Power, for All

by Julie Battilana

  While attraction and consolidation are both about increasing the other party’s dependence, expansion and withdrawal are the other two ways to rebalance power by decreasing one party’s dependence on the other party. Thus, withdrawal can be thought of as the countermove to attraction, and expansion as the countermove to consolidation.

  Withdrawal entails walking away from the resource the other party has to offer, becoming less interested in it. This is the challenge that De Beers and other diamond sellers started to face at the turn of the twenty-first century, as some consumers turned their backs on diamonds. The number of marriages has been shrinking, with evolving gender norms challenging traditional marriage rituals. In the past decades, competition for luxury goods, from travel to handbags and electronics, has also been exploding.18 Blood diamonds—gems mined in war zones and sold to finance military insurgencies—have further tarnished diamonds’ once-pristine reputation as the symbol of eternal love. These social trends have lessened De Beers’s and, more generally, the diamond industry’s power, with some analysts calculating a drop in sales growth by as much as 60 percent between 2000 and 2019.19

  But De Beers had been losing power in the industry even before these trends began to play out, so much so that by 2019, its share of the global rough diamond market had fallen to roughly 30 percent.20 De Beers’s change of fortune resulted partly from strategic moves by its suppliers and competitors: The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 weakened De Beers’s partnership with Russian diamond producers, while new mines opened in Canada, and start-ups began to use new technology to grow synthetic diamonds in their labs. Suppliers could now connect directly with buyers to negotiate prices, and buyers had more options for suppliers, further weakening De Beers’s power. Meanwhile, the company was caught up in antitrust litigation that enabled its suppliers and customers to further increase their alternatives. This kind of expansion strategy can radically change the balance of power not only in economic exchanges, but also in everyday life. Think about the child who loves cookies and has a friendly neighbor. Nothing like an outside option to take power away from your parents!

  In sum, to increase another’s dependence on you, you can try to increase how much they value a resource you have access to, or you can try to increase your control over this resource by becoming one of its only providers. Conversely, to decrease your dependence on the other party, you can try to diminish the value you place on the resource to which they have access, or try to decrease their control over it by finding alternative providers of that resource.21 Far from being fixed, power relationships evolve over time as the parties engage in these moves and countermoves. So, as the rise and fall of De Beers exemplifies, while a diamond may be forever, power is not. This is true for organizations as much as it is for every one of us. Even those who are so powerful that we view them as power personified do not own power.

  POWER IS NOT A THING WE POSSESS

  For many of his contemporaries, Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson was the most powerful person in Washington in the 1950s. And he went on to become arguably the most powerful man in the country when he became the 36th president of the United States following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Two years later, after being elected president in his own right, he seemed to be at the apex of his political career. His presidency was notable for the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts and the anti-poverty programs of the Great Society, but it was also marred by his escalation of the Vietnam War. As more and more troops were sent overseas, youth across the nation rose to demonstrate against the war’s continuation. LBJ’s unpopularity was such that he eventually announced he would not run for re-election. He focused instead on negotiating peace in Vietnam, only to see it elude him and be achieved by his successors.

  Johnson’s rise to power is often attributed in part to his unique persona: At almost six feet four inches tall, he towered over most of his fellow senators and often used his height to intimidate them. Physical intimidation was, however, only one component of what later became known as “the Johnson treatment,” described by one reporter at the time as “an incredible, potent mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages.”22 But although he was just as tall at the end of his presidency, and he still had access to his signature “Johnson treatment,” neither helped him retain his hold on power. What, then, made him so powerful in the first place, and why was it not enough for him to sustain power during his presidency?

  No one has spent more time dissecting Johnson’s use of power than Robert Caro, whose monumental biography of the man follows every step of his rise and fall. Remarkably, when Caro was asked in an interview about what traits made Johnson powerful, he referred neither to his personality nor to the specifics of the Johnson treatment. Instead, he pointed to his “genius in creating political power.”23 In Caro’s account, Johnson’s unique capacity to gain and exercise power during his years in the Senate rested on this: He understood, better than most, what his colleagues valued, and he deployed this knowledge to maximum effect by controlling their access to it. When he joined the Senate in 1949, Johnson made a point of carefully observing fellow senators, as Caro notes: “He watched which senators went over to other senators to chat with them—and which senators sat at their desks and let other senators come to them. He watched two senators talk, and watched if they talked as equals. He watched groups of senators talk, and watched which one the others listened to. And he watched with eyes that missed nothing.”24 Johnson was at his most effective when he was one-on-one. He had an uncanny ability to read people, and made a habit of keeping people talking, always working to discover what his interlocutor really wanted. Then, he would find a way to control their access to it. For some, it was important committee assignments and seats; for others, it was enabling the bills they supported to proceed to a vote; and for others, it was going on junkets and eating in fancy restaurants. Providing his colleagues with what they needed and wanted enabled him to become one of the most powerful senators in more than a hundred years.

  Once he became president, however, his fellow senators, mostly middle-age and older White men like him, were no longer the only people he had to deal with. Now he had to engage with the American citizenry in all their great diversity, and with foreign leaders, among them Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese president. American involvement in the struggle between North and South Vietnam sharply escalated during Johnson’s tenure. While the geopolitics of the Vietnam War are much too intricate to cover here, one factor that contributed to this escalation was Johnson’s belief that he could broker a deal with Ho Chi Minh the same way that he had done so many times in the halls of the U.S. Capitol. But none of the resources Johnson could make available, such as generous developmental aid, were of interest to Ho Chi Minh, whose unrelenting purpose was creating a unified Vietnam under a Communist-led government. Johnson’s frame of reference was too detached from the cultural, historical, and ideological roots of Ho Chi Minh’s uncompromising pursuit. The Johnson treatment that served LBJ so well in the Senate was of no avail in the context of the Vietnam War. This time around, he could not intimidate or cajole his way to victory.

  Johnson’s extraordinary trajectory is a stark reminder that no one ever owns power, even those who seem the most powerful among us. Personal skills or attributes that help us gain power in one environment can actually harm our chances of gaining and keeping it in another.25

  Why, then, do so many people believe power is a personal possession? Because we tend to personalize it. L’Homme Providentiel, or “the great man” who determines the course of events and the fate of masses, is a prominent figure in chronicles and legends throughout history.26 In the 1970s, psychologist Lee Ross coined the term “fundamental attribution error,” which refers to our bias to explain another person’s behavior by their personal qualities rather than any situational factors.27 The media, biographies, movies, and more perpetuate the idea that one person can naturally p
ossess power and achieve greatness alone.

  This misconception is dangerous. For the powerful, it leads to an illusory sense of permanence, invulnerability, even hubris. And pride—the proverb goes—comes before the fall.28 For the powerless, the idea that the powerful have attributes simply beyond their reach breeds passivity, the belief that they cannot do anything, that they are trapped in their own powerlessness.

  Once you understand the fundamentals of power, it becomes easy to debunk this fallacy: No one can ever possess power, because one’s power over another party depends on what the other party needs and wants, and whether one can control their access to it. The other party’s power, in turn, depends on the extent to which they control access to resources the other values. As such, power exists only in the context of a relationship. No one is ever powerful or powerless in general. Power is a force through which the parties in a relationship can influence one another’s behaviors. In and of itself, this force is neither good nor bad. It is up to each of us to harness it so as to have the kind of impact we aspire to have.

  I. For a review of definitions of power in the social sciences, see the Appendix.

  Chapter 2 Power Can Be Dirty, But It Doesn’t Have to Be

  “Conceal your intentions.”

  “Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit.”

  “Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim.”

  “Pose as a friend, work as a spy.”1

  These are among the recommendations in The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene’s bestselling book, first published in 1998. No wonder people believe that power is dirty. Or perhaps you remember that the ends justify the means and that “it is much safer to be feared than loved” from Niccolò Machiavelli’s sixteenth-century political treatise, The Prince.

  What we forget is that, according to Machiavelli, the prince also “ought to… proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and humanity, so that too much confidence may not make him incautious and too much distrust render him intolerable.”2 But if there is humanity, too, in Machiavelli’s prince, why is it that the prince’s cruelty is what fascinates us? We humans have a well-documented negativity bias, which causes us to pay greater attention to negative events, objects, and traits than we do to positive ones, and we respond to them more strongly.3

  But portraying power exclusively as exploitative and manipulative misses its essence: Power is neither inherently moral nor inherently immoral. History shows us that power can be used for virtuous purposes as well as dishonorable ones. Whether it becomes dirty in our hands depends on how we gain and keep it and the purpose for which we use it. As such, each of us confronts three ethical decisions with respect to power: whether to acquire it, how to do so, and what to use it for.

  Acquiring power means acquiring the capacity to take action and effect change. “Power is the very essence, the dynamo of life,” in the words of American community organizer and political activist Saul Alinsky.4 Power, as the British philosopher Bertrand Russell put it, is “the fundamental concept in social science… in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.”5 And even though this energy can be channeled toward self-serving and, at times, evil ends, it can also be channeled toward principled aims that transcend self-interest. In fact, having power is indispensable to pursuing such ends, because, as Lia’s story taught us, you need to be able to influence others to achieve any kind of positive change. By seeing power for what it is—a force residing in the control of valued resources that is inherently neither amoral nor moral—we open ourselves up to wielding it responsibly. This requires overcoming the intoxicating effect it can have on our psyches, on the one hand, and learning how we can use it without abusing it, on the other hand.

  POWER INTOXICATES

  Miriam Rykles was born in Vilnius, in what was then Poland and is now Lithuania. A teenager at the time of World War II, Miriam6 was the only member of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust. After two years in Nazi concentration camps, she knew the horrors of abusive power intimately. She had seen firsthand how people with total and unchecked power can use it to destroy lives and all that makes us human. Immunized against any form of power abuse by her experiences, she would never succumb to its exhilaration—or so she thought.

  By her thirties, Miriam had resettled in Boston, where she worked as an administrative assistant in the physics department at Harvard University. At the invitation of her cousin Elwood, she visited him in London. Before the war, Elwood had waited tables and studied socialism with serious interest; after it, he made millions as a lawyer with celebrity clients from Hollywood and around the globe. His world, separated not just by an ocean but also by enormous wealth, couldn’t be more different from Miriam’s.

  On a sunny Thursday morning, Noel, her cousin’s chauffeur, picked her up in Elwood’s limousine for a day of museum-going. Their first stop was the Tate Gallery. “Noel pulled up to the entrance,” Miriam recalled, “and opened the door. I got out and saw people craning to see who was coming out of the car. I walked through the crowd feeling, Oh, they think I’m somebody! but the feeling didn’t penetrate somehow. I went from museum to museum and had a ball.” The only moment that gave Miriam pause was when she stopped for a late lunch and Noel demurred when she invited him to join her.

  By the time evening approached, the weather had become chilly. “We were driving through Trafalgar Square,” she told us, “and people were walking along quickly, shivering, trying to shelter from the drizzle. I looked out the window and felt warm and comfortable and very indifferent [to those we were driving by]: They are them, and I am me, I thought. I am in the car, and they are out in the cold. In that instant, I felt superior.”

  Miriam’s experience of feeling caught up in the comfort of power and becoming insensitive to others is not uncommon. Reflecting upon what a fleeting experience of power and privilege had done to her, Miriam explained, “It occurred to me that when you’re born into privilege, or experience it for a while, you feel the way I did that day all the time. You don’t even know that you feel that way! I was there for just one day. One day, and that’s how I felt? Me, so sure in my convictions, my sense of justice, so aware that good and evil coexist in all of us, and that it is imperative to keep the evil side of humanity in check to protect civil society. I got scared, because if something like that can happen to me in just a day, anything can happen, to me and to other people.”

  Power, Self-Focus, and Hubris

  As history attests, and psychologists have documented, Miriam is right: The experience of power can engender less empathy and respect for others, and more self-serving impulsivity and feelings of exceptionalism.7

  In the lab, social psychologists have shown the impact of reflecting even briefly on one’s power relative to others. In one study, experimenters asked participants to reflect on either those with the most wealth and prestige in the U.S. or on those with the least, and then to mark on a ten-rung ladder where they themselves fell. Thinking about the country’s most powerful people led participants to feel relatively powerless, and to rank themselves lower. In contrast, participants who thought about the least powerful in society felt comparatively powerful and ranked themselves higher. Participants then were given a well-known test, Reading the Mind in the Eyes,8 which measures people’s level of empathy by asking them to discern others’ emotional states based on photos cut to show just the top of their face, around their eyes. The people who had been led to feel of high rank were significantly less accurate than those who had been led to feel of low rank.9 The experience of power made them less attentive and more insensitive to others’ emotions.

  Beyond increasing what psychologists call a person’s “self-focus,” the experience of power also tends to make people more self-confident. Feeling high in social status leads to an increased sense of well-being;10 and some research even suggests that those holding power tend to have greater tolerance for pain11 and lower heart rates in the face of stres
s.12 Such feelings can encourage risk-taking,13 which can be good in some situations, but dangerous when a person is blinded by hubris.

  References to the dangers of hubris, excessive pride, and self-confidence abound in the myths and tragedies of the ancient Greeks, who considered it a character flaw serious enough to elicit the wrath of the gods.14 Remember Icarus, whose father made him wings of feather and wax to help him escape from the island of Crete? Warned by Daedalus not to fly too low, lest the feathers become wet and useless, nor too high, lest the sun melt the wax, Icarus, overcome by his newfound likeness to the gods and “rejoiced by the lift of his great sweeping wings,”15 ignored his father’s admonitions, flew too close to the sun, and tumbled into the sea to his death.

  What individual with power has not been tempted to fly too close to the sun? The experience of power can give us the impression that nothing and no one can resist us. Experiments in social psychology show that the powerful are more disinhibited and believe that they have greater control over the effects of their actions than they actually do.16 In an emblematic study, some participants were asked to write about a time when they felt powerful, while others wrote about a time when they felt powerless. Participants were then given a die, offered a monetary reward for predicting the outcome of a roll, and asked if they would like to throw the die themselves or have the experimenter do it. Every single participant who wrote about a time they had felt powerful chose to roll the die themselves, while only 58 percent of those who had written about feeling powerless rolled for themselves. Simply recalling an experience of power can lead us to greatly overestimate our abilities—even to the extent of controlling the random outcome of a roll of the die!17 If this is what thinking about power for a few minutes can do to us, can you imagine the psychological implications of occupying top positions of power for years?