Power Is a Tool: Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer on the Seven Rules of Getting Ahead

Jeffrey Pfeffer is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He teaches Paths to Power, one of the two most oversubscribed MBA courses, and wrote the book *The Seven Rules of Power*. He opens with evidence: research built on Gerald Ferris's scale of political skill links that skill to higher salary, promotions, job happiness and lower stress.

Pfeffer says the topic is uncomfortable because the reality of how people gain power looks nothing like what we are taught in Sunday school or by our parents. People also see powerful figures use power badly. His answer is that a hammer can hit someone on the head and still be a useful tool, and his friend, the breast cancer surgeon Laura Esserman, uses a knife to cure cancer while muggers use one to rob people.

He argues that the people who most need these skills are those whose background or characteristics put them at a disadvantage. He mentions that he was heading to Nashville to speak with people of color in the NFL who are trying to rise through the ranks. In his view they will not succeed without power skills, because the world is stacked against them in many ways.

Pfeffer's syllabus warns that the class is not for everyone. He once had students in the third row who looked as if they were in pain, and he says they learned nothing. Anyone who arrives hostile to the material, as with a physics class they don't believe in, won't benefit.

He also teaches students to be less judgmental. If someone is on your critical path, he says, the only relevant judgment is that you need their cooperation, whether or not you like them. Senior executives, he notes, have mastered the skill of letting you not know what they think of you, because showing disrespect drives the odds of productive collaboration toward zero.

The course's centerpiece is an assignment he calls Doing Power: each student must do something during the quarter that puts the principles into practice. His reasoning is that unused learning disappears, like French you never speak. His most extreme example is Derek Kan, whose project in 2012 was to get a top economic policy role on Mitt Romney's campaign. Kan was offered the job and declined it, later rose in the transportation department, and ended up as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget six years out of business school.

Pfeffer starts from the observation that there are fewer positions at the top than at the bottom, so advancing means getting promoted, and nobody promotes someone they don't know. You have to differentiate yourself, which means building a brand. He gives examples: Keith Ferrazzi at Deloitte Consulting launched an award program to raise the firm's brand recognition and later became its first chief marketing officer. Tristan Walker, ignored by Foursquare's founder, started signing partnerships, and one of them was Starbucks.

Lenny pushes back that a personal brand sounds like posting on LinkedIn. Pfeffer's example is Laura Chau, who made partner at Canaan Partners in four years. Working for a less visible firm than Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia, she wrote, started a podcast, hosted networking dinners and cultivated a distinctive look.

His summary is that visibility without substance reveals you as useless, but substance without visibility means no one knows what you have. Lenny adds a useful reframe: promoting yourself can mean amplifying your team's impact or scaling yourself by sharing what you know.

Rule one is to get out of your own way. If you think power is dirty, you won't do what your career requires. Pfeffer also points to imposter syndrome and to the habit of preemptive apology. His advice is that if a comment won't be useful, don't say it, and either way, don't apologize. If you got the job, you are probably overqualified, and a self-image of not deserving it will leak out and lead others to doubt you too.

He doesn't say to be disliked on purpose, and he cites Bob Sutton's *The No Asshole Rule*. But he says you are hired to perform. Using the example of his spinal surgeon, he says he cared about competence and not the surgeon's personality or office furniture. The same holds for a quarterback or an NBA center, and not using your skills out of worry about opinion harms the organization too. Lenny's version is to prioritize competence and respect over being liked.

Rule two is to break the rules. Doing the unexpected makes you memorable, and rules are mostly made by people the existing rules already favor. He compares it to business disruptors such as Southwest Airlines avoiding hub-and-spoke and Amazon investing in customer service. The conventional rule he singles out is not to ask for help. Research by Frank Flynn shows people overestimate how many others they must ask, and Pfeffer says he asked his late wife out repeatedly. If you ask and are refused, you are no worse off than if you hadn't asked.

As a rule-breaker in business he names Jason Calacanis, whom he describes as defying venture capital convention by making many small bets and running a lean operation with no partners. He credits Calacanis's journalism background with teaching him to ask smart people questions and become smart and insightful himself.

Pfeffer says many people find networking dirty because they approach it wrongly. He cites his friend John Levy, author of *You're Invited*, who says the first principle is generosity: what can I do for you, and who can I introduce you to? Knowing more people means being able to help more, and a broad network is also a way to get knowledge about people and ideas.

He tells the story of Omid Kordestani, who told him he was stalled in marketing and business development at Netscape. According to Pfeffer's retelling, Kordestani networked heavily, first inside Netscape and then through Silicon Valley, rather than focusing on his assigned work. When a tiny Google needed its first business hire in 1998, his name appeared on every list. He became employee number 11 and, Pfeffer says, made billions.

To make networking feel less cringeworthy, Pfeffer assigns students a list of ten people who would matter for their goals and asks them to plan how to meet each one. That could be a dinner where guests cook, a lunch, or an email with a relevant article. He describes introducing Esther Wojcicki to Stanford's Leanne Williams, who works on depression research, so that one could fund and the other could inform. He says this is the broker's role, connecting people who benefit from knowing each other, as venture capitalists, bankers and real estate agents do.

He adds the value of weak ties. Close contacts know what you know, while people different from you bring non-redundant information. Mark Granovetter's Boston study found that jobs found through network referrals were better, and the best often came from distant contacts who had a view into the labor market.

Rule six is to use your power. Pfeffer notes that people are often ambivalent about authority, citing Deborah Gruenfeld's *Acting with Power*. He recounts a Harvard Business Review article by Herminia Ibarra about a drug company executive who told her new reports she wasn't sure she deserved her promotion and then did poorly. Those who mobilize resources and get things done get more resources, since people want to be associated with success.

Rule three is to show up powerfully. Pfeffer says evidence suggests we respond mostly to how people look, then to how they sound, and least of all to what they say, so turning off the sound on a debate makes it better. In class he plays short silent clips of BP's Tony Hayward and Goldman Sachs's Lloyd Blankfein, and he says viewers can guess who will keep their job from appearance alone.

He insists these are skills, not personality. He says PR veteran Regis McKenna and his team coached a young Steve Jobs, who couldn't present, into someone who could sell anything. The list Lenny reads from the book includes making brief eye contact, not reading from notes, not apologizing, using more gestures, adopting an open posture and speaking louder. Pfeffer adds gentle touch and standing close, and says Jack Valenti never went to Congress with notes, which made the five-foot-two Valenti feel taller than he was.

Salman Rushdie's line is that if you can make people laugh, you can tell them anything. Asked about people turned off by all this, Pfeffer says students pass through denial, anger, sadness and acceptance. He gets them there with practice and coaching, starting where they can and pushing out of their comfort zone a little at a time, much like Carole Robin's 15% rule from Touchy-Feely.

Pfeffer walks through the assignments. The first, on day one, asks why you are here and what success would look like. The second has students get rated on the seven attributes of power from his earlier book and build a development plan. Another asks them to create a resource, and he mentions a student who created an award, gave it to model Karlie Kloss, and got in trouble with the school: it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

Later assignments cover networking and acting with power: students record 60- to 90-second videos, in effect becoming a better Tony Hayward, and get feedback. For branding they write a personal brand statement, revise it, and consider how they want to be known. Coaches, each responsible for around 23 students, give feedback throughout. One student told him he got more useful feedback in this class than in all his other classes combined.

Rule seven is that once you have power, what you did to get there is forgotten or forgiven. Pfeffer includes it because people fear the Icarus myth and think the world self-corrects, but he says it doesn't: if people believe you are powerful you become more so. His examples include Lindsey Graham, who criticized Trump and then became an ally because he wanted to be relevant, and Bill Gates, Jeffrey Epstein's social life after his conviction and Martha Stewart's brand. People, he says, want to be close to money, power and success and will overlook flaws to do so.

Asked about Trump, whom Lenny notes Pfeffer first planned to write about, he says Trump does these things by trial and error and not because he read the book. His better story is Laura Esserman, who in his class would not network and was savaged by students for it. He told her that she was creating friction and that reducing it would let her accomplish more. She changed, and she went on to win major awards, including a spot on Time's 2016 list of the 100 most influential people.

Pfeffer says she uses power to fight for things like precision screening, even against radiologists, and tells how Richard Blum said that when Laura asks you to do something you do it anyway. This ties back to the book's epigraph, which says that if you want power used for good, more good people need to have power.

Lenny asks why Pfeffer himself is not the most powerful man in the world. He cites the late James March, who said you can have power or autonomy but not both, and he chose autonomy. To reach powerful people he calls their assistants, whereas he controls his own calendar. He adds that power brings visibility and scrutiny, a loss of privacy, the question of whether people like you or your position, and costs for families, a point he says moved his class when Rudy Crew's daughter spoke.

For a homework assignment, Pfeffer's first suggestion follows from the discomfort running through the conversation: don't do it alone. Get coaching and build a personal board of directors, people who give advice and social support and hold you accountable. He says it is hard to do anything difficult by yourself, and that Lenny wouldn't have built his podcast without help. Lenny notes that this fits rule one, to ask for help.

Pfeffer says the book is available on Amazon and not always in physical stores. His website, jeffreypfeffer.com, has the course outline so people can take it on their own or in a group, plus research, articles and columns, and he is on LinkedIn. He describes himself as an educator for more than 50 years and says reading alone isn't enough, since you can't learn tennis by reading about it. He also points to *The Knowing-Doing Gap*.