Gary Hamel: I try to boil this down. I know it’s a very deep book with a lot of amazing illustrations and very practical advice. But if you have somebody, let’s say that’s three, four levels down an organization and they’re going, “You know, our compensation system sucks. Or our planning system is so backward looking.” You’re not the EVP. You’re not in charge of that process. What kind of advice do you give to those people about you know, not simply how do you get that job 20 years from now, but how do you use some of these principles to punch over your weight class wherever you are right now in your organization?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: I think there are two things. Number one is when you see opportunities, seize them and it goes back to your earlier phrase about being an entrepreneur, I think you need to be an organizational entrepreneur. And when you see a power vacuum, step in and fill it. I think paying attention to the small details. I mean it’s interesting. One of the stories I tell in this book, there’s a story of Lyndon Johnson who took over what was considered to be a nothing job, the Senate Minority leadership, turned it into an important job and wound up as the youngest Senate Majority Leader in history.

And I tell lots of stories of people inside companies who’ve done the same thing with these small but critical tasks. Everybody is looking for the big thing. And it’s very much I think like the story of an innovation. Everybody wants to know what’s the big game-changing innovation and as you know, and as the research literature shows, most really game-changing innovations are made up of a bunch of small steps where people have figured out how to make the products better and how to put this into that and in the other thing. And at the end it looks like an amazing thing, but it's by doing a bunch of small things I think very, very effectively.

And seizing the initiative. And just you know, I think you used the lovely phrase, punch over your weight. One of the interesting stories of this book is of the famous Keith Ferrazzi, when he began at Deloitte and Touche. Keith now runs his own firm Ferrazzi Greenlight. But when he began at Deloitte, there’s a lovely line in the case I wrote on him where one of the partners said, “One of the interesting things about Keith is he never acted like an associate. He always acted like a partner.” And part of whether or not people are going to give you power or grant you power depends upon how you show up. If you act like some timid little field mouse, nobody is going to give you power. If you act like you have confidence and you act like you know what you’re doing and you act like you’re someone who can take and accept responsibility, you’re much more likely to get that level of responsibility.