Have you got it?
Article Date: May 25 2006
Power, that great business intangible, needs to be wielded correctly. Don’t enjoy it too much and don’t take it for granted.Not many business books write about ‘power’ and those that do are much more concerned with gaining it, rather than losing it. Machiavelli is regarded as the master of the art of power, and if you read his book, The Prince, it’s a black art.
Much more recently, Robert G Breane has written The 48 Laws of Power. He says, ‘It is dangerous to seem too power-hungry. We have to seem fair and decent. So we need to be subtle – congenial yet conniving; democratic yet devious.’ He describes it as ‘a game of constant duplicity’.
Breane says you can exert power by saying very little and others, in their nervousness, will fill in the gaps, revealing more about themselves than you have. Apparently, you keep everyone absolutely on edge, totally unsure of themselves and what’s going to happen next.
This is appalling and you certainly don’t have to be such a devious shit in order to have power. All the things I believe in, such as empowerment, shared ownership and ‘just do it’ would fail spectacularly in such an environment.
I once had a boss rather like that and although we could see he was cruel, he was intellectually extremely smart. His icy powers of analysis and sarcasm initially drove out only the poor performers, because the stars were kept happy and motivated by the other owners of the business. (Another example of the value of a complementary team.) But eventually, when times became tougher and the disagreements started, the
other owners left and there were no balancing qualities of enthusiasm and optimism at the head of the business. The company collapsed soon after.
When ‘power’ is discussed in business, it’s usually as if it is a highly tangible thing: ‘The Power Top 50’; ‘She was voted the most powerful woman in the USA’; ‘With 3,000 people reporting to him, Joe Doe is one of the most powerful…’
Like confidence, power is mainly in the head – not just your head, but in the heads of those around you too. It’s a will-o’-the-wisp. When you don’t have it, you are very aware of it. When you do, make sure you don’t enjoy it too much. And never take it for granted.
Insubstantial power
My first appreciation of the intangibility of power came when I was 19 years old (I was never the school prefect type so didn’t have any practice there).
I had blagged my way into a job at a big ad agency as a ‘senior planner/buyer’. It was fatuous really, since 18 months earlier, I’d been running errands at another agency.
Well, this served me right – I inherited a 17-year-old, very tall, red-headed Irishman as my assistant. He had the gift of the blarney and, crucially, he knew how to bluff and at that stage, I was clueless.
The office hours were pretty civilised there and we started at 9.30am, but he would breeze in 10-20 minutes late each day. I made a couple of gentle, chiding comments but he’d always claim to have been elsewhere in the building. On the third time when I really challenged him, he angrily said: ‘Look, I’ve been upstairs talking to Tony Bull about the Acrow account’ and he picked up the phone, handed it me, saying, ‘If you don’t believe me, ring him yourself!’
I was humiliated, but it was great to have the experience so early in my career. Nevertheless, much later I had another experience of the insubstantiality of power
CIA was growing really well, we were approaching a hundred people and I was starting to think internationally. I felt the need for an MD to be focused on the UK operationally. However, although I had a terrific ‘can do’ team, I felt no one was suitable for this position.
I knew bringing in an outsider would be a sensitive move, but I didn’t think through just how sensitive. I was telling them, in effect, they’d failed and yet in their eyes we were performing brilliantly and they didn’t see the need to bring in ‘professional management’. (‘Process’ was practically a dirty word in our company!)
I briefly explained to the board what I was planning to do, then got on with it. I worked my way through a shortlist, then introduced the prime candidate to them.
I found a date in my diary for a meeting a few days after. I breezed into the meeting and saw six guys facing me with a body language that said this wasn’t going to be a good meeting. One of the directors had clearly been elected spokesman and he proceeded to take to pieces the credentials of the prospective MD. At that point, I could feel my power vanishing – they didn’t want this guy at any price (and of course, although it was largely unspoken, they didn’t want an MD at any price).
The reality of the situation hit me between the eyes very quickly. If the whole board of six directors in a hundred-person company doesn’t want something to happen, they will make sure it doesn’t work. So, although I had majority control of the company and knew I was right in principle, taking the whole board on would have resulted in my winning a battle and totally losing the war (and ‘losing the war’ in this case could have meant destroying with internal politics the company that we had all worked so hard to build). Better to admit defeat quickly and live to fight another day.
Changing the status quo
I had failed to get ‘buy in’ on a huge change for the business, had felt my assumed power vanishing through my fingers, but by choosing to lose the battle it didn’t become an issue. And it didn’t do any harm for us all, including me, to discover that there was an unwritten balance of power between us.
However, the fact was that I was left with the status quo and in Momentum Management this is never good enough. I had a hungry hunting pack of a management team and we’d gone a long way together, but with precious few management skills to take us on to another level and frankly, not the interest in acquiring them either.
We lost a year, but meantime I’d developed a grim determination that we were going to become a truly European business, even if I had to throw every one of our executives over the obstacles to achieving it.
The breakthrough came when we realised that we needed a lot more funding to be a success in Europe and so we chose to go public. This created a whole new discipline at the top of the company and the need for new management skills was no longer questioned.
