some way disadvantaged by your race or gender or by your social origins or your social class or anything else, other people will think of you in that same way. So the first part of rebranding is to overcome any vestiges of what is commonly called imposter syndrome and to think of yourself as a leader and as a powerful leader at that. That's number one. Number two, you can use going to an executive education course such as the lead program at Stanford or reading a book or something as a way of giving yourself and others permission to think of you differently. You know, no one was born a tennis pro or a concert pianist or anything else, but one of the things that makes you I think successful is, in fact, first of all, branding and putting out the message that you want to have others associated with you and then get that message shared on as much social media and by as many other people and influencers as possible. You know, and then also use the fact that you've gone to a class or read a book or had some transformational experience as a way of also giving yourself permission to be different than what people expect of you. Excellent. Well, I think now it's a good time to shift over to the live Q&A. Some of these questions that are being submitted over on the Q&A tab seems like we have a place where you can go over there. There's been a number that have been submitted and you can also upload those so we can look and see which ones are getting the most interest and I can start with using your time on those and I'll invite the person asking the question first. So let me look over a woodhung is our first question I see up with Oh, it's midnight for wood right now. Okay, I can't join the stage. No worries at all. Let me go ahead and relay the question because I thought as a good one. Jeffrey, so when negotiating an exit offer, what power tactics would you recommend to improve my leverage and secure a more favorable deal, particularly if I'm not the primary founder? Let me say two things. Number one, it depends upon what country you're in. In the United States, one of the things that I noticed is that many people think that they're going to negotiate foreign by themselves. I think doesn't often help. So I would say get yourself if you're in the United States, which of course has one third of the lawyers in the world. I don't know if anybody knows this, but one third of the lawyers in the entire world are based in the United States. Get yourself an attorney. You need somebody to help. I see Scott nodding his head. Yes. You need somebody to help represent you. You need somebody who understands what your rights are legally. You understand that you need someone to help you read the contracts that you may or may not have signed going in, but you need an ally. So I would say, first of all, particularly in the US, which has a zillion attorneys, get yourself an attorney to help you negotiate. And number two, if you don't get yourself an attorney in any event, get yourself some counsel and help. I think oftentimes when we are particularly exiting from a situation, particularly implied in your question in a situation in which we have been a founder or co-founder and we're getting forced out by our colleagues, oftentimes we feel angry or sad or resentful or maybe all of the above. And I think it's hard to be as objective as we need to be. So I would say get counsel. Legal counsel, yes, counsel from your friends and colleagues. Yes, counsel from people who you know, who have experienced similar things earlier in their career or earlier in the time that you knew them absolutely. So get yourself advice. That would be my first thing to do. And the second thing to do is to show up again and act in a powerful fashion and don't accept the first thing that's offered. You know, oftentimes when we're forced out, we believe it's our fault or we believe somehow we've done something to deserve it, this idea of the just world idea. And so we do not advocate for ourselves as powerfully as we can. Gotcha. Say it's advice. It's a follow-up wood hog says they're from Taiwan, but this suggestion is very helpful. Thank you, Jeffrey. Let me move on to the next question from Alyssa Demail. If we can invite Alyssa to ask her question, if you would like, Alyssa, are you able to join in? Hi, hi, Dr. Feffer. Thank you for taking my question today. So my question is, can you discuss the paradox of power as in how its pursuit can sometimes lead to the very outcomes one seeks to avoid such as isolation or corruption? How can leaders navigate this paradox effectively? Okay, that's an interesting question. So your question implies something which I think is extraordinarily correct. There is a price for having power. There you are, my god, I can actually see you. Amazing. There is a price for power. And you alluded to one of the prices for power, which is, you know, this is saying it's only at the top. It is only at the top. It's only actually climbing your way to the top. And so one of the things I tell people is if you're going to pursue power, you need to be willing to think about what trade-offs you are comfortable making. And by the way, this is true, not just for power, but it's true for career success in general. If you're going to be successful, I know very few senior-level executives who do not spend too much time at the job and insufficient time working with their family relationships are in many cases they don't have as many friends as they would like. So power and career success comes with a price and you need to think thoughtfully about what price you're willing to pay and how much of that price you're willing to pay. And don't assume there's a some way to avoid the price because there are other people who will be willing to do things that you aren't willing to do. So the question is, what are you willing to do? What is going on around you? What are other people doing? Are you willing to do it or not? It's fine. You don't have to do it, but power comes with a trade-off. And thank you for asking that question. I think people need to be much more explicit about the trade-offs they're willing to make. And I think the Jeffrey Sonnenfeld case study is a really good example of the consequences of that. So he's come back. It's all okay. I did see that. Thank you. Thank you. Melissa had also suggested in the chat Dr. Caldini. Jill Dini. Jill Dini. I would love to see him on your podcast. Yeah, Robert Bob Chaldeen and I are very good friends. He actually came to a celebration of my career last year. There's a picture of us sitting together. I've known him for many years. He's wonderful. Oh, that's great. That's a great suggestion. The reason why I have not put him on the podcast, but you're, it's a good suggestion. It's a good thing to do. The reason I have not put him on the podcast is that with the exception of Dana Carney was on the podcast. And so with respect to body language, that's another source for Dana Carney. Listen to the Dana Carney episode on Feffer on Power. Deb Gunefeld was on my podcast relatively recently. As Scott knows, she's also a good source. But in general, I have tried to avoid academics on the podcast because most of the podcast listeners are not academics. They don't relate that well to academics. I'm trying to give you illustrations of people who have taken the seven rules of power or whatever they've learned from me over the years and put it into practice in their careers. So the podcast really emphasizes startup founders and executives making their way up the organization. But I love your suggestion about Sheldon. It's a good one. And also the suggestion reminded me, we just had this question about body language and showing up in a powerful fashion and executive presence. You can listen to Deb Gunefeld and or Dana Carney's episodes and learn a lot. All right. Thank you very much. Next up, we have a question from Chaz. What are your favorite fictional depictions of power like TV show movies or books? Do you have any favorite fictional depictions? Well, I did not watch it. But people tell me House of Cards is absolutely perfect for this. And then it's not fictional because of course it's a documentary. But I would say the documentary on Amel DeMarco's The Kingmaker. It is not to be missed. I mean, it is so incredible because as you know, as many people on this podcast listening to me will know, the Marcos family was driven out of the Philippines in disgrace because basically they looted the country. And here's Amel DeMarco's coming back to the Philippines in triumph and getting her son, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. elected president. The documentary is like unbelievable. In general, I find the documentaries to be fabulous. There was a series called The American Experience on public television. They had a documentary on Robert Moses, the famous builder. They had a documentary on Lyndon Johnson. Documentaries on powerful figures like Robert Moses, Lyndon Johnson. Fantastic. Very nice. All right. Let me switch to the next one. I have one from Daniel Thomas. We're also broadcasting on LinkedIn live. And so we have some questions that have made their way from LinkedIn that I'll do after Daniel's question. All right. So Daniel's question is, I'm an early tenure track faculty member at an R1AAU institution. What are some immediate things I should do early in my career to grow my consulting slash brand as you have? I'm not sure my consulting brand has been grown so well. But I would say it's one of the rules, right? Yeah, that's correct. Well, I, you know, early in my career, I didn't always do what I should have done because I wasn't as smart as I am now. But at any event to answer this question, I would say I think many people at a R1AAU university, which is essentially, of course, a research university for those who don't know what an R1AAU university means. It's a research university. People at research universities believe they need to do research. I believe that's correct. But the second thing they need to do is they need to market that research. You need to get invited to give seminars. You need to go to conferences. You need to do a bunch of stuff so that people know about your research. I think that's number one. You need to have other people talk about your research. That's number two. But basically, you need to market yourself. You should not assume that the work will stand by itself, particularly in today's world. We now have a proliferation of journals. We have a proliferation of articles. We have a proliferation of content. And much of this content, by the way, is fabulous at a moment when people are reading less. So the irony is there's more wonderful stuff to read, even though nobody has any time to read it. So you need to do something to stand out and to market yourself. Good advice. All right. Our next one I will get from LinkedIn. If we can put the LinkedIn question up on the screen. This is from Raj S. Mietra. And it says, hi Jeffrey, organizational dynamics are incredibly complex. Taking power is often met with fierce resistance from peers and subordinates. How can one drive the change management process to accelerate the process to power? Okay. But I think that question has two elements in it. Number one, the world is in fact competitive because as we've talked about, there are fewer positions at the top than at the bottom. This is true whether we're talking about consulting firms, investment banks, manufacturing organizations, whatever. So you're going to face competition. And if you were to look at the key ferrati case, he wrote the famous book Never Eat Alone. Keith will tell you that he would have gotten fired from Deloitte consulting if he had not built relationships with his bosses. So yes, your peers may resent you. You can do some things if you're charming enough to overcome that. Your subordinates, of course, should be helping you become more successful. And you can do that for both peers and subordinates by flattering them. Most people under use flattery. But beyond that, the most important relationships are the relationships with your boss. And I think many people do not spend sufficient time to praise I often hear is managing up. You need to manage up. And that's a good thing to do. So yes, there will be resistance, there will be competition. And you have to kind of get used to it and not let it bother you. All right. Well, all right. And by the way, I see also in the LinkedIn stuff, though I can't read it all perfectly because it's going by too quickly. But I see some comments being made by some of my fabulously fantastic executive coaches. So I hope people are looking at what's going on in the chat because we have fabulously fantastic brilliant executive coaches who are making their usual brilliant comments. Well, our next question I have is from Karina Kasseman. Karina's question is if our opponent has such a strong existing brand or power, what do you recommend that we can do to quickly a mass power to overcome the strong opponent? So I will give you two answers. Number one, the simplest answer is to follow the seven rules of power. But the other part of that answer is sometimes you're in situations in which you are not going to succeed. And I think the other thing, in addition to people spending insufficient amounts of time building relationships and insufficient amounts of time, making sure that people know about their good work, the other thing that people I think do make mistakes about is they say too long in environments in which they have almost no hope of succeeding. And so you need to be pretty clinical about is this a situation in which you're going to win? And if the answer is no, you know, you're a talented human being with lots of skills, go find a place where you're going to have more chance of success. No end to fold them scenario. That's exactly correct. Thank you, Karina. Thank you for the question. Excellent. So I see we're also running closer toward the end. Let me see if there's one more question I can find in here. I do have another one from Wood Hong who has said, as a second co-founder in a startup, how do you increase my influence and decision making authority within the company, especially if the first founder has a more dominant personality or a larger equity stake? Well, the dominant personality I wouldn't worry too much about. I see people gain power not only in startups, but in other kinds of organizations by basically taking initiative. There are a bunch of tasks and organizations that give you power that almost no one wants to do like taking notes at a meeting who gets to be described, who gets to take the minutes, if you will, and therefore make sure that your ideas get captured. Who's involved in recruiting? In many organizations, nobody wants to be involved with the mechanics of recruiting. Everybody wants to interview the candidates, or particularly the finals, but nobody wants to generate the pool from which you're going to recruit in the first place. I have seen people gain power by taking on tasks that nobody else wants to do, oftentimes recruiting, oftentimes taking minutes, sometimes believe it or not, keeping the books because everybody's interested in technology. Nobody wants to deal with all the, if you will, financial, undergirding or underpinning. Find an important task that nobody wants to do and take the initiative to do it. My friend Tristan Walker, on whom I wrote a case, became the head of the business development at four square. Now, this is an early, very early state startup. And when I interviewed the head of four square, I said, how did Tristan Walker become head of business development? He said, I got this email from the sky, Tristan Walker. He said, I didn't pay attention to it. So the next thing I know, we didn't have anybody doing business development, which is not unusual for technology company. Tristan Walker just basically began doing the job. And when he brought me a deal from Starbucks, I decided to hire him. So basically, sometimes you can just do things that need to be done that nobody else is doing. That way, you take the initiative and get power from doing that. Makes sense. All right. So let me shift everyone's attention back to the chat for a second and encourage you guys to maybe write in some of your key takeaways from our discussion in these questions. And if you can type them with a hashtag key takeaway, all one word followed by your insights in the chat, we can go over a couple of those. And Jeffrey, since you and I aren't typing, while they're doing that, I was going to ask you one more question I have from Anoop George in the chat. And this says, power is usually associated with corruption. Is it actually a problem with power, which means everybody follows suit and becomes corrupt to a large extent? Or is it heavily influenced by individual character or personal circumstances? So how is a tool? And like any tool, you can use it for good or for evil. You can use nuclear power to basically get around climate change. Or you can use nuclear power to blow up cities has happened during the Second World War. You can use a knife to do surgery or to stab somebody. So power is a tool. And therefore, I think you need to master the skills of power. And I begin seven rules of power with a quote. Sometimes it's attributed to me. I'm not sure I said it, but I'll take credit for it. If powers to be used for good, more good people need power. So the idea that power corrupts wraps the power corrupts absolutely. I think it's not quite correct. Having power certainly changes people sometimes for the good. Sometimes that's so much for the good. But I think in a world in which all of us are hoping to have an impact. Stanford Business School as a model. I kind of like change lives, change organizations, change the world. If you're going to change anything, you need power and influence. If you're going to solve climate change, if you're going to solve the problem of poverty, famine, war, pestilence, all the kind of things that are going on in this world, you need to be in a position of influence. You're not going to be able to do it without influence. And so therefore, you need to seek power. All right. And I have another question for you now. This is from one of our past guests, Deep Deep Power. Deep Deep. She's also not only a past guest, she's also a coach in the online version of the power class. And by the way, I see Raquel Gonzalo Dalmo was put her contact information and the things. And I see a comment from my friend Monica. So I have a bunch of coaches who are on this podcast. So thank you. Let's take these questions. Hey, Jeff. So nice to see you here. And I mean, it's been a pleasure working with you, but I think one can never learn enough from you. So amazing questions and amazing answers right now. I do want to still ask one question, which has been playing on my mind, which is you've interviewed a diverse range of individuals, right? Some diverse backgrounds, which is something I believe very good, because your research shows that whatever you've been working on actually works for everyone in that light, if you had to come up with an eighth rule of power, how would you define it? Based on the common patterns, you've particularly seen with underrepresented backgrounds. I'm not sure I would have an eighth rule of power. I'm not sure what it would be, but I suspect knowing you that when you had that question, you have an eighth rule of power in your mind. So I'm going to turn the question back on you given your long history with the class. Thank you for your work and the work of the course facilitators. What would your eighth rule of power be? I think most of the times this might wasn't an opinion that most of the times when we think about building our own power, we forget about the power that others are having, and building on others power sometimes is very, very helpful as well, which is to say to understand who's influential in getting the wrong aside, this is what you talk about, but at the same time, how could you actually collaborate with them rather than trying to be someone that you can get help from kind of changes the dynamic? I mean, that's my experience, but I would the math team. That's a good rule. So I would say the eighth rule of power, I'm going to paraphrase it in a way that you probably, it's a little different than what you said. So I just had lunch the other day with a friend of mine that worked in supply chain of Tesla. Now he's working in supply chain in Rivian, and he's got a boss who is moved from obviously Tesla to Rivian, and he's moved from Tesla to Rivian, and the boss is said to him, his name is Felipe, he absolutely happens to be a Brazilian. He said to Felipe, he said, Felipe, stick with me, is I rise, so will you. So for the eighth rule of power is find somebody whose trajectory is amazing, and get yourself associated with them, so they will carry you along as they're rising. That's my eighth rule of power. Very nice. Love that. We're going to promote that to the course, and thank you Scott again. Thanks. Absolutely. Great to talk to you again, deep deep. All right. Well, Jeffrey, now I see we're coming up on the end of the hour. I wanted to see in the key takeaways, some were saying that the rules of power being universal, key takeaways of the mountain shape of momentum, and learning the rules of heart over and over again, practicing them, keeping them consistent, believing in yourself, and a lot of thank you for a great session from everyone. So good job, Jeffrey, and I want to thank everyone who's listening in attendance, and listening after the fact, I want to remind you that this will be out as an episode of Fefferon Power, accelerating your career, the podcast with the fabulous Jeffrey Feffer, where every other week, we bring you an episode talking about the subject of power, right, Jeffrey? That is exactly correct, and Scott, you are learning so much from being the producer and listening into the conversations. I think we're going to send you a bill. Oh, no. Oh, no. By the way, since the bill will come from Stanford, it will be an expensive bill. No, all kind of aside, I have really enjoyed very much our collaboration as we have put together these episodes, and your health with this session as well. Absolutely. And I want to remind people listening, you can subscribe to Fefferon Power on Apple or Spotify or anywhere you find podcasts. Also, rate and review them on Apple Podcasts. We see those, and those are fantastic ways to be a part of the show as well. And I would also say that it is never too late to go back and listen to these episodes, because the amazing thing about the internet is this stuff lasts forever. So, if Deb Blue was in my very first thing before I even was working with University FM, but you can find, you know, if you're interested in the success of this Asian American woman, go back and look at her thing. Benji Fernandez, who runs Nala, who just raised $40 million in a series A. It's an early podcast episode. Darren Dodson, so you can always, always find these episodes. We did an episode with John Levy. So I would encourage you to look not only at the current episodes and the episodes forthcoming, but to go back and look into the library of what we've created. Absolutely. Well, thank you. I couldn't have said it better. If those are great closing words, as we finish up, we'll let everyone back to their afternoon or morning wherever you're at. But thank you again, Jeffrey, for joining us. And thank you, everyone. This has been Feffa Ron Power, the live Q&A session. Thank you for joining in. This has been the Feffa Ron Power Podcast. Where every other week we talked to an accomplished individual about their path to power and their 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. Feffa Ron Power is a production of Stanford University and University FM. Feffa Ron Power, the live Q&A session.