The End of Power

by Naim, Moises

  The combination of such risks can lead to alienation. Powerful institutions have been with us for so long, and the barriers to power traditionally have been so high, that we’ve composed the meaning of our lives—our choices about what to do, what to accept, what to challenge—within their parameters. If we become too alienated, the decay of power may turn destructive.

  We urgently need to understand and address the nature and consequences of such decay. Indeed, although the aforementioned risks fall short of outright anarchy, they are clearly already interfering with our ability to address some of the great issues of our time. From climate change to nuclear proliferation, economic crises, resource depletion, pandemics, the persistent poverty of the “bottom billion,” terrorism, trafficking, cybercrime, and more, the world faces increasingly complex challenges that require the participation of ever more diverse parties and players to solve. The decay of power is an exhilarating trend in the sense that it has made space for new ventures, new companies, and, all over the world, new voices and more opportunities. But its consequences for stability are fraught with danger. How can we continue the welcome advances of plural voices and opinions, initiative and innovation, without at the same time driving ourselves into a crippling paralysis that could undo this progress very quickly? Understanding the decay of power is the first step toward finding our way forward in a world that is being reborn.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MAKING SENSE OF POWER

  How It Works and How to Keep It

  YOUR ALARM GOES OFF AT 6:45 A.M., A HALF-HOUR EARLIER THAN normal, because your boss insisted that you attend a meeting you think is worthless. You would have argued, but next week is your annual review, and you didn’t want to jeopardize your promotion. An ad plays on your clock radio for the new Toyota Prius: “It gets the best mileage of any car in America.” You’re sick of paying so much every week to fill up your tank. The Joneses next door have a Prius; why not you? Except that you don’t have the money for a down payment. At breakfast with your daughter, you notice that she—despite your offer last week to allow her to listen to music on her headphones if she would eat granola instead of Cocoa Puffs—is sitting there with headphones on and eating . . . Cocoa Puffs. You and your wife argue over who will leave work early and pick up your daughter from school. You win. But you feel guilty and agree to walk the dog as a conciliatory concession. You go outside with the dog. It’s raining. He refuses to move. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do to budge him.

  As we make the many big and small decisions that come up in daily life, as citizens, employees, consumers, investors, or members of a household or family, we must constantly bear in mind the scope—and the limits—of our own power. Whether the challenge is getting a raise or a promotion, doing our job in a certain way, pushing an elected official to vote for a bill we favor, planning a vacation with a spouse, or getting a child to eat right, we are always, consciously or not, gauging our power: assessing our capacity to get others to behave as we want. We bridle at the power of others and its irritating and inconveniencing effects: how our boss, the government, the police, the bank, or our telephone or cable provider induces us to behave in a certain way, to do certain things, or to quit doing others. And yet we often seek power, sometimes in very self-conscious ways.

  Sometimes, the exercise of power is so brutal and definitive that it has an enduring half-life. Even though Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi are gone, their victims doubtless still shudder at the mention of their names—an experience commonly shared by survivors of brutal crimes long after the perpetrators have been caught. Past or present, we feel the presence of power, even when it is subtly used or merely displayed.

  Yet whatever the extent to which power is part of our daily lives and on our minds, it eludes our understanding. Except in extreme cases when we are crudely compelled by the menace of handcuffs, fines, demotions, shaming, beatings, or other penalties, we tend to experience power more as emotional coercion than as corporeal force. Precisely because power is primordial, elemental, in our daily lives, we rarely stop to address it analytically—to identify exactly where it resides, how it works, how far it can go, and what stops it from going further.

  There is a very good reason for this: power is hard to measure. In fact, strictly speaking, it is impossible to measure. You cannot tally it up and rank it. You can rank only what appear to be its agents, sources, and manifestations. Who has the most money in the bank? Which company can buy another one, or which has the largest assets on its balance sheet? Which army has the most soldiers or tanks or fighter jets? Which political party won the most votes in the last election or controls more seats in parliament? These things can all be measured and recorded. But they do not measure power. They are only proxies. As gauges of power, they are unreliable, and even when tallied up they do not tell the whole story about how powerful someone or something is.

  Still, power pervades everything from the system of nations to markets and politics—indeed, any situation in which people or organizations compete or individuals interact. Wherever competition takes place, a distribution of power exists, and it is always relevant to human experience. Though not the only motivation behind such experience, the quest for power is surely one of the most important.

  So how can we usefully talk about power? If we are to understand how power is obtained, used, or lost, we need a way to discuss it that is not vague, grandiose, or misleading. Unfortunately, most of our conversations about power never actually make it past those pitfalls.

  HOW TO TALK ABOUT POWER

  There is a way to talk productively about power. Yes, power itself is partly material and partly psychological, partly tangible and partly something that affects our imagination. As a commodity or force, power is hard to pin down and quantify. But as a dynamic that shapes a specific situation, it can be evaluated, and its limits and latitude assessed.

  Take, for example, the ritualized group portrait of the heads of state and government who gather at a summit of the Group of Eight influential countries. Here are the president of the United States, the chancellor of Germany, the president of France, the prime minister of Japan, the prime minister of Italy, and others of their rank. Each of them is “in power.” In that respect, they are peers. And indeed, each of them has a great deal of power. Does it come from the prestige of their office, its history, and the ritual that accompanies it? From their victory in an election? From their command over a large civil service and military? From their ability to direct, with a stroke of a pen, the spending of billions of dollars raised by taxes on the labor and commerce of their citizens? Obviously, it is a mix of all these factors and others too. That is power as a force—palpable, but hard to disaggregate and quantify.

  Now, with the same photo in mind, imagine the latitude and limits that these leaders enjoy or confront in different situations. What happened during the summit meeting itself? What issues were discussed, what agreements were negotiated, and, in each case, whose will prevailed? Did the American president, often labeled “the most powerful man in the world,” win every time? What coalitions formed, and who made what concessions? Then imagine each leader returning to his or her country and addressing the domestic agenda of the moment: budget cuts, labor conflicts, crime, immigration, corruption scandals, military deployments, and whatever else might be going on in that particular region. Some of these leaders command strong parliamentary majorities; others depend on fragile coalitions. Some, through their office, have great scope to rule by executive order or decree; others do not. Some enjoy great personal prestige or high approval ratings; others are beset by scandal or politically vulnerable. Their effective power—the practical translation into action of the power of their position—depends on all these circumstances and varies from issue to issue.

  Even if we can’t quantify power, we can be quite clear about how it works. Power operates in relation to others. The more accurately we define the players and the stakes, the more sharply power comes into focus: no
longer an ill-defined force, it can now be seen as an arbiter of a menu of actions, of possibilities for shaping and changing a situation, with a defined scope and real limits. And if we understand how power works, then we can understand what makes it work well, and thus sustain itself and increase; and also what makes it fail, and thus disperse, decline, or even evaporate. In a given situation, to what extent is power fettered or constrained? What ability does each player have to change the situation? By examining competition or conflict in these practical, operational terms, we can begin to understand where events are headed.

  Nowadays, as we will see in the pages ahead, the accumulation and exercise of power are headed into uncharted waters.

  HOW POWER WORKS

  In Chapter 1, I offered a practical definition: Power is the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals. This definition has the benefit of clarity, and better still, it avoids misleading proxies such as size, resources, weapons, and number of supporters. But it does need elaboration. After all, the actions of others can be directed or prevented in many ways. In practice, power is expressed through four different means. Call them the channels of power.

  •The Muscle: The first channel of power is the most obvious and familiar. Force—or threat of force—is the blunt instrument through which power is exercised in certain extreme situations. The muscle can take the form of a conquering army, a police force with its handcuffs and jail cells, a bully in a schoolyard, a knife to the neck, a nuclear arsenal to deter attack, or someone’s ability to bankrupt your company, fire you from your job, or expel you from your church. It can also dwell in the exclusive control of some essential resource that can be proffered or denied (money, oil, voters). The presence of muscle is not always bad. We all celebrate a police force that catches criminals even if doing so at times requires the use of force. The legitimate use of violence is a right that citizens grant the state in exchange for protection and stability. But whether in the service of tyrants or enlightened leaders, muscle ultimately relies on coercion. You obey it because if you don’t, the consequences will be worse than those of obeying.

  •The Code: Why do Catholics attend Mass, Jews observe the Sabbath, and Muslims pray five times a day? Why do many societies ask elders to mediate conflicts and consider their decisions just and wise? What causes people to follow the Golden Rule and refrain from harming others even when no law or punishment exists to deter them? The answers can be found in morals, tradition, cultural mores, social expectations, religious beliefs, and values handed down through generations or taught to children in school. We live in a universe of codes that we sometimes follow and sometimes do not. And we allow others to direct our behavior through their invocation of such codes. That channel of power does not employ coercion; instead, it activates our sense of moral duty. Perhaps the best example is the Ten Commandments: through them, a higher and unquestioned power unequivocally tells us how to behave.

  •The Pitch: You hear a lot about the power of advertising. It gets the credit when people switch from McDonald’s to Burger King or when Honda’s sales surge as those of Volkswagen dwindle. Billions of dollars go into advertisements in television and radio programs, on billboards and websites, and in magazines, video games, and every other possible vehicle for the express purpose of getting people to do something they would not otherwise have done: purchase the product. The pitch requires neither force nor a moral code. Instead, it gets us to change our thinking, our perception; it persuades us that some product or service is worth selecting over the alternatives. The pitch is just the capacity to persuade others to see the situation in a way that leads them to advance the persuader’s goals or interests. Real estate agents who induce potential buyers to value the advantages of living in a specific neighborhood are not applying force, exerting moral suasion, or changing the structure of the situation (by lowering the price, for example). They are changing the clients’ behavior by altering their perception of the situation.

  •The Reward: How many times have you heard someone say “I wouldn’t do that even if you paid me to”? But typically the opposite is true: people accept payment to do things they would not otherwise do. Any individual who can provide coveted rewards has a major advantage in getting others to behave in ways aligned to his interests. He can change the structure of the situation. Whether in the form of an offer of fuel oil to North Korea in exchange for letting its nuclear reactors get inspected, the addition of hundreds of millions of dollars to the foreign aid budget to buy another country’s support, or a bidding war for a top banker, singer, professor, or surgeon, the deployment of material benefits to induce behavior is perhaps power’s most common use.

  These four channels—muscle, code, pitch, and reward—are what social scientists call ideal-types: they are analytically distinct and extreme renderings of the category they seek to represent. But in practice—or, more precisely, in the exercise of power in specific situations—they tend to mix and combine and are seldom so clear-cut. Consider, for instance, the power of religion, which operates through multiple channels. Dogma or moral code, whether enshrined in age-old scripture or propounded by a latter-day preacher or guru, is a big part of what earns an organized faith its adherents—along with their commitment of time and belief, their presence at services, their tithes, and their labor. But when churches, temples, and mosques compete for members, they often do so on the basis of a pitch—as in advertising. Indeed, many institutions of faith stage elaborate campaigns managed by highly specialized advertising firms. And they offer rewards as well—not just the immaterial reward of promised salvation but tangible here-and-now benefits such as access to the congregation’s job bank, child care, singles’ nights, or access to a network of members in prominent positions. In some societies, religious participation itself is enforced by means of muscle; consider, for instance, the laws in certain countries that require certain forms of behavior and punishing others, enforce the length of women’s abayas or men’s beards, or excommunicate physicians who perform abortions.

  Nonetheless, each of the four channels—muscle, code, pitch, and reward—operates in a distinct way. And understanding those differences offers a glimpse of the atomic structure of power.

  My formulation of these four channels adheres to the compelling framework first presented by a distinguished scholar of business and management from South Africa: Ian MacMillan of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (see Figure 2.1). In Strategy Formulation: Political Concepts, published in 1978, MacMillan sought to educate business students about the complexities of power and negotiation. He observed that in any power interaction, one party manipulates a situation in a way that affects the actions of another party.1 But various kinds of manipulation are available depending on the answers to two questions:

  •First, does the manipulation change the structure of the existing situation, or does it instead change the second party’s assessment of the situation?

  •Second, does the manipulation offer the second party an improvement, or does it instead lead the second party to accept a result that is not an improvement?

  The relative role of muscle (coercion), code (obligation), pitch (persuasion), and reward (inducement) determines the answers to those questions in any given real-world situation.

  FIGURE 2.1. MACMILLAN‘S TAXONOMY OF POWER

  Outcome seen as improvement

  Outcome seen as nonimprovement

  Change incentives

  Inducement via reward: Increase the salary, lower a price

  Coercion via muscle: Law enforcement, repression, violence

  Change preferences

  Persuasion via pitch: Advertising, campaigning

  Obligation via code: Religious or traditional duty, moral suasion

  SOURCE: Adapted from Ian MacMillan, Strategy Formulation: Political Concepts, 1978.

  Professor MacMillan’s approach has three big advantages. First, it goes straight to the practical s
ide of power—its effect on real-life situations, decisions, and behavior. In his assessment of power, MacMillan is not blinded by the image of the leaders posing for the photograph on the red carpet, projecting the pomp of their office. Instead, he asks (a) what tools are available to each leader—and to his or her opponents and allies—in addressing a particular challenge, and (b) what scope and what limits exist for changing the situation.

  Second, because his approach is strategic and focuses on power as a dynamic, it is applicable—beyond geopolitics, military analysis, or corporate rivalry—to just about any other domain. A scholar of business, MacMillan devised his framework in the context of his field—business and management—and thus goes on to examine power dynamics within firms. But there is no reason why his approach cannot be applied to other fields—which is what I do in this book.

  A third big advantage of this way of looking at power is that it lets us distinguish among concepts such as power, might, force, authority, and influence. For instance, people commonly confuse the difference between power and influence. Here, MacMillan’s conceptual framework is very helpful. Both power and influence can change the behavior of others or, more specifically, make others do something or stop them from doing it. But influence seeks to change the perception of the situation, not the situation itself.2 So the MacMillan framework helps show that influence is a subset of power, in the sense that power includes not only actions that change the situation but also actions that alter the way the situation is perceived. Influence is a form of power, but power can obviously be exercised through means other than influence.