Gary Hamel: What are the kind of fundamental tactics, recipes for somebody who is looking to accumulate power? What’s the core of your advice to them?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Well the core of my advice would be several things. Number one, you’ve got to understand the personal qualities that produce power. And you need to get a very objective self-assessment, which is hard to do because we all like to believe that we’re above average on everything that’s positive. So I often tell people they ought to get themselves a personal board of directors. Two or three people who are not competitive with them and are not in the same organization that they’re working in, but who will give them honest and objective advice. And not only give them honest and objective advice and ratings on the various qualities that produce power but also hold them accountable. So we often have personal development plans. We’re going to become better at X or Y or Z, and then we slide off the wagon, if you will. And it’s nice to have a personal board of directors that would hold you accountable. So my first thing is you know, figure out what are your strengths and weaknesses and get some people to help you build your strengths and overcome your weaknesses and hold you accountable for that personal development plan.

I think the second thing is you know, the networks are important and everybody understands the importance of building efficient and effective social networks. They need to understand how to do that and go about doing that. People need to learn how to act and speak with power. I will show in a few weeks in my class a video, which I’ve carefully edited from the hours of testimony that I’ve watched of Tony Hayward of BP and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. And I show it with and without sound and listen to the language. And these are two guys, each whose companies have caused a lot of economic damage – though Lloyd of course never admits it, which is one of his advantages. And Lloyd comes and he’s forceful. And Tony Hayward comes in and he’s remorseful. And the research literature and certainly that little experience shows that you’re better off being forceful than remorseful.

These are all skills that people can learn. People can learn to speak more effectively. People can learn to show up more effectively. People can learn to adopt more powerful postures. People can learn how to become more efficient social networkers. And with respect to this networking issue, it’s really interesting. I recently talked to Chip Conway, of Joie de Vivre Hotels on a case I’m writing, not on Chip but on someone else. And I said, “Chip, why is it that so few people become effective in building these efficient and effective social networks?” And he said, I think something that is extremely insightful. He said, “Look, to most people, networking is a task. And so the person on whom I’m writing the case, networking is a skill." A task is something like taking out the garbage. Nobody works on getting better at taking out the garbage. Nobody thinks about that this is a skill that they want to develop or that they’re proud of.” He said most people think about networking as a task. It’s something you got to do. You go into a meeting and you got to meet a bunch of people, exchange a bunch of business cards, whatever. They don’t think about it as a skill that you can get better, that you can develop, that you can develop some craft in and some artistic confidence. And he said this guy that we were talking about, this guy understands that networking is a skill. So it’s a difference between task and skill. These are things that people can get better at as long as they recognize that this is a skill, something you can develop like riding a bike or speaking French or whatever your particular interest in or passion is. You can get better at these things and you can get better at playing organizational politics as well.

Probably the single most important quality that I would tell people that they need to develop is the ability to respond and overcome setbacks and failures because everybody is going to have them. You know this, as an academic, journal articles get rejected. Editors are not happy with your first draft of the manuscript. It doesn’t mean that you don’t pay attention to or listen to what the people are telling you. But you say, “Okay, I’ve heard this. I’m not going to take this too personally. I’m not going to get depressed. I’m going to figure out how I can take this advice and get back on the horse if you will and continue riding, and continue doing what I need to do in order to be effective and successful, and this ability to overcome setbacks and to just be persistent.

One of the people I talked about in the book is my friend Laura Esserman, who’s changing the world of medicine and just an incredible physician as well as an MBA at the University of California San Francisco. And you know, when I met Richard Blum, the Chairman of the Board of Regents, a very successful money manager and Diane Feinstein’s husband, at a conference, I said you know, “How did Laura get you to this conference?” His answer was, "Pretty much the same way she got you here. I’ve learned over the years that if you say no, it doesn’t do you any good because she’s going to basically pound on you until you say yes, so you might as well just say yes at the beginning." And this whole issue of persistence and resilience I think are really, really critical.

Gary Hamel: I came away thinking a little bit Jeff, as I read the latter parts of the book that in a way, you’re kind of suggesting that the pursuit of power is theater. That it’s the process of constructing this, this set of images and perceptions around yourself that convince the rest of the world you are as powerful as you say you are. I mean, the wizard was completely powerful until Dorothy pulled back the curtain. So you know, is that a correct characterization? Let me put it in a different way: How far can you go in constructing a reality that doesn’t meet the reality? I mean the real sense of who you are and what you’re capable to do. I mean the people ultimately catch up with this and you’re saying, often not, maybe because the powerful protect the powerful. But you find people have lost billions of dollars, who've blown up half of the global economy and still seem to be suffering no consequences. So, should we be celebrating how capable these people are of getting powers? Should we bemoaning the fact that you know, we don’t have people who are powerful enough to unseat them?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: I think the short answer is we should be doing both. We shouldn’t only be celebrating their ability to keep powerful, but we should I think more importantly or practically, we should be understanding the forces and the theories and the behaviors and why they have been able to keep power in spite of the fact that they’ve blown up half of the world economy.

I know you go to Davos occasionally. And when you go to Davos and the World Economic Forum, I’m sure you will see many of these people still being wined and dined and feted and everything else. And we all need to understand why that is. And ought to, because if we’re going to change it, I think we need to understand what keeps the system working as it is in the first place.

But you know, there is this interesting thing that you allude to, which is that perception becomes reality over time. I am a huge believer in both the individual level and at the organizational level and at the societal level in the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy. If everybody believes the stock is going to go up in price, it will go up in price because everybody will want to rush out to buy it. If everybody believes that – to take an example which I use in the book – that Tina Brown is a great editor, and her taking over Newsweek and combining it with The Daily Beast is going to make Newsweek more successful, this will increase her ability to get talented people to write for the magazine. And if you increase your probability of getting talented people to write for the magazine, the odds of the magazine’s success go up.

Take Heidi Roizen, a graduate of Stanford, who is now is a venture capitalist but prior to that was the Head of Software Developer Relations at Apple Computer. Apple in the 90’s wasn’t as hot as it is today. Her job was to convince software developers that they ought to write software for a company that had about 3% market share. Now, by the way, if no software developer will write software for Apple, their market share is going to zero. If everybody will write cools apps for Apple, their market share actually goes up. So it’s not just that a perception creates its own reality; it creates its own reality in a very physical way, in a very material way. If if people believe our products is going to be successful, they will support it and that will increase the product's capacities and its quality. And it will make it more successful.

If people believe you’re going to be successful, if everybody believes that Gary Hamel is the world’s greatest management theorist, more talented people will want to work with you. And if more talented people want to work with you, your odds of doing better work will of course go up. So there’s a real as well as a perceptual way in which the world does create its own self-fulfilling prophecies.