Michael Korda

POWER!
HOW TO GET IT,
HOW TO USE IT

Random House-New York

Copyright © 1975 by Michael Korda and Paul Gitlin, Trustee for the
benefit of Christopher Korda All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United
States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
 The author and the publisher are grateful for permission to quote
from the following books:

The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse. Translated by Richard and Clara
Winston. Copyright © 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Reprinted
by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

Journey to Ixtlan, by Carlos Castaneda. Copyright © 1972 by Carlos

Castaneda. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and by
special authorization of Ned Brown and Carlos Castaneda.

The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission of

Charles Scribner's Sons.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Korda, Michael, 1933-
Power! : How to get it, how to use it.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Success. 2. Power (Social sciences) I. Title.
HF5386.K77 658.4 75-2263 ISBN 0-394-
49314-1

Manufactured in the United States of America

24689753 First Edition
To the memory of Brendan,
The Rt. Hon. The Viscount Bracken, P.C., M.P.
"Sometimes, to those around him, he seemed so idealistic as to be
innocent. He never talked about power and he did not seem to covet it.
Yet the truth was quite different. He loved power and he sought it
intensely, and he could be a ferocious infighter where the question of
power was concerned . . . Part of his strength appeared to be his
capacity to seem indifferent, to seem almost naive about questions of
power."
—David Halberstam, on
Robert McNamara,
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST

"Liking power, he despised those who preferred glory."

—Douglas Hurd
TRUTH GAME

Contents
 PART ONE: POWER PEOPLE

Chapter One: THE POWER GAME 3

Chapter Two: STORIES OF POWER 16

The Look of Power 16
" . . . Go tell him about dogs" 19
"Joe Namath was a leader . . ." 28
" . . . Maybe I'm a weakling" 36
"Power means love . . ." 43

Chapter Three: LIVING WITH POWER 48

PART TWO: THE WORLD OF POWER

Chapter Four: THE POWER SPOT 63

Power Lines 64
Power Areas 70
Power Groups 79
The Power Dynamics of Office Parties 82
Gossip Power 88
TOO vs. TOP 93
The Power Circle 100

Chapter Five: GAMES OF POWER 106

Games of Weakness: "Avoid victories over one's superiors" 108
"Nice guys finish first" 115
Expand, Don't Climb! 120
The Information Game 125
"Nobody is indispensable!" 131
No-Power 134
Games of Manners 137

Chapter Six: POWER EXERCISES 146

"I'm afraid I have bad news for you . . ." 147
The Mythology of Meetings 150
The Rituals of Power 154
" . . . None will sweat but for promotion" 159
"Money and sex are forces too unruly for reason . . ." 165
"Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once" 168
"Men must endure their going hence . . ." 170
Chapter Seven: SYMBOLS OF POWER 175
Foot Power 175
"Phone me in the limo" 179
Status Marks—"A Gold-plated Thermos Is a Man's Best
Friend" 186
Furniture 194
Time Power 203
Standing-by 209

Chapter Eight: WOMEN AND POWER 213

PART THREE: LOVE OF POWER

Chapter Nine: POWER RULES 253

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 262
NOTES 264

PART ONE

POWER
PEOPLE
Chapter One

THE
POWE
 R
GAME
The only way to learn the rules of this Game of games is to take the
usual prescribed courses, which require many years; and none of the
initiates could ever possibly have any interest in making these rules
easier to learn.

—Hermann Hesse
THE GLASS BEAD GAME

The only limits of power are the bounds of belief.

—H. Wilson
ON CRAFTS

The purpose of this book is to show you how to use, recognize and live
with power, and to convince you that the world you live in is a challenge
and a game, and that a sense of power—your power—is at the core of it.
All life is a game of power. The object of the game is simple enough:
to know what you want and get it. The moves of the game, by contrast,
are infinite and complex, although they usually involve the manipulation
of people and situations to your advantage. As for the rules, these are
only discovered by playing the game to the end.
Some people play the power game for money, some for security or
fame, others for sex, most for some combination of these objectives.
The master players (some of whose games we shall study) seek power
itself, knowing that power can be used to obtain money, sex, security or
fame. None of these alone constitutes power; but power can produce
them all.
No matter who you are, the basic truth is that your interests are
nobody else's concern, your gain is inevitably someone else's loss, your
failure someone else's victory. In the words of Heinrich von Treitscheke,
the German philosopher of might, "Your neighbor, even though he may
look upon you as his natural ally against another power which is feared
by you both, is always ready, at the first opportunity, as soon as it can be
done with safety, to better himself at your expense . . . Whoever fails to
increase his power, must decrease it, if others increase theirs."1
It would be difficult to sum up the position of the average person
more succinctly than this. Von Treitscheke's analysis of the human
condition, despite what might at first reading seem to be a familiar
streak of German paranoia and depression, in fact applies to a good
many jobs, marriages and love affairs, and represents, for a lot of
people, a way of life. Since the people who live their lives along these
lines have a marked tendency to find their way into positions of power
that threaten or block the rest of us, learning to play the power game is a
means of self-defense.

Why do people wake up to discover the promotion they expected has

been given to someone else, the raise they counted on has not
materialized, that they have been retired before they wanted to go, are
no longer invited to meetings, or worse yet asked to attend so many that
it's obvious the real action is going on somewhere else? The answer
may, of course, be simple incompetence—it is unfortunate that
stupidity, drunkenness, and laziness often intervene in the game,
obscuring its otherwise perfect logic—but above a certain level of play
it is safe to assume the losers have been defeated by superior players,
have failed to pay sufficient attention to their own moves and those of
others, and are now obliged to pay the price.
For that matter, the same ebb and flow of power can be observed in
every kind of human intercourse; the same rules apply to love affairs as
to office warfare. Who does not know the dangerous moment in any
relationship when one person's need for the other becomes strong
enough to shift the balance of power? The power game is played in bed
as fiercely as elsewhere, if not more so, and marriage is perhaps the best
school for the player who wants to study and master the use of power in
its most subtle form, over a long period of time.

To play the power game, it is first necessary to discover for yourself

what power is. The student of power ought to begin by learning to
recognize its manifestations in every aspect of life— for all life is a
training ground, and every human exchange is an opportunity for testing
the player's ability. The masters play the game twenty-four hours a day,
with parking lot attendants, spouses, lovers, headwaiters, agents of the
IRS, traffic policemen, their fellow workers, their superiors and their
subordinates, instinctively trying to control every situation in which they
find themselves and to place as much of an obligation as possible on the
other person. To the master player, even the most ordinary human
encounter is completely fascinating, offering incalculable opportunities
for practice. Some of the best players I know developed their basic
techniques in such places as fruit markets, where the choice of the
individual pieces of fruit one wants as contrasted to those being palmed
off on one, can be used to study such concepts as resistance under
pressure, feigned hesitation, whining and compromise. Childhood itself
teaches us many useful techniques—playing one parent off against the
other, withholding affection, throwing up when all else fails—but most
people forget these valuable techniques in the process of becoming
adults. School, on the other hand, provides lessons in the power game
which are seldom forgotten by anyone, particularly the ability to look
busy and industrious when one is in fact doing nothing, and the essential
knowledge of how to deal with bullies, or become one.
The trick is to develop a style of power based on one's character and
desires. With that foundation, it is possible to hone the moves of one's
own game to a fine, cutting edge. Those who were bullies at school
often develop a very sophisticated repertoire of bullying techniques in
adult life, though they may eventually find themselves at a disadvantage
if they meet a more powerful bully; those who learned as children to
deal with bullies by means of flattery, cunning and a display of
weakness, usually go on using these defenses against adult bullies with
the same success. The most successful players of the power game can do
both, and don't mind looking foolish or weak when it's useful—a certain
amount of ego destruction is not a bad thing.

The instinct for power is basic to men and women—as Nietzsche

observed, "Wherever I found the living, there I found the will to
power"—2 but it is usually thought of as one of mankind's less attractive
characteristics, along with violence and aggression, with which it is
often confused. Most people do not like to admit that they want power,
which is why they never get it, and those who do have power go to
endless lengths to mask the fact. Some politicians, like the late Lyndon
B. Johnson, openly relish the trappings of power, but the contemporary
American style of power is to pretend that one has none. To confess that
one has power is to make oneself responsible for using it, and safety lies
in an artfully contrived pose of impotence, behind which one can do
exactly as one pleases. In an age of clamorous victims it is easier to join
in the clamor, to follow the inspired lead of the Mafiosi who demanded
our sympathy because they were discriminated against as Italo-
Americans, just another minority group, no connection to the guys who
make their living from loan-sharking, narcotics, illegal gambling and
prostitution. The "man of respect" gave way to the complaining victim
as the power style of organized crime at just about the same time that
the urban middle-class was making the same discovery.
The old ideal of "walking tall," of exuding an aura of power in all its
physical and psychological terms was a potent weapon in the traditional
arsenal of urban man. The city-dweller's motto toward his fellow-man
has always been "Don't tread on me!" until recently. Cringing was
thought to be wrong, the ideal cringe-figure being of course Uncle Tom,
that lovable old darky who represented so perfectly what whites hoped
(but inwardly doubted) the blacks felt toward them. With the onset of
urban disintegration, power moved into the streets in the alarming form
of the blacks themselves, who learned to ritualize their demands for
power in a series of attitudes designed to suggest that they welcomed
confrontation: the swaggering walk, the coldly contemptuous stare, the
eye-dazzling display of high-pimp clothing styles, all conspired to make
the black street-visible, to suggest that ordinary, wage-earning blacks
were connected to the threats of armed violence of the radical left and
the frightening reality of urban crime. In response to this, the white
urban middle-class—those who did not flee to the suburbs—retreated,
learned to walk small, to avoid confrontation. Showing that one had
power was asking for trouble, and admitting, what is more, that one
might possibly be held responsible for second-rate education in the
ghetto, crumbling housing, insufficient medical services, rapacious
landlords, corrupt police . . .
It was easier and more sensible to pretend that we were all victims of
the system, whether we lived in the ghetto or a twelve-room duplex
apartment with a view of the park. The fact that it had been our system,
that we lived well in part because other people lived badly, was
something we found it convenient to ignore, now that it was under
attack—which explains the unusual phenomenon of people within the
system, the beneficiaries and architects of it, so to speak, joining with
those outside to denounce it. Hence it was possible for Leonard
Bernstein to claim that he "understood" the Black Panthers at his much-
publicized party in their honor, for it was evident that there was no
percentage in defending the system that had made it possible for him to
acquire a cooperative apartment in the first place and which was
designed to ensure that his neighborhood was safe, the education in his
district first-class, the garbage on his street picked up every day, if that
system was going to be destroyed. None of the crew had any desire to
go down with the ship, as it were, and even the first-class passengers
were eager to prove that they had been press-ganged on board or had
never sailed on her at all. And why not? Half the people in Washington
who had worked to get us into the Vietnam war later joined the antiwar
campaign as if they had never had anything to do with what happened.
What people had always done instinctively in their private and business
lives was suddenly elevated to a living philosophy.

Now that sex is a subject that can be openly discussed, power seems
to be the one dirty little human secret we have left to hide. The most
familiar comment on power is that of Lord Acton: "Power tends to
corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."3
Yet in our age, the consequences of not playing the power game are
generally considered worse. Acton's view of power has been superseded
by the general belief that power is good, that "all weakness tends to
corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely."4 If we believe in anything
in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it is in the extension of
power, the drive to dominance. Not to reach for power, in the
contemporary view, is to limit one's potential, to set a limit to one's
consciousness. Two world wars, Darwin and Freud, have finally brought
most Western men to the realization that existence is finite, that death is
real. There are no longer any plausible substitutes for success and
fulfillment in this life, nor any comforting belief that failure here below
will be rewarded in some way above. We have no alternative to present
apotheosis; stripped of our uniqueness as human beings by Darwin,
exposed to our own inadequacies by Freud, compelled to live with the
knowledge of our immense potential for violence and irrationality by
history itself, we are left to fabricate our own substitute for immortality.
Power—"the ability to bring about our desires"5—is all we have left.

In former times, power was a game of the elite, a violent activity like
jousting or fox-hunting that occupied the time of those who already had
enough to eat. The majority of people were hard put to survive, and any
doubts that they might have about their position in society were
answered by the religious leaders of whatever faith had been imposed
upon them. Cecil Alexander's familiar and moving Victorian hymn,
which began optimistically enough with "All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small. . ." went on to express the more brutal
realities of the traditional social contract:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or
lowly And order'd their
estate.

Work and prayer were the lot of the unleisured classes, and given the
nature of preindustrial society, work tended to absorb most people's
energies fully.
In our age, work is a less absorbing experience, especially for people
with office or "managerial" jobs. Few modern offices bear even a
superficial resemblance to those Dickensian counting-houses in which
clerks worked long, exhausting hours under fierce direct supervision and
discipline. In fact time lies heavy on most people's hands today, and
there is ample energy left to use in improving one's position. What is
more, we now have a democratic attitude toward work: formerly it was
believed to be a harsh necessity, part of God's judgment on mankind for
that fatal gastronomic error in the Garden of Eden, an inevitable misery
that would be redeemed, if at all, in Heaven; today we believe that work
is an opportunity. Learn a trade, get a job, make something of yourself,
be someone! Work is no longer an end in itself but a means of changing
ourselves, of rising. We no longer view the places where we work as
treadmills but as ladders. And how much more interesting is the climb
than the work itself!
Psychoanalysts, who differ on most things, agree that "the will to
power" is an essential expression of our humanity, though they seem
unable to recommend just how this instinct should best be used.
"Achieve! Arise! Conquer!" exhorted Alfred Adler, "Whatever name we
give it, we shall always find in human beings this great line of activity—
this struggle to rise from an inferior to a superior position, from defeat
to victory, from below to above."6 True enough: rising "from below to
above" is so universal an ambition that it is almost pointless to discuss
the morality, or even the common sense, of such a desire. We believe in
ambition as we once believed in salvation; indeed, some power games
exist largely to supply the illusion of a hard-fought contest in lives and
careers that are in fact unconditional surrenders. As a species, we want
to believe that we're fighting for the leadership of the herd even when
we're merely grazing peacefully on the edges.
Thus it is easy enough to understand why we need power— without it
we are merely cogs in a meaningless machine. The more difficult
question is why we need work. Very few people, after all, can be said to
enjoy working, and as society becomes more complex and
technological, and jobs are broken down into ever smaller specialities
offering a constantly decreasing opportunity to be involved in the whole
process, the number of people who enjoy their work is likely to decline
still further.
In an age when the Puritan work-ethic seems irrelevant, there are
primarily four reasons for working: 1) Habit; 2) Pleasure; 3) Money; 4)
Power.

Habit is a significant factor. Most people are inclined to fall into a

steady routine of work, simply because anything else would require
imagination, invention and a spirit of adventure. Accepting the routine
of work gives meaning and order to lives that would otherwise be
chaotic and unbearable. It's not so much that people like work as that
they fear having nothing to do and no place to go for eight or more
hours a day. How else to explain the depression that comes over men
facing retirement, even in cases when they are leaving with a generous
pension and a fat bundle of stock? Work is a habit-forming drug, and the
habit is hard to break.

With the exception of skilled craftsmen—a vanishing breed— few

people work for pleasure. Most people don't mind working, but feel that
it's both indecent and wasteful to enjoy it openly. Half the reason for
working at all is the hold it gives us over other people. In domestic
situations, work can be used to justify almost anything: impotence,
impatience, refusing to wash the dishes, falling asleep on the sofa after
dinner, a whole variety of excuses, demands and special pleadings. Few
men are inclined to come home from a day's work and say how much
they enjoyed it; there is more to be gained by affecting fatigue, despair
and tension, as if the working day were a terrible sacrifice on behalf of
one's loved ones. Women at home have their own ways of exacting a
tribute from others for work performed: nobody has anything to gain
from admitting that they like their jobs. Then too, there is always the
suspicion that a person who enjoys working may simply not be working
hard enough. It is safer to complain along with one's colleagues, and to
hope that the complaints will suggest that one's salary is being earned,
and should perhaps even be increased.
By contrast, people who are interested in power know how to work,
and usually work hard. They have a purpose beyond merely making
money or filling up time, because they want their work to lead
somewhere, to reward them in terms of autonomy, independence and
self-satisfaction. Only the person who understands power can extract the
maximum benefit from his work, however skillfully it is performed.

As a reason for working, the desire for money obviously remains a

powerful one, but in our society it is increasingly irrelevant—not that
Americans are any less strongly motivated to accumulate wealth than in
the past, but as a dream wealth has faded in the era of the bureaucrat, the
"junior executive," inflation, credit cards and high taxes. Few people can
hope to acquire great wealth—fewer still even suppose it possible—and
almost everyone who works is involved in an organization of one kind
or another, within which the limits of their monetary ambitions must be
contained.
It is the desire for power that keeps most people working. What we
are offered is no longer the opportunity for unlimited wealth, but the
chance to acquire limited power, with the advantage that its satisfactions
cannot be taxed and are not subject to depreciation or the depredations
of international speculators. In modern corporations money is no longer
the goal—or the goad for that matter. The most successful corporate
executive can hardly hope for more than an increasing sufficiency in
terms of income, and the real goal of most employees is to build up
enough benefits to tide them over the usually impecunious period from
retirement to death, assuming always that they survive to undergo this
dreary foretaste of death itself. Like Christianity, the corporation offers
comfort in the problematic future in exchange for sacrifices and good
deeds in the present. A Golden Age on Social Security is the modern
equivalent of Hell.
Still, you cannot motivate people solely by threatening them with
penurious old age—you must offer them some motivation for the
present. The opportunity to acquire and wield power provides just such
a motivation; thus most corporations find it in their interest to encourage
power games. Hence, in every organization there exists a built-in or
"house" power game, the rules and rewards of which are established by
the management. The astute player must play the company game as well
as his own, while being aware that winning someone else's game is not
necessarily winning his own—indeed, victory in a game that has been
established by the management of a company, or has developed as part
of the company's traditions, may ultimately involve losing his own
game. The player should therefore automatically distrust most
promotions, titles, symbols of office and raises when they are offered to
him—which is not to say that he should turn them down or denigrate
them openly. It would be wise to remember the following warning:
"Power cannot, strictly speaking, be given to another, for then the
recipient still owes it to the giver. It must in some sense be assumed,
taken, asserted. For unless it can be held against opposition, it is not
power and will never be experienced as real on the part of the
recipient."7 What is given to us, however attractive it may seem, is
almost always a trap.
Corporations are perfectly happy to give power and prestige to the
people who work for them. Power is cheaper than raises, anyway at the
top, senior executives can hardly hope to keep more than half of what
they're paid. Nor is it in the corporation's interest to give anyone a
guarantee of substantial retirement benefits, even if inflation made that
possible—uncertainty pays dividends in performance. What keeps
people working is the promise of security—if they actually had it, they
might stop. Hence the organization has an interest in encouraging the
natural propensity of men and women toward self-aggrandizement, if
only by means of symbolic rewards. Furniture is cheaper than bonuses;
it is depreciable, and can be used in any case for the next incumbent.
 Since what people want most is power over others—"managing
people," as the euphemistic business phrase goes—the average
corporation functions as a kind of broker, providing those who want
power with a certain number of people over whom they can exert it.
This costs nothing; every organization always has plenty of people so
unimportant or easily replaceable (assuming they were ever necessary in
the first place) that it is simple enough to satisfy the power cravings of
even the most incompetent executives by giving them someone to
tyrannize. For years this has been the real function of secretaries in the
minds of many men.
But the kind of power the corporation can give us has its disad-
vantages—take the person who has the power to decide on salaries. This
is a coveted power position, since it allows the holder the maximum
possibility of increasing his ego at other people's expense, together with
the assurance that he will be courted, flattered and feared. On the other
hand, the ordinary person who holds such a job is often condemned to
be underpaid himself, since his position is usually dependent on the
ability to hold salary increases to a predetermined amount. He cannot
exercise his power and at the same time give himself the substantial
raise he deserves, or at any rate expects.* In his case, as in so many
others, the power over other people is a sham. However much he may be
feared, he has lost the power game in being given power;

*My feelings about power are not in any way sexist. Women should have
their share of it, and experience tells me they will use it in much the same
ways men do. However, I have thought it better not to burden the reader
with such cumbersome devices as "he/she" or the constant use of the word
"person." Most of the actions I describe can be attributed just as easily to a
woman, and where there are differences, or when I'm referring to a woman,
I will make this clear.
his control over others is a substitute for real gains for himself.
The power game player, on the contrary, will never allow himself to
be placed in this position. He does not regard the company's interests as
identical with his own. If asked to enforce economies he will do it, but
never at his own expense. His aim will be to cut salaries by ten percent
and use his success at doing this in order to get a twenty-percent
increase for himself.
Power, as we shall see, pays off.
 It is not enough to want power, or even to have it. It must be used
creatively. And it must be enjoyed.
The use of power as a weapon of aggression makes monsters of us.
The feeling that power is a wearisome burden ("If only you understood
how hard it is to be the one who has to make decisions ...") is self-
destructive. Power must be the servant, not the master.
In The Act of Will, Robert Assigioli describes very precisely the value
of play as a means of dealing with life in a passage that might serve as
an eloquent description of the power game: "One of the best incentives
is the instinct to play . . . Thus the danger is avoided of making life too
rigid and mechanical, rendering instead interesting and colorful what
would otherwise be tiresome duties. All with whom we are associated
can become our cooperators (without knowing it!). For instance, a
domineering superior or an exacting partner becomes, as it were, the
mental parallel bars on which our will . . . can develop its force and
proficiency . . . Talkative friends or time-wasters give us the chance to
control speech; they teach us the art of courteous but firm refusal to
engage in unnecessary conversation. To be able to say 'no' is a difficult
but useful discipline. So the Buddhist saying goes: 'An enemy is as
useful as a Buddha.' "8

Chapter Two

STORES
OF
POWER
He could leave the Archives to the archivists, the beginners' courses to
the present set of teachers, the mail to his secretaries, and would not be
neglecting any serious matters. But he did not dare leave the elite to
themselves for a moment. He had to keep after them, impose himself on
them and make himself indispensable to them. He had to convince them
of the merit of his abilities and the purity of his will; he had to conquer
them, court them, win them, match wits with every candidate among
them who showed a disposition to challenge him—and there was no lack
of such candidates.

—Hermann Hesse
THE GLASS BEAD
GAME

Only power can get people into a position where they may
be noble. —Alfred Kazin

THE LOOK OF POWER

Some people seem to have been born knowing how to use power,
sometimes even formed by nature in its image.
It isn't necessary to be six feet tall and built like a football tackle, but
there are some physical signs that hint at power—a certain immobility,
steady eyes, quiet hands, broad fingers, above all a solid presence which
suggests that one belongs where one is, even if it's somebody else's
office or bed.
It is possible to cultivate some of these signs of power, and even to
adopt certain idiosyncrasies that will make one the center of attention in
any group, but nothing can substitute for that combination of self-
control and personal magnetism that naturally powerful people have.
It helps to have a large face, with at least one overpowering feature—
General de Gaulle's nose or President Johnson's ears are examples—but
failing this gift from the gods or the laws of genetics, the apprentice
power-seeker would do well to take a good look at himself (or herself)
in the mirror, thus putting to good use the time that would otherwise be
wasted in merely shaving or making-up. After all, when people look at
you, your face is the first thing they see, and very possibly the only
thing they'll remember.
You might think there is little you can do about your face, short of
plastic surgery, but this is not altogether true. We live behind our faces,
while they front for us. We may easily ignore how badly they are
serving us. Try looking in the mirror, and saying, in a firm, reasonable
and believable voice, "I think my work entitles me to more money than
I'm making now, and I know I can get more, as a matter of fact, but I'd
prefer to stay here." If your eyes look shifty and blink a lot, and your
lower jaw is pushed forward pugnaciously, your face is giving you
away, and in a real encounter your superior will probably conclude that
you don't have any job offers and probably don't even believe that your
work is worth what you're already making. By practicing in front of a
mirror, it is possible to develop a firm, trustworthy gaze, and a
confident, relaxed mouth.* We may not be able to make ourselves

*Facial "power problems" include licking the lips and biting them, any
twitch of the mouth, particularly at the corners, blinking and excessive eye
movement. EEM is the easiest defect to correct—one merely has to practice
looking at a fixed object without showing boredom. It is possible to prevent
involuntary twitching at the corners of the mouth by applying Xylocaine
anesthetic ointment before an im beautiful, but we can learn to control our
facial reactions, to eliminate the more obvious signs of nervousness.
Despite the recent popularity of beards and mustaches, these are
seldom useful in playing the power game, since they are still often
assumed to hide a weak upper lip or a lack of chin, and are, of course,
unavailable to women players. Men with beards almost always look as if
they had something to hide, and very often do, and the majority of
mustaches look like half-hearted compromises between shaving and
growing a full beard, thus giving an impression of uncertainty.
It is useful to learn to sit still while others are fidgeting—many a
businessman has benefited from his rocklike immobility in times of
crisis, which is bound to give the impression that he alone is in control
of himself—while in fact he may simply have nothing useful to suggest
or have failed to understand just how bad things are. Gradually, people
who sit still and keep quiet acquire a reputation for common sense and
reliability, and even toughness, particularly since they seldom offer an
opinion before hearing what other, more impetuous souls have to say.
This is a talent which can be learned in time—a few weeks of Yoga in-
struction may help, or reciting large parts of The Oxford Book of English
Verse or baseball scores to oneself during business meetings. The main
thing is to be silent, impassive, alert in appearance and yet at the same
time, visible.
Clothes can sometimes help to make one visible, but nothing annoys
other people more than eccentricity in clothing. In corporations where a
"shirt-sleeve" atmosphere reigns, it is possible to acquire high visibility
by always wearing a jacket, which makes

portant meeting, but the effect is temporary, and if too much ointment is
used the lips become numb and speech is slurred. A friend of mine went to
Japan to have his eyes widened, in order to acquire a more frank and open
gaze, but the operation is not cheap once you have added the cost of air fare,
and only worthwhile for an aspiring politician, which he is.
one look more solid, conservative and reliable than anyone else.
Feet have their uses. Most people cross their legs when seated, so a
certain aura of solid power can be projected by planting the feet firmly
on the floor. Feet can be used much more subtly, as we shall later see.
Executives who sweat heavily may find it worthwhile to invest in a
powerful air-conditioner, even at the risk of making other people shiver,
since perspiration is usually considered a sign of tension or lying. None
of these tricks, however, can substitute for the advantages of a good,
strong, well-controlled face.

" . . . GO TELL HIM ABOUT DOGS"

Those who have such a face are thrice-blessed. Take my friend Jack:
imagine a tall, lean man, radiating strength and power, endowed by
nature with a thrusting, powerful nose (even the nostrils are large, which
is a good sign of power in both people and horses), hooded, bright-blue
eyes, fierce eyebrows and prominent cheekbones. Jack knows by
instinct how to assume "the power position." Without even thinking
about it, he faces the entrance in any restaurant or bar, with his back to
the wall, knowing that a man with his back to the door is apt to be
nervous and ill-at-ease, unable to prevent himself from looking over one
shoulder. In conferences, Jack sits with his back to the window so that
others have to look into the glare of the sun to see him.
He speaks in hushed whispers, so you have to lean forward to catch
what he's saying, thus putting you at an uncomfortable angle and
creating an illusion of "bowing." Like all good power players he never
sweats and has absolute control over his bladder; no matter how long the
meeting or luncheon, he will not be the first to leave the table for the
bathroom, since the first person to go is apt to be considered weak by
the rest, even if they all go a few minutes later. (Players doubtful of their
ability on this score might well emulate the British royal family, for
whom it is customary to prepare for public appearances by drinking as
little as possible for several days beforehand, and eating a low-bulk,
high-protein diet—one may be thirsty, but one is not likely to have to
ask to be excused just when a destroyer is to be launched or the Lord
Mayor of Sheffield knighted.)
Jack is a business advisor of world-wide fame, with a genius for the
unconventional deal that throws everyone off-balance. He went from a
Brooklyn high school in the Depression to an enormous office of his
own in the Seagram building on Park Avenue. The conference room
looks like a bank vault, all stainless steel and polished brass, with a glass
table big enough for a meeting of NATO. Yet his personal office looks
like something a street-corner notary public might have in Bensonhurst
—battered old furniture, dusty file folders all over the floor, a
grandfather clock that doesn't work—an office which emphasizes that
its occupant doesn't need all the gleaming show of power outside. In
fact, these two styles of decoration correspond to Jack's two basic styles
of power. When he meets you in the outer office, surrounded by
telephone consoles with gleaming buttons, chrome-plated lighting
fixtures from George Kovacs, rugs that look like modern tapestries and
wall hangings that look like antique rugs, Jack projects tireless strength,
resolution and efficiency. He is crisp, impersonal, forever flashing
quick, concise orders to people over the intercom system. The carefully
contrived lighting gives his face a glow of good health. In the presence
of such indefatigable energy and purpose, it seems pointless to resist.
When he's in his private office, he slips naturally into another style,
his shoulders slump, he complains that he's exhausted, that he's too old
to take the red-eye flight back from L.A. and drive straight from
Kennedy to the office, his hooded eyes no longer project power, but
rather infinite fatigue. Lost amidst huge piles of paper, he draws on your
sympathy, inquires after your ailments and describes his own,
recommends a doctor for your bad back, offers you a tranquilizer while
cautioning you not to take it. When necessary, he can shift quickly from
one style to the other, until his opponent is thrown completely off-guard,
never quite sure whether it's the efficient financial wizard or the doting
uncle he has to deal with. Jack has no trouble in switching from one role
to the other: both are real, and it is instinct, rather than cunning, that
guides him.
Jack understands power, all right, it's his stock in trade. He appears in
people's offices without being announced by the receptionist so that they
look up from their desks to find him standing there. He knows how
much it's worth not to give them time to tell the receptionist to keep him
waiting for a few minutes; he catches them with their jackets off, their
ties loosened, busy making calls to their girl friends on their private
telephones or joking with a secretary, and already he's a step ahead, like
a man who has walked into a woman's bedroom and found her naked.*
No receptionist stops him anyway: he looks as if he owns the whole
company and is about to evict the entire staff, possessions and all,
leaving them standing on the street with their coffee mugs, ecology
posters and the ashtrays their children made in crafts class, wondering
what happened.
From the very beginning of his career, he has known better than to
ask for favors—he grants them willingly enough, but makes sure that
there's no way of returning them. The balance is always on his side. He
acts with impassive, but instinctive, generosity. At the end of one long
and unsuccessful negotiation, an executive, sensing that they had
reached a dead end, paused to admire Jack's watch, a slim, gold Patek
Phillipe with a mesh-

*Or, to be fair, a woman walking into a man's bedroom and finding him
naked! In either case, the naked party is more embarrassed than the clothed
party and has nothing left to hide. The person who has been surprised nearly
always feels guilty about the encounter, and thus loses power to the intruder.
Full exposure is a kind of surrender.
gold bracelet. "That's a terrific watch," he said, "is it expensive?" Jack
shrugged. "Four hundred dollars," he replied. "I'd like one," the
executive said, "is that list or net?" Jack allowed himself a smile, and
taking off the watch, he placed it on the desk and rose. "Net," he said,
"but the watch is yours. If we can't make a deal on the contract, we can
always make a deal on the watch." Before the astonished executive
could reply, Jack was gone, leaving his opponent to struggle with the
dilemma. Did he owe Jack four hundred dollars? Or the list price? Or
four hundred dollars minus reasonable depreciation? Or, God forbid,
nothing? Could he give the watch back? Despite repeated telephone
calls, Jack refused to discuss the watch, or even acknowledge its
existence, and by the time the two men met to renew their negotiations
on more substantive matters, the executive had very little on his mind
but the question of the watch, and easily gave way on most of the points
Jack had wanted him to concede in the first place.
 If he had been smart, he would have sent the watch back by registered
mail, but as Jack later pointed out, "He really wanted the watch. So I
made it the most expensive watch he'd ever buy."
Jack moves automatically to establish his territorial imperative. At the
luncheon table, sitting opposite you, he gradually moves his pack of
cigarettes, his gold Dupont gas lighter, his reading glasses, his butter
plate and water glass, if necessary, closer and closer to the center of the
table, finally crossing the invisible boundary until they encroach on your
table space. By the time the meal is served, he has you surrounded,
while you're leaning forward across his belongings to hear what he's
saying. The table has become a chessboard, and you suddenly find his
pieces on your side of the board, threatening your king. He has
checkmated you before you even knew the game had started.
He always brings his hat and overcoat into your office, so he can drop
them on your couch or chair, thus establishing a territorial right, rather
than hanging them up outside. He often asks to use your telephone, a
reasonable enough request that nobody would refuse. Since you are
likely to leave while he's on the telephone—which is only polite—you
return to find him sitting at your desk, your telephone (an obvious
Freudian symbol of power in form and function) in his grip. This sight is
enough to unbalance a great many otherwise shrewd men.
If Jack has any weakness, it is sentimentality, an affection for certain
people so strong and passionate that it even seems to surprise Jack. He
has learned to manipulate people, but not to be indifferent to them,
which makes his task just that much harder, since he basically wants to
make everybody happy, even when he's won. Even when his opponents
have been defeated, when every clause has been altered to his
satisfaction, he leaves them with the impression that they have made a
successful compromise. He never claims or celebrates a victory. If there
is any way to defeat him, it lies in his sense of justice, as spontaneous as
it is genuine. Many of his clients are "waifs and strays," people Jack has
met who need him, and who somehow touch his inner depths of paternal
kindness, Jack's desire to right the world's wrongs. Perhaps it's simply
that a life spent dealing with the vast intangible problems of oil leases,
conglomerate real estate deals and Latin American resort hotels fails to
satisfy his own needs. However that may be, Jack can often be found
playing the power game for small stakes, or no stakes at all, like a
successful doctor who puts in two afternoons a week at a free clinic, or
secretly treats a patient too poor to pay.
One of these doctors, as it happens, is his brother. He is one of those
saintly, old-fashioned doctors one imagines no longer exist, a stooped,
powerfully built man, with an innocent face and the clear eyes of a
natural diagnostician. His love is medicine, and he may well be one of
the last people in the country to believe in the Hippocratic oath and the
Declaration of Independence without reserve. So you have to imagine, if
you can, one of those Gerald Greene-type doctors of the old school,
living out in Canar-sie, with an old frame house and garden near Avenue
U and 69th Street at the back of beyond in deepest Brooklyn,
somewhere behind the Floyd Bennett Naval Air Station and lost
between the parking lot of the new Macy's and endless stretches of
pastel-colored asphalt-shingled houses, filling stations decorated with
bedraggled plastic flags fluttering from limp wires, sinister-looking
taverns with windows just large enough to comply with New York State
Liquor Law requirements, and public high schools optimistically
designed to resemble Mt. Vernon and now surrounded by cyclone
fences and covered in graffiti—Checkpoint Charlies on the Berlin Wall
of sporadic racial violence, appearing in the Manhattan newspapers only
as backgrounds to photographs of plastic-visored tactical patrolmen and
screaming mobs of housewives and anti-bussers . . . In other words, it's
a neighborhood "in transition," physically a kind of peninsula, sloping
down toward Sheepshead Bay, its grimy beaches littered with worn-out
tires and junkyards and ramshackle horse stables and odd little industrial
pockets that process malodorous plastics or specialize in the repainting
of stolen cars; sociologically, it's changed from Jewish to Italian to
black, not quite fast enough to satisfy the blacks, but fast enough to
drive out the Jews, who have long since fled to Larchmont and Great
Neck, and to anger the Italians, who have moved in after the Jewish
exodus. This process means—you have to picture it, if you're not a New
Yorker— that whole areas look like Dresden in 1945, vast reaches of
rubble punctuated by weather-worn signs promising vast urban recon-
struction projects under the guidance of some long-departed mayor,
synagogues that are now Muslim temples, storefronts that have been
covered in plywood to serve as the local offices, or armed strongpoints,
of the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League, pseudo-Irish bars
whose names are changing from "The Shamrock Grill" to "Mecca," a
furniture store which has taken on a new lease on life as the center for a
brotherhood of "martial monks" in green robes with black cords, who
teach the disciplines of Kung Fu, Karate and Judo and are generally
suspected of supplying young blacks with drugs, automatic weapons, or
both. It is not a happy place to live.
At one time, the neighborhood supported a good many doctors —
GP's who knew their patients, made house calls, and carried barley
sugar for children in their pockets. As the neighborhood changed, they
fled, into retirement or the suburbs, and for most of the residents,
medical care is now something connected to interminable forms and
performed in the huge, scary hospital that looms on the horizon next to
the few high-rise housing developments and the Con Ed gasometers.
Except for Jack's brother, who stayed, learned a little Italian, took to
schmoozing with the parish priest instead of the rabbi, but found
himself, in the end, isolated in the ebb tide of social disintegration. Drug
addicts journey out from Bedford-Stuyvesant to break into his office, he
cannot make house calls at night for fear of being mugged, the picket
fence around his house is torn down while he's sleeping, delinquents
remove the hub caps and the MD plates from his car, graffiti appear on
his door. Where once he received respect, he is now harassed.
All of this has happened without Jack's being aware of it—he loves
his brother, but their paths seldom cross, and each thinks the other an
innocent. Los Angeles is closer to Jack than Brooklyn by now, and not
surprisingly when he told me the story of his brother's distress, it was in
the dim light of the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I had
just rescued him from an argument with a drunken businessman, whose
parting shot to us was "I don't care what you say, I'd rather control
technology than be President any day, and that's what I'm doing. All my
life I've worked for 'fuck-you' money, so I can say 'fuck you' to anyone,
and I'm saying 'fuck you' to you!"
"A yokel," said Jack with contempt as he guided me to a table. "He
has some system for a back-pack dispenser that keeps beer ice cold. You
strap it on vendors and they hawk ice-cold beer around the stands at
sports arenas. That's technology? That's power? Tom Swift and his
back-pack beer-keg? I'll tell you how to use power, if you want to know.
"You know my brother, right? Maybe you don't know that one of my
clients is a Mafia don—except that we refer to him as a man accused of
underworld activities, right? We'll call him Mr. Pietro, okay? He's a very
important man in certain circles, and has a lot of power in Brooklyn,
where he runs a number of business establishments. Personally, I like
him—he's a warm, generous guy who looks after his relatives, which I
admire. I think he's set them up with Carvel stands from one end of
Long Island to the other. He once told me, 'They can't do no harm
selling ice cream, but the only guy I'd trust a hundred percent to run an
ice cream stand would be a diabetic. At least he wouldn't steal the stock.'
Anyway, Pietro is in federal prison right now, and I see him every once
in a while on his personal investment business. His professional
business, I don't want to know about.
"Pietro was the last guy on my mind when I went out see my brother
for his birthday, something I hadn't done in a long time. When I got out
to Brooklyn in the limo—I figure I left there on the subway, when I go
back it's going to be by limo—I could see my brother looked worried
and unhappy. I prodded him a little, and he told me what was happening
around there. Ten years ago he could have gone to the rabbi or the cops,
but now, who knows? Well, I figured I'd do something about it on my
own, without telling him, so after lunch—one of those big lunches like
the whole menu of the Stage Delicatessen, only with lace tablecloths —I
went out for a walk in the old neighborhood, and after a couple of
blocks I see this corner candy store, the kind that sells papers, and
magazines, and about a million other things, and it's the center of the
neighborhood, right? Well, there's this old guy at the counter, a ghinny,
big white mustache, apron, set up so he can see the whole street. So I go
in, and I square off my shoulders, and when I'm standing right in front
of him so he can't see out the door—I make it clear I'm deliberately
blocking his vision— I look him right in the eyes. 'Can I get you
something?' he asks. 'No,' I said, 'I have come to bring you a message
from Mr. Pietro. The message is this: Don't mess with my consigliere's
brother!
I am Don Pietro's consigliere. The doctor is my brother. That's the
message.'
"So this guy looks at me and opens his eyes wide. 'Why tell me?' he
asks. 'What can I do? Kids, who can control them these days? They do
all sorts of things, their parents don't care, the neighborhood isn't safe.
You got blacks moving in, our own kids don 't show no respect, even the
priest don't feel safe. Tell your brother he should buy a dog.' I just
looked at him without blinking. 'Don't give me that,' I said. 'I'm not
authorized to have a discussion, I don 't want to hear about dogs, I'm
empowered—right? empowered—only to give you a message, that's all,
and you heard it. You got the message from Don Pietro. What you do is
your business, friend. You want to talk about dogs, you go tell him
about dogs.'
"Well, since then my brother tells me things have changed. His fence
has been fixed, nobody touches his car, there's even a earful of
neighborhood guys watching his front door at night to make sure he
doesn't get mugged, all of them carrying tire irons and plumber's
wrenches. He's a happy man. He thinks the neighborhood has become a
very nice place. I haven't told him what I did, and I haven't told Pietro I
used his name either, not that he'd mind—he has a sense of humor and
he's against crime in the streets himself. I used power. And nobody even
knows I did.

"I don't want my name on the screen because credit is something that
should be given to others. If you are in a position to give credit to
yourself, then you do not need it." 1 This statement (it is Monroe Stahr,
the Hollywood producer, speaking in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last
Tycoon) represents the most subtle view of power—and the rarest. Few
people who have power, or want it, can forgo self-advertisement (for
this reason, powerful people are seldom good at keeping secrets). People
like Jack who like to use power invisibly are rare. In Malcolm X's
phrase, "Power is best used quietly, without attracting attention"— 2 a
judgment that was dramatically confirmed when he went public with his
power and was cut down by a submachine gun.
The most talented power players prefer to operate behind the scenes,
getting what they want with the minimum of publicity and fuss. They
have learned that it is better to set things up quietly and patiently so that
what they want is offered to them. Confrontation produces friction, and
friction slows progress.
For most people in organizations, however, the main attraction of
power lies precisely in its visibility. The role of eminence grise does not
appeal to them. Nor does modern life favor secret power: we don't mind
being led, but we want to see our leaders in action, to share their
struggles vicariously. We like open diplomacy, "up-front" power
confrontations in our politics and plenty of interesting power games at
work. Every business organization thrives on power games, perhaps
because the satisfactions of most people's work are limited and they will
generally put up with a good deal in return for the pleasure of watching
others struggle for power. It's at once a spectator sport and a participa-
tory one, since everyone, however unimportant, can play a role, take
sides, make judgments, feel involved in something more dramatic and
interesting than their own limited task. Thus a flamboyant seeker after
power is likely to attract far more supporters and sympathizers than a
quiet plotter.
People who enjoy the public appearance of power can rise very fast.
They become stars, celebrities in their own small worlds, they build
their own legends by wielding power openly; they are born leaders.

"JOE NAMATH WAS A LEADER . . ."

David Mahoney, the fifty-two-year-old chairman, president and chief

executive officer of Norton Simon Inc, is "accustomed to the fast
track."3 The track has always carried him toward power and success, and
indeed he moved so fast and looked like such a winner that "the way has
always been cleared for him by older men." 4 The son of a Bronx
construction worker thrown out of work by the Depression, Mahoney
runs a conglomerate whose sales exceeded one and a half billion dollars
in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1973, and whose activities include soft
drinks, packaged foods, cosmetics, liquor, fashions and magazines.
The executive offices of Norton Simon Inc. on Park Avenue seem to
have been designed to reflect the presence of power and money, in a
quiet, self-assured style that is peculiarly late twentieth-century
American. The "reception area" (it is far too big to be called a waiting
room) is dimly lit, decorated in shades of brown, as silent and
overpowering as a Pharaoh's tomb, and probably not much less
expensive to build. The walls are hung with enormous abstract
paintings, the kind of bland but costly art that is at once inoffensive and
soothing, the carpet is a dark brown and beige basket-weave design, the
furniture is stainless steel and leather—not so very different in spirit
from a first-class passenger lounge at any airport—one almost expects
to see a miniskirted waitress appear to take one's order and to hear the
subdued moan of Muzak. What makes the difference is money.
Everything here is solid and expensive, and despite the size of the
rooms, one doubts that these chairs and couches are often occupied—
they are here to fill up space.
The corridors are equally dark and hermetic, though an open door
reveals a glimpse of a surprisingly cheerful ladies' room, brilliantly lit
and decorated in brightly modern flowered chintz and white plastic.
Mahoney's own outer office is a big, quiet room with a spectacular view
of New York, a conference table covered in painted blue linen,
womblike armchairs in tan suede leather, ornate cigarette boxes filled
with Tareytons (Mahoney's brand), a table in fake alligator hide on
which sits a copy of David Mahoney's interim report to the shareholders
for the three months ending September 30, 1973, tastefully bound in
blue-gray parchment paper. The white curtains sway gracefully in the
breeze from the ventilating system, the windows are sealed, and from
the other side of the door that leads to Mahoney's private office come
the sounds of a spirited argument in which the phrase "operating capital"
recurs frequently. It is like being in the control room of a spaceship
starbound for profit.
When the door opens, the captain himself appears, a lean, tall,
handsome man in his early fifties, wearing a checked suit, a blue linen
shirt, black patent leather Gucci loafers and a thin Florentine gold wrist
watch which he never looks at. Mahoney has the rugged, expressive and
self-deprecating good looks of the young John Huston or Jason Robards,
Jr.—one can imagine him easily as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. The
first thing that strikes one about him are his eyes, large, intelligent,
shrewd and of a dazzling blue intensity that is instantly persuasive and
disarming. Mahoney seems to know how to use his eyes—he looks
straight at you, doesn't ever seem to blink, leans forward across the table
to bring them closer to you, twists himself in his chair to keep them at
the level of yours. He has the quality of a hypnotist or an actor—there's
something unlikely about him as a businessman, except that the eyes can
go awfully cold when he's asking you questions. Unlike Jack, Mahoney
is in constant motion, chainsmoking, pouring himself Sanka from a
stainless steel coffeepot, gesturing, tilting his chair back, but his feet
stay firmly planted on the floor, and he has Jack's habit of pushing his
belongings across the table very gradually, a gold lighter, his ashtray
and his silver-plated mug making their way inexorably toward you as he
talks.
 It is difficult to imagine Mahoney radiating anything but vitality. His
physical presence is striking—he is lean, tanned in midwinter, one of
those people who would attract attention anywhere. He has a charm like
that of John F. Kennedy (another Irish-American success story),
although the only photographs in the room are two autographed color
spreads of President and Mrs. Nixon from a McCall's story.
"Power is a lever ..." Mahoney says. We are chatting about his
responsibilities, his meteoric career, and Mahoney is trying to define
just how he got where he is. "Is power persuasion or force?" he asks,
shrugging, "or manipulation?" He pauses to ask if I have read Alan
Watts, gracefully works Newton's Third Law into his conversation,
quoting it exactly, dismisses people who have disagreed with him with a
genial "God bless 'em," picks up a phone and says, "Tell them it's for six
o'clock and we're going to have to move them back," then he goes on to
discuss how he runs his business. For Mahoney sees power as a means
of getting things done, is uncomfortable with the idea of power as an ab-
straction, a quality he has rather than a working tool. He is interested, as
he says, in "how, not why."
"There's no autonomy in the world," he says. "There are damn few
things I could just do. Do I feel that I want to run things, and make the
decisions? Yes. But I've always been a line operator." He pauses.
"Basically, for all the companies I've worked for, I've had to be a
moneymaker. There has to be a leader to make things work, somebody
who has whatever that intangible quality is." Mahoney searches for an
example, obviously reluctant to use himself. "Joe Namath!" he says. "He
had the power; he was a leader." Mahoney smiles broadly, and I
understand why Namath comes to his mind, for Mahoney excelled at
baseball and basketball at Cathedral High School in Manhattan, and
realized that skill and the will to win in athletics was the only way he
would ever get a college education. Playing basketball to win took him
to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and, in a sense,
finally to this office. He is still playing to win, and has a fellow feeling
for athletic stars, whose problems on the field he likes to compare to his
own. So far as his own success is concerned, he is content to say that
"Ever since Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets, the
world has been moved by salesmen. I'm a salesman."
As to running a company, Mahoney sees his role as getting the best out
of people, a form of salesmanship itself. He likes "to ratify good
 decisions, not make them, to orchestrate people," but one can imagine
that he has no trouble in orchestrating them toward the decision he
wants made, and he does not deny a capacity to manipulate people and
enforce discipline. "I much prefer a consensus," he says, "but I don't
trust total agreement. If two people agree all the time, one of them is
unnecessary."
On the question of using his power toughly, Mahoney is ever so
slightly evasive, in part because of the story of a power game he is said
to have played on the executive who had been running Norton Simon
Inc.'s Canada Dry division for two weeks. When the latter pointed out
that the division couldn't possibly meet its figures for the year, Mahoney
told him to "be on budget by the six-month mark." When he asked what
would happen if he couldn't make it, Mahoney is said to have replied,
"Then clean out your desk and go home."5
This story worries Mahoney a lot, and he is at pains to point out that
the Canada Dry executive did in fact "make his figures," and is still with
the company. "These things aren't personal. What I want to know is not
why you are down, it's When are you going to be up? Give me the how,
not the why. I'm prepared to listen to the reasons, and I can understand
good reasons, like a strike in a bottling plant, but I want to know how
you're going to climb out of something like that. If you can't make it
you'd better have a damn good reason and a plan." For the first time, a
hint of Maho-ney's toughness shows through as he dismisses the subject
abruptly: "Anyway, he agreed to those figures, they were his figures!"
Figures play a large part in Mahoney's conversation, and in fact he
explains his own position by saying, "All I am is the sum total of
everybody else's figures." How does he ensure that everybody meets
their figures? Mahoney talks about "the process of getting things done,"
about persuasion, incentives ("You fill people's needs for money,
security, whatever it is, everybody wants something, after all, even if it's
only a good table at the Pump Room"), then reluctantly considers the
possibility that his power relies on an element of fear. "People fear
things, sure, they sometimes fear me. You fear anyone or anything that
can cause you a problem. People's fear of me is really their fear of
themselves. If they're performing, they don't have anything to fear.
There's probably fear in every organization, and it's natural. The first
time you disagree with the boss the fear starts. It can't be helped."
 Mahoney quickly points out that the constructive use of power is not
easy for him. He dislikes firing people—"It's the most difficult decision,
hard enough when it's people you know and like— you know their
wives, homes, children—but it's even harder when it's people you don't
know, when you close down a whole plant because you have to." For a
moment he looks grim, perhaps it's a decision he's in the process of
making, then he smiles suddenly and adds, "You have to take the job
seriously, but not take yourself seriously. Otherwise work is a drudge."
How does Mahoney feel about money? Did he always want power,
wealth, success? "I just always knew I never wanted to be poor," he says
and recalls seeing a limousine waiting outside a theater when he was a
child and thinking it meant "power and security." He rises to his feet
without having looked at his watch, apparently aware that it is nearly six
o'clock. "But limousines and things like that wear off," he adds. "You
get a lot of perquisites, and they're important to your ego. To me, it goes
back to the money end of it. I don't want it to be unrewarded. I've earned
it." He apologizes for leaving, but has an exercise class at Alex and
Walter's Gym at six-thirty, and the limousine is waiting downstairs. At
the door he pauses and turns back. "With power comes responsibility,"
he says intently. "When you have a string on the company—it has a
string on you." And he's gone, moving with
the graceful speed of an old athlete.
* * *
Clearly Mahoney doesn't mind the string. Part of his charm is that he
doesn't take himself altogether seriously: power is a game, he plays it
well, he wins a lot, loses sometimes, but obviously gets a lot of
excitement out of it. He is not, as another major corporate executive has
been accused of being, "a total-control freak whose need for power can
never be satisfied."6
Of course it's easier to play the power game so disarmingly from a
position like Mahoney's, and with his natural grace (the New York Times
recently compared him to Robert Redford, which gives you some idea
of his star quality). As for his subordinates, he controls them by means
of whatever they want—as someone once remarked of Harold S.
Geneen's hold over ITT's executives, "He's got them by their limos." 7
Still, Mahoney is a smoothie, which makes him very rare in his world,
where it is more common to rely on inducing "a tension [that] goes
through the company, inducing ambition, perhaps exhilaration, but al-
ways with some sense of fear."8
Inducing fear is the kind of power that most people understand best,
and in many offices one can see scenes that remind one of carnage in the
jungle—the stifled shrieks of the victim, the triumphant cry of the
successful predator, the hushed and subdued twittering of those who
have been spared and tell themselves after each kill, "Thank God it
wasn't me this time." Lots of people like to be feared, and don't feel they
have power unless they are. Aggression is their strategy; anger is their
favorite weapon.
To a limited extent it is possible to control people through fear, if only
because most people will do anything to avoid a scene. In the words of
Erich Fromm, "the animal reacts to threats to his existence whether with
rage and attack, or with fear and flight [and] flight seems to be the more
frequent reaction."9 Some people become adept at the art of
intimidation, a tactic which is often useful at meetings, where it is
possible to single out a scapegoat and attack him suddenly and
outrageously. If the attack is unexpected, the shock and surprise will
prevent other people from coming to the scapegoat's defense, which is a
valuable way of concealing the attacker's own deficiencies. Most people
are happy to follow a strong lead, even if it's in the wrong direction. As
power moves go, however, this method is primitive and dangerous.
Open confrontations easily get out of control, especially when they take
place in public, and successful power players soon learn to avoid them.
A fierce display of temper is sometimes a useful device, but usually
falls into the realm of defensive games. Most executives, however
senior, are inclined to avoid head-on collisions with colleagues who are
"thin-skinned" or notoriously short-tempered. It's simply too much
aggravation.
All the same, while people who lose their temper easily are frequently
given enormous privileges and freedom simply to keep them quiet, they
seldom rise to any real position of power. The most they can do is to
frighten intruders away from their nests by a ritual display of anger, like
the male fiddler crab, which waves its left claw "as a warning to other
males . . . and to delimit territory". 10 In the average human executive, the
equivalent signs are predominantly facial—the cheeks become flushed
and pouchy, the eyes fixed and sometimes bulbous, the lips stiffened in
the center, but trembling at the extremities. Following the territorial
patterns of human beings, explosions of temper are always most severe
when they take place outside the individual's office, since his rage is
intensified by the insecurity of standing on space that doesn't "belong"
to him. Wise executives therefore prefer to have such confrontations in
the office of the person likely to lose his temper—on his own ground he
is more capable of giving way.
Such manifestations of anger generally derive from insecurity, and as
people rise in the hierarchy, they usually learn to control themselves and
to calm others, aware that power lies in "the production of intended
effects,"11 rather than in violent self-display. While a lot of powerful
people start out as "tough guys" because it's an easy, fast game for a
certain kind of gutsy player, most of them soon learn to rule by reason.
The trick is to make people do what you want them to and like it, to
persuade them that they want what you want.

" . . . MAYBE I'M A WEAKLING"

W. Michael Blumenthal is a case in point. The president and chairman

of the Bendix Corporation, which had revenues of nearly two billion
dollars in the fiscal year ending September 30, 1972 (and earnings of
$56,400,000), Blumenthal acquired an almost legendary reputation for
being "a tough guy," who was, in the words of a former employer,
"arrogant and overly aggressive." A Fortune story on Blumenthal began
with a warning paragraph: "Visitors to the Bendix Corp. headquarters in
South-field, Michigan, should be advised not to stand near any closed
doors. There is too much danger that they will be knocked flat by W.
Michael Blumenthal. . . Blumenthal doesn't just enter a room —he
explodes into it, and a bruising bump awaits anyone who happens to be
in his way."12
This dramatic picture irritates Blumenthal, as one quickly discovers in
talking to him, but it is also possible to guess that there was a time when
it would have pleased him immensely. For Blumenthal is a very special
kind of industrialist, perhaps the first and most successful of a new
breed—men who have succeeded in the academic world and in
government, then gone on to cash in their IQ's in industry for
astronomical salaries and stock options. Blumenthal taught economics at
Princeton University and turned down an offer of tenure to go to work
for Crown Cork International, a producer of bottletops, served for two
years in the State Department, and spent four years as chairman of the
U. S. delegation to the "Kennedy Round" of international trade
negotiations, the youngest person ever to hold the title of Ambassador.
Looking at him, it is difficult to imagine him knocking anyone flat—he
is thin and gray, a youngish man whose hairline has receded and whose
most noticeable facial characteristic is a firm, pugnacious jaw.
Blumenthal has none of the obvious signs of physical vitality that would
make David Mahoney stand out in any group; on the contrary, he looks
stooped and tired, and the combination of his extreme pallor and a gray
suit makes him seem almost invisible. Sitting quietly on a commuter
train, Blumenthal would look like an accountant going home to New
Jersey, a middle-aged man with other people's worries on his mind who
knows he ought to get some exercise and fresh air, and also knows he
won't. But Blumenthal almost never sits quietly; he is a fluent,
impatient, nonstop talker. He manages to hold his irritation under
control most of the time, but it is clearly a Herculean effort, and the least
interruption produces a state of complete tension in him, resolved only
when he can plunge back into the conversation and get it under his
control again. Clearly, he has been forcing himself to listen to people
instead of lecturing them, but he hasn't altogether succeeded in this
transition so far, and has acquired from somewhere the odd habit of
sticking his tongue out as far as it will go, almost stretching it
downward, when hearing someone out. It doesn't seem rude; perhaps
unconsciously it's the only way he can hold himself back from cutting
off the speaker and regaining the conversational initiative.
Rudeness is very much on his mind, as we sit in his suite at New
York's Regency Hotel, surrounded by the modern appurtenances of
power and wealth—for Blumenthal is accompanied by his personal
assistant and by Bendix's vice president of public relations, his
limousine is waiting downstairs to carry him to an appointment, and he
has offered to fly me up to Boston with him later on in the afternoon on
Bendix's JetStar in case we need to continue our conversation. And
indeed, he isn't rude; he's even gracious, but his impatience is a warning
of the violent temper concealed beneath the polite exterior.
"I wasn't rude," he says, "but I may have been a little—abrasive. My
press was: Able guy, getting the job done, but abrasive." For a moment,
Blumenthal is silent, leaving the word "abrasive" hanging in the air, and
I can't help remembering a phrase of David Mahoney's: "I'd accept
abrasiveness as the price of competence any time, if I have to."
Blumenthal looks up at the ceiling for a moment, then goes on:
"Experience has taught me to relax, to let nature take its course. You
learn how to get your way differently . . . To be successful in using
power you have to have a sense of power. I would define that as a gut-
feel of being able to predict with some degree of certainty how people
will react in certain situations, so you can predict when there is going to
be trouble over something. You also need an understanding of what
motivates people in a positive sense, and in a pejorative sense, you need
manipulative skill. Manipulative. I hate that word. It's using people
almost in the negative sense, to your advantage . . . Still, so far as my
previous press is concerned, all those stories about my being abrasive,
pushy, I do have an image of myself now as being sufficiently skilled in
manipulating people so that I don't need to operate that way any more . .
."
There is still something of the professor about Blumenthal, but what
strikes one most is that his habits of speech, his precision, his "can-do"
enthusiasm, his commitment to energy ("Energy," he says, "is the basic
requirement of power") are all reflections of the Kennedy Years,
hangovers from that period when it was thought possible to link the
academic and the political worlds and produce a new style. Today, only
Kissinger remains as the greatest triumph of this unlikely marriage, and
in many ways, Blumenthal, another German-Jewish refugee who made
good in the academic world, then left it to seek greater power, resembles
him. His voice is less accented, but he too uses the language in a precise,
professorial way, is addicted to such neo-Kennedyisms as "gut-feel,"
"getting the other fellow on board" and "excellence" in a way that is
slightly nostalgic, and shares Kissinger's impatient contempt for those
less intelligent than himself and for the professors who went into
government and failed to learn that "there was no way to get your thing
down the road unless you could get the right fellows on board with
you." Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Blumenthal's
PR man uses phrases like "the criteria of relatedness," and says of his
boss, "He's above all things an efficacious man. Efficacity for him is the
equivalent of memento mori for the existentialists." One imagines that
the purchase of sets of the Encyclopaedia Britan-nica and dictionaries
of quotations must have soared in South-field, Mich., when Blumenthal
took over Bendix.
Like most people who have acquired money and power, Blumenthal
denies an interest in money, and despite the suite at the Regency, one
senses that he means it. "I don't have a primary interest in money at all,"
he says. "I was making five thousand dollars a year as a professor, in
1958, and I was thrilled when I got thirteen thousand as the assistant to
the president of Crown Cork, but that wasn't the reason I left Princeton,
and it isn't the reason I left the government for Bendix. I left Princeton
because I'm bored by the requirements of being a first-class scholar—for
that you have to have a lot of Sitzfleisch, the ability to sit on your rear,
researching." What motivates Blumenthal is "the exercise of power," the
desire to go beyond any imposed limitations. When he first came to
Washington, he was impressed by the people around him, but as he
points out, "the higher up you went and the closer you got to these very
powerful people, you found they were no different from anybody else,
and you were just as smart. . . You look at a guy who could be President
of the United States, and you say to yourself—I could do it as well as he
could. Maybe power is the gall to think that about yourself. As the
Germans say about important people, 'They also cook with water'...
What interests me is the opportunity to excel in the use of my talents
without any restrictions on them."
In common with most modern executives, Blumenthal isn't even
slightly interested in ownership. Asked if he would like to own Bendix,
he reacts with great emphasis, speaking abruptly for the first time. "It's
not ownership that counts—it's control. And as chief executive that's
what I've got! We have a shareholders' meeting next week, and I've got
ninety-seven percent of the vote. I only own eight thousand shares.
Control is what's important to me . . . To have the control over this large
animal and to use it in a constructive way, that's what I want, rather
than doing silly things that others want me to do."
As for the means of control, Blumenthal sees it as the ability to select
and motivate people, a process which he admits he has had to learn by
experience since those days when he acquired a reputation as a man who
knocked people over in his haste to get his own way. "When you have a
two-and-a-half-billion-dollar business, it's quite clear you will fail
unless you can be very selective. The ability to decide where to put your
time becomes critical. If you're really good at picking people, you use
your power through them without stifling them. I work very hard at not
recruiting yes-men, and that's hard to do in a big company, because if
you knock them over the head two or three times, they will become yes-
men." Blumenthal scowls momentarily, then says, "I tell them all the
time, 'I don't want you to be yes-men!' " His expression as he says this,
raising his voice for the first time, is a little like that of the Blue Meanie
in Yellow Submarine, who would never take yes for an answer.
It is a familiar problem of power: how to control people without
making them subservient. Blumenthal, a man of quick intelligence, has
managed to learn the importance of listening to other people, however
impatient he may seem, largely because he has moved into a business
where it's necessary to deal in areas of technology and science that his
education hasn't prepared him for. "I'm an operator," he says, "a
synthesizer, not an intellectual. One of the elements of success is the
ability to do a quick study. When I went into government, I got into the
kind of work where I had to learn enough to be able to operate in a wide
variety of fields in which the language was technical and the facts
mysterious. Commodity trade. What the hell did I know about
commodity trade? What does anybody know? You have to come down
to basic issues, policy questions. Take computers. Most business
executives are scared of those devils. Our company spends something
like twenty million dollars a year on them, so they're important. You
learn to ask, 'Can you tell me what that means?' "
Blumenthal rises and goes to the phone, dials quickly and asks, "Did
Lisa make an appointment for me?" There is a pause. He sticks his
tongue out—perhaps it's only a nervous reaction of boredom. He nods
and puts down the receiver, then smiles broadly. "Power! I was just
trying to get an appointment at the barbershop! You learn quickly to
accept the fact that I can say I'd like to have a car waiting downstairs at
one-twenty—I see we're already four minutes late—because I want to be
at a certain place by one-thirty . . . Or I want a plane to fly me to Boston
at six-thirty tonight, things of that kind, you learn to expect. They look
like power to other people, but they're just a convenience." He struggles
into his coat and picks up a heavy brief case, waiting in the hall, ready
for him. At the door, he turns for a moment to say goodbye, and adds:
"When you have a strong ego, and the strength to use your power, you
learn by experience that it is best in life to listen to people who can help
you make a decision, and to defer to people, sometimes against your
better judgment, because you've learned by experience that it's wise to
defer to them for any number of reasons. Then you go home in the
evening with this gnawing feeling in your insides, asking yourself, 'Am
I abdicating my responsibilities, am I reduced to the role of an arbiter?
Why am I not that strong chief executive? Maybe I'm just a weakling.' "
* * *

To men like Mahoney or Blumenthal, power is a technique. They are

high priests of a system, who seek control over things, justifying their
own ambition in terms of efficiency. The more things you can control
(and "things" includes people, of course), the more power you have. But
their power is to a very large extent impersonal. As one person said of
Blumenthal, "An organization of 87,000 people tends to surround its
chief executive with a certain amount of awe," which is certainly true,
but ultimately one can influence the work of 87,000 people only by
indirect means. A chief executive often plays small power games with
his immediate staff just like a minor executive in a small company, for
the very good reason that it is only over his immediate entourage that he
can exert power directly and visibly; in power terms, the human touch
counts for a great deal, and power over people one knows is always
more satisfactory than power over large numbers of strangers.
At the same time, size diffuses power. Blumenthal, God knows, is no
"weakling," despite his own fears, but the sheer size of his company
forces him into the role of a conciliator, however aggressive he is by
instinct.
Even a man like Henry Ford II, though he conveys "an umis-takable
aura of power that inspires respect, awe and sometimes downright
fear",13 is obliged to operate within the confines of what amounts to a
large, private bureaucracy. Though it is true enough that "Ford is the
boss, he always was the boss . . . and he always will be the boss," 14 his
role is still that of a high-level manager, not an autocrat. When asked
why he had allowed the company to embark on an advertising campaign
that he disliked, he replied, "They wanted it, so there it is."15
Those who desire personal power are very different. Instead of
controlling a portion of the existing world, they set out to create their
own. A well-known motion-picture director once told me, in all
seriousness, that when he made a movie he was God. "I have the world
in my hands," he said, "I can make it come out any way I want, decide
who lives and who dies, who gets punished, who gets to live happily
forever after. In between pictures is my seventh day. I rest." This is, of
course, a somewhat romantic and self-indulgent view of power. After
all, even the most despotic movie director usually starts with somebody
else's story, and has to deal with actors, art directors, writers, technical
problems, the studio money-men and many other obstacles to
independent creativity. Still, it's a common enough point of view—those
who aren't satisfied with power over things want to create complete
worlds that are reflections of their own power. Nothing will satisfy them
but omnipotence.
The omnipotent look powerful in their own worlds, but their position
has its weaknesses. People like Mahoney or Blumenthal could seek
power elsewhere, and probably will someday, people like Jack get their
power by playing a game against the rest of the world; people who
create worlds in their own image in order to feel powerful end up
needing their employees more than their employees need them. In the
quest for absolute power, they become servants and victims.

"POWER MEANS LOVE . . ."

On the outside it's a perfectly ordinary town house in the mid-Sixties of

Manhattan, just off Fifth Avenue, a quiet side street from which it is
possible to hear the noises made by the animals in the Central Park Zoo.
There is nothing flashy about the exterior, no indication that this is the
residence and private office of Robert Guccione, owner and creator of
Penthouse, who has built a girlie magazine into a vast international
empire by keeping one step ahead of Playboy in nudity. Inside,
however, it is a vision of opulence, somewhere between Mae West's
bedroom and a night club in style. What is not covered in antiqued,
smoked mirrors is covered in gilt, marble or velvet. William Randolph
Hearst would have felt at home among the gilded cherubim, the heavy
drapes and the ormolu furniture, if only the ceilings were higher.
Guccione's secretary, a statuesque young woman with long blond
hair, dressed in a very short white minidress, leads one up the stairs to
his office, a room of indescribable chaos, which must once have been a
library and is now filled with books, records, telephones, photographs,
layouts, posters and clothes. Guccione himself seems at ease here,
within reach of the telephones that allow him to exercise a personal
control over his transatlantic empire. He is a tall, heavyset man, possibly
in his early fifties, though it is hard to tell, dressed in a skintight sueded
buckskin shirt-suit, open to the navel to reveal a hairy chest crisscrossed
by heavy gold chains and ornaments, among them a gold Penthouse
Club key. He has a strong face, rather like that of a Roman emperor of
the Late Empire, dominating but self-indulgent and easily bored. There's
an uneasy feeling of discrepancy between the Guccione who talks about
Penthouse as a cultural influence on the future of American life ("The
things we are embarking on are going to be very important in the life of
this country") and the tough, ambitious boy from New York who made
his way from a job in a London dry-cleaning firm to take on Hugh
Hefner, via cartooning and art direction. Guccione is certainly
persuasive enough, but one feels that he's trying too hard for sincerity
when he talks about social goals and freedom of speech and changing
life-styles, that he's rehearsing himself in the role of a "communicator"
and entrepreneur for some imaginary stockholders' meeting in the not-
too-distant future. He is more relaxed, and on the whole more
convincing, when he talks about the way he runs Penthouse, and the
reasons for his success ("Even as a kid, I was a leader").
To Guccione, his business is, in his words, "a family." "To some
people," he says, "power means respect, power means love. They must
be needed." There is little doubt that Guccione is one of these people—
his is a personal view of power, very unlike the cool drive for excellence
and control that characterizes Michael Blumenthal or the orderly sense
of priorities that enables David Mahoney to function. All are powerful
men, but Guccione sees himself as Penthouse, it's not that his ego is
involved in it—it is his ego.
"In my little world," he says, giving a deprecating nod to the row of
telephones, "I have absolute power . . . As power corrupts, it also
mellows. I'm very patriarchal to begin with. I take an extraordinary
interest in people's problems . . . But there's only one boss—that's me!
It's a benevolent dictatorship."
This is a point of view that is comparatively rare among powerful
people, most of whom prefer to seem more than they are until they've
succeeded, then go to a great deal of trouble to seem less than they are,
often denying that they have any power at all. For Guccione, each day is
an opportunity to prove his power, and he clearly relishes every
moment. Obviously he is in the process of transforming himself from a
tough entrepreneur into a culture-figure of sexual liberation and a
business success story. It seems to be very much on his mind, obliging
him to take on a tone of sweet reason which doesn't appear to suit him
and with which he isn't altogether comfortable. Just as he's telling me
that he doesn't want to dominate anybody ("I always give the other guy
the benefit of the doubt"), his secretary brings him a cup of coffee, and
he spills a drop on his new buckskin trousers. "I told you I want a
saucer!" he shouts, suddenly coming alive, and it is apparent that indeed
there is only one boss here. He smiles again, as if to reassure me that
this flash of temper isn't really him, then quietly begins to talk about his
power, but now that his temper has appeared, he can't quite conceal it.
"Power is something you have—just another tool at your disposal. Big
companies had me under their fucking knuckles! Power gives you a new
weapon!"
As Guccione talks about "big companies," his face changes—it swells
with passion, the smile lines vanish and he seems to me, to be honest, a
little frightening.
Slightly startled myself, I get up and walk around, while Guccione
dabs at his trousers and reaches for a telephone, for here, perhaps not
entirely to my surprise, is an authentic tyrant, a man who values power
as a personal prerogative, who doesn't have doubts about it . . . But
Guccione, who has just completed the telephone call, has turned
suddenly gloomy. "When a man really makes a success of his life," he
says, "ninety-nine percent of his friends vanish. I have never changed,
but I feel rejected by the people I used to know and love." This is a
common complaint of people who have acquired power, and perhaps a
justifiable one —it changes relationships. Somehow the path of power is
seldom the path of love. Guccione still wistfully wants both, hopes to
bridge the gap. "Penthouse,"he says, "is like a family. You think of
everyone as a brother, son, cousin, sister. You treat them with respect. . .
You're giving love and attention to people who sometimes think it's just
another job." He stares into space, a man with money and power, who
wants the impossible from the people who work for him. "I've even had
plans," he adds thoughtfully, "for buying an estate and moving my key
people into it. It's feudal. But it would be nice. It could happen . . ."
There's no doubt about it, whatever the inner satisfactions are, it's hard
to play God. It's easier to rule by committee, to influence things rather
than running them to the last detail, but the temptations at the top of the
power tree are heady—the higher up you go, the easier it is to assume
that you know what is best for people, to feel responsible for them.
Power over people! What an intoxicant: it's better than drugs, better than
alcohol, not only better than sex but part of it. Still, we have to ask
ourselves if that's the kind of power we want. We can learn a great deal
by studying the very powerful, whatever their power style, but for most
of us the purpose of power is not to make ourselves responsible for
others, but to protect ourselves. The wise man soon learns that
omnipotence is servitude. Too much power over other people can be
almost as bad as falling into the clutches of people who think they have
the right to run your life.

Chapter Three

LIVIN
G
WITH
POWE
R
He suffered the fate of all who exercise a natural and initially
unconscious power over other men; this power is not exercised without
a certain cost to its possessor.

—Hermann Hesse
THE GLASS BEAD
GAME
It is strange desire to seek power and lose liberty.

—Francis Bacon ESSAYS, II,

Of Great Place

Without power, we might as well be trees, rocks, oysters, whatever you

like, estimable objects in the sight of God, useful even, obeying the
complex laws of Nature, but without the capacity to alter the world, to
control our own lives. The abyss opens before us, the bottomless gulf of
living a life controlled by others, the humiliation of submission.
I remember a day, long ago, from another world, when the movie
business was still a game of autocrats, before television humbled the
great tyrants of the West Coast, leaving them rich but impotent, when I
went to the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel for my swimming lesson.
One of the great studio heads was floating on a rubber raft, smoking a
cigar. For weeks he had been "making himself unavailable" to an elderly
screenwriter, refusing to answer telephone calls, breaking appointments,
keeping the old man in tortured suspense, until finally he had let it be
known that he would consent to hear him out at 3 P.M. at the pool. When
the writer arrived, he could see the producer floating like an obese and
hairy water lily in the middle of the pool, available to anyone who could
swim out to him. What the producer knew was that the writer couldn't
swim. Like a condemned man, the writer retired to don a borrowed pair
of swimming trunks, and while the producer's aides smirked and giggled
at the cabana, he ungracefully waded across the shallow end of the pool,
with the timid courage of the damned, until the water reached his chin.
But the producer, using his hands as flippers, moved his raft out into
deeper waters, foot by foot, until the writer found himself floundering in
the pale, chlorinated water—a nightmare scene of sadism taking place
under the creaking palm trees of Southern California, to the noise of
small children happily paddling and beautiful young women slapping
suntan lotion on their expensive bodies, bodies like those which had no
doubt once been available to the writer when he had been "hot" and
owned his own house on South Rodeo Drive, with a tiled pool and a
guava tree. Bravely he splashed his way toward the ever receding raft,
attempting to explain why his contract should be renewed as he gulped
in distasteful mouthfuls of water. Sometimes he vanished beneath the
surface altogether, only to reappear, still talking. At last, when he began
to look dangerously exhausted, the pool guard dived in after him. As he
was hauled back to the poolside, one of the great man's aides leaned
over, lighting a cigarette with a gold Dunhill lighter, and said firmly,
slowly, loudly, as one might talk to the senile or the hard of hearing,
"Okay, he saw you and he heard you. Now you can get dressed and go."
Hobbes notwithstanding, nothing is quite as "brutish" as life
among civilized man; the sudden violence and uncertainty of primitive
life can hardly compare to the degradations of our society. A moment's
weakness, and we are at the mercy of monsters, real ones too, not the
supernatural figures of the savage's imagination. Power is a means of
protecting ourselves against the cruelty, indifference and ruthlessness of
other men.
This does not mean that we have to become monsters ourselves.
Whether or not power is, as Henry Kissinger says, "the ultimate
aphrodisiac"1 (and one hopes it's not), in itself it is neither good nor evil.
We can learn to use it in order to be more free, to make life happier and
more productive for ourselves and others, or we can use it as "a vehicle
of an ego which takes no consideration of guilt and innocence, but
merely of what it can get." 2 The object of power is to survive in a
difficult world.

Nor is it wise to think of power as a compensatory mechanism. Those

who seek power to make up for some real or imagined physical defect
are in for an embittered and angry life. Napoleon was not necessarily
driven to succeed because he was short, as many seem to believe; he
succeeded because he was Napoleon. Height is an obsession with people
who hunger after power in the wrong ways. Perhaps men still believe
that height has something to do with the size of the penis, despite the
assurances of the Masters and Johnson report on this score. Perhaps it's
just that for a certain kind of man the thought that anyone can literally
look down on him is unsufferable. On the rare occasions when Harry
Cohn dined out, he was said to place a telephone book surreptitiously on
his chair. "Elevator shoes," which promise an additional two inches in
height, appeal to the same insecurity.
There is no doubt that short men are inclined to seek out some means
of making up for their lack of height—Winston Churchill's long cigars
and funny hats perhaps served this purpose; L. B. Mayer used to receive
visitors from behind his enormous, wall-like, curved desk, and
whenever he was photographed signing a contract with a star like Clark
Gable, who would have towered over him, the star was seated next to
Mayer on a lower chair, so that their heads were level.
In some circumstances, nations can fall over the question of a man's
height. Paul Reynaud, the Premier of France in 1940, was under the
domination of his mistress, Helene de Portes, an unattractive woman of
a certain age, who loathed the British and was in every way defeatist.
Her influence on Reynaud was considerable, even absolute, and was
said to be based largely on the fact that he was small and she alone
could make him feel tall and powerful. As one observer said, "Had
Reynaud been three inches taller, the history of the world might have
been changed."3
Height means something to people, and it's wise not to forget it. The
chairman of one great conglomerate is said to have a pedestal behind his
desk so that he appears to be about a foot taller than he really is when he
stands up to greet somebody, and it is rumored that a stockholders'
meeting had to be delayed because an underling had forgotten to place
the pedestal behind the podium. It is certainly true that he likes to have
short men around him; one's chances of success at this particular
corporation are vastly increased if one is under five foot eight inches in
height. Indeed, being tall is dangerous there. The chairman loves to
humiliate people who are taller than he is, and sometimes promotes
them just so that he can make them suffer. "Big is dumb, short is smart,"
he once told an executive who had displeased him. Another executive,
when asked why he continued to work at a company which paid him
less than he could have gotten elsewhere, replied, "Well, it's the only
place I know where everyone in the top management above me is
shorter than I am. I feel comfortable around here. Where else can a guy
five foot nine feel tall?"
* * *
 If shortness supposedly spurs us on to power, health is usually taken
as a sure sign of having it. Years ago, I remember seeing Robert F.
Kennedy walk into a roomful of people in Dark Harbor, Maine, all of
them rich and healthy, and noticing that he positively radiated good
health and energy, not unlike David Mahoney, but on a higher plane of
intensity. "God!" breathed the woman beside me, "look what power
does to you. I wish I had it!"
It is a curious sign of our admiration for power that we associate
power and health; in former times, power was popularly supposed to
lead to worry, illness, premature aging and baldness, rather like
masturbation. Today, we expect the powerful to glow with health, and
they mostly do. The successful exercise of power, like a satisfactory sex
life, tends to make people feel good about themselves, whatever the real
state of their health, and constant excitement tones up the system
wonderfully.

Of course power takes its toll too. Erik Erikson has pointed out that
Martin Luther, a man with an enormous need and drive for power,
suffered all his life from constipation, a misfortune which obsessed the
great reformer to the point that his spiritual breakthrough took place
while he was sitting on the toilet. Erik-son points out that Luther was
"compulsively retentive,"4 that he stored up his energies and his
knowledge as if aware that they would someday be released in a single,
explosive moment, a purgative flash that would at once cleanse Luther
himself and the Church. Odd as it may seem, constipation is often the
price of power, even among less titanic figures than Luther, perhaps be-
cause powerful people are not only anxious to control everything, but
determined not to let go of anything. Be this as it may, the use of
laxatives seems to increase as power increases, and a good many of the
powerful people I know not only suffer from constipation, but discuss it
quite openly, as if it were proof of their success, a form of self-imposed
suffering. I have seen a motion picture halted every morning at nine-
thirty so that the director
—a man of great fame in the movie business—could go off and fight the
daily battle with his recalcitrant bowels. As he left, the cast and the crew
wished him success, and on his return he would describe exactly what
had happened, or not happened, in graphic detail. Gradually I came to
realize that knowledge of the daily state of his bowels was a kind of
status symbol. Think of it: actually being able to force people to discuss
his shit as if it were a subject of fascination. What greater proof of
power than to force a hundred people, maybe more, to pretend that they
cared about what he did on the toilet. Not for nothing did Joseph Man-
kiewicz once remark in another context that "the whole world is wired
to Harry Cohn's ass."
As if that weren't enough, a group of researchers has found that power
(and "achievement orientation") correlates very highly with serum uric
acid, the substance in the blood that is responsible for gout, and which is
considered "a possible risk factor in coronary heart disease."5 Serum uric
acid is high among powerful, successful men, and at its lowest among
the unemployed, a depressing piece of information for the ambitious to
consider. Blood pressure and serum cholesterol both increase among
those who have "responsibility for others" in a working situation, which
makes it hardly surprising that nearly thirty percent of the businessmen
who responded to one nationwide survey felt that their jobs "had
adversely affected their health."6
The kind of jobs that lead to power naturally involve stress and
responsibility, but I strongly suspect that the businessmen who felt their
health was affected were simply responding to the "suffering quotient."
This is an extension of the Puritan pleasure/pain principle, in which
pleasure must be expiated by an equivalent or greater amount of pain,
and implies that all power, insofar as it is enjoyed, must be justified by
suffering. The basic proposition is simple—I am not supposed to like
power, though it's what I most want, therefore I must pretend that it has
been thrust upon me by others against my will; and I must convince
everyone around me that it is a painful burden, that I'm suffering on
their behalf. Often, no sooner is a person promoted than he begins
complaining about the demands made on him and the sacrifices he has
had to make. On one level, this is an attempt to placate one's rivals, to
suggest that they wouldn't have liked the job if they had got it, but on a
deeper level, it comes from the feeling that while it may be all right to
have power, it is wrong to enjoy it.
Not surprisingly, many powerful people are hypochondriacs. On the
one hand, they want to command and control; on the other, they want to
be comforted and appreciated. One way of bridging these conflicting
demands is to suffer openly, publicly, constantly—to show by coughing,
sneezing, groaning, limping and wheezing that they are stretched
beyond endurance by the demands of power. A recent survey of
vacation habits concluded that powerful executives "have been turning
away from extended, uninterrupted rest periods. Many of them are not
even taking their full allotment of vacation . . . Mentally, they are never
away from the office . . . Like any natural warrior, the executive is more
comfortable at the front, however exhausted or exposed to danger he
may be, than he would be if safe behind the lines. He would rather fight
than rest."7
Note the romanticism of this comment: "the natural warrior" —the
notion that work is like fighting in the front lines, the
ciicrgpsHnn that the executive is actually exposing himself to dan-
ger by staying at his desk . . . In fact, many senior executives W H O stay
at their desks do so because they are bored by their families, or because
they are afraid to let anyone discover the office can be run without them.
For some, it is worth staying in the office all summer simply in order to
be able to say, "I never take vacations." It is part of the suffering
quotient.
The complaints of powerful people about stress, tension and overwork
are mostly bogus, and when they're real, they're self-imposed. It's a form
of guilt, the fear that Thackeray may have been right when he wrote that
"Every man who manages another is a hypocrite,"8 that it's wrong to
love power.
Yet love it we do. In the words of novelist Patrick Anderson, "It's like
a woman you want to stay in bed with forever. But that's not all, not for
the best people. There's all you can do with power, if you're smart and
tough and lucky. You get kicked in the teeth every day, but sometimes
there'll be those moments when you've done everything right, when
everything breaks your way, and then you're soaring, you've won your
game, whether or not anyone else knows it or understands it or even
gives a damn."9
Perhaps herein lies a key to the difficulty we have in coping with
power—it is perhaps the most personal desire we have, since even the
intimacy of sex is usually shared with someone else. Power, by contrast,
is a private passion, the winning and the losing are internal, only we can
know whether or not we've won our game.

"Power!" says The Rev. John J. McLaughlin, the controversial Jesuit

who was a deputy special Presidential assistant, and seemed to function
as chief exorcist to the defunct Nixon White House. "What do we know
about it? We don't know anything about it. We have sex education—
why don't we have power education? You can train yourself to handle
power."10 True enough, though one wonders, judging from Father
McLaughlin's support for such temporal matters as the Christmas
bombing of Hanoi, the mining of Haiphong and the President's stand on
Watergate, whether he himself is able to perceive the difference between
what he describes as "two views of power . . . an opportunity for an
ego-trip, and an opportunity for service." We don 't in fact know much
about power, and given the way history is taught in this country, when
it's taught at all, it's surprising we know anything. In every century, men
have used power well, or destructively and self-servingly, and a careful
study of history could show us what kinds of power corrupt and why. If
we don't know it's because we don't want to know.
No sooner had the scandal of Watergate been revealed than sermons
began to appear on the evils of power, as if the White House under
Richard M. Nixon had been the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Yet what
was Watergate but an example of the price of impotence? The rationale
for the burglary—and all that followed from it—was insecurity and
envy, the baffled fear on the part of the President and his assistants that
even in the White House they were somehow powerless, the inner sense
of worth-lessness that made them fear they had no right to be there, and
might at any moment be found out, revealed as weak and ordinary men.
George Allen of the Washington Redskins, Mr. Nixon's favorite
football coach, was perhaps unconsciously speaking for the President
when he remarked, "The winner is the only individual who is truly alive.
I've said this to our ball club. Every time you win, you're reborn; when
you lose, you die a little." 11 But power is not based on winning all the
time. A man who has to win every battle is asking the impossible of
himself and the world, and is likely to collapse the first time he
encounters defeat. A powerful man, by definition, is able to survive
failure and humiliation, to draw some deeper wisdom from them, to
practice what John F. Kennedy called "grace under pressure."
The essence of power is the ability to cope with the demands of life,
not to react like a paranoid at every real or imagined threat, or waste
one's life and energy trying to submit everything to one's own control.
The world is a disorderly and dangerous place, and always has been, and
the man of power must learn to live in it comfortably. It is one thing to
have a sense of order, but quite another to impose that sense of order on
the rest of the world—no amount of power is sufficient for that, and one
can only fail in the attempt. We can only control others to a limited
degree, and the world is full of men who seem powerful in their little
world, but are in fact chained to their desks like galley-slaves to the oar.
On and on they labor, far into the night, because they fear one moment
of inattention or hesitation will under-
LIVING WITH POWER ■ 57

mine their power. One could see these traits in former President Nixon
—the joylessness, "the endless struggle for control," 12 the compulsive
need to be "on top," the tortured attempts to disguise even small defeats
and failures as victories of some kind, the endless pleas for sympathy
and understanding, the feeling that life is nothing but a tough challenge,
in which hard work and the will to win count for everything. It is not
power—perhaps not even the abuse of power—that is at the root of the
"White House horrors," as John Mitchell called them. "The thing that is
completely misunderstood about Watergate," said former White House
special counsel Charles Colson, "is that everybody thinks the people
surrounding the President were drunk with power . . . But it wasn't
arrogance at all. It was insecurity. That insecurity began to breed a form
of paranoia. We overreacted to the attacks against us and to a lot of
things."13 There is no doubt that "a high level of self-pity influenced the
style of the Nixon White House,"14 and self-pity is not an emotion one
connects with a sense of power. What is more, it led inevitably to
blunders, inefficiency and bad management. A truly powerful group of
men might well have succeeded in burglarizing the office of Daniel
Ellsberg's psychiatrist or tapping Larry O'Brien's telephone— neither
feat would seem insuperably difficult. But these were frightened
amateurs who felt themselves ill-equipped to play in the big leagues,
and constantly needed to reassure themselves that their fears about "the
enemy" were justified.
Nor was the Nixon Administration unique in this respect. Many of
the people we think are powerful turn out on closer examination to be
merely frightened and anxious. It is a mistake to assume that the
position and the person are the same thing. A man may have a
resounding title, a great position of authority, money, influence, but if
we notice that his hands are constantly fidgeting on his desk, that he
can't look us in the eye, that he crosses and uncrosses his legs as if
suffering from a bad itch in the crotch and that when the telephone
rings, he can't make up his mind whether to pick it up or ignore it, we
can then, I think, safely conclude that he is not a man of power.
However humble our own position, we have a chance of getting
whatever it is we want. How often we fail to recognize this, how long it
takes us to learn the difference between real and simulated power, what
opportunities we waste, not to speak of time!
Often we look for power where there is only fear, greed and self-
interest. We have to learn to recognize the signs of power and to fight
subtly, ruthlessly, constantly for our own. As nations carry on
diplomacy and war to maintain their own independence, so we too must
play the games of power in order to be ourselves, to avoid "being lived
by [events], rather than living them." 15 What is at stake is our ability to
be the person we want to be, rather than being the person others want us
to be. What we all want is what Rollo May describes as "sense of
significance . . . a person's conviction that he counts for something, that
he has an effect on others, and that he can get recognition from his
fellows."16
Thus, trivial as power games may sometimes seem, they are a means
of defining who we are, of preserving both our freedom of action and
our ability to effect change. We learn, early on in the schoolyard, that
things often go badly for bystanders, that engaging ourselves in events
may lead to their turning out in our favor, rather than against us. When
you pick up the telephone, write a letter, join in a conversation, you are
—like it or not—initiating a game, at the end of which you will either
feel pleased with yourself or have the nagging sense that you have
somehow been diminished, reduced in significance. Nothing is static;
every action makes us more or less than we were before. Even the most
mundane office is a place in which to test our power. Every moment in
the day offers us the opportunity to try our skills, to enjoy our triumphs,
to learn something from defeats—for we cannot always be victorious.
Most of us think power lies elsewhere, in the next office, on the floor
above, in the White House, beyond our reach. But it is all around us; we
have only to seize it. It does not lie beyond the everyday activities of our
lives, but in them.
Power is a myth, but we do not have to journey to the deserts or
undergo any long initiation to learn its meaning and master its
mysteries. When Carlos Castaneda, the anthropologist and student of
power, complained to his mentor Don Juan that he was not really
qualified to follow his guide on the path to power and knowledge in the
frightening loneliness of the deserts and the mountains, that if he could
perhaps "disentangle" himself from his commitments as a twentieth-
century urban man and go and live in the wilderness, he might fare
better, the old man pointed to the busy streets of a modern town, and
said: "This is your world . . . You are a man of that world. And out
there, in that world, is your hunting ground. There is no way to escape
the doing of our world, so what a warrior does is to turn his world into
his hunting ground. As a hunter, a warrior knows that the world is made
to be used. So he uses every bit of it. A warrior is like a pirate that has
no qualms in taking and using anything he wants, except that the warrior
doesn't mind or doesn't feel insulted when he is used and taken
himself."17

PART TWO

THE
WORLD OF
POWER
Chapter Four

THE
POWE
 R
SPOT
. . . the Game was virtually equivalent to worship, although it
deliberately eschewed developing any theology of its own.

Hermann Hesse
—THE GLASS BEAD GAME

You are hunting power and this is your place, the place where you will
store your resources.

Carlos Castaneda
—JOURNEY TO IXTLAN

To the person who works merely because work is an unfortunate

necessity, the place in which it is done is convenient or inconvenient,
pleasant or unpleasant, but not of any basic significance in itself. To the
person who plays the power game, on the other hand, it is the board on
which the game is played, a fascinating world of infinite possibilities.
An office, for example, can be seen as a chessboard or a battlefield,
depending on the nature of one's game and psyche. It is also a world
which we inhabit for at least eight hours a day, and which provides all
the risks, opportunities, dangers, triumphs, defeats and demands of the
larger world outside. It has its own landscape and natural features,
which must be approached as the hunter approaches his environment,
its own trails and paths and watering places, where the inhabitants can
move and congregate in comparative freedom from the attention of
predators, places where the natural cover is good and other places where
danger can be scented, where the power of the predator is in the air.
In every corner of even the most banal office there are ritual objects
with which people mark their own place of safety or power—the poster
taped to the wall, the photographs of children or lovers or vacation
spots, framed diplomas, stuffed animals, carefully calligraphed phrases
or poems—the list is endless, but the instinct to mark one's place is the
same. Everyone feels the need to make their spot theirs by right, even if
it's only a desk in the typist's pool, and all attempts to impose a clean
and uncluttered scheme of impersonal design ultimately fail for this
reason. Even in modern banks, where the desks are exposed to the full
view of the public by plate-glass windows and where the rules are fairly
rigid about the display of personal objects, one can see the evidence of
this need. At night one can walk down Park Avenue and see the long
rows of gleaming desks, identical, clean of scattered papers, but on
every one there is an object that is meaningful to somebody, a
homemade ceramic ashtray, a miniature plastic football helmet, a pink
plastic rose, a Charlie Brown desk calendar . . . In offices which are
hidden from the public's sight, personality markers flourish, usually
growing more expensive and permanent in nature as the salary and size
of the person's office increases, but leveling off at the $40,000-a-year
mark, at which point a professional decorator is usually responsible for
the office's appearance.

POWER LINES

It is important to develop an eye for the "geography" of power in the

office. Generally speaking, offices are based upon a corner power
system, rather than a central one, because the corner offices tend to be
larger and more desirable. The closer one is to the center, the less
powerful one is, just as the offices in the middle of a row are less
powerful than the ones at either end of it. Power therefore tends to
communicate itself from corner to corner in an X-shaped pattern,
leaving certain areas as dead-space in power terms, even though they
may contain large and comfortable offices with outside windows.
 A glance at the diagram will reveal that an "outside" office, however
desirable it may be because of its window, is in fact a less powerful
place to be than an inside office within the area of power, and it may
well be better to stay inside the power area, forgoing a window, until
such time as one can acquire a corner office. People who move to
"outside" offices in the middle of the row, in the power deadspace, tend
to stay there forever, decorating their offices with bizarre collections of
junk and meaningless magnetic wall charts, and earning less than
$30,000 a year until they're retired.
The conference room, if there is one, should be at the center of the
office, where the power lines bisect. Any attempt to place it elsewhere
usually ends in its being abandoned and turned into something else, or
used only for meaningless and time-wasting staff conferences. Any
attempt to exert power from a middle office is likely to fail, unless the
people in the corners are singularly inept, senile or in the habit of
drinking three double martinis at lunch. Even then, their power position
may protect them. I know of one man who managed, by a series of
adroit moves, to obtain a corner office by the age of fifty. Once in it, he
put up photographs of his children, took up golf with an obsessive en-
ergy, and spent his day on the telephone or at his club arranging for golf
partners and auditioning for outside directorships. Eventually, his
younger colleagues managed to strip him of his functions, and his
authority within the corporation declined. He was no longer invited to
meetings, cash-flow reports no longer appeared on his desk, he was
taken off the office distribution list for information reports, an enraged
executive even had his name removed from the interoffice telephone
directory. Nobody, however, was willing to commit the ultimate in-
dignity of depriving him of his office. As a result, instead of being fired
or forcibly retired, he stayed on to the age of sixty-five. So long as he
stayed in that corner office, he was at one of the four poles of power,
however he spent his day, and was therefore protected.
In another, similar, case, the man in the corner office posed more
severe problems. He took to heavy drinking, even going so far as to train
his secretary to mix Manhattans. The problem was that he remained
active and ambitious, interfering in the management of the corporation,
refusing to accept any diminution of his authority and generally holding
back progress. It seemed impossible to dislodge him, and the other
members of the management group more or less resigned themselves to
living with him until mandatory retirement or death solved the problem.
A solution, however, was eventually found: expedient reasons were
invented for moving to a new building, and the obstructive executive
was given a large and luxurious suite of offices in the middle of an
outside row in the corporation's new headquarters. Here, out of the
power area, he was no longer in a position to interfere, and quickly
slipped into obscure semiretirement. As one of the participants recalls,
"It was a stroke of genius, I mean, we couldn't move him out, and he
wouldn't go, and as long as he was there in that office, we couldn't do
anything with the company. So we moved the company. Still, when you
come to think of it, it's weird. Because we couldn't move one man, we
moved three hundred fifty people to two floors in a new building, at a
cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars and God knows what
inconvenience—and it was worth it!"
 Anyone who has ever tried to reallocate office space can testify to the
existence of certain fixed patterns which are almost impossible to
disrupt—offices which people don't want to abandon even for the lure of
larger, lighter ones, secretaries who have acquired territorial rights so
strong that they cannot be moved, pieces of furniture that have acquired
totemic significance. Certain power spots are obvious—for example,
executives always prefer to have their offices protected from easy
access, while most secretaries, because acting as a lookout against
unwanted intrusions is part of their function, prefer to have an open
view. Thus, an executive office that is out of the traffic mainstream is
desirable, while a secretary is likely to prize a position that gives her a
view in as many directions as possible. It is interesting that most
executives, valuing privacy for themselves, assume that their secretaries
would be grateful to have their desk space walled off with a partition,
not realizing that a secretary may prefer to forgo privacy for the
advantages of good sight-lines. (Even among the highest and most
securely protected of the executive elite, it is usual for the desk to be
positioned so that its occupant can look up and see the door, not so
much out of politeness as because nobody likes to be caught unawares.)
If your function is precisely to protect another person, you need to see
approaching danger in time to take precautionary measures and give a
warning. Thus the more a secretary is exposed to other people's view,
the more powerful her own position is likely to be. While the office of
the President of the United States is closed off by a solid door, and
guarded by armed secret-service men, his secretary's desk is in a kind of
open corridor, with a view down a passageway and out toward the
White House Rose Garden. Doubtless the secretary to the President
could have a more private office if she wanted one, but her power is
dependent on her ability to see who is approaching. The fact is that
access to the President's office is guarded by the secret-service men, but
the fiction is preserved that the President's secretary checks the
approaching visitor, greets him or her and goes through the motions of
arranging access to the President. The secretary's desk retains its
significance as a power spot even though the appointments are actually
made by the President's assistant, and the armed guards at the door
check any visitor against their list and authorize entry into the office. To
give the secretary a "better" office in the President's terms, that is to say
one which is more secluded and private, would be to deprive her of
power.
If the view is important, so is proximity. In most cases, power
diminishes with distance. Put someone's assistant next to his superior's
office, and he benefits from being close to the source of power. Promote
the assistant to a larger office that is further away, and his power is
likely to decrease. Only if he is given a title and a job that allows him to
create his own power base can he benefit from moving. I have known at
least one assistant to an aging senior executive resist every temptation
to move to a better office, well-meant as these suggestions were. Seated
in a kind of cubbyhole beside the great man's office, a dark, hot closet
full of filing cabinets and coatracks, he fought to protect his position
until he had a title of his own. No secretary would have worked in that
airless little cubicle, but Sidney stayed on it, and for many good reasons.
It had a door that led into the executive's office, thus giving Sidney a
right of access without going past the executive's secretary, and another
door opening out onto the corridor, so that he could see everybody
coming and going. Well-wishers told him that he was crazy: it was too
noisy, he had no privacy, it was too close to the men's room, how could
he work there?
"So long as I sat there," he recalled, as we talked in his luxurious new
office, "I had it made. I got to know everyone who came in, if they had
to wait, they came in and leaned on my desk, or used my phone to
confirm lunch dates, and everybody assumed that I must know
everything that was going on. When I first moved into that god-awful
hole, the only thing I insisted on was a telephone with several lines and
an intercom line to my boss. I don't think I ever used it, but when he
made a call, one of the buttons would light up on my phone, and anyone
in my office would have a sense of my being connected to him. It's the
proximity to power that counts, not space, a carpet, or a window.
Anyway, sitting where I was, I didn't have to do anything, whereas if I'd
moved to a real office, people would have passed by and asked
themselves who the hell I was and what I was supposed to be doing. I'd
have had to justify my existence, which is hard to do when you're just
beginning. Being next to a man with power justified it for me. What's
more I got good marks in everybody's eyes for not being pushy or
ambitious. I turned down the offer of a more comfortable office, and
people thought that was a nice gesture of loyalty, or humility, or just
generally being a harmless person. If I'd moved to a big new office,
people would have hated my guts in a week."

POWER AREAS

One should study the arrangement of an office and try to see it as a

coherent landscape. In many offices, the center of power is on a lower
floor than the rest of the organization. I know of one large investment
banker which has two floors at the top of a Wall Street skyscraper; the
reception room and the working staff are on the higher of the two floors,
while a narrow staircase takes the visitor downstairs to the offices of the
senior executives. This arrangement is by no means uncommon, and
may be the result of an atavistic memory of World War II—if the
building is going to be bombed, the more floors between you and the
bombs, the better, and the more dispensable members of the
organization therefore go on the upper stories of the building, the
ultimate center of power being, of course, the cellar. In ordinary terms
of power, however, a business in which the senior executives have
retreated to a floor below the working staff is usually one in which they
have also abdicated any direct responsibility for day-to-day operations,
allowing a separate and more active hierarchy to flourish above them
unsupervised. When the senior executives are on the floor above, they
usually exercise a tighter control over the organization. This may simply
be because it's easier to walk downstairs than to climb upstairs—beyond
a certain age, the difficulty of climbing a flight of stairs discourages
interference, but the fact remains that anyone seeking power would do
well to choose a company in which the President and his closest associ-
ates are on the floor below, rather than on the floor above.
Obviously to be avoided are offices built on the open plan, with few,
if any, walls and partitions. It may well be that "an open office
encourages openness in people,"1 but openness is not necessarily
desirable, and the justifications for removing executives from their
offices and placing them out in the open together are seldom
convincing. After all, they're not supposed to be communicating with
each other on a free and open basis, even if that were possible, which is
unlikely; they're supposed to be developing ideas, competing, running
things and making decisions. The rationale for an open office is
democracy and sociability, but the fact is that chief executives who
insist on them basically don't trust their senior employees and want to
keep their eyes on each and every one of them. This paranoid view is
frequently masked by talk about "productive intercommunication" or the
"business sociability factor," but the fact remains that the executives are
out in the open at their desks like typists in the Army, and their boss is
in a position to see all of them, like a master sergeant. One of the first
steps toward giving people autonomy was to give them privacy, and
deprived of it they are reduced to the role of clerks in a Victorian
counting house. Even in the most open offices, a closed space usually
exists for such delicate operations as firing somebody. The real problem
is that people in open spaces are not working for themselves, or on their
specific task, but for an audience of fellow workers and superiors. It isn't
so much "sociability" that's encouraged, as the art of looking busy, and
when the chief executive of a corporation wants to get out of his office
and sit among his vice presidents, it is more likely to be because he
doesn't trust them than because he wants to engage in open dialogue
with them.
It is precisely where power is valued and symbolized that power can
best be sought. Places in which the management has tried to eliminate
the signs and symbols of power, to encourage "openness," are places in
which the leadership is determined to retain all the power in its own
hands and to prevent the growth of any alternative centers of power
below them.
Extreme architectural innovations should be seen as warning signs by
the wary player of the power game, whatever their form. For someone
who wants to rise swiftly, it is not encouraging to learn that the four
partners of one investment managing concern share a big circular desk
in a corner office (which they refer to rather threateningly as "the war
room"); executives who spend their working hours as close together as
this are unlikely to take much notice of the people who work for them—
the whole game is being run, as it were, for their own amusement.
Extremes of office decoration are usually a reliable sign that it is
difficult for the newcomer to obtain power. One company I know of has
its senior executives segregated on the top floor of the building, in a
kind of garden-penthouse overlooking New York's harbor, reached by a
small private elevator which is simply, but expensively, decorated with
a Renoir landscape. The floors below look like any other office, the
usual mixture of shabby and modern; the penthouse is full of English
wood paneling, French eighteenth-century furniture, enormous hunt
tables, breakfront libraries, chinoiserie commodes, paintings and
furniture gathered from every antique shop in Paris and London. Adams
fireplaces have been hacked out of ancestral walls to be recessed into
offices without chimneys, Regency wine coolers which once held
bottles of champagne now serve as telephone tables, at one corner of the
office stands a carved and gilded horse from an old fairground carrousel,
the rest of which, together with its steam-driven machinery, is packed
away in crates somewhere below.
An office like this as good as warns you that you aren't going to get
any power until you have the key to that private elevator, and the people
up there in the penthouse are not likely to want to see you have one.
Indeed, a setup with sharp divisions like this is partly intended to keep
the lower echelons in their places. Like a medieval castle, it serves to
remind the peasantry of their humble station and to discourage the
ambitious and the troublesome. Some offices carry the stronghold
theory to extremes—one has executive quarters built like bank vaults in
stainless steel (including the floors!), giving the impression that the
management feels it necessary to defend itself from an armed uprising.
With its steel walls, doors, floors and Venetian blinds, the power center
of the office looks like the guardroom of a modern prison—one almost
expects to see an emergency button that will seal the doors and pour
Mace into the outer offices at the first sign of unrest. Another company
has executive offices in dark slate, with narrow slits for windows and
rough-hewn granite blocks as partitions. Once again, it seems to have
been built with an eye to potential hand-to-hand combat, an effect
strengthened by the remark of one vice president, who proudly
described his office as "the fighting bridge."2 When executives talk
about their offices in terms of combat, it is seldom the outside world
they have in mind. It is mutiny they are thinking of, not the competition.
A careful look at an office can reveal whether power is centralized or
distributed in some pattern. If it shows signs of being firmly centralized,
it may be as well to go somewhere else; if it doesn't, then it's necessary
to study the pattern. For instance, one should try to discover the extent
to which the occupant of a corner office has been able to extend his or
her territorial rights, and in which direction. Most executives try to build
up a buffer zone of subordinates, intruding into the middle outer offices
on both sides as far as they can, and also reaching out toward the center
of the office. Architectural features sometimes get in the way, but the
impulse to reach out is very strong, and department heads are often
anxious to secure some small beachhead a long way from their own
domain in the hope of gradually taking over the space between their
own power center and this isolated outpost. No matter how complicated
the construction problems involved are, they will then attempt to create
a single corridor of access running the length of their territory, and to
seal off its end in a kind of Berlin Wall, obliging the visitor to go back
out into the hall to get to the next office in line. Failing this, they will
attempt to take over portions of the hall itself, using bulletin boards,
posters and wall decorations to lay claim to the portion of the common
hallway that runs through or past their territory, so that a stranger
walking down the hall immediately realizes that he has crossed an
invisible frontier into another department.
Part of the territorial power game consists of making surreptitious
inroads on your neighbor's space or seizing neutral ground with a token
force. Large filing complexes are particularly valuable in this game,
since they require space and are not as a rule needed at the very center
of the power area. An excellent example of this can be found in the
offices of a large recording company, where the contract files were
placed under the nominal supervision of a new and junior vice president,
though in fact they were tended by the legal department, which,
inconveniently enough, was on a different floor. The vice president took
the files under his wing because he could see that they were a valuable
property. It wasn't necessary at first to do anything with them— they
were just there, lending prestige to his corner of the office, their contents
obviously central to the company's business, if only in a symbolic
sense, since most of the information they contained had long since
been transferred to IBM tape and stored in some computer center. Still,
in the unlikely event that anybody should want to consult these bulky
files, he had control over access to them, and even set up a complicated
security check over them. The more carefully the files were looked after,
the more important they could be made to seem, and thus the more
important he would be. It was a very nice little move in his own
personal "Monopoly" game, more than justifying the amount of space
the filing cabinets took up in his area and not imposing any real burden
on him.
From a business point of view, however, they represented an asset
without any potential for growth, and growth is a central factor in
power. Their new owner therefore undertook "a sweeping
reorganization of the contract files," which involved the purchase of a
large number of expensive horizontal filing units, hiring a filing clerk to
put every contract into a neat new color-coded folder and a central file-
keeping index system. The result was a swift growth in the size of the
files, if only because the new cabinets were far more bulky than their
shabby predecessors. Since they had now outgrown the corner in which
they had been placed, it was necessary to find a new home for them, and
the vice president shrewdly lobbied for an office some distance away
from his own area, rather than simply trying to add one more office
adjacent to his territory. The alternative being to stack the cabinets in the
hall (or admit that they were useless), they were moved to the new
office, and he was able then, over the period of a year, to gradually seize
the offices in between, thus gaining about two hundred feet of space and
turning the files into a potent power symbol. So far, nobody has pointed
out that their contents are recorded on the company computer, or that
both the legal and the accounting departments maintain up-to-date
Xerox copies of each contract. The point is that these are the originals,
and therefore have totemic significance. There they sit, occupying space
formerly belonging to the merchandising department, guarded by a
young woman who has nothing else to do but prevent open access to
them and log them in and out in the unlikely event that anybody should
want to consult them. It won't be long before the man with the filing
cabinets takes over merchandising. Why not? He's got them outflanked.
"Hell, filing cabinets are chickenshit," said Mark Haendel, a man I
know who works for a major television network. "When I first came
here, we had a guy who was making merchandising tie-ups with the
network's shows, you know, toys, games, cocktail napkins, stuff like
that. He was doing it out of one small office, and he saw what everyone
else was doing, and decided to grow. I was working for him then, and
what he did was to fill up his office with so much junk that he needed a
display area. At that time, we were in an old building on Lexington
Avenue, and space was tight, but the network had leased part of an old
hotel off Third Avenue, and since everybody was embarrassed at
making money off floating rubber ducks and Indian chief make-up kits
for kids, they moved us over there. It was a weird place. There was a
health club on the roof, two floors full of hookers and most of the rest
were network offices in hotel rooms. Some guys who were divorced or
separated actually moved in there, I mean why not—with the hookers
and the health club and the coffee shop downstairs, it was a perfect life.
Everybody had to go over to the corporate headquarters once a week to
sign for their pay check, and the secretaries had to go over to get pencils
and typewriter ribbons, but apart from that, we were pretty much on our
own. My boss knew just what he was doing. He took over room after
room, suite after suite, until he had a whole floor. We had mer-
chandising racks, display rooms, strange guys developing new toys and
games, we built up files, an international licensing department, we got
ourselves our own screening room. I thought he was crazy—he was
expanding so fast that we didn't even know what we were doing half the
time, but he told me not to worry. 'Listen, Mark,' he said to me, 'right
now this corporation is building a big new building over on Sixth
Avenue. When we left the old one, we had a couple of rooms, right?
When we move back in, they're going to have to give us half a floor.
Just remember that every senior executive with kids gets one of
everything we do, compliments of this department.' Of course, he was
right. When the new building was ready, we had a whole department to
move in, with display rooms, conference rooms, big offices, everything
you could want. It was beautiful. The only trouble was that they'd
installed a central computer system, and when they got it working, they
discovered we'd been losing money for two years. Even then, we were
okay. Nobody was going to wind up a department that had half a floor
of office space, and people had gotten used to receiving the toys and
things, I mean, they weren't about to start going out and paying money
for birthday presents and Christmas gifts after two years of getting them
by the gross on the cuff. All they did was give my boss a title and put a
financial guy in under him, with authority to straighten things out. After
all, you don't fire a guy for expanding too fast—that's optimism. Today,
he's got the audio-visual cassette department as well, and he's making a
hundred thousand dollars a year, and the only thing he really knows is
how to grab for space, and to have everything under his control painted
the same color, so people can see just how big his area is. It's always
primrose yellow— even the men's rooms. I think he has his own
painters in the closet, ready to go out at a moment's notice and paint up
another office yellow so people will know it belongs to him. By now, I
think he could just have the painters in at night to paint an office yellow,
and people would assume it was his and whoever was in it was working
for him. If he ever gets to be the chief executive officer, I guess he'll
have the building painted yellow."

The use of color is not all that unusual in marking off the space under
one's control. Color is one of the most effective ways to establish the
visual image of an area. There are now even "executive color
consultants," who analyze the worried businessman's character and
appearance to find the colors most conducive to his personal power.
Once the "basic power color" has been found, they advise their clients
on matters ranging from office decoration to shirts, ties, socks, cars and
the formica in their kitchens at home. One man threw away his clothes
and spent $1,800 to refurbish his wardrobe in his power color, while an-
other not only had his office repainted, but insisted on having his new
car resprayed.3 The president of one corporation not only had his own
"color palette" drawn up, but sent his major executives out to have their
individual colors selected, then had their offices redecorated
accordingly. "I feel ten years younger," he was reported as saying, "and
their performance is up ten, fifteen percent." Not every corporation is
likely to seek the help of the consultant whose claim to fame is that he
selected the clothes for one of the "ten best-dressed men in Sacramento"
(Liberace presented the award), but many discover the value of marking
their territory by means of color, whether they pick it themselves or pay
$175 to be told what it should be.
One executive of my acquaintance has what might be called a "thing"
for blue. She began by having a blue carpet installed in her office, then
had the furniture re-covered in blue corduroy, then had the walls and
even the Venetian blinds painted blue. Soon her secretary's chair was
replaced with a blue one, and a blue IBM Selectric II typewriter with a
blue ribbon appeared on her desk. Gradually, blue began to spread
outward from her office, as her power increased, a tide of blue that
touched filing cabinets, desks, floors, coffee mugs and water coolers.
Since the other executives had no comparable obsession with color, the
growth of this one highly visible color theme was all the more striking,
and soon came to acquire almost a threatening force as a symbol. The
people who worked for her tended to wear blue, simply because it
matched their surroundings, but what had begun as a joke or a habit
before long became a badge of loyalty, and the heads of other
departments trembled when their secretaries turned up for work in blue
dresses, as if they had unmasked themselves as the Fifth Column of an
enemy army. Until one of them discovers a rival color power, the office
will just go on getting bluer every day.*

*Most people seem to regard blue as the most powerful color, provided
it's reasonably dark. Yellow is sometimes thought to be frivolous and
Color is not the only way to establish control over space, though it is
perhaps the simplest and the most obvious. More subtle forms of
decoration can be used. In one Wall Street financial office, two rival
executives have been competing for years with ship prints and Audubon
prints. You can tell just whose area of power you're in by looking at the
walls, and when one is ahead of the other, corridors take on a nautical or
nature-loving aspect, depending on whose fortunes are on the rise. In
other, more conservative offices, where decoration is in the hands of
higher authority, the limits of a power area are established by such
things as identical pen and pencil desk sets, cork wall boards or
magnetic wall charts. The main thing is to find something nobody else
has, appropriate it as a symbol and use it to establish territorial rights. If
there is no other way, certain ways of placing furniture can sometimes
be used to establish such rights. In many offices all the desks in one
department or power area can be seen to face the same way, usually
toward the head of the department, as Mohammedans face Mecca when
praying.

POWER GROUPS

Generally speaking, people tend to stay away from power areas, as if

dangerous radiation emanated from them, but power-seekers should
learn to identify them and learn to live there. Areas in which a great
many people congregate are seldom power areas, since people generally
collect together for safety. In a lot of offices, you can see where these
safety zones have been estab-

weak, beige and tan are too neutral to convey a sense of power, red is
frightening to many people and dark browns depressing. White gives people
a sense of space and freedom, so one can conclude that the most powerful
combination of colors for an office would probably be white and dark blue,
with perhaps a small hint of red to inspire fear.
lished by the wear and tear on the linoleum and the rub-marks against
the walls. By mutual consent, certain places are set aside where people
can talk, drink coffee and relax, without interference from management.
A similar grouping inside a power area would almost certainly attract
unfavorable attention.
Thus, secretaries will leave the power area to drink a cup of coffee
and chat, whereas people outside the power area can and do stay where
they are. Some meeting areas are departmental, purely local areas of
safety closed to people from other departments, others are integrated, in
the sense that people from every department can meet within their limits
at ease. The most important safety areas are those near a power area,
since they tend to attract senior power game players as well, who
emerge from time to time to join the rank and file, largely to seek
assurance that they still have power.
A careful analysis of any office will show that there are certain places
in which even the most powerful people are able to mingle with their
inferiors on a relatively equal basis. Sometimes it's the reception area,
where, for a moment, everyone is equal as they struggle into their coats.
A secretary may hesitate to speak to the chairman of the board in the
hall, even though they're both walking down it at the same pace, and
may even drop behind deliberately so as to allow the chairman to go
first and avoid initiating a conversation. Then, as they enter the
reception area, she may well speak to him. In power terms, it's a neutral
area, not quite in the office, but still a part of it, so an exchange between
them becomes not only possible, but mandatory. After they have
negotiated the door and entered the elevator, conversation once more
becomes impossible. They have now left the office, and have no
connection with each other—in all likelihood, a cheery exchange in
front of the receptionist's desk will be followed by their standing in
separate corners of the elevator, eyes fixed on the flashing numbers
above the door so as to avoid further visual contact.
 If the reception room is an area in which free communication between
people at different power levels is—briefly—possible, other areas in the
office exist for the purpose of power displays. Certain corners, meeting
rooms and hallways are likely to be used as arenas for the more
powerful executives, who will either stand there looking busy in order to
make their presence visible, or create informal hallway meetings in the
open to make a display of power. Such meetings are best avoided, since
decisions and comments made as a public display of authority are
almost always ill-advised. Groups in power areas are always searching
for a victim to prove they belong there. It's difficult to display power in
public without humiliating someone. If you want to catch the ear of
someone powerful, it's usually better to do it as he passes the
receptionist than when he's standing near his office holding court.
Still, an astute observer of power will notice that no powerful person
likes to be sealed up in his office forever, however luxurious it is. The
rituals of power must be completed in public, and the powerful are
obliged to reaffirm their membership in the power structure at regular
intervals and following an established pattern. Where people take their
coffee breaks together power players will usually emerge from their
own offices and join the group, but will seldom become part of it,
preferring to stand slightly to one side, and as far away from other
power players as possible. If these encounters take place in a hallway, as
is frequently the case, the power player will usually try to get his back
against the wall and position himself near a doorway that leads to some
open area. He is thus protected from the approach of people who might
come up behind him, and able to move rapidly away from the group.
The important thing is to place himself so that he can never be surprised
or trapped, preserving a quick escape route. Few power players are at
ease in other people's offices (unless they're playing the kind of aggres-
sive territorial game that involves taking over an opponent's power
space by coming in and putting their feet on the desk), and for this
reason they prefer to draw people out into the corridors and hallways
(neutral ground) as much as possible.
Certain corners of hallways and corridors thus acquire the social
functions of a Middle Eastern bazaar or the main street of a frontier
town, until meeting there eventually becomes like membership in an
informal club, and a newcomer may find himself excluded or ignored
until one of the power players has recognized his existence and his right
to participate.
Within their own sphere, people with power are subject to extreme
pressures of rivalry and competition, in conflict with others who are
either determined to strip them of power or refuse to admit that they
have any in the first place. Thus those who have power are in a sense
dependent upon those who don't —as a sort of testing ground. This
phenomenon explains why office parties are necessary, and why they
are invariably held outside the power area itself, however inconvenient
this may be in terms of space or access.

THE POWER DYNAMICS OF OFFICE PARTIES

An office party is primarily an opportunity for those with power to meet

their constituency, either by standing in a corner to see how many
people move their way, or by mixing in to test their power over certain
individuals. If you watch any office party, you will see that those who
have power usually arrive late and seize a corner for themselves if they
can. Those who are unsure of themselves tend to stand near the door or
by the bar, whether it's a formal one or one improvised from a desk,
since this way they are in the flow of traffic and are almost bound to be
greeted and engaged in conversation. Astute players avoid these
positions, however, since the object is to make the flow of traffic eddy
toward you, gradually building up a circle of supporters and adherents
so that there will tend to be a fixed knot of people at each corner of the
room, and a restless mass in the center, trying to decide to which corner
they should move. In large organizations, where parties require several
rooms, either in the office or in a hotel, the same phenomenon will
repeat itself in each room —the powerful people will move to the
corners, as far as they can from their competitors, and will stay there,
gathering supporters around them. Those who fail push their way back
out to the door, in the hope of attracting passers-by, but this is a sign of
defeat, and people who are reduced to this position normally leave the
party early, pleading work or a headache.
At a certain point, the people who have power will usually abandon
their corner positions and move together toward neutral territory, where
they form a circle, with their backs to the people who don't have power.
Their first act is to display themselves and seek confirmation of power
from the rank and file. Once this has been accomplished, they move
naturally toward one another and close ranks, the powerful separating
themselves instinctively from the non-powerful. To a power game
player the timing of this movement is interesting to observe, and
sometimes useful. In the first phase, a powerful executive will hew his
way into a corner and make himself easily available to anyone, from
secretaries to middle-management personnel, joking, belittling his
colleagues, passing his glass out for someone to take back to the bar and
refill. This is the moment when an ambitious person can move in on a
powerful person without seeming pushy or giving offense. In the second
phase, any approach or attempt at familiarity will be taken as an
intrusion, and possibly even rebuffed. When people who have power
need others, they make themselves available; when they have had
enough, they make themselves unapproachable. The moment when the
senior executives, having collected enough people in their corners to as-
sure themselves of their power, begin their movement into the center of
the room, is the moment to break away from them. It is a sign thai; the
period of familiarity is over—what could have been said to them with
ease two minutes earlier, would now give offense.
This power nucleus will always form by instinct fairly close to the
bar. From the corner, surrounded by underlings, they can easily get
another drink without leaving their power position, but standing together
in a closed circle, they can't, nor will the inner rivalries between them
allow any of their number to perform this kind of service. They must
therefore position themselves within easy reach of the bar, taking over
one corner of it as their own. On rare occasions, the design of a room
prevents this. I have seen one party given in a large hotel suite which
had a carpet with a large embroidered medallion in the center, im-
mediately below a crystal chandelier. At the point when the power
players abandoned their corners, they automatically formed a circle
below the chandelier, standing on the medallion which offered them a
perfectly visible and distinct power spot. Unfortunately, it was at some
distance from the bar. Nobody could approach the spot, and those on it
were unwilling to leave, so for some time the senior executives stood
together with empty glasses, irritated but rooted to the spot, until an
understanding secretary sent a bartender over to take their orders.
 In these circumstances, powerful people rarely sit down. Sitting at
this type of social function is a kind of defeat, not only because it
projects fatigue and a general lack of energy, but also because it
prevents movement and puts the sitter at a disadvantage in terms of
height. Participants in the power game will remain standing even when
they have one leg in a cast and are obliged to lean on a cane, as I myself
have frequently witnessed!
One can easily assess the relative importance of senior executives by
watching their behavior at parties. Those who are most sure of
themselves find a corner; those less sure of themselves place themselves
in the middle of the traffic stream; the least secure players circulate
around the room, avoiding the corners, which are already occupied, but
attempting to form a circle of followers large enough to give them a
visible constituency of their own. In almost every case, such people will
move in a counter-clockwise circle, starting from the point of entry, in
order to keep their right hand (the normal power side) toward the ex-
terior of the room and the corners. They may be talking to the people on
their inside (i.e., to the left as they make their circle), but the true focus
of their attention and concern is the outside, where the power corners
are. At the point when the people in the corners make their way toward
the center, the people circling the room can then spiral inward to meet
them, as unobtrusively as possible, as if they had never been trapped
among the powerless in the first place.
Thus a general scheme of an office party, much simplified, will look
like this in the first phase:
 The power player who is circulating around the room usually hopes to
seize one of the corners in case its occupant has to abandon his position
to go to the bathroom or take a telephone call, and the power player in
the "secondary power position" (by the door), will often move to the
right and start a circle of his own, slightly larger than the existing
circular power pattern.
In the second phase, everyone moves inward, as we have seen:
 It is obvious that the player following a circular pattern is in an
advantageous position at the moment when the inward movement
begins, since he can circle in and establish the actual position of the
power spot, while the person at the door, in the layout shown above, is
in the weakest position, since he has to make his way around the room.
The people in the corner must move very fast indeed if it's not to
seem that they are merely joining those who are circling the room, and it
is usually the one nearest the bar who makes the first move, his object
being to arrive at the power spot before any of his competitors have
reached it, and to make it seem as if he had chosen it, and they had
followed his move. The player at point A is in the best position, since he
is nearest the bar and in a corner, and he is likely to move out of his
corner at just the point when circular player E is at the far side of the
room, opposite the bar, thus effectively making E the last player to
arrive, or the next to last, after the player in the door. Generally
speaking, this move will take place by mutual consent about a half-hour
to an hour after the beginning of the party (the beginning being
computed from the moment that a major power player has arrived). In
many cases, it is the moment when any fun that is going to be had
begins, since the period when the power players are displaying
themselves and recharging their power at the expense of the rest of the
people present is basically a formality. It isn't that they would
necessarily frown on dancing, drunkenness, or the seduction of young
women; it's merely that they have a purpose to be accomplished before
there is time for any of these things. Indeed, the movements of this ritual
will take place even when they have arrived late and the party is already
out of control. I have been present at one party where the power players
were delayed by a last-minute meeting, and arrived in a hotel room to
find the ice already melting in its cardboard tubs, the male guests with
their coats off, some of them dancing and others sitting on the floor, and
one young lady dancing on a tabletop with a lampshade on her head and
the front of her minidress unbuttoned to the navel. Embarrassed and
fretful, they nevertheless took up positions of power exactly as
described here, and went through the obligatory motions. The most they
could do was to curtail the time span and form their power circle as
quickly as possible, like settlers taking refuge from hostile Indians in the
circle of their covered wagons.
The power circle, once formed, can only be broken up by mutual
consent, but the period of time can be quite short. It need only be long
enough for the members to assure each other of their status, and display
it to the others in the room. At a dull party, the members may stay
together for an hour or more, turning the power group into a kind of
meeting; at a lively one, five minutes may be enough. Once the circle
has been broken, each member is free either to leave or join in the fun.
No power player is likely to walk into a party and enjoy himself until he
has completed this two-part display of power—to do so would be to
separate himself from the other players, and would automatically cost
him status. On the other hand, once the power display has been
accomplished, a member of the power group may get drunk, dance, take
of his jacket, flirt or wear a lampshade on his head—the breaking of the
circle renders him "invisible" to his peers and he has established his
membership for the evening.
 GOSSIP POWER

Gossip has always come in for a bad press, and the person who is
interested in power should certainly avoid gossiping to anyone. That
does not mean it's a bad idea to listen to gossip. Quite the contrary: all
gossip is worth hearing if you are strong enough to resist commenting
on it, embellishing it, or passing it along. It pays to be a good listener,
and to cultivate the habit of nodding wisely, as if you already knew
about whatever you've been told. By carefully cultivating silence and
reticence it is possible to build a valuable reputation as a person who
knows a great deal and has probably been pledged to secrecy by some
higher authority. Thus, if someone says to you, "Isn't it fantastic, did
you know that X is having an affair with Y and that Z is about to be
fired?" the proper response is not, "No kidding!" or "Tell me more." It is
to sit impassively and say "Mmmm." If these are useful pieces of
information, you can file them in your mind for later use, if they are not,
you have taken no position on them. In either case, you have given the
impression that you already knew all about it. This is all the more
important when the gossip concerns your own affairs. If someone comes
up to you with a sad and commiserating expression and tells you how
sorry they are to hear that the promotion you hoped for is going to be
given to your rival, the proper thing to do is to nod sagely and praise the
other person's abilities and human qualities, even though it may be the
first hint you've heard that you have been passed over. Later on, you can
rage, or attempt to rectify the situation, but one of the first rules of
playing the power game is that all bad news must be accepted calmly, as
if one already knew and didn't much care.
I know of one case where two rival vice presidents were seeking a
senior managerial position. One of them wrote a long and persuasive
memorandum to the chief executive officer, explaining why the other
person was temperamentally unsuited for the post. When this
unwelcome news was told to the first person, he reacted by calmly
praising the wisdom, talents and company loyalty of his rival, allowing
it to be thought that he already knew about the memo, indeed that it had
been shown to him. News of his reaction swiftly spread throughout the
office, and the memorandum was defused. Some days later, he met the
chief executive officer in the elevator (by design) and referred to the
now-famous memo jokingly. The great man laughed, and dismissed it
with a wave of his hand. The job, he indicated, was his. In cases like
this, anger, immediate action and a public display of emotion are
invariably fatal. The best thing to do is to strike a noble and calm
posture, and repeat it in front of as many people as possible. The news
will quickly make its way back to the senior management people
without your having to call them. In this sense, gossip is useful—it
represents both an informal (if unreliable) information system and
feedback to higher levels of management.
There are various ways in which news, or rumor, travels. It works
something like a river system: there is invariably a headwater of
mysterious origin, then a mainstream from which tributaries branch off
to every department. Once you have traced the main river to its source,
it is perfectly possible to pick up whatever news you want from the
tributaries—the water is the same. The gossip of people who have no
power and no real knowledge of events is important only if you already
know the stages by which the news traveled to them, since you then
know where it came from and can guess with fair accuracy just how it
may have been distorted and changed in its passage along the channel. If
you don't know the geography of the system, then all gossip is
meaningless.
By observing who talks to whom, in coffee breaks and at lunch,
which people commute together, or ride in the same car pool, you can
fairly easily map the system. If you know that the vice president in
charge of public relations commutes with the treasurer's assistant, and
that she in turn often eats lunch with your department head's secretary,
and that she drinks coffee with your secretary, you can trace a piece of
news that sounds as if it might be true or interesting back to its original
source by the simple expedient of finding out with which member of the
executive committee the vice president lunched on the day before you
heard the news. Once you know the source, you may well be in
possession of a valuable piece of information that will allow you to
anticipate certain actions on the part of the management, or predict
major changes in personnel. If your secretary, for example, points out
that the whole office is worrying about the health of an executive in his
late fifties, and if you know the channels through which gossip flows,
you may be able to trace the story back to a member of the executive
committee, in which case you can be sure that the executive's retirement
has been discussed at a very high level, and that ill health is going to be
the reason given for his dismissal. It's also worth bearing in mind that
gossip is often used to test people's reaction to a decision, as a kind of
informal polling system that allows higher management to gauge the
feasibility of a plan or a personnel move. If the entire office is indignant
about the forced retirement of this executive, the idea may well be
dropped without anyone's having to admit that it was a real possibility.
If the gossip creates no waves, then those in positions of authority can
move to implement the decision with confidence. It's not so much that
they need popular support, unlike politicians, though they may from
time to time solicit it; it's that they aren't always sure of what to do, but
are generally in no position to ask for advice, since that would diminish
their authority. If a thing seems doubtful, it is always useful to have an
informal means of testing its effects. Thus gossip plays a real role in
management technique, providing the powerful with a channel of
communication to the powerless which can be used without loss of face.
It can also be used to spread bad news before it's officially
announced, in order to make the actual announcement less painful and
surprising. Thus a decline in profit sharing or a drastic ceiling on salary
increases will almost always be rumored for several days before they are
made official, and the actual announcement comes as an anticlimax. Bad
news of this kind, when it makes its way along the gossip system, is
nearly always a deliberate leak. Good news, on the other hand, is usually
kept secret until the last moment, since all senior corporate officers
naturally enjoy announcing it.
Immediately before the end of the year, there is always a wealth of
rumors about people who aren't going to get the raises they expected,
who will, indeed, be lucky to stay on. This kind of leak is designed to
soften the blow and make life easier for the person who will eventually
have to make the announcements on a personal basis. Usually, these
rumors are exaggerated; if someone hopes to get $5,000, the best thing
is to allow him to think he will get nothing and let him sweat it out for a
few days or weeks, so that he'll accept the $2,000 you intend to give him
without arguments, and will even be grateful. In much the same way, the
gossip system can be used to warn someone that he's going to be fired in
order to facilitate the task of the executive who has to do the firing, and
also serves as a means of warning people whose performance is
unsatisfactory.
 It must always be remembered that gossip, unlike river water, flows
both ways. The people who pass on gossip downward also feed it back,
and anyone who receives information is supposed to return the favor.
Few companies have any real espionage system, but almost all
organizations have an informal one which works very effectively.
However big or small an organization, the people at the top will
eventually hear about what is happening at the bottom, but seldom along
the lines of the conventional hierarchy. At every level executives are
reluctant to pass along bad news about the people under them, if only
because their failures can easily be held against those above them. The
internal gossip system acts as a counterweight to this phenomenon,
providing top management with a sense of what people are actually
doing and saying, as opposed to what their superiors think they should
be doing. Few department heads are likely to inform their superiors that
a certain executive is drinking too much and frequently comes back
from lunch at 3:00 P.M. with his tie askew and his buttons in the wrong
buttonholes, but by means of the gossip system, the news is sure to
travel to the top management almost instantly, bypassing the department
head and reaching the president of the company long before the
department head has even decided to inform him.
TOO vs. TOP

Nobody interested in power can afford to ignore the existence of this

system of alternative management, without which no business could
survive for long. All tables of organization, and most titles, are
meaningless, and the more carefully worked out they are, the less they
are likely to have to do with any recognizable reality. Just as
information-flow in an office is geared to gossip rather than to any
formal information system, so almost every other function in places of
work is duplicated by an informal, alternative system. The person who is
able to see the place where he or she works as it is, in terms of power,
instead of as it's presented, is better equipped than a more
conventionally minded player. Most committees meet to ratify decisions
that have already been made long before, most memoranda simply
convey ideas and plans that have already been discussed and decided
upon by other people; surveys and reports, however elaborate, are
usually designed to justify plans that have already been made or to serve
as expensive rationalizations for decisions that were taken before the
"facts" were ever put on paper. In most offices, the majority of the staff
is employed in preparing explanations for actions that have already been
taken, and in building up a case for projects that are already under way.
Take a large conglomerate which is in the bottling business and plans
to get rid of its breweries to concentrate on soft drinks. The chairman of
the board and the president of the company will discuss it first, perhaps
taking the day off to drive up the coast for a round of golf and go over
the problem in the open air, "away from the phones," as they say. By the
time they have packed their clubs in the car, the whole office will know
what they are considering, since each of them will have spent the
previous week asking for financial reports on the beer business.
By the time they come back, determined to inform the executive
committee of their decision, the people in the beer business will already
be telephoning their friends for jobs, the brewers' union will already be
organizing committees to save their jobs and the financial reporters will
be on the telephone to ask if the rumor is true. The alternative
information system is simply stronger and more effective than
management in most businesses, and the only effective way to outwit it
is to leak a rumor, then do the opposite. An interesting exercise for
anybody who wants to play the power game effectively is to draw up the
"table of organization" (TOO) of his or her company as carefully as
possible, in terms of its formal structure, putting everybody's name, title
and function in neat, identical little boxes, with lines indicating the chain
of command. A handsome chart like this will fill up an hour or so of
time in a pleasant and constructive way, and in some companies may
even exist in printed form, saving you the trouble of drawing up your
own.
Once you have completed it, take a sheet of tracing paper and add to
the chart the names of people who are not on the TOO, but who play
significant roles in determining what happens in the company, or simply
influence the way decisions are made. You may have a nice little box
for X, but if his secretary is a strong-minded, interfering and gossipy
lady with whom you suspect he has been sleeping for years, then her
name should clearly be placed beside his. Perhaps Y is a genial drunk
who has held onto his job for years by getting things for his superiors,
from free theater tickets to first-class air seats at tourist prices, while his
assistant is bright, and in fact runs the department. The assistant's name
must be placed beside his. Now redraw the little boxes so that everyone
gets a rough circle equivalent to his or her relative power. If Y's
assistant is beginning to eat lunch quite frequently with Z, you may feel
that the assistant should have a larger power circle than Y's. Now
connect all these circles with lines of power, that is, lines of varying
thickness indicating friendship, obligation, dependency, private
alliances, rivalries, etc. You will now have two quite different
charts, one marked
TOO. the formal table of organization of the company, the other marked
TOP, the "table of power," which shows how things actually work.
Let us take a simplified example of higher management in an
imaginary company. At the top is the board of directors and the
president. Below them is the chief executive officer; below him is the
vice president of operations, to whom the various department heads
report. The TOO might look like this:

Now let us assume that the chief executive officer is approaching

retirement and that his secretary is a dominating and powerful figure in
his life, that the president and the vice president of operations play golf
together, that department head A went to school with the vice president
of operations and that department head D used to sleep with the
executive officer's secretary. We can begin, in a very simplified way, to
draw up a TOP as opposed to a TOO, bearing in mind that other factors
have to be considered, and that the lines of power are so complex that
they form a spider's web of contacts and obligations that overlap the
established chain of command, and frequently obliterate it.

The personnel listed are the same, but we now have quite a different
picture of the power structure. Note that the thick, shaded lines indicate
channels of power outside the formal structure and superseding it, and
that the size of the circles indicates real power and influence,
irrespective of formal position in the hierarchy. The reason I chose
circles instead of larger or smaller rectangles is that circles seem less
"rigid," more suggestive of the fact that people's power is subject to
almost daily variations, and is never fixed. The circles should be shaded
to
 show the person's maximum power potential and minimum power limit like
this:

The small circle in the center represents A's actual position on the
TOO, the outer dotted circle represents the maximum amount of power
A can exert relative to the other members of the organization, the shaded
area in between them represents the extent to which A's power
fluctuates according to such variables as health, willingness to seek the
vice president's support, the profitability of his department, etc. If his
area of power on your chart were to balloon beyond the outer circle it
would begin to approach the vice president's in size, in which case the
chart would indicate that he may be about to replace his old schoolmate
or that his old schoolmate is going to have to find a way of firing him to
secure his own power area. If his circle of power diminishes to the same
size as that of the other department heads we can assume that his
alternative power channel has been cut off (in which case the other
department heads, who will have been jealous of his position, may
combine to destroy him), or that the vice president's own power is on the
wane (in which case we can look for department head D's circle to
grow). The main thing to realize is that your TOP is concerned with
movement, not with a static explanation of who reports to whom. The
amount of information to be taken into consideration may seem
enormous (Does the president's wife play a major role in making
decisions, in which case she too should be included?), but therein lies its
value.
The time spent in thinking about the real power of the people you
work with, and the means by which they communicate and exert their
power, will give you a sense of the real structure of relationships, which
is always far more complicated and subtle than it appears to be. If the
chief executive officer always wears blue shirts and you suddenly notice
that department head A has taken to wearing the same kind of shirt and
frequently lunches with the chief executive officer, you can sensibly
assume that something is happening, and looking a t your TOP, you
may conclude that the chief executive officer is attempting to deprive
the vice president of operations of his ally and dependent and is
beginning to succeed, in which case you can also expect to see
department head D having many earnest conversations with the chief
executive officer's secretary, his protector, since he will be afraid of
losing his special position.
Every change, however small, in one relationship leads to a shift in
the others, in which event new channels between people are opened up
overnight in order to safeguard everybody's position in the TOP. Almost
everybody maintains a fallback position, or several, in case a sudden
change should occur. Department heads B, C and D will almost
certainly maintain some sort of relationship with A, just in case his
connection to the vice president should become a significant factor, or
his protector's circle of power should suddenly envelop the chief
executive officer's. By the same token, A is likely to maintain cordial
relationships with D because of the latter's special position, just in case
A's protector begins to decline in power. By these means, people
attempt to ensure their power, relying on small social contacts—
lunches, after-hours drinks, a shared cup of coffee, an occasional
friendly office chat—to indicate their willingness to accept a new
system of alliances if the old one collapses. Those who are interested in
power are not likely to write anyone off until they're actually fired and
out of the game. After all, life is full of surprises: a system of power is a
delicate structure, which can collapse and be reconstructed in a quite
different form overnight, unlike the TOO, in which it is merely
necessary to insert a new name in the rectangle. The TOO represents a
fixed system into which people are placed to fill specific functions; the
TOP represents the results of these people's ambitions and their
interaction with each other: a change in personnel changes the whole
relationship, rather than simply replacing one player with another.
It is valuable to understand and exploit this system of alternative
management, and to school yourself to read the signs that identify its
presence. Very often, distribution lists of information sheets, reports and
magazines will give you a clue. In most cases, the company reports, or
any document of an official nature, will be circulated from person to
person in the order established by the TOO—that is, the official
structure of authority. On the other hand, informal items like trade
magazines usually follow distribution lists made out by a secretary, and
are likely to be sent in the order of the TOP. The secretary doesn't
bother following the official structure of authority; he or she puts the
names down in the order of their real importance. The difference is
likely to be very instructive.
By the same token, it is worth looking at the order in which groups of
people enter elevators, since they tend to board the elevator in turns
established by the TOO, following the official order of precedence by
title, and to leave the elevator according to their TOP positions, the time
of ascent or descent giving them an opportunity to reposition themselves
in the order of their real power. Allowance must be made for men who
sometimes defer to a woman, but in general people enter the elevator by
seniority and leave it in the order of their relative positions in the power
structure.
THE POWER CIRCLE

As a general rule, meetings are somewhat unreliable as indicators of real

power. Needless to say, those who have substantive power will always
try to arrange matters so that meetings are held in their own power spot,
rather than in somebody else's or on neutral ground. The accomplished
power player would far rather crowd a dozen people into his or her
office, however uncomfortable it is for everybody, than hold a meeting
in comfort somewhere else. Unless the meeting is so formal that there
are predetermined places, as in an old-fashioned dinner party, the person
whose meeting it is (all meetings are the property of somebody) will try
to arrange matters so that he or she sits facing away from the window,
so that the others get the sun in their eyes, while those attending the
meeting will attempt to take up positions as close as possible to the
leader's desk or chair. The object is to appear to be associated with the
power that has called the meeting, rather than being part of the larger
group that has been called in. This is particularly true of meetings in
which people are going to be told they have to make a greater profit, or
spend less, or stop coming in at ten in the morning. By placing himself
close to the meeting leader and facing in the same direction, even if it
means forgoing a chair and balancing on the window sill, the student of
power can make it seem that he already knows what is going to be said,
approves of it, and that it doesn't apply to him. For this reason, many
people make a practice of arriving early for meetings and hovering near
the desk of the power figure, dithering around long enough so that there
are no seats left, and nothing for them to do but stand or lean behind the
power figure, facing out toward the seated audience. This, however, is
not a position of power—it's a form of self-camouflage.
In meetings where people are seated around a table, whatever its
shape, the order of power is almost always clockwise, beginning with
what would be the number "12" on a clock face, and with power
diminishing as it moves around past positions at three o'clock, six
o'clock, nine o'clock, etc. People will go to a great deal of trouble to get
themselves in the position that corresponds to their place on the TOP,
arriving long before the meeting begins (though this doesn't help if you
don't know in advance where the top TOP person is going to sit),
pleading a draft down their necks, the glare from the sun, deafness in
one ear or the other, anything in order to find what they consider to be
their proper place in the circle of power.

Power circle for a meeting at a table of any shape. The second most
powerful person will be at one o'clock, the least powerful at eleven.

A neophyte in matters of power might suppose that the seats to either

side of the power figure would be worth staking a claim to, but, as we
see, this is not the case. To be on his left (at one o'clock) is to be next to
him in terms of power; to be on his right is to be nobody. The reason for
this is quite simple. In ancient times, when life was more direct, it was
easier to stab to your left with the dagger in the right hand, than to use
your right hand in trying to stab someone seated to your right, which is
almost impossible since it requires a backhanded thrust. It was therefore
prudent to place a powerful guest immediately to your left, though
politeness might have dictated otherwise, since in that position he could
not stab you, while you were excellently placed for killing him. The
person sitting immediately to your right would be someone of no risk to
you, and hence of no importance. Although much has changed, and
those attending business meetings seldom carry weapons (except
perhaps for meetings in the Mafia and the police), this ancient wisdom
still determines the direction of the seated power circle, while at the
same time reminding us that the true measure of power is the extent to
which one is feared by the person one step higher in the TOP.

There are numerous other signs to look for that may indicate where
power lies. The less power people have, the more strongly lit their space
or office is, the extreme of nonpower being a desk in the open, lit from
above by banks of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. With each step up,
the amount of light tends to decrease, the assumption being that since
truly powerful people don't need to type, write or even read very much,
they don't need bright working lights. In most offices this pattern is easy
to observe, from the open spaces which are lit like operating rooms and
the more private offices, in which a certain ambiguous dimness is
maintained, to the inner executive offices, which are paneled in dark
wood, have curtains instead of Venetian blinds and are lit by shaded
lamps, the dark, private caverns of the powerful. In all ages, darkness
has been the realm of power, and the modern office is no exception.
All such signs are useful if you already know your territory— it's
simply a matter of looking at the familiar from a new point of view—
but in searching for a job it may be more difficult to assess the power
opportunities available and the power relationships that already exist.
You need a trained eye and a certain
THE POWER SPOT ■ 103

amount of ingenuity to guess at the real nature of an organization when

you're on the outside. As we have indicated, the architecture, general
layout and decoration of the office can serve as useful indicators, but if
you're simply interviewed by the personnel department, there isn't much
you can do—personnel departments are reticent on the subject of power,
and rightly so, since they have so little. Every effort should be made to
avoid being hired by the personnel department, but if it can't be avoided,
you should make sure to take a tour of the office on your own afterward.
You can simply ask for the directions to the nearest toilet when the
interview is over, then proceed to look around the office. One man I
know, a perennial job-switcher, always says goodbye to the person who
has interviewed him, then spends the rest of the day wandering around
with a clipboard in his hand, writing down the extension numbers on
people's telephones and looking preoccupied. "I don't actually pretend to
be a telephone repairman," he says, "but I don't discourage the idea.
Secretaries tell me all sorts of useful things. I was interviewed at one
place where the personnel guy told me all about their fantastic dental
plan. That was important to me, because I needed a lot of work done on
my teeth, so I was interested to hear one secretary tell another that the
management had decided to stop the dental plan because too many
people were using it and it cost too much. If you can get to the area in
which you're going to be working, you can see just what life is like
there, how people talk to each other, whether or not they look happy.
You can even ask them questions—why not? They assume you're
simply curious. The thing to do is to leave your coat and your brief case
in the bathroom, so you can walk about in shirt-sleeves. Nobody
distrusts a guy in shirt-sleeves with a clipboard and a few ballpoint pens
in his shirt pocket. You can open people's doors, look in on meetings,
study the general layout of the place, observe people at work, really
decide if this is a place you want to be. I usually bring a sandwich in my
brief case so I can sit down and eat when
104 ■ POWER!

everybody else is having lunch at their desk. They'll usually talk to you
pretty freely then. I always take a careful look at bulletin boards too.
They're full of useful information, and they represent a kind of office
counterculture, which makes it pretty clear how the employees feel
about the management, and how the management communicates with
the employees. You owe it to yourself to be informed. They ask you
questions when they hire you, but there's no way you can ask them the
kind of questions that matter."

The rites, customs and traditions of power vary in different offices,

but have in common the fact that people use them to "dramatize their
own positions in [an] organizational scheme."4 In learning the traditions
of a place of work, you are preparing yourself to become powerful
within it. Many of these rites can be effectively performed for yourself
—as opposed to having them performed on you—and by acute
observation you can often shorten or avoid altogether the usual initiation
process. Thus, it is advisable to learn which are the important meetings
to attend and to find a way of attending them by yourself, instead of
waiting to be invited. It is prudent to know which of two rival execu-
tives is the more likely to win a power struggle, before committing
yourself to one or the other, and important to know in whose power area
your office is going to be, since those within a given executive's power
territory will be presumed to be his allies. It is not necessary to take
quite so extreme a view as did Machiavelli, who urged his readers to
"fear everything and anybody,"5 but in a competitive world it is
necessary to seize every possible advantage, and to learn how to find
and secure one's own power spot. To paraphrase "the Peter principle," 6
one can say that people rise to a level of power just one step beneath that
which would make them feel secure. Once we understand the nature of
the power relationships around us, we can begin to find our security in
fluidity and movement, understanding that power is not static, but must
be sought, defended, increased and protected by cleverness and
originality. Once we have studied the board, we can proceed to the
moves, confident that we understand the larger frame in which they are
being played.

Chapter Five

GAMES
□F
POWER
A whole universe of possibilities and combinations is available to the
individual player. For even two out of a thousand stringently played
games to resemble each other more than superficially is hardly possible.

—Hermann Hesse
THE GLASS BEAD
GAME

Kronsteen was not interested in human beings . . . Nor did the

categories "good" and "bad" have any place in his vocabulary. To him
all people were chess pieces. He was only interested in their reactions to
the movements of other pieces.

—Ian
Fleming
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

Once you've understood the context, you have to develop the moves you
need for winning the power game. Before you can act to get yourself a
raise, for example, you should know the prevailing conditions with
respect to compensation, the personalities and the likely reactions of the
people involved in the decision, the forces against you and potentially in
your favor. But once you understand all this, you still have to know
what to do. "Action makes more fortunes than caution," 1 is a piece of
advice worth remembering, whenever you are tempted to do nothing.
The consequences of acting are always more interesting than those of
failing to act, and you cannot play the power game without moving your
pieces (and risking them). At some point, a theoretical knowledge of
power must lead to practical decisions.
The variety of plays that people use to attain the goal of power is
endless, and more a matter of temperament than study, but certain
moves are basic, in the sense that all others are merely variations of
them. In fact, the number of basic moves available to the player is
comparatively limited, the crucial division being between "games of
weakness" and "games of strength." Games of weakness are much
underestimated, particularly by men, since they seem to lack machismo.
This is a pity, because they are extremely effective. The late Colonel
Gamal Abdel Nasser, for example, was a master of this particular move.
He was willing to bluster, bluff and talk of war, though never very
convincingly, but when attacked or threatened he simply warned the
major powers that he might be obliged to surrender and collapse,
obliging them to rescue him. When attacked by the British, the French
and the Israelis in 1956, he blocked the Suez Canal, thus cutting himself
off from a considerable source of revenue and power, and announced
that if he wasn't rescued by international action, he would collapse. The
world at large, including his triumphant enemies, hastily came to his aid
—nobody can conduct a heroic military campaign against a regime that
has declared its impotence in advance. Nasser's successor has not been
quite so acute—possibly the temptation to compete in terms of ma-
chismo has been too strong for him. It takes a really powerful man to
play the game of weakness to ultimate victory.
The Israelis themselves, of course, play both the game of strength and
the game of weakness with consummate skill, a rare combination. When
necessary, they act with force and violence, imposing their will on the
Egyptians by means of superior military power; on the other hand, when
it suits them, they play the game of weakness, threatening to let
themselves be engulfed by the Arabs unless they receive the arms and
money they need.
It would seem extraordinary for the same nation to be able to celebrate
its military victories and plead weakness at the same time, were it not
for the fact that our lives are full of people who do the same thing on a
smaller scale quite successfully. Marriages, for instance, are frequently
boards for just such a game, in which one spouse maintains power over
the other by complaining that he or she has none. In the words of Lao-
tse, "The soft overcomes the hard; the weak overcomes the strong."2

GAMES OF WEAKNESS: "Avoid victories over one's superiors"3

William Hazlitt wrote, "There is nothing that helps a man in his conduct
through life more than a knowledge of his own characteristic
weaknesses,"4 which is certainly true, though one must of course be
capable of seeing other people's weaknesses as well. The basic move in
this game is to deny one has any power at all, thus avoiding the painful
necessity of taking a stand on an issue. This game can be seen quite
clearly when people who have considerable power are asked to get their
subordinates a raise. People whose whole life and soul are wrapped up
in the ability to make tough decisions, for whom "eyeball to eyeball"
confrontations and "showdowns" are virtually a life-style, can be
reduced to whimpering helplessness by a secretary w h o wants to be
raised from $140 a week to $150. Suddenly, they are powerless, brought
low by the specter of taking action on behalf of someone else's needs,
however small. A person who has just negotiated singlehandedly a
$425,000 deal and who would do anything short of physical violence at
the board of directors' meeting to get a raise for himself, will plead
incapacity, weariness, overwork and above all powerlessness, to avoid
"going to bat" for someone else's ten dollars a week—his hands raised
palms upward, elbows cocked, shoulders slumped, the Gallic gesture of
resignation that signifies impotent sympathy, the instinctive body lan-
guage of the weakness game.
When it comes to raises, the smaller the amount involved, the more
difficult it is to put through. Raising an executive from $45,000 to
$50,000 is easy enough, and it may even be felt that not giving him the
$5,000 a t the end of the year would be either an insult or a warning of
imminent dismissal. Raising a secretary from $140 a week to $150, on
the contrary, is sure to involve a bitter struggle, and require emotional
appeals, blackmail and a personal commitment. Executive salaries,
however large, are seen as reflections of the corporation, and are thus
collective decisions, while smaller salary increases are by their very
nature personal requests, requiring the executive involved to lay his
own prestige "on the line." Thus, the same man can ask, "What do you
think we ought to do about the vice president of sales? Don't you think
we'll have to give him five?", while in asking for a raise of smaller
dimensions he would be obliged to say, 'Td like to give X another ten a
week. It's deserved, and it would make my life easier, okay?" The
smaller the sum of money, the more personal it is going to appear,
which explains why most executives are reluctant to undertake such
tasks, and why the best way to get a big raise is to already be making a
lot of money.
Weakness games are primarily useful as a means of saying No
without actually having to say it, the question of salaries being a perfect
example of an area in which weakness pays dividends. On the level
above you, after all, your performance is being judged in part on your
ability to hold down salary increases in your immediate area of
responsibility, while among those below you, their loyalty to you is
determined by your ability to get them what they want. In this position,
the best posture to adopt is one of uncompromising toughness with one's
superiors and weakness with one's inferiors. The executive who is
himself (or herself) preparing to campaign for a personal raise can only
do so by holding back everybody else. The more people who don't get
raises, the more he or she will deserve one. It is therefore worth
remembering that the structure of our society makes it fairly certain that
the person one has to go to for a raise can only get more money himself
by refusing to give it.
Denying power can be fruitful in many other ways. Any competent
negotiator knows it is better to curse the management, flaunt his
weakness, blame everything on the computer or the board of directors,
and by joining his opponent, imply that they are both victims of the
same rapacious organization, negotiate a lower price for whatever is
at stake.
For example, when I first went to work, I was impressed by the fact
that most senior book publishing executives made something of a fetish
of making decisions. The game, as it was then played, consisted of
pretending that one had autonomous, as it were, unlimited, power. It was
bad form to admit that one had to consult with anyone, the main idea
being to imply to agents and authors that your word was it. This was
never, in fact, the truth; the management, those nebulous figures who
controlled finance and knew where the books were shipped from,
always retained a veto power, but the trick was never to admit that they
existed. Today nobody will admit to having any authority at all. The old
pride of decision-making has been dropped in favor of an attitude that
implies one cannot make any decisions for oneself, that one is in fact a
kind of messenger for unseen, dark forces. This has meant the
disappearance of a good deal of the zest of publishing, which used to
consist of spirited personal bargaining. Ten years ago, if you mentioned
a figure, a bargaining session would begin, rather similar to that which
you might overhear in any Anatolian rug bazaar. These days, an agent
merely mentions a figure, $100,000 say, and the editor replies, "Well,
that's interesting, I'll have to talk to people here about it. It sounds okay
to me, but I don't know what 'they' will think." An hour later, he will
come back on the phone to offer $25,000, with many apologies for
"their" intransigence, failure to perceive literary talent and general
stinginess. He may even complain about his own salary to show that he
too is a victim. This would have been unthinkable in the days when
editors found their macho in the big confrontation, but in fact
nothing has changed but the style; the editors are simply willing to
humiliate themselves to make the deal they want, whereas before they
were in the habit of humiliating other people.
The important thing to note is that they have turned humiliation into a
productive and profitable system. If we can inspire pity, instill in the
other person the belief that we are all victims of the same system, we
may get what we want for the price we all intended to pay in the first
place. Pride and a public show of authority are things we simply can't
afford, hence the difficulty, in modern life, of finding anyone who will
admit to being responsible for an unpleasant decision—unlike the old
days, when young men regarded each unpleasant decision as a way
station on the road to success, and wanted nothing more than to prove
they had made it for themselves, unilaterally rather than by committee.
The humiliation factor is an effective weapon in the hands of the
person who knows how to use it and who doesn't suffer from the
nagging itch to show his power. Take women's liberation. Faced with
the demands of women for equality in the office, men first reacted by
counterattacking with anger, the big stick, so to speak. When that failed,
as it did in many places, they swiftly adopted a different game-plan: the
fellow victim pose. With more effective results. The trick is to counter
any complaint with one's own sufferings. "I'd love to talk about it, Sue,
but not this week; if you could see my calendar, you wouldn't believe
it. . . " "I know, I know, I think you should have more money too, but
hell, things are tough for everyone, I'm going to be here until eight
tonight going over these reports, I haven't had time to answer yesterday's
phone calls yet, and as far as money goes, I haven't had a raise in two
years . . ." "Look, this just isn't the time, I have troubles with the Board,
if I try to get more money now, it just won't work, so be patient, okay?"
Men even carry this tactic to the lengths of making it a form of
preventive deterrent, complaining bitterly about their lot in order to
shame women into not making embarrassing and difficult demands.
This subtle form of the humiliation game is easy to observe in many
offices. It requires a man to sigh a great deal, to hold his head in his
hands in a posture of extreme weariness and defeat, to convey a
suffering that precludes any woman from adding to his burdens by
bringing up her problems, such as the fact that she hasn't had a raise
in two years. Driven by the combination of the urban condition and the
unfamiliar militancy of women, a whole generation of American
businessmen have schooled themselves to portray attitudes of fatigue
and nervous tension, developing these histrionics into a finely tuned
response, adaptable to all circumstances and demands.
A group of men can be sitting comfortably in an office, ostensibly
holding a meeting. Let a woman enter the room and their feet will fall
swiftly from the desk or the coffee table, their relaxed manner will
evaporate instantly. As if by reflex, they will hunch over in postures of
suffering thought, clench their fists in tension, take up all those primate
signals of executive man under strain —remove the glasses and massage
the bridge of the nose between thumb and forefinger to indicate
eyestrain and mental exhaustion, close the eyes as if in deep reflection,
raise the voice to show that what is taking place is important and
urgent . . .
I have known one mild-mannered executive who schooled himself to
smash ashtrays and coffee mugs so as to indicate that his nerves had
been strained to the breaking point, another who affected a trembling of
the fingers and a bad stutter to project fatigue and defeat, yet another
who uses the simple, but effective, device of asking any importunate
woman to bring him three aspirin before she has a chance to say
whatever is on her mind. The trick is to get one's claim as a victim in
before she can put hers in, to show that one is oneself weak, powerless,
miserable, to join in her complaints rather than allowing oneself, by a
show of authority, to be put in the position of having to answer them.
My friend Harry, for instance, who is as strong as an ox and whose
nature is, to put it mildly, combative, has adopted hypochondria as his
protective cloak. From a bad cold, he can clinch three good deals, turn
down four requests for raises and shame his secretary to staying until 7
P.M. typing letters. All his instincts drive him to command, but urban life

has taught him the value of appearing weak. He has mastered the
middle-class urban guerrilla arts—the shuffle down the middle of the
pavement, looking neither right nor left, the quick movement across the
street at the sight of three studs coming toward him, the cheery evenings
with neighbors discussing private police patrols, guard dogs and the
merits of the Medeco cylinder lock. Being no fool, he has put his
domestic experience to business use. In the office he suffers from bouts
of ill health, clutching his stomach in agony, calling for tea, Bufferin,
complaining of tachycardia. In the middle of a negotiation he leaves the
room to throw up, and comes back to lie trembling on his sofa for a few
minutes. Ask him for a raise and he inquires if you have any nose spray
on you, frowning with the pain of terminal sinusitis.
Until recently, men were taught never to complain, it was supposed to
be (wrongly) something women did, but method acting has become a
business asset. Certain things can't be faked, other things don't do any
good. A broken leg, for example, is not only troublesome to fake—all
that plaster—but is generally taken as a sign of good health and sporting
enthusiasm. It evokes no sympathy. Tuberculosis and the social and
contagious diseases are also out, since nobody wants to be quarantined
from the board meeting. All minor ailments, and particularly food
poisoning, flu, severe colds, back trouble, sinus headaches, are very
much in among knowledgeable game players. At the moment, asthma is
probably the most popular thing to fake. One editor of my acquaintance
can withdraw to his office couch in spasms of coughing at the mere
mention of renegotiating a contract or raising an author's royalties,
rolling his eyes and clutching his throat as if he were playing Judas in
De Mille's The Life of Christ. By the time you have given him a glass of
ice water, found his bronchial spray and helped him swallow a Benadryl
capsule, it is hard to sit down and go on explaining to him the nature of
your exorbitant requests.
One of New York's best-known businesswomen, a powerful lady
whose appetite always seemed voracious, now carries on her
thriving business from what appears to be her death bed, seldom taking
or answering calls, passing down despairing messages through her
secretaries, who always begin, "Well, she isn't feeling well today and
isn't coming in, but I did speak to her just before the doctor came, and
she said that $50,000 isn't enough, and would you please think about it
some more . . ." On rare occasions when she can be reached on the
telephone, she makes it clear that any disagreement on your part may
prove fatal to her; you can hondle and argue if you like, but do you want
to be responsible for killing her? Continued argument at this point will
soon produce a rash of calls from mutual friends, asking how, how,
could you have done that to a sick woman? Did you know that she was
in tears when she put down the phone? Did you know she's had a
relapse? What kind of a human being are you?
There's no winning against this kind of self-abasement. Unless you're
willing to counter every suggestion of ill health with something even
more drastic and grave of your own, you are lost. An English author
who felt he wasn't getting enough attention from his American publisher
announced by telephone, on arrival in the lobby of the building, that he
suffered from a fear of elevators. Since it was difficult to hold a meeting
by the cigar and news counter, his editor came down to meet him, and
together they walked up fifteen nights of stairs. This reduced the editor
to such trembling exhaustion that he was more than willing to give way
on every point of contention, and in fact conceded most of them
somewhere between the fifth and fifteenth floor, while gasping for
breath and rubbing one calf against the other.

Shamelessness is the key to winning weakness games. If you have

committed yourself to do something you cannot do (or simply don't
want to do), soul-wracking sobs, hand-wringing—the entire repertoire
of the Jewish Arts Theater—should be brought into play, the right tone
to strike being roughly that of Jacob Adler in Tomashefsky's production
of Lear. The trick is to make the other person feel guilty, the master
stroke being to make him apologize to you because you've gone back on
your word. If, for example, you have negotiated a contract in good faith
and decided that it would be a mistake to go through with it, the honest
thing would be to proceed with it and take the consequences, and the
courageous thing would be to refuse to sign it on the grounds that you
had made a mistake; the intelligent move, however, is to say that the
executive committee has refused to allow it to go through, and to
persuade your opposite number that you have risked everything on his
behalf, and failed. This enables you to repudiate the contract easily, and
acquire a reputation for candor as well.

"NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST"

Perhaps because of the general brutalization of our age, we often expect

power to be wielded with as much savagery and contempt as possible, as
if toughness were synonymous with success. This may explain the
popularity of professional football among businessmen and politicians,
who like to feel that their work, while sedentary and basically
manipulative, calls for the same kind of physical courage and toughness
that football players are supposed to need. This is unfortunate in many
ways: in business and politics the skills of a chess player or bridge
champion might be more useful as guides to success than those of a
football tackle, and the kind of courage that is necessary to make
decisions is very different from the kind that is needed to break someone
else's nose. Knute Rockne's famous comment, "When the going gets
tough, the tough get going,"5 is doubtless excellent when applied to the
football field, but in matters of state and business affairs, it would be
more sensible to say, "When the going gets tough, the tough get smart."
We have been conditioned to expect "toughness" from those in
power, and to equate it with bad manners; thus politicians are forced to
prove that they're not "nice guys" if they're to win elections. Lyndon B.
Johnson was not only famous for tyrannizing his staff, but ended u p
trying to demonstrate his toughness on the North Vietnamese, with well-
known results. Both John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were
contemptuous of Adlai Stevenson, not because he was clever or had lost
a Presidential election, but because he seemed like a "nice guy," and
therefore a weakling. Former President Nixon and his advisors, with the
notable exception of Henry Kissinger, a man who clearly understands
the power game, were notorious for their "tough guy" rhetoric, always
ready with football metaphors and addicted to "eyeball-to-eyeball
confrontations" and "showdowns." For them, pugnacity, verbal abuse of
their opponents and simple rudeness are the hallmarks of power. This
display of toughness is curiously unconvincing in a group of middle-
aged bureaucrats whose only physical exercise is lifting up telephones
and, lately, holding their hats in front of their faces when appearing on
the steps of courthouses to answer indictments. Nor, of course, do they
think of "toughness" as the ability to withstand punishment; like most
people who take a vicarious pleasure in sporting events, they identify
with the winners, and tend to feel that the mark of toughness is how
hard you can be on other people.
Although our national political style has always favored toughness as
a sign of power, in emergencies, when survival is a t stake, it IS
Seldom the people who talk tough one finds running things. General
George s. Patton was a master of "tough guy" rhetoric, but control of the
Army was sensibly placed in the hands of General George C. Marshall,
a man of great firmness, to be sure, but universally respected for his
shrewdness and politeness. General Patton's superior was Dwight D.
Eisenhower, a born conciliator whose tact, niceness (and ability to do
nothing when in doubt) were proverbial. For that matter, American
Presidents in major wars have never been rhetorical "tough guys,"
perhaps by lucky chance. Lincoln was a man of graceful charm, wit and
tact, who would probably have been attacked as a weakling and a "nice
guy" by Richard Nixon; Woodrow Wilson, though irritating, was a
quietly courteous gentleman; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was
charming, devious and willing to compromise. None of them would
have been foolish enough to think that there was any virtue in having
their "backs against the wall," or stupid enough to find their way into
that unenviable position.
In extreme cases (of which there are many) people will even provoke
a dispute in order to prove how tough they are. Many business
executives are secretly delighted to catch errors in their subordinates'
work, or go to great trouble to create "showdown" situations so that they
can win them. It is possible to set unrealistic goals for one's subordinates
then lose one's temper when they fail to meet them—this is a common
way of demonstrating power. Another way is to find what an executive's
opinion is on something before a meeting, tempt him into exposing it in
public, then force him to do the opposite of what he wants to do. Many
people don't feel comfortable unless they encounter opposition—if they
ask someone to do something and it's done without protest, they feel
they've asked for too little. Faced with this kind of power tactic, the
proper response is to cushion one's answers and present several
alternative solutions to any problem.
Thus, if you are asked, "When can we ship out the first hundred
thousand units of this item?" the proper answer is not "June twenty-
first." This will merely provoke the power player into telling you, "I
want them shipped by June fifteenth or heads will roll," and you are
trapped. The intelligent response to this question is "When are they
needed?" This places your opponent in the position of having to fix a
date. It is always better to respond to a question with another question,
and very important to avoid being the first to mention a specific date or
sum of money. Whenever a person who has more power than you asks a
question like "How much do you think this property is worth?" you may
be sure that he has already decided what he thinks it's worth. The only
answer that will satisfy him is his own, so it is best to treat all such
questions as if they were rhetorical. A pipe is useful in these situations,
since you can puff on it thoughtfully while staring into the smoke until
your opponent is driven by impatience to say, "I'll tell you what / think
it's worth!" Another good response is to shift ground by asking, "Do we
really need it at all?" Once the subject has been opened u p into a more
general discussion, your opponent may well inadvertently mention the
sum he has in mind as part of his argument.

A great many people are absolutely committed to "the tough style."

They simply cannot bring themselves to show the slightest weakness,
and given the choice, would rather be tough than right. They are never
happy unless they can force other people to do things by threats,
bullying and invective, even when the people they're fighting are
perfectly happy to do what they've been told. Their lives are spent in an
imaginary death struggle with the rest of the world, as if one smile
would kill them. They have got to prove that in a frivolous world, only
they take life seriously. Even when they attain positions of great power,
they are never at ease there, fearing that a moment's weakness will
reveal them as weaklings.
President Nixon and his advisors, even before Watergate, were
seldom photographed smiling, and when they were, never looked
natural. Haldeman and Ehrlichman always seemed to be on the verge of
losing their tempers—their chins pushed forward to express pugnacious
determination, the corners of their mouths turned sharply down (like
their Leader's), and their foreheads creased with worry lines. They
represented to perfection the face of "tough power," which is designed
to convince us of the wearer's absolute faith in himself and his contempt
for other, less powerful, people. Eventually it becomes difficult for the
person to smile at all, since his lower jaw has been fixed in a "power
underbite," with the muscles forming two hard, distinctive knots just
below and in front of the ears. This jowly look of threatening self-
importance, with the characteristic forward set to the lower jaw, can be
seen in photographs of Martin Bormann, Mussolini, Senator Joseph
McCarthy, a great many newspaper executives, most motion picture
producers and a high proportion of businessmen. The object is to make
the face a visual warning signal, like the elaborate aggressive displays of
lower creatures, which are intended to show one animal's superiority
over another without provoking a real fight. When men wear the mask
of toughness, they are simply adopting a signal, like a ruffed grouse in
the mating season, or a surprised owl. When wolves meet, for example,
the dominant animal adopts "a rigid stare, the ears are pricked forward
and turned a bit outwards . . . the whole expression suggesting there will
be an explosion at any moment."6 The brows and the back of the
dominant animal's nose will also swell up, the whole mask indicating
that he is ready and willing to fight, and has the power to win. Since
wolves are on the whole more sensible than people (despite Vanzetti's
unjust comment that "Man is wolf to the man"), 7 they seldom in fact
carry out their threats. These facial signals are nearly always accom-
panied by a characteristic and recognizable color display, either a bright
red complexion, or extreme pallor, and sometimes alternating
interestingly between the two. Both colors suggest suppressed rage,
exasperation and the threat of retaliation, but a face suddenly gone white
is generally considered to be the more dangerous, red often being
confused with overindulgence in alcohol.
What is seldom noticed is that the people who don't talk tough very
often get ahead of those who do. Aggression is so much a part of our
national life-style that it's hard for most people to recognize ambition
unless it's accompanied by brutality. Nothing gives a person greater
freedom and more opportunities than being dismissed as a serious
contender for power. A great deal can be gained by simply learning to
smile, an exercise which is not all that easy for many people to perform.
The person who wants to use power must learn to control his facial
muscles, his temper and himself, and avoid taking "tough stands" where
they aren't necessary. Flexibility and cheerfulness are better weapons
than brute force, and if used properly have the advantage of making
your rivals forget that you're a competitor for power.
Of course you can't expect a smile to do the whole job for you. You
have to understand something about hierarchies too.

EXPAND, DON'T CLIMB!

People who believe in hierarchy move upward, if they move at all, by

steps. Theirs is essentially a linear and static view of power, as if life
were a ladder, to be climbed one rung at a time. You can't get to the top
without touching every rung, which means that the rungs themselves
become, in a sense, more important than the people on them, the
extreme examples of such a power system being the Army and the Civil
Service.
An Army division, for example, requires a major general to
command it. His duties and functions are defined by the regulations, and
provided he can maintain the discipline and efficiency of his unit in
peacetime, and give it at least a minimal fighting spirit in wartime,
no more is expected of him. He cannot turn his division into a corps. His
post exists and must be filled, whether by a gifted and ambitious soldier
in the style of Patton or by a nonentity—indeed the nonentity may do
the better job in some circumstances. In any event, a divisional
commander (and there are many civilian jobs that resemble this
position) can only move vertically, and must abandon his division to
gain promotion—he can aspire to become a corps commander, for
instance, or to be chosen for some staff post that carries with it the rank
of lieutenant general, but there is no way for him to win an extra star by
changing or expanding his division.
In civilian life certain departmental executives exist in similar
situations. They can only rise by leaving their present job and taking on
a bigger, more important one, rising step by step, either continuously
(i.e., within the same company)—

or discontinuously, by changing jobs and rising upward in different

companies with each change.
 Note that both diagrams are identical in one important respect:
upward progress can only be made one step at a time, and each step
taken means abandoning the one below it, just as you have to take your
foot off rung A of a ladder to place it on rung B. This kind of promotion
requires a great deal of time, and the competition for each rung is
severe. Worse, you have to abandon what you have in order to reach for
what you want, thus increasing your risk of falling off and landing back
in the heap at the foot of the ladder. And you are planning your career in
terms of an existing and rigid structure, which means that you're playing
according to someone else's rules.
Very different is the position of those who can expand their jobs,
gradually enveloping enough people and functions so that they have to
be promoted to regularize their acquisitions, made, as it were, by
reaching out arms like an amoeba, then filling in the spaces.

Note the difference between this pattern of power and that of the
"ladderer." The expander never gives up his original job or any of the
ones he acquires; instead of moving upward, he expands outward,
flowing like lava. He adds to his jobs and titles and responsibilities,
trusting that he will pick up enough people on the way to make it
possible for him to delegate the more onerous parts of his workload. The
trick is to learn how to delegate without giving up responsibility, until
one is finally responsible for everything without having to do anything.
The really fierce power games tend to be played by "expanding"
people, as opposed to "ladderers," since the "expander" can spread out
rapidly, amalgamating and absorbing whole departments, destroying old
titles and creating new ones to describe his expanded functions. By
contrast, the "ladderer" can only go up one rung at a time and must wait
for the person above him to move. Let us assume that the "creative
director" of an advertising agency, a "ladderer," wishes to rise quickly in
his company. He is already a department head, so he would have to
displace the first vice president to move one step up the ladder.

Unless the first vice president is either completely incompetent or a

hopeless drunk (and even then!), this is likely to prove difficult, if not
impossible, and would require the creative director to persuade the other
department heads to join in a conspiracy, with obvious risks. Of course
the creative director may lobby vociferously for a vice presidency of his
own, but this will not change his status one bit: he is still standing on the
rung below the one he covets, with three other people beside him. If he
gets a vice presidency, as he probably will for the asking, the other
department heads will demand the same title for themselves, which
results in its immediate debasement and reduces its power significance
to zero. This process, a kind of Gresham's Law of titles, has been so
complete in some companies that many vice presidents refuse to use the
title on their cards and writing paper, or insist on adding a second,
descriptive title to the one they already have, as in "Vice President and
Manager of Business Systems," or "Creative Vice President." Other
corporations further complicate matters by creating two kinds of vice
presidents (sometimes referred to in one cosmetics company as the
sheep and the goats), one a meaningless giveaway to placate people who
haven't received the raise they expected, the other more or less genuine,
in that the recipient is a corporate officer and is authorized to sign
contracts and go to jail on behalf of his employer. Hence the importance
of knowing just what kind of vice president you are dealing with, the
rule of thumb being that a vice president without a corner office or a
sofa more than five feet long is the corporate equivalent of a Kentucky
Colonel, i.e., the holder of an honorary title without power.
If our creative director gets his vice presidency, he will be swiftly
followed by the other department heads. Those on the rung will simply
have swollen a bit, thus making life on the rung a little more crowded
and uncomfortable than it was before. Until the man above him either
falls off the ladder or moves his Gucci loafers up to the rung above him
and becomes president, the creative director—whatever his title—is
stuck.
The "expander" has no such problem. He does not think in terms of
rungs, he simply overflows, taking over bits and pieces of other people's
departments, projects so boring or difficult that nobody else wants them,
above all tasks which require liaison and communication between
departments. Soon he will have created a complex and almost invisible
system of alternative management, probably more effective than the real
one represented by the first vice president, since it is closer to actual
operational problems, while at the same time spreading out so widely
that it will quickly be necessary to "do something for him," as the
management phrase goes. A good "expander" will swallow up so many
of his superior's functions that eventually nothing is left but the title,
which can be discarded together with its incumbent, when he has been
reduced to powerlessness. "Expanders" not only drown those in their
way, but prefer to submerge all traces of the past, creating new titles to
match their enormously expanded functions. Even when they have
acquired the power they seek, they are careful not to reestablish a fixed
hierarchy to replace the one they have destroyed. You can't knock them
off their perch because they have none. Since they never relinquish any
of their responsibilities, they virtually eliminate the possibility of
challenge; every path in the management maze they have created leads
back to them, however elaborately it has been delegated, their only
weakness being a tendency to remain mired in a mass of petty detail
which they can't abandon for fear of leaving a vacant area of power
behind them. To the expander danger to himself always lies within the
circle of his power, not on the periphery or the outside. Like the
commander of an occupying army, the successful expander must always
be on the watch for signs of revolt in his territory, constantly straining to
maintain control over the vast areas of power he has absorbed.
Still, for all its inconveniences, expanding represents the surest power
game of all. The promotion ladder only exists as long as people believe
in it, and are willing to trudge up it. The moment somebody begins to
spread out like a tide, it floats away.

THE INFORMATION GAME

More important still is the control of information. Almost everybody is

dependent on the supply of information, yet "information input" is
usually regarded as a clerical task, not much better than menial labor.
Hours are spent in discussing major questions of policy, but the
information on which these decisions have to be made is sought after in
the most casual way. An executive planning a promotional campaign
that may cost a hundred thousand dollars is perfectly capable of turning
to a person whose salary is under two hundred dollars a week and
saying, "Listen, check the production people to see when the product is
coming off the lines, and make sure sales and shipping get the stuff into
these cities so it's there before the ads run, okay?" For the next two
hours, he may debate with his subordinates the merits of print vs.
television, the right color for displays, whether the model in the ads
should be sexy or motherly, whatever else is on his and their minds, but
the only important thing has been delegated to someone who may well
be a secretary.
By the same token, information always comes from below, and the
more important it is, the farther down one has to go to collect it. If the
same executive wants to find out how much money was spent on a
comparable campaign a year earlier, he will ask his secretary to find out,
and she will ask the advertising manager's secretary, such routine
matters being beneath his attention, and together they will go back to the
files and add up whatever figures they can find. Because they are not
privy to high policy, there may be hidden items they know nothing
about, with the result that their meticulously collected figures will be
entirely misleading. Nevertheless, six well-paid executives will base
their assumptions on these figures unquestioningly. Almost all requests
for information are burdensome and involve someone in tedious
research, particularly since information is seldom kept in the form it has
been requested. If you want advertising figures for a specific product
over one year, you will be sure to find that they are kept by city for all
products, or simply as a yearly total, or broken down into a series of
figures so meaningless as to be useless. The person who has to bend
these statistics to produce an answer to a specific question must
therefore use judgment and imagination.
Years ago I was assigned to examine a book publisher's list of books
over a five-year period and break down the total output into several
categories—"religious," "fiction," "belles-lettres," "history,"
"biography," etc. The object was to trace on a graph the percentage of
books in each category, so that the executive committee could plan
ahead for purchases of manuscripts according to the number of novels or
biographies or works of poetry needed. My companion in this
unwelcome task (now the editor in chief of a major publishing house)
knew as little about the company's past history as I did, and both of us
were at the very bottom of the hierarchy—nobody with any power
would have undertaken such a tedious job of information collection.
Unfortunately, the categories were hopelessly selected. It was
impossible to decide, for example, whether a work of mysticism by a
Greek poet should be listed under "poetry," "philosophy," "belles-
lettres" or "religion." If we listed it under all of these (which would have
been correct in the literary sense), our total count of books published in
that year would be inaccurate, since we would be counting one title as
five books. If we assigned one-fifth of the book to each category our
survey would be hopelessly cumbersome. Our choice was to toss a coin,
or list the book as a "translation," or chuck it into "miscellaneous," along
with four-color wall charts of the herbs of the world, a teaching machine
for beginning bridge players and a pocket calorie-counting dial. Despite
our literary scruples, we listed it as "miscellaneous," a category which
soon included about fifty percent of the list. Not having read the books,
we found it difficult in some cases to guess from the titles where they
belonged, and when it seemed to us that the number of novels published
in a year was unreasonably low, we simply transferred some of the more
doubtful "general nonfiction" books to the "fiction" category, where
they probably belonged. Our task was to produce a neat graph in a
week, interestingly colored, broken down into preset categories; the fact
that these categories made no sense was no concern of ours.
Needless to say, our labor was accepted with enthusiasm, and formed
the basis for "planning" at the highest level for some time thereafter.
Years later, the percentages of various categories we had worked out
even found their way into textbooks on publishing, and took on the
special aura of "second-degree information," that is to say information
that has been given to someone outside the company, put in printed form
as a book or magazine article, then fed back into the company in this
new and far more authoritative form. People who doubt the figures in
their own files will accept them as gospel when they come back from
the outside in a magazine, forgetting that they provided the magazine
with the information in the first place.
Of course we failed to use our task as a power game, being then
comparatively innocent. We took the praise for our work and used it to
push a number of avant-garde French novels onto the list. Had we taken
our chart seriously, we would have produced a system of information so
complex and ambitious that only we could have explained it, with the
result that the executive committee would then have been obliged to
consult us on publishing decisions. Instead of simplifying, we should
have elaborated.

Those who play the information game know better. They not only
obtain and control information, they know how to make it practically
incomprehensible. Their object is to render the information at their
disposal as mysterious and inaccessible as possible, compiling it in such
complex forms that only they can explain what (if anything) it means.
The advent of the computer has made their task much easier, not only
because most computerized information is printed in odd ways on forms
that fold like an accordion and tend to slip off the desk onto the floor in
a hopeless jumble, but also because any information produced by the
computer needs interpretation. Whatever the question, the computer is
likely to provide several responses, none of them in quite the form that
will answer the question easily, and all of them leaving out the essential
knowledge of just what facts were fed into the computer in the first
place. The person who controls the computer is thus in a singular
position of power, and all the more so since he is in charge of an
extremely expensive piece of machinery. Once a corporation has
invested Several million dollars in a computer system, it is obliged to
pay some attention to the information the computer produces. To ignore
it is to admit having wasted a fortune.
The information game is seldom played successfully at the level of
"information input," though there are examples of companies that have
been taken over by the expert in charge of the computer, who has
succeeded in devising a system of information and accounting so
complex that the only way left to run the organization is to hand it over
to him. In most cases, however, those who process information are
pawns. The master players simply attempt to channel as much of the
information as they can into their own hands, then withhold it from as
many people as possible. If the weekly sales figures and the profit-and-
loss sheet are regularly circulated to a dozen people in an organization,
an executive who wants to play the information game will first devise
some new way of reporting these figures, arguing that the old way was
meaningless (of course the new way will be meaningless too, but that
doesn't matter).
Once he has taken over the responsibility for creating a new form of
reporting, which his colleagues will be willing to let him do, as a rule—
most of them being content to tick off their initials as the sheets pass
over their desks—the power player is then free to cancel the old
distribution list. The information is now fed to him, and he controls
access to it.
At first, nobody is likely to notice or care, but gradually the person
who controls information can use his monopoly to good effect in any
discussion. Faced with disagreement, he can say, "You're speaking from
opinion; I'm speaking from facts!" This device (your opinion vs. my
fact) is remarkably effective. In the first place, nobody can get at the
"facts" once all the information has been channeled to one person. In the
second place, the "facts" are now reported in a form that only one
person can understand. Even if you can persuade the executive who
controls the information to show you the figures, you will have to ask
him to explain what they mean, which automatically increases his power
over you. Finally, any protracted argument about these "facts" would
mean challenging them, which implies an exhaustive study of the
information system itself. Nobody in his right mind cares to do that, and
the possessor of "facts" is therefore in a fairly invulnerable position.
The amount of information that can be subject to one person's control
is virtually unlimited. Once you have taken over certain key reports, you
can begin to expand by asking other people to report their information
directly to you, which they are usually happy to do, since nobody else
has ever shown the slightest interest in knowing how many typewriters
there are in the office and what their insured value is, or the number of
letters that pass through the mailroom in a single week (not counting
those lost). The possession of this information not only gives one power
in arguments, but also gives one a certain authority over the people who
are submitting the information, even though they may not be in one's
official area of responsibility. It is important not to throw away any
report, however trivial, if this authority is to be confirmed. The proper
move is to return every report to its sender marked "Noted," with one's
initials and the date below. This meaningless courtesy will quickly be
accepted as standard practice, and with a minimum of effort you can
begin to argue that the reports are not "approved" until you have
initialed them. The fact that nobody authorized you to approve them in
the first place and that they don't need authorization anyway can safely
be ignored. A power custom will have been born, and only a major
change of some kind can shatter it.
This move, simple though it is, can be used in many ways. Let us
assume that all the department heads in a company send in a weekly
report to a major executive, with copies to three other key
executives. These reports are mostly meaningless and time-consuming.
For the person who compiles the report for his department it's a tiresome
chore, only useful because it proves the department exists; for the
people who receive the report, it's virtually interoffice junk mail, and
goes straight into the waste-paper basket. Assuming there are such
things as accurate figures, they will come from the accounting
department in the form of quarterly reports, so it's a waste of time
looking at the weekly reports. An ambitious executive, however, will
ask to receive copies of these reports on the grounds that he's trying to
improve "the flow of information." Since this involves nothing more
than making an extra Xerox copy, nobody will object. But instead of
throwing the reports away, like his colleagues, he initials them and
returns the initialed copy to each department head. Unless the
department heads object—and they are unlikely to do so, since they
have other things on their minds—the executive will have established
"initial rights" over this system of reporting. He has created a new area
of power for himself, and can now proceed to use it as a base from
which to establish his right to control the department heads in other,
more important, ways.
Controlling information has an additional advantage as a game of
power. It tends to make the person who controls it seem indispensable—
and the indispensability game, though risky in the long run, is an
excellent secondary move in acquiring and holding power.

"NOBODY IS INDISPENSABLE!"

All struggles between management and personnel are contained in the

problem of indispensability. The employee must consider himself
indispensable, even if he or she doubts it, while the management must
hold the opposite view. Many people spend their working lives
attempting to make themselves indispensable, a search for absolute
security which seldom pays dividends. First of all, the management
point of view is basically correct: nobody is indispensable; however
important you are, replacing you is at worst a question of inconvenience,
expense and time. People who attempt to prove their indispensability are
obliged to expand at a geometric rate—they can never have enough
tasks, titles, duties and responsibilities to establish their indispensability
to their own satisfaction, just as nobody who requires love to feel secure
can have enough love. To expand in order to get more power, or more
money, or more prestige, is a feasible ambition. To expand until you are
secure is impossible. In every corporation, the people who think
themselves indispensable, and are generally regarded as such by their
colleagues, eventually get fired. The reason is simple, but seldom
accepted: no corporation can afford to believe that its existence is
dependent on the health, sanity and good will of a relatively small
number of people, especially if it's true.
One of my dearest friends set out to make himself indispensable to his
company, and almost did so. Not only were his projects enormously
profitable, but he gradually extended a kind of moral control over the
entire office. Important files were locked away in his drawers, totemic
pieces of furniture were removed from their places in the middle of the
night and carried to his office, so that the ancient mahogony boardroom
table appeared one morning as his desk; he had the lock to the lavatory
on his side of the office changed, so that nobody could go to the
bathroom without coming to him for the key. Constantly fatigued,
harassed and complaining, he involved himself in every problem, from
the company picnic to the typography of the annual report. What is
more, he had mastered the most important strategy of indispensability,
which is to create an outside legend: a good part of his time was spent in
giving interviews, going to parties and appearing on television, and
since any management prefers to believe what they hear and see from
the outside rather than what they can observe for themselves, his claim
to indispensabil-ity went unchallenged.
As one of his colleagues says, "For three years we lived with this
legend. All the power gravitated toward this guy, and if you objected or
argued, he would explain how tired he was—he had this thing of taking
off his glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose to show that he was
exhausted—then he'd tell you that he wasn't sure how much longer he
could go on carrying all these burdens people were heaping on him.
'How much more can flesh and blood bear?', he would ask, but if you
tried to do the smallest thing without asking him, he would quietly undo
whatever you'd done, and make you do it his way. Nothing could stop
him—if you pushed him too hard, he'd lie down on the floor and suffer
from tachycardia until you went away. You couldn't win. If you got in at
eight in the morning, he'd tell you that he'd been in on Sunday for hours,
if you came in on Sunday, he'd tell you that he'd been up to four in the
morning trying to make sense of other people's work, and wasn't sure
just how much longer he could carry on, and it was true. He made a
practice of making at least one change in everything, however minor, so
he could always tell you that he hoped you wouldn't mind if he added
'the finishing touch,' and so he could say to other people that whatever it
was made no sense until he'd 'saved' it. Then one day he walked out to
take another job, and it was like the end of the world. It wasn't just that
nobody could be sure what was in the files, or what it meant, we
couldn't even find them. Everything was so centralized that when he
took away his little pocket address book, we couldn't find the telephone
numbers of our customers—we hardly even knew who they were. Then
I realized what made him powerful: we were lazy. We'd been happy to
let him take over. It simply meant less work for us, and better than that,
no responsibility, because after all he wanted to be responsible for
everything. We'd made him a monster, and within a couple of weeks it
was as if he'd never been there. Life went on; it was a lot better in fact.
We didn't go bankrupt, and we didn't go to pieces. But I realized one
thing: nobody is indispensable, it's really true, and it's not just
management paranoia either. The moment you think you're
indispensable, you're doing too much work for what they pay you. It's a
loser's game."
The more you try to prove how much you're needed, the more you are
likely to attract the attention of people who wonder whether your job is
necessary in the first place.
Someone who tries to make himself indispensable is like a swimmer
clinging to a piece of flotsam in a raging storm when it might be safer to
let go and swim. The world is full of people who will work a fourteen-
hour day to hold a job that could easily be done in seven hours,
exhausting themselves and irritating everyone above and below them in
the useless struggle to prove that life couldn't go on without them. It's
better by far to make it clear that a great many other people could
probably do your job, some possibly even better, but that for the
moment you are doing it.

NO-POWER

The ability to say No can be pyramided into a position of unique

influence and authority. This power is usually financial, and manifests
itself as a kind of "Scrooge power" in most organizations, in which
every request for money, whether it is an investment, an expenditure or
a raise, is automatically turned down at least twice, however reasonable,
even profitable, the request may be. This attitude is perfectly
represented by Ms. Mildred Pearl-man, a New York City civil servant in
charge of reclassifying the city's 3,600 job titles: "You start by saying
No to all requests," says Ms. Pearlman, "then if you have to go to Yes,
okay. But if you start with Yes you can't go to No."8
Power and money await anyone who can manage to say No all the
time, nor are such people easy to find. Almost everybody likes to be
thanked and loved, no matter how powerful they are, and saying Yes is
therefore a constant temptation for most people. The true "no-sayers"
like Mildred Pearlman are incorruptible and mvaluatle, nor do they mind
looking ridiculous. Their mode of operation is simple: they say No to
everything until overruled, secure in the knowledge that they are likely
to be right at least sixty percent of the time and forgiven for the other
forty percent.
A talented "no-player" can rise very fast, since most executives are
happy to find someone who will say No for them. How much easier it is
to listen to an impassioned plea for a new project, or a $5,000 raise, or
an expensive marketing survey, or a new Xerox machine, and say, "Yes,
you're right, it makes good sense and I'm for it. Just clear it with X first
on the budget side, and we'll go right ahead ..." X's job, of course, is to
listen in stony silence and say No, immune to pleas, threats and common
sense.
The most important thing for those who want to play the "no-game" is
to be consistent—the moment you start saying Yes to some things,
making value judgments, acceding to certain requests because they're
reasonable, you've become simply another decision-maker.
People who can say No are usually penurious by nature, and the "no-
position" requires a certain reverence for thrift if it's going to be carried
off successfully. Most "no-players" have a minimal sense of proportion,
and can spend endless time saving paper clips, or worrying about the
number of times a single sheet of carbon paper can be used, or issuing
directives on the re-use of interoffice envelopes. Their value to the
management lies in the simple fact that paper clips are as important to
them as anything else; they will say No to a plan that might double the
company's profits with the same firm lack of passion as when they
refuse a request for a new box of paper clips.
Paper clips, in fact, are a potent symbol to "no-players," and when
you see someone hoarding old, bent and worn out paper clips, and
forcing them back into shape for one more use, you can be sure that a
"no-game" can be expected from him. Or her, since a great many "no-
players" are women, perhaps because of some atavistic sense of
housewifely thrift, or the feeling that all men are showoffs and
spendthrifts, while women are cautious and realistic. Whatever the
reason, women frequently make excellent "no-players," treating every
request for money as a wife might the pleas of a drunken and self-
indulgent husband who has a weakness for playing the horses. I know of
one powerful woman who used to turn toward any man who came to
her with a request for money and say, "Mister big spender!" Like most
players of the "no-game" she believed that conserving office supplies
was a worthwhile and profitable occupation, and indeed the test of
corporate efficiency. It was possible, though not wise, to drive her to
distraction by twisting paper clips into bracelets while talking to her.
Lights are another potent "no" symbol. People who like to say No are
usually compulsive about turning off lights; indeed I once knew an
executive who insisted that no work done after five-thirty could possibly
make enough money to justify the waste of electricity, and used to walk
through the office as he left for the day turning off the lights, even
where people were working. Needless to say, he said No to everything
—no matter how tempting and profitable a deal was, he would listen in
silence and then reject it. His power was unshakable, and he retired to a
condominium in Arizona, heavy with honors and money.
Certain physical signs can be discerned in "no" people, the most
obvious being the ability to remain unmoved by enthusiasm, passion
and excitement. Most "no" people prefer huge, heavy desks, which serve
as barricades, and usually place the chair for a visitor so that you're
obliged to face them directly, looking right into their eyes. Since they
know in advance what they're going to say, they are usually very polite
—indeed politeness is often a sign that the person who is talking to you
has already decided what to do.
* * *
Closely allied to "no-saying" and indispensability is the use of
responsibility as a power game. It consists, quite simply, of feeling and
appearing to be responsible for everything, as if by showing concern for
the things that don't come under your control, you can excuse the state
of the things that do. Just as everybody is a perfectionist about other
people's work, everybody is entitled to worry about the things they
aren't responsible for, and take a grave view of problems they don't have
to solve. It is a basic rule of power players that when they look worried,
they're worried about what you are doing, not about what they are doing.
People who play the responsibility game almost always appear more
worried than the people who are actually in charge, their goal being to
show that they care, at the very least; and, if they're lucky, to qualify
themselves to take on the job of worrying about really important things
in a corner office. Just as there's a place for someone who can say No,
there's also a place for a person who can manage to look worried even
when things are going well. Constant pessimism can be irritating to
those in charge, but events will almost surely justify pessimism sooner
or later, so the pessimist, if he is patient, will eventually gain a
reputation for good judgment.

GAMES OF MANNERS

At first glance, the world of power seems to contain nothing but "savage
men, and uncouth manners,"9 but the social games of power are in fact
complex and various. The most obvious is the use of bad manners to
emphasize one's power, and indeed many men, and not a few women,
compete in terms of profanity and "uncouth manners" in order to prove
that they are powerful enough to humiliate those who have to listen to
them. Extreme profanity has a certain shock value, as if one were
saying, in effect, "I know you don't like this kind of language, but you're
in no position to object, and the fact that I'm using it shows just how
little I care about what you think." There is also an implied threat in
profanity, a kind of vicarious machismo.
Until recently it was much used by men to keep women in their
places, but with the advent of Women's Liberation and the arrival of a
new generation of young women who can perfectly well answer back,
returning profanity for profanity, the charm of this game has dimmed.
Profanity remains, however, a very distinct claim to power. Anyone
who has ever attended a meeting will remark that there are certain rules
governing its usage. The person running the meeting may use profanity
to show that he (or she) is tough, serious and has power, but those in
inferior positions do not use profanity until the most powerful person
present has opened the way for them. At the same time, the introduction
of profanity into any meeting leads to an automatic escalation of
obscenity, since everybody wants to outdo the previous speaker. The
ability to swear becomes synonymous with seriousness and power, and
nobody wants to be left behind—which explains why one can
sometimes find agreeable middle-aged women executives and well-bred
Harvard graduates using language like cavalry troop sergeants at
meetings, while remaining perfectly well-spoken in private. When used
sparingly profanity can establish one's superior position instantly, but as
a style it is of limited use and has the disadvantage of debasing
conversation throughout the office to the point where the whole place
sounds like a barracks, and swear words no longer have any meaning.

Other examples of bad manners, while less extreme, may sometimes

be more useful, and frequently take on bizarre and complicated forms.
Perhaps the most interesting is the reverse by which people in positions
of power imply that any knowledge or ability which they do not share is
both unimportant and ridiculous. This popular game has never-ending
variations. Thus, an executive who needs the advice of a lawyer to help
him draft a clause in a contract, will put down the lawyer as being
cautious and lost in details, whereas he has in fact asked the lawyer to
come in precisely to supply caution and a grasp of detail. Early in my
own pre-publishing career, I learned to hide my knowledge of foreign
languages, since I found that every time I was called upon to make use
of them I would then be subjected to ridicule. "I can't read this crap," I
would be told, "what does it mean?" or I would be introduced to others
as "a guy who speaks a lot of languages," with the implication that a
knowledge of languages was proof positive of my powerlessness, one of
those effete educational accomplishments that either meant I was a
refugee or a failed professor.
Powerful people are inclined to believe that anything they don't know
or can't do has to be useless, and a sure sign that the other person is a
technician or a specialist, unable to grasp "the broad picture." They
instinctively develop a number of tricks to keep their superiority afloat
when asking for help, phrases like "I don't know anything about these
details," or "Don't give me all that jargon, just tell me, will it work or
won't it?" The best trick is simply to call the "expert" in, whatever the
nature of the expertise, and make fun of him or her in front of other
people.

Humor is an unreliable means to power. People who like power take

themselves seriously, and distrust humor in all but its most savage
forms. Besides, people who have a great deal of power get accustomed
to hearing other people laughing at their jokes, so even if they do have a
sense of humor, it tends to atrophy from a surfeit of unwarranted
appreciation. Many powerful people see jokes, in any case, not so much
as a humorous diversion but as a means of dominating the conversation.
Thus, if six people are engaged in a discussion, a person trying to
emphasize his position of power may say, "Listen, before we go any
further, I've got a funny story to tell you," and proceed to tell it at great
length, not to amuse, but to prove he can interrupt the discussion on a
whim. An excellent clue to power personality can be found in the use of
such phrases as "You're going to love this," or "I'm going tell you
something you'll find hilarious," or "Listen to this, you'll die!" Jokes and
"funny" stories that begin with a command are almost always weapons
of power, and not to be confused with good fellowship or humor.

Precedence is of course a gold mine of power games, the basic

technique being to call people into your own office, rather than going to
theirs, which implies giving up your power spot and entering theirs.
This is simple enough, but ignores the complexities of territorialism.
Many powerful people, particularly the aggressive ones, prefer to go to
other people's offices, since they are then invading the other person's
turf. Thus a man who wants to establish his precedence over another
may go into the other person's office, sit down, and put his feet on the
desk, thus infringing on the intimate territory of his inferior. These small
signs of conquest are numerous, and include using objects as ashtrays
when that's obviously not what they were intended for, giving orders to
somebody else's secretary, spilling coffee, and even lying down on
someone else's carpet to do back exercises when the other person is
seated at his or her desk. The important thing in such games is to
simultaneously establish territorial rights and appear more casual than
your opponent, giving the impression that you believe his office belongs
to you by making yourself at home there. Generally speaking, people
playing the power game on subordinates will call them into their own
power spot to give orders, and go into their subordinates' offices to issue
warnings, threats and denunciations. A special situation (though
doubtless familiar to many) is that of calling a meeting in your own
office and making sure there aren't enough chairs, thus obliging people
either to go and carry their own down the hall or sit on the floor. This
establishes one's power by making people uncomfortable.
# * #

While hysteria may not seem a likely source of power, in fact it is an

effective weapon in the right hands. All things being equal, a person
who has acquired the reputation for being hysterical, thin-skinned and
oversensitive will usually get a raise or a larger office more easily than a
placid worker, for the excellent reason that nobody wants to provoke a
nasty scene. If your work is needed, it is quite possible to acquire a good
deal of power by behaving badly, crying and going into brooding,
somber rages. As one executive told me, "We've got a person here who
goes berserk at the slightest opposition, and I imagine in the long run it's
paid off, in terms of raises when nobody else was getting anything.
Somebody like that will never get to the top, but providing they deliver,
they can get more little privileges than you'd believe, and carve out a
whole world of their own. When you've got to treat somebody with kid
gloves all the time, you pay more attention to them than you would to
somebody else, and in the long run they get more. It's unfair, but that's
the way it is. Of course it's not without dangers. It's like the theater:
people who do star-numbers had damned well better be stars."

The theatrical side of power is often overlooked, perhaps because

most people in business want to be thought calm and conventional in
their behavior, and rational in their decisions. However, the element of
theater exists, and not just in the kind of tantrum that is usually
associated with Broadway rehearsals and dressing-room feuds. Since
office life is often dull, the ability to produce drama is a helpful element
in acquiring and maintaining power, in much the same fashion as the
later Roman emperors were obliged to provide both bread and circuses
to keep the mob quiet and busy. A dull executive, who lacks the talent
for dramatizing his own career and the work of people around him, is
bound to lose popular support. Astute power players know just how to
create and publicize epic crises in order to get the credit for solving
them, and how to predict catastrophe just before announcing good news
in order to make the good news sound even better. In fact, if this game is
played properly, even bad news can be made to sound like a triumph—
it's simply necessary to make the predictions so terrible that anything
short of bankruptcy will come as a relief.
A command of such games eventually gives a person a certain mythic
quality as a "miracle worker" or, in the currently popular phrase, "a
troubleshooter." Nobody is likely to notice that the "trouble" was either
imaginary or self-created in the first place. If you have a good reason
to believe that the monthly figures for your department are going to be
down $200,000 from last year's, the correct thing to do is not to waste
time inventing excuses, but to go into action with the news that
catastrophe has struck, that the figures will be down at least $400,000,
that "heads are going to roll." It should be noted that the first step is to
imply that it is other people's heads which are at issue. The best way to
do this is to call your staff into your office and stage a scene appropriate
to Othello, accusing everyone of betraying you and threatening dire
reprisals. Once you have established that you are not at fault, you can
move to the next position, which is to take responsibility for disaster in a
noble and self-sacrificing manner. Your superiors will have heard of
your attack on your subordinates, and having indirectly established that
they are at fault, you can now quietly announce that things look bad for
the month and that you're willing to be made the scapegoat. It is okay to
offer your resignation if you think there's a good chance it won't be
accepted, which is usually the case. By now, you will have prepared
those above you for the worst, reinforcing their fears by sending out
calamitous memoranda, and by staying in the office until everyone else
has gone home. It is also useful to see as much as you can of the higher
management executives. The more you involve them, the more your
problem becomes "our" problem, and the responsibility for it is spread
above you as well as below you. When, at the proper moment, you
announce that the loss is "only" $200,000, it will be thought that you
have worked a miracle, and with a little bit of effort you can extract as
much credit as you would have from an increase in the figures. What
you have done is to make a prosaic failure into a full-scale drama, with
yourself as the hero. Since everybody is happy to watch a drama
unfolding, and even happier to be able to play supporting roles in it, the
figures themselves will soon seem unimportant and meaningless, and
any judgment that is being made on your career from above will be
based on the exciting quality of your performance. Months later people
will be talking about the way you "weathered the storm," and you will
be congratulated on your courage in the face of disaster. "He didn't
panic," they will say. "He was down some fantastic amount, five or six,
I forget what, and he got it down to two."
Creating artificial catastrophes is a game that can be played at every
level, and is particularly useful in making other people feel guilty, and
in warding off unwelcome requests. You can usually keep your
subordinates in their places by making their mistakes into major dramas.
I have heard an executive say, "This is the worst day of my life," sitting
slumped at his desk in an attitude of despair, only to discover that he has
been struck down by a misplaced file. Exaggerations of this kind not
only contribute to a heightened sense of drama, but serve to make
everybody around you feel guilty, even if they're not involved. The
logical extension of this kind of game is the man who returns home
after a perfectly happy day at the office and drops into his armchair with
a sigh. If his wife asks, "Did you have a bad day?" he can say that it was
indeed so terrible that he can't even begin to explain it; if she doesn't
ask, he can complain she doesn't care. In either case, he wins. In its
nondomestic form, this game can be used to discourage people who
want raises, emphasize the stress involved in one's own job, evoke
sympathy, and prove that one's salary is justified. After all, the more we
suffer, the more we have the right to ask for a raise, and impose our
wishes and demands on other people. All that anybody asks is that the
suffering be dramatic and interesting. Nobody respects a person who
suffers silently or, worse yet, boringly. The trick is to suffer in style.

One of the most profitable behavioral power games is transference, in

which a discussion of a specific fault or mistake of one's own is opened
out into a more general conversation. The object, of course, is to spread
the guilt among so many people that one is no longer individually
responsible.
Thus, if you are criticized for lateness, you should not protest or argue
—instead you shift the conversation to the general question of office
discipline, as if you were part of the management. You join them—
MANAGER: You were late again. We have rules here, you know.
YOU: I know. And we need them, too. You can't run a place
like this without rules. A lot of people are coming in late,
leaving early, taking long lunches . . . It's bad for everybody.
MANAGER: What people?

YOU: I don't want to name names, you understand, but I think what we

have here is a morale problem. I've been giving it a lot of thought lately,
and I have some ideas on it. Do you want to have lunch someday soon,
whenever you're free, and talk about it? Something has to be done, and
worrying about individual cases isn't the answer.

The important thing is to move as quickly as possible from the

specific to the general, and to side firmly with the person who is giving
you a hard time. Most people in positions of power would rather talk
about general problems than deal with the matter at hand, and given an
opportunity, will be happy to speak at great length about their own pet
theories of management. This is particularly true if you can manage to
have such interviews take place immediately after lunch or late in the
afternoon, both of which are low-ebb periods for action and decision-
making. Not everybody can hope to emulate a friend of mine who
worked for a large conglomerate and managed to parley a discussion
about the lunch bills on his expense account into the management of the
company's newly acquired restaurant and food division, but on a smaller
scale, it's a game everybody can play.

Chapter Six

POWER
EXERCISES

Those engaged in the struggle forever overestimate it, forever glorify

their own enterprise—but it is nothing but brutal, bestial, material
power they seek . . . this age old stupid scramble of the ambitious for
power and the climbers for a place in the sun . . .

—Hermann Hesse
THE GLASS BEAD
GAME

I'm a compromiser and a manueverer. I try to get something. That's the

way our system works . . .

—Lyndon B. Johnson NEW YORK

TIMES, December 8, 1963

In the business world, it is possible to lead a full, rich life without ever
having to hire, fire, retire or promote others; and indeed some
corporations keep "hatchet men" on the payroll just in order to spare
senior executives these difficult tasks. To the person who seeks power,
however, these are acts that must be accomplished.
At some point power must be put to the test, and it can only be done
by exercising it on other people, seldom in ways they will appreciate.
Some enjoy this direct application of power, but very few; for most, it is
the unpleasant but necessary price of success.
For example, almost everybody prefers to find a way of firing someone
indirectly, rather than in a face-to-face confrontation, perhaps because
we can all too easily imagine ourselves what it would be like to be fired,
and sense with a certain gloomy foreboding the uneasy caprices of fate.
In much the same way that the death of another touches most people
with a sense of their own mortality, the presence of someone about to be
fired troubles and unnerves even the most powerful executives, most of
whom are half inclined to fear that failure may be contagious. In our age
we have come to terms with death, on the private level by hiding it away
in "funeral homes," and on the public level by making mass murder a
media event or a historical curiosity. What we fear is not so much death
as failure, as though failure were a kind of premonition of the larger and
more final loss of power to come. The deaths of our contemporaries do
not, if we could tell the truth about our feelings, shock us as much as the
news that they have lost their jobs or been forced into unwilling
retirement. By comparison, death is sometimes treated as if it were a
welcome release from impotence and failure. After all, once you have
lost your power, what else is there left for you to do but die?

"I'M AFRAID I HAVE BAD NEWS FOR YOU . . ."

Firing people is comparatively simple, provided you can first persuade

yourself that the person is being fired either because of incompetence or
because he has committed an outrage so great that firing is virtually an
act of mercy. It is always interesting to see how those in power tend to
work themselves into a rage against someone they have to fire, and how
they quickly become fond of the same person once the act has been
accomplished, simply because they're relieved to have it over with. Half
the trick in firing people efficiently lies in inventing for yourself reasons
why they deserve to be fired, the most persuasive reasons being, of
course, personal and irrational. People who have to do a great deal of
firing steel themselves to it by a careful inventory of the victim's
annoying character traits, physical characteristics and clothes, and
search for forgotten grievances and slights. The actual reason may be
inefficiency, corruption or stupidity, but such valid causes are seldom
sufficient for the person who has to do it. He needs to find something
personal. The victim may have lost every important file in the office or
been responsible for the loss of thousands of dollars, but in the end it
is the fact that he wears brown shoes with a blue suit, or crunches ice
cubes from his drink, or has shifty eyes, that makes it possible to get rid
of him. People are never so closely watched as when they're about to be
fired. If someone who has quietly done a job in comparative obscurity,
without attracting much attention or offending anyone, finds the
importance of his job suddenly inflated, it may well be a sign that
dismissal is imminent.
One senior executive tells of an assistant department head, a
congenial and respected young man, whose somewhat nebulous job
seemed like a good place to start making economies when the order
came down from the top to "cut back." "Everybody liked Martin," he
said, "but nobody knew exactly what he did. You couldn't say he was
doing a bad job because nobody could explain what the job was, except
that it consisted of keeping a lot of magnetic wall charts with colored
markers, and generally reminding people of things they'd already done
or had already left until too late. The moment the management
committee began to consider him as 'firing material,' his job was
magnified into a major management function, as if this poor son-of-a-
bitch, who was making twelve or fifteen thousand, was responsible for
all the troubles of a multimillion-dollar company. Martin was made into
the scapegoat without even knowing it, and top brass, who didn't even
know who he was, were suddenly tracing every error in the past two
years back to Martin's wall charts, which nobody had ever looked at
before. Up to then, he'd been a guy most people liked, but pretty soon
people were complaining about everything from his scuffed shoes to the
shape of his face. All the habits that had endeared him to people, or at
any rate made his presence tolerable, suddenly irritated them. Martin
had always been a calm man, a positive trait so long as he was wanted
there, but he was now accused of being lazy and indifferent. He'd
always been punctual, and one executive complained that he was just
the kind of guy who comes in on time to make up for the fact that he
doesn't do anything. He had never been pushy so now he was 'stand-
offish, a lousy mixer, a neurotic who can't get along with people.' By the
time it was necessary to give him the bad news, everybody on the
management committee had persuaded themselves that he was some
kind of misfit or psycho, which made it easier to can him. Nobody ever
paid as much attention to him as they did in the weeks before they gave
him the ax."

Nobody likes firing people, which explains why every business is full
of people who clearly ought to be fired by any rational standards of
efficiency or common sense. A friend of mine, not normally a
superstitious or unkind man, once explained to me why he didn't want to
sit next to a colleague whose dismissal seemed inevitable. "I don't want
to get too near him," he said, "in case the bad luck rubs off on me." This
fear is quite common, and the first sign most people have that their
further employment is being "discussed" is that they're quarantined and
ostracized. People greet them a little too heartily, but while doing so,
carefully cross to the other side of the corridor in order not to get too
close. A hush descends when they enter a room, and there is a certain
reluctance to take the chairs on either side of them at a meeting. "I knew
I was through," one executive told me, "when I was waiting for an
elevator after work and a man I knew came out, saw me standing there,
and said, 'I have to go back and get something I forgot,' rather than share
an elevator with me. I started phoning around for a new job the next
day."

THE MYTHOLOGY OF MEETINGS

It is not so much the fact that we care in human terms about the people
who are fired, nor even that we empathize with them, so much as that
there is a ritual significance to a firing. There is a quality of exorcism
about it, the hope that sacrificing one person will somehow cause the
gods to smile upon the rest. When things are going badly, people are let
go not so much to cut back on overhead (they will almost certainly be
replaced by others brought in from the outside at higher salaries) as to
fulfill this need for a ritual sacrifice, like the tanists who, in ancient
times, were slaughtered at midwinter, their sprinkled blood serving to
fructify trees, crops and flocks, in the hope of plentiful spring harvest.1
The act of firing, therefore, has awesome potency far beyond the fate
of the individual concerned, or the justice of the decision, and tends to
make the person who is empowered to commit the firing a tribal shaman
in the eyes of his subordinates. Like the ritual priestess of pre-Hellenic
Europe, the "firer" must perform the sacred act himself, and on his
choice of the right victim lies the survival of his tribe or group. Just as
the victim used to carry with him to his death the symbols of all the
guilts, crimes and misfortunes of the preceding solstice, so that these
might be borne away with him, cleansing the tribe, the person to be
fired, as we have seen, tends to grow in importance prior to his dismissal
so that he or she can be made responsible for everything that has gone
wrong.
All power is ritual and myth, as it always has been, and those who
seek power must be prepared to enact the rituals of power and take their
place in the local mythology. Certain events have totemic significance.
A meeting called by one person for a specific purpose exists for its own
sake—or for his. But fixed meetings, whether of committees that meet at
regularly appointed times, or board of directors' meetings, meetings
which do not occur at one person's whim but take place by schedule,
automatically become invested with magic significance. On one level,
they represent meetings of the tribal elders, whether real or self-
appointed; but on another, deeper level they symbolize the soul and the
continuity of the tribe, which is why it is so hard to change their timing
or their place. It is not necessary that such meetings be productive, or
even that substantive questions be discussed; it is only necessary for
them to take place so that the rhythm of tribal life is maintained in an
unbroken pattern. Without such routines, life would seem chaotic,
unorganized, and there would be no calendar of events to give form to
work.
Those who play the power game are aware of this, even if
unconsciously, and take every measure to transform the meetings held
under their control into regularly scheduled ones as soon as possible.
With habit, even the most spurious and useless meeting becomes a rite,
investing the person who "owns" it with the status of a tribal elder. From
the point of view of power, it is much less profitable to hold casual
meetings whenever they're necessary, however urgent and productive
they may be. The important thing is to create a purpose for which a
meeting may legitimately be required, then to make sure that meeting
takes place at the same fixed time and in the same spot, and is firmly
marked on everybody's calendars, whether there's any business to be
discussed or not. Since all those who are called upon to attend the
meeting are obliged to consider it important (if it weren't, what would
they be doing there?), there will soon be any number of people eating
their hearts out in bitterness because they weren't invited to attend,
which gives the person running the meeting the chance to award favors
and establish his or her own authority by inviting certain people. There
is a limit to the number of people who can be invited to a meeting—
once it has lost its exclusivity, it has lost its power—but there is no limit
to the number of separate meetings, for different purposes, that can be
created by an imaginative person. Sooner or later, everybody can be a
member of some meeting, and of course some people will overlap so
many meetings that they will have little time left for anything else. The
number of meetings such people attend will ensure that they are always
thought of as important, both by themselves and their superiors, yet
never have enough time to become rivals to those in power. It is also a
perfect way of keeping one's eye on potential rivals or malcontents.
Participation in group rites represents a form of initiation into the
tribal power structure. People can work for years without receiving this
initiation, which can come in many different forms. Being elected a
director (not an outside director, of course) is a form of initiation into
the central, symbolic power circle of the tribe, and is generally regarded
as such. Meetings to discuss other people's salaries represent initiation
into real power, and confer special prestige, as do certain kinds of policy
meetings and some conventions. Perhaps the most jealously guarded
privilege in most corporations is that of talking to people on the outside,
particularly the press, but the power in this case does not attach itself to
the people whose legitimate job it is. They are merely message carriers
—real power is the right to by-pass them and deal directly with the press
on matters of "corporate policy" or the occasional scandal. A pipeline of
your own to the media, even if it's only the appropriate trade journals,
gives you enormous leverage, and will certainly lead to initiation into
the power group—unless the power group decides to fire you for not
going through authorized channels.
All forms of initiation are designed to "separate the men from the
boys," even when the boys are in fact girls, as is so often the case today.
At meetings, powerful executives will sometimes brief a junior to attack
someone else's proposal or plan, so that the "man of power" can pretend
to be impartial, listening to two juniors debating a question without
having to acknowledge that one of them is putting forward the
predetermined view which has to succeed. This kind of delegation
involves initiating the junior executive into the ways of power, while at
the same time actually suborning him. It is particularly effective as a
device for tormenting older executives on the verge of retirement. By get-
ting younger people, with less power, to oppose them, it is possible to
make older rivals feel that they're being ridiculed and belittled, while
maintaining a calm facade of impartiality oneself. Where an open
confrontation with one of the tribal leaders might fail, it is always
possible for the aspiring warrior to persuade younger members of the
tribe to make fun of the older man, until his position has finally been
eroded by disrespect from below. Because it's beneath a senior
executive's dignity to argue with younger and more junior executives, he
has no way of fighting back: he can only retaliate against an equal
adversary, and none being offered to him, he is bound to be destroyed.
The ritual aspect of such struggles for power is always the important
element, not the consequences themselves. Many a man could rise to
power without eliminating his rivals, but his power would not be
confirmed in ritual terms if he failed to eliminate them. A sacrifice is
required to legitimize a promotion, and without it the act is incomplete,
just as some tribes require a young warrior to smear himself with the
blood of his vanquished enemies. Merely killing them would not be
enough—the young warrior must add their strength to his if he is to be
truly powerful, as the aborigines of the South Seas used to eat the flesh
of their enemies to become stronger and more powerful themselves, and
as the American Indians of the plains collected scalps to protect
themselves with the magic of those they had killed. Since most people
on the rise do not want to collect the scalps of weaklings and
nonentities, they are bound to exaggerate the power of those over whom
they have triumphed, which explains why office mythology is full of
legends about the cunning, ruthless and predatory executives of the past,
who, if they had truly been that powerful, would never have had to leave
in the first place. Their reputations must be glorified to make the
victories of those who defeated them meaningful.

THE RITUALS OF POWER

Meals, and food in general, offer further examples of ritualiza-tion. Here

the religious significance is strong and obvious: a meal shared together
is supposed to establish a sense of unity, as if an expense account
luncheon were a kind of Eucharistic transub-stantiation. We "break
bread together," "share a meal," "have a bite together," in obedience to
ancient laws of ritual in which hospitality plays only a small part. It is
not so much that people want to eat lunch with suppliers, colleagues,
rivals, inferiors, superiors, agents, salesmen, lawyers, accountants,
inventors, authors and public relations experts, nor is there any real
belief that you can buy agreement for the price of a meal—rather there's
an unconscious memory of the significance of eating as a gesture of
peaceful intentions. In many tribes, and in most cultures, a stranger must
share something to eat with a member of the tribe before being accepted.
From the tribe's point of view, he has been offered hospitality and an
obligation has therefore been placed on him; from the stranger's point of
view, he has announced his peaceful intentions and accepted those of
the tribe. An exchange has taken place, but it does not involve food,
except in the ritual sense.
The question of obligation is central to such rituals and can be seen in
its most extreme form in the traditional culture of Japan, and in the
determination of most men to sign an expense account lunch check. The
point is to show civility and friendship, while at the same time forcing
the other person to incur an obligation to you. Seen in these terms,
picking up a check at lunch—seemingly prompted by a generous
instinct—is, in fact, a concealed act of aggression. In Japan, this notion
of obligation was elaborated into a complex code of behavior, or On, in
which the repayment of these obligations was precisely defined and
made into a schematic formula.2
A rigid system that defines exactly one's obligations toward state,
friends and family may well have made life easier for the Japanese by
relieving them of all the tedious doubts and questions that plague
Western social intercourse, but it is possible to see behind the imposing
facade of their code of manners the bare bones of a complex game of
social blackmail similar to our own. On is very precise about the manner
in which obligations are to be repaid, and even the amount of time
allowed, but it also makes it clear that the man who accepts an
obligation is the loser. The dialogues of On are perfect examples, on a
ritual level, of the kind of struggles we go through all day long in
attempting to obligate others while refusing to accept obligations in
return. Hence our notorious inability, as a culture, to settle the question
of who goes through a door first, which in other, more codified societies
might be settled by a precise order of precedence. Five men leaving an
office together will not only go through extraordinary contortions to find
the proper order, bumping into each other, missing their turns in
revolving doors and holding up other people, but will repeat the same
confused jockeying for position on the way back. In a democratic
society, no solution to a social problem is a permanent one, so the order
will have to be worked out again at each door, and will offer no clue to
behavior tomorrow, if the same men have lunch together then. What is
more, the complexities of On in a case like this are infinitely difficult to
solve. In principle, the senior man present, in age or authority, should be
offered the chance of going through a door first, and this is usually the
case. As a rule, however, he will refuse this honor to show his modesty
and place an obligation on someone else. If this person also refuses to
go through the door first, the senior man may give way and allow
himself the luxury of going first. More likely there will be a short
struggle, consisting of a series of subdued taps and squeezes on the
shoulder, between the senior person who is refusing the right to go first
and the person he is trying to push through the door instead. The latter,
of course, is attempting to show his unworthiness of such an honor, and
trying to refuse a gift which will effectively put him under an obligation
to the senior man, and possibly attract the hostility of the other men
waiting as well. If he allows himself to be pushed through the door first,
he will jockey for position at the next door to make sure that the senior
person goes through first this time, then wait until the others have gone
through so that he can enter or leave last, thus canceling out the
obligation placed on him at the first door. Since this same struggle is
being repeated in the rest of the group, each man trying to get behind the
other, or ahead, in the case of a very few aggressive and ignorant souls,
the possibilities for confusion, collisions and delay are excellent on even
the shortest journey.
Some people make a fetish of avoiding obligations—on the simplest
level, they are eager to do favors for people, but wily and determined in
refusing to accept favors in return. They simply cannot allow other
people to sign restaurant checks, open doors for them or lend them a
newspaper, as if accepting the normal social civilities would place them
under some ritual obligation to those offering them. Unfortunately, they
are not altogether mistaken—the whole purpose of social civility is to
place others in a position of obligation with a gesture that costs the
offerer little. Nothing makes a power player more nervous than a favor
he or she is unable to refuse, or repay on the spot. Power players live by
a system of On of their own, its rules often personal and obscure, but
absolute for all that. Beat them to a restaurant check and they will move
heaven and earth to invite you to lunch at their expense as soon as
possible, or to perform some small, unwanted favor on your behalf that
will, in their eyes, if not in yours, cancel out the debt. What is more,
these repayments are carefully graduated in master players' lives. In
keeping their own personal score of favors received and repaid, they
attach a value rating to each transaction. Let us say that in the mind of
the man whose lunch you have bought a meal at the Italian Pavillion
counts for 5 on a scale that runs from 1 to 10. You have won by picking
up the check, and you are ahead 5 points on his mental scale, a
situation which he cannot allow to continue, because you have acquired
On, or power, over him. He must find a way of repaying that obligation
by some favor or act that will not only pay back the 5, thus canceling
out the exchange and freeing him, but try to increase the score in his
favor. If it's your birthday, he may send you a bottle of champagne,
which might count for 8 points on his scale, in which case he now feels
you have an On, or obligation, toward him of 3 points. He can now rest
easy, so far as you are concerned, though instinct will drive him to
increase the value of the obligation as much as possible, until he feels
you owe him so much On that you can never repay it. For the power
player, the accounts must be balanced if possible, but if they can't be,
then nothing must be owed.
The receiving and giving of presents is another example of On
behavior—very few people can accept a gift without immediately
worrying about how it can be repaid. It is no accident that people say,
"You shouldn't have!" when confronted with an unexpected gift, or that
at Christmas-time, the exchange of presents reaches a neurotic intensity.
The instinct not to place ourselves in another's debt is as strong among
us as it is among the Ik tribesmen of Uganda, where a man tries to build
his house secretly at night, if he can. 3 Politeness and custom obliges his
neighbors to help him erect a house, and in turn, he is obliged to offer
them food as repayment for their help. Since the Ik live at starvation
level or below, a man's neighbors can fulfill their social obligations to
him and starve him out at the same time. The social contract has been
fulfilled by their help, but the last thing the prospective Ik householder
wants is to assume this unwelcome, indeed fatal, obligation. He cannot
afford gratitude or the acceptance of favors, and is able to see very
clearly the motives behind the "generosity" of his neighbors. Most of us
do not feel that we are better off in this respect than the Ik, though
affluence allows us the luxury of pretending otherwise. The worst news
at Christmas is the arrival of a gift or a card from someone to whom we
have sent nothing, especially when it's too late to buy the return gift that
will cancel out the obligation. An On obligation has been placed on us,
and we know it. Even an expensive present sent to the people in whose
debt we now are will not altogether cancel our On to them, and we may
find ourselves bitterly exchanging presents for many Christmases to
come, or simply deciding never to see them again.
In this sense, all social customs consist of concealed aggression
carried out as politeness, much as Clausewitz defined war as diplomacy
carried out by other means. We shake hands to prove that we are not
carrying weapons in our right hands (a custom which explains the bad
reputation of left-handed people for treachery), we rise to our feet at the
approach of a stranger to our table, not out of politeness, but because our
ancestors couldn't draw their swords from a sitting position, and if we
believe that the elderly and the respected should go through the door
first, it is simply because in ancient times only the most powerful and
courageous warrior would take the lead, in case of ambush, with the
result that it became an honor. The exchange of obligations is at the very
heart of our relationships to the rest of the world, and can be seen at
work in almost every situation in which power is involved.
". . . NONE WILL SWEAT BUT FOR PROMOTION . . ."4
"I like the Garter; there is no damned merit in it," 5 Lord Melbourne once
said about the most ancient and exclusive of English honors, a view
which applies to promotions in general. Almost everybody in the world
feels that they deserve to be promoted to some higher estate, no matter
how high they may already have risen. Since the number of positions
declines as the level of pov/er increases, most of the world is
automatically doomed to live in disappointment and envy. This system
has many advantages, chief among them the fact that if it were not for
the hope of rising, few people would do any more work than is
necessary for survival. It is important for people to believe that work
will lead to promotion, but, as Melbourne pointed out, merit is in fact
something that most people in power dislike.
From above, merit merely confuses the issue: the reasons for
promoting someone that have nothing to do with merit are always the
most persuasive ones, if only because they're easier to notice and
remember. Those who hang on, get up. Most promotions are based on a
system of rewards for faithfulness, rather than on any real attempt to
assess merit. It has to be remembered that nobody can be promoted to a
job until the person who occupies it has left, a fact which is simple, but
often forgotten. If that person is about to be fired, then it is sensible to
make yourself as different as you can from him; if he is about to be
promoted, then it makes sense to pattern your behavior on his; if he is
about to retire, you're on your own. After all, if he is in danger of being
fired, then his superiors will be looking for "somebody different"; if
they're thinking of promoting him, they will be looking for someone as
much like him as possible, not only because they think highly of him,
but also because as "promotion material" he will be asked for his advice
on replacing him, and will naturally recommend someone like himself;
in the case of someone who is about to be retired, the management will
be unable to decide what they want, and may even be willing to consider
the dangerous expedient of "bringing someone in from the outside." It
never does to forget that managements, like individuals, get bored with
what they have, and since they are not anxious to replace themselves for
the sake of change, they can only change by shaking things up below
them. As one executive said of another, "He likes to stir the pot from
time to time, just to show he owns the spoon."
To those in power, promoting people is second only to firing them as
an exercise in the use of power. As games go, it has the advantage of
involving many people—after all, you can only fire one person at a
time, as a general rule, but there may be a dozen people who want to be
promoted to a given job. The opportunities for playing one person off
against another are endless. What is more, such occasions present an
excellent chance to gauge the loyalties of those beneath one. As the aged
Emperor Franz Josef of Austro-Hungary said, when a minister was
recommended for promotion on the grounds that he was a patriot, "Yes,
but is he a patriot for me?" When people are being interviewed with a
view to promotion, the person doing the interviewing, like old Emperor,
is looking for personal loyalty, trying to determine the extent to which
the interviewee will be obligated, in the event he or she gets the job.
This is normally a delicate dialogue; very few people can bring
themselves to say, "I'll swing the job your way if you'll agree to join my
camp," yet the underlying rationale of promotion is much the same as
that of medieval vassalage, each executive trying to build up a small
army of supporters who owe their livelihood to him. These people
comprise his feudal levy in time of need, and the higher up he is, the
more of them he will want; but the more of them the are, the harder it is
to support them. Like a medieval army, they must be clothed, fed,
housed and provided with rewards and booty. Their leader belongs to
them as much as they belong to him, and his obligations to them are as
demanding as theirs to him. These groups exist in every corporation, and
the urgent need to provide them with promotions, titles, work they can
do and raises explains much of the endless activity and intrigue that
makes office life so fascinating. Since there is always pressure from
below, and the need on the part of every executive to build up his ranks
of loyalists, the temptation to create openings at every level is always
strong, and naturally leads to a good deal of the unnecessary firing and
job-changing that characterize corporate life.
A good rule for those who have the power to promote others is to
ensure that they maintain absolute control over the process. Many
executives insist on being the bearers of good news, with sound reason,
and not a few are addicted to creating false rumors, building people's
hopes and generally fogging up the issue, in order to keep everyone in
suspense and dramatize the final decision. The more nervous people are
about getting a promotion, the more they will appreciate it if they do,
and many people are flattered at even being included in the rumors. By
giving the maximum number of people the chance to believe they may
be selected for a job, even if you have already selected the person for it
in your mind, you can focus everyone's attention on your power while at
the same time making an exciting event of a one-horse race. Besides, as
a management friend says, "You don't want a guy to become too cocky,
even if he's the only logical choice for a job. Make him sweat a little.
He'll be just that much more grateful when he gets it, and it gives you a
chance to show him who's boss,"

For those who want to be promoted, there are certain rules worth
observing. In the first place, propinquity helps. If you can move your
office closer and closer to that of the person whose job you want, he or
she will not only feel threatened (or that you are the logical successor
for the job), but you will also create a certain feeling of inevitability in
the minds of the people who will decide on your promotion. It is,
therefore, always worthwhile to move from where you are toward the
corner of power you covet. By the time you have taken the office next to
the one you want, most people will assume that the next step is yours by
right of succession. Ordinarily, the executive nearest to the one who has
to be replaced will be first in line, so every opportunity should be taken
to move in the right direction. Power people walking in and out of an
executive's corner office will see you sitting next door, and will
naturally assume that you are being "groomed" as the executive's
successor, whereas the person who is most qualified to succeed to the
job (in other words, the one with merit) may be four offices down, and
thus comparatively invisible.
A promotion should always involve a change of office, if it's to do
you any good in the larger scheme of things. It does little good to
change jobs or receive a new title if you stay in the same office, no
matter how important your new responsibilities are. To stay put always
seems static. Shifting offices, by contrast, gives people around you a
sense of dramatic change, as if by moving sideways you were in fact
moving upward. Even for the most important and successful players, the
promotion that means the most to them is likely to be the one that
involved a major change of office (to a corner or to the "executive"
floor, for example), however many new titles and promotions they may
have acquired afterward. It is the geographical change that gets
celebrated, because it is both visible and symbolic. A promotion may be
an important move in a person's career, but if it merely involves
ordering new cards and stationery, its effect on most other people will
be minimal. What counts is a new office. Few people know or care what
an executive's new title is, or can work out what it means in terms of
power, whereas a new office can be compared to other people's in terms
of size, desirability and decoration. I know of one man who worked his
way up the ladder of promotion, eventually reaching quite a high
position and title, without ever acquiring any real power over other
people, or being taken seriously by his colleagues. Unfortunately for
him, he had inherited a large and comfortable office early in his career,
when he was not strictly entitled to two windows, a tufted leather couch
and a designer desk in Jacaranda veneer. Already comfortable enough,
he had no desire to move, and in any case there was no larger office to
move him to. As a result, all his promotions seemed like empty
formalities, and were dismissed by others as meaningless; eventually
they even began to seem meaningless to him, and he complained
constantly that his career had "bogged down," though in fact his rise in
terms of promotion was impressive and swift.
It is quite possible to simulate promotion by moving one's office,
provided the move is accompanied by sufficient ceremony, and doesn't
look like a midnight flit or mere restlessness. It is as in certain Indian
tribes, where the size of one's tepee, and its place in the encampment,
determined one's social standing. Some Indians were notorious for
attempting to take advantage of each move the tribe made to a new
location to alter the place of their tent.
Promotion by side-effect is a more difficult game, but quite effective.
This can take many forms, but the most familiar is to work out a specific
relationship with another executive, preferably one who is ambitious
and bound to rise. If you can establish that your proper relationship to
him is one position behind, then you are quite likely to be promoted
whenever he is, in order to keep the same distance behind him. Thus,
if you are able to persuade people that you belong one rung below X on
the ladder, you go up one rung whenever he does, your only risk being
that X turns out to be a non-starter. A great many promotions are
determined by this or other schemes designed to preserve a balance
between people, and once locked into them, it is possible to make one's
way quietly upward with little or no effort. Nothing is more useful than
an ambitious executive, especially one brought in from the outside,
since almost everyone will have to be "adjusted" to compensate for what
it has been necessary to give him in order to acquire him in the first
place. Thus, the arrival of an outsider who has to be given a good title
may well lead to the inflation of everyone else's titles, just so that
nobody's feelings are hurt. In cases where the turnover of outsiders is
high, the people who remain may find themselves promoted upward
with dizzying rapidity, until it's hard to even invent new titles for them.
One man I know has stayed in the same place for ten years, placidly
doing the same job, while the entertainment conglomerate he works for
has nervously hired and fired executives in a reflexive, twitchy attempt
to create a new image for itself. By now, he has acquired a certain
power, being one of the few people who has been there long enough to
remember where everything is and just what it is the company
manufactures, but with each change of executives, he gets a new and
more sonorous title "to keep him happy." "Happy?," he says, "of course
I'm happy. What's not to be happy about? Every time they bring in some
hotshot, they come to me and they say, 'Listen, we don't want you to
worry, we need this guy and we had to give him a title to get him, but
just to show we love you, we're making you deputy creative director, or
senior vice-president, or whatever.' Everybody says that these are just
phoney titles, they don't mean a thing, and in a way it's true, but you can
always use them to get an extra thou or two at the end of the year. I
mean, they're pretty embarrassed to have to admit that the titles don't
count for anything, and they usually figure if they've given you the title,
they may as well give you a little cash as well, just to make it okay.
Anyway, if they've given you a new, bigger title, it's hard for them to
fire you. Somebody would be bound to ask why they made you a vice
president in 1974 if you were doing such a lousy job that you had to be
fired in 1975, you know? So you've got them, really. By me, they can
bring in people from everywhere, anytime, and promote them over my
head. When they come in, I go
POWER EXERCISES ■ 165

up one notch without any effort, and if they keep on doing it I can see
myself being president and chairman of the board in five years."
The astute power player should be able to make good use of other
people's promotions, rather than resenting them, as many people do.
Every promotion means another job or title open, and most promotions
can be used as a good reason for promoting you.
 "MONEY AND SEX ARE FORCES TOO UNRULY FOR
REASON . . ."6

What is true of promotion is equally true of raises; the two are

inextricably linked, with the major difference that one is public, the
other almost always secret. There would be no point to a secret
promotion—by definition, it has to be a public event— while raises are
generally shrouded in mystery, the innermost secret of any given
business tribe. This is as it should be, of course. Money is what all
business is about, and therefore it retains all the power of the central
mystery of a religious cult. Most people will tell you anything about
themselves except what they earn, and most corporations approach the
task of deciding upon salary increases in an atmosphere of secrecy,
intrigue and conspiracy suitable to a CIA plot. The problem of money
raises is common to every organization, and it is not surprising that
among the documents purporting to prove that Martin Bormann,
Reichsleiter and Deputy-Fuhrer of the Third Reich, is still alive, there
exists a letter refusing Adolf Eichmann a larger pension, on the grounds
that the other Nazi refugees would be clamoring for more money if they
ever heard about it.7 It is not necessary to be alive and well in Argentina
to have heard this argument a thousand times before—"if we gave you
what you want, and it leaked out, we'd have to give it to everybody, then
we'd be out of
166 ■ POWER!

business." It is always difficult to win—ask for a big raise, and you will
be told it can't be done because it would set a precedent; ask for a small
raise, and you will not only lose respect, but be told that the
management refuses to be "nickled-and-dimed to death." In no single
area of adult life do the rules of childhood apply so strictly as in raises;
arguments having to do with money duplicate on both sides the baffling
dialogues that take place between children and adults. If you ask how
much someone else is getting, you will be told, "That doesn't apply," or
"It's not your business," just as something other children were permitted
to do was never a sufficient reason for being allowed to do the same
thing ourselves. You will also be told to "be reasonable," "be patient,"
and to "try and understand our problems," advice liberally given to
children by parents, teachers and headmasters, and designed to make
them feel guilty for even asking. All else failing, there is the private
school approach, an appeal to one's sense of community—"Look at it
from our point of view, it's a big organization, we have to think of the
receptionists, the secretaries, everybody, you're not the only one, after
all."
Very few executives know what they're worth, given the general
secrecy about money, and most have some slight suspicion that they
might well be worth a good deal less than they're already being paid;
few management people can bring themselves to say no without
wrapping the refusal in explanations and justifications. "Money," in the
words of one executive, "is the bottom line," but because nobody wants
to talk about it, managements find it easy to separate promotion and
power from money, giving people responsibility, authority and titles
with a lavish hand, while at the same time arguing that none of these
things justifies a raise. It is easy enough to co-opt people by promoting
them. The more power they have, the more responsible they are for the
corporation's profit, and the more responsible they are, the more
restrained they have to be in their own demands. There is no better way
to discourage people from asking for a lot more money than promoting
them to the inner circle of power and then appealing to their sense of
responsibility.
Most employees cannot be sure whether they're being overpaid Of
underpaid, a situation which explains a great deal of their Angst. It's
another of the crosses the respectable middle class has to bear. Union
workers know exactly what people in other trades get an hour, the
officers of a corporation can find each other's salaries in the annual
corporate report, but the vast multitude between these two extremes
lives in ignorance. Nor, of course, do they understand that salaries form
a power structure, in which the actual amounts of money involved are in
fact of secondary importance. Nobody minds giving secretary X another
ten dollars a week, or executive Y another thousand a year—the prob-
lem is what X's raise would do to the delicate balance of relationships
between all the other secretaries, and the same for Y, on a higher level.
As one experienced advertising executive put it, "There's a system to
salary. There's a subtle relationship between yourself and other people,
and when you ask for more money, you're fighting the system. Let's say
it's established that you make, say, twenty-five, and your colleague
makes twenty-seven-five. If you go to twenty-six, you've narrowed the
gap between the two of you, and that gap was created for a purpose. So
your thousand is going to cost the company twice that, because they're
going to have to give something to your colleague if they give
something to you, or accept a change in the balance, which upsets
everybody's position on the power scale. It isn't money or overhead*
that's at stake: it's the integrity of the power structure. So what I do is
simple. I encourage everyone around me to ask

*"Overhead" is a common enough word; its counterpart, "underfoot," is

less well-known, but represents an essential management fact of life.
"Underfoot" is the amount of work a person or a department needs to
justify overhead. Most people in any large organization are producing
jnderfoot to sustain an increase in overhead. Neither word has any con-
lection with "profit," a very different concept.
for more money, even the highest executives, who decide on raises.
What the hell, they think they're underpaid too, so the best thing you can
do is to tell them they deserve more. You also have to do everything you
can to encourage raises for people below you. That's important! A lot of
guys have a 'dog-in-the-manger' attitude toward money; they get itchy
and nervous when people below them get raises. That's foolish. So long
as you can keep your position on the power scale, they're going to have
to adjust your salary upward when the people below you get raises, and
when the people above you get more money, they'll pull you along, in
order not to widen the gap. At the moment, the number one man here
makes $100,000, and the number two man makes $75,000, and I make
fifty. Fine. I don't waste my time asking for a raise—that would threaten
them, right? I try and persuade number one he deserves at least
$125,000. If he gives that to himself, we'll all go up proportionately,
without my having had to ask for anything at all. It's the way the system
works. From above, salaries don't represent money, except when they're
all added together on a yearly basis. They represent a kind of points
system which indicates everybody's importance and their position vis-a-
vis each other in terms of power."
"STAND NOT UPON THE ORDER OF YOUR GOING, BUT GO AT
ONCE"8

Although not generally recognized as such, quitting is an art.

It obviously requires no great intelligence to walk out of a job in a fit
of rage, because one hasn't been promoted, or given a raise, or simply
because one doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. This is the equivalent
of ending a chess game by conceding.
For people who know how (and above all when) to quit, it can be the
most rewarding move of all. Most experts at quitting are people who are
determined to rise meteorically; at the least sign that their rise is
slowing down, or being obstructed, they make a spectacular leap to
another company, usually gaining one step up the ladder in the process,
and continue from there. Each time they change jobs, they try to reach
a new level of power and money, thus getting a good jumping-off point
for the next move. "The important thing," as one executive said, "is
never to stay too long. When they hire you for a good increase over
what you were getting, there's a honeymoon period. The trick is to quit
while you're ahead."
Best of all, in the words of one successful quitter, is "to quit on a
high." There is a certain power in leaving a job when you're on top, both
because it's dramatic, and because it shows that you control the
situation. "It's partly shock therapy," explained one quitter. "You bring
off a big coup, and they expect you to come in asking for money, and
instead you come in and say, 'I quit,' and leave them with egg all over
their faces."
Quitting is an action game, rather like dancing over sword blades.
The player is required to leap quickly and unnerringly to the next job
without ever missing his footing. One slip, and he loses. Once his
upward momentum has gone, he becomes just another of the
unemployed, and it is always harder to look for a job when you don't
have one than when you do. The job you have gives you the power to
get the job you want, but without that power you may find that people's
interest in you ebbs swiftly. Power players know this, and conform to
the etiquette of quitting. Job interviews, for example, can only take
place after-hours, over drinks; if they take place during working hours,
they are a breach of etiquette toward the company you're currently
working for. The mystique of loyalty must be preserved to the very end,
and even the people who are thinking of hiring you will be alarmed if
you fail to do so. In playing the quitting game, it is therefore necessary
to lavish praise and respect on those whom one is about to quit, while at
the same time emphasizing one's desire to leave. Nobody wants to hire a
person who is contemptuous or disloyal to his present employer. There
is a bond that links all those who have power, even when they're in
competition, and it is wise to respect this.

"MEN MUST ENDURE THEIR GOING HENCE . . ."9

Difficult as it may be to exert power by quitting, it is even more difficult

to take a powerful approach to retirement. To most people, retirement is
the ultimate loss of power, a fear intensified by the fact that it is usually
accompanied by a sharp drop in income. The most interesting power
games are often those played to postpone retirement and those designed
to speed an aging executive on his way.
The best way to postpone retirement is to do nothing. A last-minute,
desperate burst of activity not only attracts attention to you, but is also
likely to make people feel you are a menace to their plans and
ambitions. It is better to cultivate the relaxed and confident demeanor of
an elder statesman: write no memos, enter no arguments, acquire a
reputation as a "peace maker" and, if possible, take up pipe-smoking. It
is prudent to join as many industry groups as possible, and to serve on
every committee, board and association you can, making speeches
whenever possible. It is always difficult for a company to get rid of an
executive when he has become a public figure "on the outside," and
since such activities are mostly meaningless, they threaten nobody at
home. The art of delaying retirement lies in securing the appearance of
power while giving up its reality. To hang on to real power is pointless
and self-defeating—it merely makes it necessary for younger, ambitious
people to drive you out. By conceding real power to them voluntarily
you can not only keep the appearance and the perquisites of power, but
give up most of the worry and work that usually accompanies them.
Those who fear that their power to retain the comforts of business life—
a corner office, a secretary, a liberal expense account, business travel—
is threatened, are usually mistaken; it is their power to make decisions
that arouses antagonism, or to be more exact, their power to limit other
people's growth to power. For this reason, the best way to avoid
retirement is to give up any influence one may have on other people's
salaries, promotions and careers, while holding on to every possible title
and honor.

Needless to say, from the opposite point of view, the best way to
speed an executive's retirement is to keep him involved in power
decisions which no longer concern him, and can only cause him trouble
and aggravation. Ambitious people who want to get rid of an aging
power player are usually reluctant to attack his prerogatives. It seems
brutal to scrutinize the expense account of a man in his sixties, or
withdraw his credit cards, or prevent his flying to Hawaii for a
convention. Company presidents and chairmen are usually fairly near
the retirement age themselves, or past it, and have a natural sympathy
for people of the same age, however much they may dislike them or
wish them gone. The sight of a man in his sixties being shorn of his
privileges can only alarm them; they may agree to his being deprived of
power, but they will not, as a rule, be pleased to see him humiliated or
relieved of his comforts and self-esteem. Past the age of fifty, every
man, however powerful, is inclined to feel, "There, but for the Grace of
God, go I."10
It is therefore much better to lavish respect on anyone you would like
to see retired, while at the same time drawing him into every decision
and difference of opinion, then shifting the final responsibility to him.
At the same time, he can be isolated by setting up committees which
will in fact determine whatever happens, but of which he is not a
member.
The first step in such a game is to suggest that there are all sorts of "day-
to-day" routine matters which the victim doesn't need to be bothered
with. Many a man has discovered too late that a whole new set of
meetings has been taking place on a regular basis, without his having
been invited to join them. "Oh," he will be told, "we didn't think you'd
want to be bothered with all that stuff . . ." In some cases, such meetings
are held informally, over a drink after five-thirty, say, which restricts the
power group to those who are willing to stay on late at the office. This is
an effective tactic, since those who work on into the evening not only get
a reputation for hard work, but also form a kind of inner power circle.
A man who doesn't want to be retired should beware of people
 collecting for "a little chat" at just about the time he is leaving to catch
the commuter train for home. They are usually his executioners.
Other, more subtle, signs can indicate to a man that his time has
come. Promoting his secretary is a move that never fails to indicate the
erosion of his power. It is also possible to produce anxiety by rapidly
changing all the forms and procedures of the office, so that everything
looks unfamiliar to him, including the labels and the letterhead. New
reports, expense-account vouchers, contract forms and information
sheets can quite easily undermine the confidence of an executive
nearing retirement age, and when all else fails, it is always possible to
change everybody's telephone extension number so that he's always
dialing the wrong one.
It is often useful to put a man on the verge of retirement in charge of
such things as pension schemes, profit-sharing plans and employee
benefits. In the first place, such irritating and time-consuming
responsibilities are likely to make him want to go, and the sooner, the
better. But at the same time, a man about to retire is apt to take a more
generous view of company benefits and retirement policies than a
younger executive would, and will therefore do his best to improve
things from the employee's point of view, particularly if he's likely to
benefit from it himself, while the nature of these tasks is sure to make
him think about his own retirement.
In the words of one veteran, "When a man reaches sixty, and the
people around him and below him are in their thirties and forties, there's
bound to be pressure to get him out early. He has power, they want
power. It's as simple as that. If you own the place, you can fight back.
But if you don't, the only thing you can do is to trade power for comfort.
A guy who's willing to become a figurehead can go on forever, but the
trouble is, not many people are content to be figureheads, or know how
to enjoy it. They eat their hearts out because other people are making
decisions, formulating plans, acting on things. It's crazy, but a lot of
quite smart guys would rather be kicked out than kicked upstairs."

Exaggerated deference and extreme rudeness can both be useful in

making a man think about retiring, and it is also possible to make him
feel uncomfortable by constantly referring to pop music stars he has
never heard of, dances he has never learned and resta urants he has
never been to. People under forty discussing things which are absolutely
unfamiliar may go far in persuading a man who is over fifty-five that
he's hopelessly out of touch. It is possible to talk in a very low voice in
an effort to make him believe he is going deaf, though some prefer to
shout in a loud voice as if they were already convinced of the victim's
deafness.
The important thing is to keep the candidate for retirement constantly
on the defensive. If he can be persuaded to talk about the past ("Well,
the way we used to do it was ..."), let him ramble on, then point out that
things are now different. Once you have him defending the past, you
have won. We live in an age when only the present and the future are of
interest, and any reference to past events qualifies a man above the age
of fifty for "the chop," particularly since the errors which took place in
the past are easy to discern, whereas those in the present and future are
as yet invisible.
Astute power-seekers should beware of openly attacking the position
of a man who is close to retirement. The important thing is to get rid of
the individual without destroying the power of his position. If his
position is totally eroded, there is nothing left to inherit, and therefore,
no point to having driven him out. It may be wiser to exaggerate his
importance, in fact—by making his duties seem more necessary and
vital than they really are, it is that much easier to suggest that he's too
old to fulfill them. Many a man suddenly finds himself being taken
seriously at the age of sixty, after a lifetime of relative obscurity.
Everyone nearing retirement age should beware of a last-minute
inflation of his importance; it is the beginning of the end.

Chapter Seven

SYMBOLS
OF
POWER
At last he had attained his goal. The battle was won. It had been a great
labor to subdue this elite, to drill them until they were weary, to tame
the ambitious, win over the undecided, impress the arrogant.

—Hermann Hesse
THE GLASS BEAD GAME

There was a sameness to these men . . . They ate in the same

restaurants, wore the same suits, wore Gucci loafers.

—Zan Thompson

FOOT POWER

You might not think that feet are symbols of power, except in those
paintings of ancient tyrants putting one foot on the chest of a vanquished
enemy, or resting an armored and spurred foot negligently on the tail of
a dying dragon, but sometimes feet tell the whole story. Most people
will only expose the soles of their shoes when they feel themselves to be
in a position of protected Dower or superiority, not because they fear
they may have holes n their shoes, but because the sole of the foot is a
particularly sensitive portion of the anatomy. Even the toughest person
will hesitate before walking barefooted over gravel or hot sand, and
most of us are extremely ticklish—and therefore vulnerable—in this
area. When men cross their legs, they have a tendency to lower their
toes, as if they were protecting the soles of their feet, despite the fact
that this places considerable strain on the muscles and tendons of the
ankle. It's a reflex action, an indication of the fact that we are at our
most comfortable with both feet on the ground, firmly planted, ready to
spring up if we have to.
Watch an executive in action, talking over a problem. He sits back,
one leg crossed over the other, apparently self-assured and relaxed. At
the moment when the discussion becomes serious and difficult, he will
almost always uncross his legs, place both feet on the ground, and lean
forward with his hands on his knees, assuming his position of maximum
power. At this point, the other person has two choices: he can do the
same thing, in which case they will now be hunched forward toward
each other in a mutual combat position, or he can cross his legs and lean
back, expressing indifference and lack of fear at the other's power
stance. Oh yes, our feet give us away: they swing back and forth,
showing impatience or doubt; we tuck them out of sight under the chair
in moments of timidity and fear; we place them solidly before us to
indicate that we're not going to budge or change our minds; we turn the
toes toward each other in a position of maidenly deference when talking
to a very powerful person, and place them far apart, with the toes
pointing outward at a forty-five degree angle to show our contemptuous
superiority.
Power people are very sensitive about feet, perhaps because the
question of what to do with them has only recently re-emerged. In the
past it was a matter of careful etiquette, but the advent of the boxlike
desk in the nineteenth century, which protected a man from his visitors
and employees like a wooden Maginot Line, made foot-behavior and
foot-signals a lost art. Now that desks have become mere tables, often
just a plate-glass or wood shelf on thin chrome legs, feet are once again
painfully visible.* Few people know what to do with them, though most
powerful people prefer to leave them on the floor, where they belong,
and to keep them as still as possible.
What to put on them is another problem. When they were hidden
behind a heavy desk, it was possible for everyone to wear black boots,
sturdy and practical objects, guaranteed to keep the wearer's feet snug
and dry, and indicating power and class only by the quality of the
leather and the perfection of the shine. J. P. Morgan's boots were not
very different from those of his clerks, except that he had a valet to
shine them and make sure that the heels never wore down. It was, in this
sense, if no other, an age of equality. Today, with feet once more out in
the open, they can be used to mark all sorts of social distinctions and to
emphasize a variety of claims to power.
One thing is basic: power people have their shoes polished, or do it
themselves. In all shoe-wearing cultures, and in every age, a dirty shoe
is sign of weakness. Latin American gentlemen of the old school spent
hours sitting in the streets having their shoes shined, and the best place
to see important people lined up is at the shoeshine stand in any big
office building at about nine in the morning. Many powerful people
have a second shoeshine after lunch, when the shoeshine man makes his
afternoon visit to their offices to restore the morning's gloss. At night,
when they go home, they can afford to get their shoes dust and scuffed,
since they are leaving the world of power. This explains why there are
no shoeshine stands at commuter stations, and very few open after five
—nobody needs a shine on the way home.

*Desks can be useful in determining their occupants' style. Many people feel
more comfortable and secure behind a huge, heavy wooden desk, and it is
always easier to do business with such people if you can tempt them out
from behind it and get them to sit on a sofa or chair in the open. If you can't,
then put your hat or brief case on the desk if you want to make them
nervous. Note that people with old-fashioned desks that serve as barriers
almost always leave them to say "yes," and sit behind them to say "no."
Once they have taken refuge behind five-hundredweight of mahogony, you
can't argue with them.
Powerful people generally wear simple shoes—Peal & Co., Ltd., five-
eyelet shoes from Brooks Brothers, for example, and always put the
laces in straight, not crisscrossed, and use round, waxed shoelaces.
Shoes that have square toes, or high heels, or large brass buckles, or
stitching in odd places, or are cut like jodhpur boots, are all definitely
not power symbols, and to be avoided. The investment of sixty or
seventy dollars in a good pair of shoes is a sound move for anyone
interested in power. Since people go to great lengths not to look at other
people's faces, or expose their own to direct scrutiny, they tend to see a
man's shoes more than any other part of him, and when they think of the
person, the image that stays in their minds is that of his shoes.
Recently, loafers with little brass snaffle bit buckles have become
fashionable, and these are all right if they genuinely come from Gucci's,
in New York. Imitations are subtly recognizable, and absolutely out.
David Mahoney, for example, wears black patent leather Guccis, with a
red-and-green cloth stripe and a brass snaffle bit across the instep, and
these are strong symbols of success and confidence, though like all
fashionable objects, they may already be out of date by the time you
have bought a pair. For the moment though, they are acceptable. I
recently heard two businessmen talking in the King Cole bar of the St.
Regis Hotel in New York, and one of them said to the other, "Listen,
don't forget you promised to take me to Gucci and help me buy a pair of
shoes." The second man, wearing his Gucci loafers, of course, nodded
wisely, and replied, "Well sure, I will, but if you need help maybe you're
not ready for Guccis. You can't put Guccis on Florsheim feet, you
know."
 Florsheim shoes! The ultimate foot put-down, along with people who
wear anklet socks, exposing unsightly stretches of skin every time they
cross their legs, almost as terrible as wearing shoes of crisscrossed,
plaited leather in the summer. You understand, the right shoes won't
make you powerful, but you may as well as start somewhere in learning
to read the symbols of power, and shoes are basic.
"PHONE ME IN THE LIMO"

In simpler societies than our own, the symbols of power are instantly
recognizable, whether they consist of a necklace of glass beads or a
crown and scepter. When there is only one visible power structure, the
symbols of power are generally easy to read. Such relatively simple
hierarchies exist even within our larger, more complex society—in the
Army, for example, everyone's relative power is clearly marked, and
every soldier and officer can instantly tell the position of a complete
stranger. In the armed services, a man's career is summarized on his
shoulders, his sleeves and his chest, for all to see, and the same is true
for officers of the law, uniformed postal workers, firemen and teen-aged
youth gangs. This is a simple way to mark differences of power, like the
eagle feather headdress of a Pawnee Indian chief, the gold spurs of a
medieval knight, the brown shoes that used to distinguish naval aviators
in summer tans from ordinary line officers, and a thousand other
peculiarities of dress and tradition.
In our everyday world, the marks of power are necessarily more
ambiguous, and a good deal of the anxiety that is evident in modern life
derives from the constant struggle to guess other people's relative
positions of power. Since we cannot wear stripes on our sleeves or stars
on our shoulders, we are obliged to invent more subtle distinctions, and
can only hope they will be recognized for what they're meant to be.
The problem is that one person's power symbols may be meaningless
to the next person: it's all a matter of guesswork, and as a result even the
smallest things become important to someone. One executive I know
has a firm, if unreasonable, prejudice igainst French cuffs, another
despises people who wear button-!own collars, still another, a major
figure in book publishing,
elieves that no man who wears a belt instead of suspenders can be
trusted. Most of these prejudices are totally irrational, though when all is
said and done, it is probably just as sensible to promote a man because
he shares your taste in shirts (or imitates it) as for any other reason.
However, the important thing is that these prejudices do not form a
system that can be readily deciphered: the seeker after power must guess
what the significant signs are, and guess right. Since most people's
fixations in this area are based on dim, ancestral memories of what their
fathers used to wear, or what they were taught to wear at school or
college, or the notion that anything that doesn't come from Brooks
Brothers is flashy and untrustworthy, power signals outside the armed
services are often baffling, and in an age when women are beginning to
fill positions of power, sometimes even incomprehensible.
Because they are baffling does not mean they do not exist. David
Mahoney's enormous office, with a view of the midtown Manhattan
skyline and both rivers, is a symbol of power, and an obvious one, but
so are his carefully cut blue suit, his Gucci loafers, his midwinter tan
and his command of a limousine. The "limo" syndrome is, in fact, a very
common barometer of power. On one level, a limousine is of course a
comfortable and desirable way of moving around town, one of the
obvious prerogatives of success, but on another, it is important because
it clearly and instantly defines your rank. As one senior executive told
me, "When I get into the limo on a rainy evening in December, and look
out the window, it isn't speed that I think about. For God's sake, the
subway would be faster. No, I say to myself, 'Those people out there are
getting cold and wet, and I'm in here warm and dry.' I had to go through
a lot of shit to get where I am, but when I look at people waiting for a
bus in the rain, it makes it all worthwhile. They know I've made it. I
know I've made it. You can't beat a limo for that."
Even among those who have limousines, there are distinctions of
power. Rented limousines are less prestigious than ones which are
owned, Rolls Royces carry more prestige than Cadillacs, and nothing
quite equals a Mercedes 600 with the chrome painted black and the rear
windows tinted to make the occupant invisible. Telephones in
limousines have become so commonplace that they are no longer a
significant power symbol, though it is interesting to note that several
radio supply companies offer dummy radiotelephone aerials at $19.95
for your "limo"—they aren't connected to anything! The "limo" game is
much like any other, after all. One businessman I know rents a
limousine whenever he needs one, but always finds out the driver's first
name and slips him ten dollars. He then will say, "Listen, Harry, I think
we'll take the Midtown Tunnel today, right?"—to imply that it's his car
and chauffeur, not a rented one. He also sits up front, which tends to
give him an air of proprietorship, as well as the illusion of familiarity
with the driver. With power symbols, it's attention to detail that counts.
I have myself seen a respectable businessman tip the bartender of a big
hotel five dollars at lunchtime, with the instruction that when he
returned in the evening, the bartender was to say, "Good evening, Mr.
X, you'll have your usual?"
Not being in the armed services, we have to manufacture our own
system of power signals, using whatever opportunities and materials are
at hand, searching for ways to prove that we are, in the words of a West
Coast producer, "very important people."

The symbols of power are all around us, crying out to be recognized,
changing with each new fashion in dress and decoration, becoming;
more widespread and complex as more people reach for power. When I
first began to work in publishing, one telephone was considered ample
for each person. In the case of very busy and important people, the
instrument itself might have a row of buttons, allowing the user to buzz
his (or her) secretary and to have two or three extra lines. Over the
years, the telephone has blossomed as a power symbol, and in the same
office that used to contain one instrument, unobtrusively planted on the
desk, there are now four—one on the desk, one at either end of the sofa,
and a bright red push-button private telephone, that doesn't go through
the switchboard, on a stand beside the desk. The number of lines
available has not increased, unless you include the unlisted private
phone, nor is there any real increase in efficiency, but the sight of all
those telephones certifies that this is a "power center," where instant and
constant communication is necessary and available.
Telephones are not necessarily a convenience—for many they are a
prop. I know a good many people who arrange to have their secretaries
call them at lunch so that a telephone can be brought to the table and
plugged in, and what's more, won't eat in a restaurant where they can't
have a phone at the table. One top executive in New York has a private
bathroom with a telephone on the wall next to the toilet, which is
certainly a convenience for a busy man, but not a very public symbol of
power. Another major corporation executive has telephones concealed
in small green, rustic boxes attached to trees on his estate, so that he can
make calls and receive them even when he's walking to the pool or the
boathouse, the insistent ringing rising above the gentle woodland noises
of the birds and the wind. Once people have associated telephones with
prestige, there's no end to what they can do. There are radiotelephones
built into handsome leather brief cases, which sound a soft, distinctive
hum when you're being called, and sell for just over $2,000—well worth
it in case somebody rings you on your way from your office to your
"limo." More plebeian telephone addicts carry rolls of dimes, fresh from
the bank, in their pockets, and set up shop in telephone booths,
desperately anxious "to keep in touch" at all times.
The telephone is a perfect example of how we make do with what
we've got to create power symbols. What was invented as a mundane
and unattractive convenience, we have made into a complex mark of
status and power, as if by instinct. If we have a visitor in our office, we
can demean him by accepting telephone calls while he's talking, or
impress him by saying, "Excuse me, it's the chairman of the board
calling"—or the President of the
United States, or "the Coast" or a call from overseas—and finally, if we
want to flatter him, we can say, "Hold all my calls, whoever it is."
Nothing puts a person in their place better than carrying on a dialogue
with a man who has a telephone receiver cocked between his ear and his
shoulder, and who says, "Keep right on talking, I'm listening, I just have
to take this call."
The telephone can effectively establish your power over the people in
your presence particularly since the instrument is in your hands. They
are limited to talking to you, or filling in the time by making whispered
small-talk between themselves, while you can be connected to anyplace
in the world, or place calls to people far more important than your
visitors. You don't even have to place the calls. You can simply tell your
secretary, "No calls, but if Henry Kissinger calls me back, put him
through."
Years ago I was invited to lunch by a world-famous motion picture
director who had expressed "interest," as a fleeting and ill-informed
whim is called in the trade, in an idea of mine, and had vaguely suggested
I might like to fly to Los Angeles and "develop" it. He summoned me to
lunch at The Four Seasons restaurant in New York at twelve forty-five,
together with his lawyer, my lawyer and two studio flacks. At the
appointed time, the five of us were seated by the reflecting pool, but our
host was conspicuously absent. A captain arrived from time to time to
bring us bulletins—"He's on his way," "He's due any moment," "He says
to have a drink"—and to bring us fresh rounds of drinks. By one-fifteen,
everybody at the table was glazed with fatigue and alcohol, and any
appetite they might have had was quenched by having consumed several
baskets of rolls, bread-sticks and croissants and a pound of butter.
Nobody, however, iad had the courage to order.
When the great man finally arrived at one-thirty, unapologetic md
cheerful, he sat down, and before saying a word to us, ordered
telephone to be brought to the table. As soon as it was plugged in,
e had himself connected to his chauffeur, then cruising the lidtown
streets in the "limo," and proceeded to give a series of animated
directions, most of them having to do with suits that had to be picked up
from the tailor, or taken to the cleaners. Communication from his
luncheon table to his limousine having been established, he placed a call
to the West Coast, and then, cradling the receiver to his ear, appeared to
notice us for the first time. "Say," he said, "Have you guys ordered yet?
I just have to phone my wife, but why don't you all have another round
of drinks?"*

Few power symbols are as versatile as the telephone. Let us say that it
is necessary to show a business associate that you are still alive and
employed, but that for various reasons you do not much want to talk to
him, perhaps because he will then pin you down to a lunch date. Or
perhaps there's a deal you don't want to say No to, can't make up your
mind to say Yes to, and don't want to lose for lack of having expressed
interest. By means of the telephone, you can keep your optionaopen for
a considerable period of time—you simply telephone the other person at
a time when he or she is guaranteed to be out, lunchtime for example,
leaving a message to say you called. You are now in the position of
having initiated a telephone exchange; whatever happens, you can now
say, "I've been trying to reach you." When the other person calls back,
you do not accept the call; you ask your secretary to say you're already
speaking to someone and will call back shortly. You then return the call
the next day, once again choosing a time when you can be sure the other
person won't be there—say, five minutes before he or she gets to the
office in the morning. When your call is returned, you are, of course, in
a meeting. With very little effort, this ex-
*A refinement of this game is now available to patrons of New York's La
Borsa di Roma restaurant, which provides the services of a secretary, Ms.
Diana Danar, at no additional charge. Customers can dictate letters, place
overseas telephone calls, make airline reservations and order birthday
presents for their wives right at the table, without, in the owner's words,
"letting the tortellini get cold." There's no end in sight. Yesterday I saw two
men lunching together, and each had his own telephone plugged in at the
table! One wonders why they bothered to have lunch together at all.
change can be kept going for at least a week without the two parties ever
making verbal contact, yet nobody can accuse the initiator of the
exchange of not trying. On the contrary, as the person who started the
series of calls, the initiator gets credit for attempting to open
communication, even if it never takes place. The person who receives a
telephone call is always in an inferior position of power to the person
who placed it. This explains why people with a sense of power do not
like answering services or mechanical devices. People only have to
phone and leave a message, and you become responsible for getting
back to them. The proper power response to a call you don't want to take
is to have your secretary ask the caller to try you at home after six-thirty,
then make sure that nobody is at home to take a message. The moment a
message has been taken, the ball is in your court, and all further
responsibility for completing the exchange is yours.
As a general rule, the power game in telephoning is to have the
maximum ability to place telephone calls together with the minimum
possibility of receiving them—the flow, in other words, should always
be outward. When input equals or exceeds output, there is a loss of
power. This is not as difficult a trick as it sounds. The more telephone
calls you make, the less time is available for people to reach you. By
carrying this procedure to its extreme, it is possible to delay almost any
matter until it has ceased to be of importance to either party without ever
being accused of negligence or indifference.
One peculiar aspect of telephone power is the fact that a touch of the
dial or buttons defiles. Among power-conscious people, it is all right to
pick up a telephone receiver, but not to actually place a call. No matter
how hard the telephone company's researchers work to make dialing
easier (and with area codes, direct dialing and push-buttons, it could
hardly be easier), there is still a general feeling that you lose power
unless you can have someone else do the fingerwork. In part this stems
from the power player's traditional reluctance to pick up the receiver
until the party he or she is calling is actually on the line and waiting, a
power game so familiar that we hardly even notice it any more, but
there is also a slightly subliminal feeling that dialing a telephone is
manual labor of a kind. With rare exceptions, power people do not dial
telephones, use Xerox machines, add up figures themselves, type or
sharpen pencils. The first sign of a rise to power is often creeping
helplessness—people who have dialed their own telephones for years, or
rushed to the Xerox machine to run off a copy of a letter, not only won't
do these things any more, but even claim not to know how. As one
secretary told me, "We had a guy here, an assistant manager who started
in the mailroom, where one of his jobs, actually, was looking after all
the copying machines. When they didn't work, you phoned down to the
mailroom and he came up and fixed it. A few days ago he was
promoted, and the next thing I know, he's standing by my desk holding a
piece of paper and he says, 'Could you run off some copies of this for
me? I don't know how to use the machine.' He's forgotten how to dial a
telephone too. Until his new secretary arrives, he wanders around asking
people to place calls for him. He's not so dumb. The less you have to do
for yourself, the more power you have."

STATUS MARKS—"A GOLD-PLATED THERMOS IS A MAN'S BEST

FRIEND"

The more elaborate and expensive pieces of office machinery are

seldom power symbols—merely knowing how to use them, or even
where they are, indicates a low power rating. Electronic pocket
calculators, when they were first introduced, had a certain cachet, and it
is still possible to use them in negotiations by performing what appear to
be complicated problems in higher mathematics whenever money is
being discussed. When turning down someone's request for a $1,250
raise, for example, it is useful to do a quick calculation on your pocket
machine and ask if he or she has any idea what percentage of the present
salary the raise would be, a question which is irrelevant, but unanswer-
able by anyone who doesn't have their own calculator at hand. Slide
rules serve much the same purpose, and have the advantage of taking
longer to use.
 If calculators never quite caught on as power symbols, it is partly
because they seem related to adding machines, and thus associated with
supermarket checkers and accounting clerks, and partly because people
in power aren't much interested in mathematics—they're interested in
winner-take-all, not profit-and-loss. If they can force you to agree with
their view of a situation or a deal, they can usually rely on having
someone else work out the details and be pretty sure of making a profit
somewhere along the way. An obvious attention to mathematics seems
to them small-minded and self-limiting. "Once a guy pulls OUt a
Calculator," says a well-known negotiator, "I know I've got him. He's
interested in the mathematics of the deal, which means he's already sold
on the idea and the substance of it. Guys who do that never stop to think
whether the deal is worth making in the first place. They're too busy
working out how much money they can make, or what it's going to
cost."
An office calculator on the desk is therefore a sign of weakness and
overattention to detail. On the other hand, Presidential example has
turned yellow legal pads into power symbols, cheap as they are. By
sitting back and writing everything down on a yellow legal pad while
the other person is talking, you are in the position of keeping the record,
of having the facts. Nothing is more inhibiting than the sight of
someone carefully writing down everything you say, and many quite
powerful negotiators are thrown off-balance when faced with an
opponent who calmly nods and writes away industriously. A further
advantage to the use of yellow legal pads is that they provide you with a
perfect excuse to avoid looking at the person who is talking, thus hiding
your own reactions—so long as your eyes are on the paper, you give
nothing away. What is more, you can punctuate the discussion by
tearing off a page when you've come to the end of it, a noise
which serves as a warning that the meeting has gone on for too long or
no longer interests you.
People who use yellow legal pads in power games nearly always
cross one leg over the other and sit well back, so as to hide the surface
of the pad. Secrecy is essential to the proper use of the pad, all the more
so if it is merely being used for doodling or calculating one's income tax
during a contract negotiation. Gifted power players have long since
learned that when a man who has been assiduously writing on a yellow
legal pad stops writing, he has made up his mind. This is the moment to
shut up. Noah Levine, a well-known labor lawyer and a gifted
negotiator, has developed the use of the yellow legal pad into a fine art.
"Look," he says, "on one level, it's just a working tool for lawyers,
right? But on another, it's a weapon. Everyone is talking away, and
you're nodding wisely and writing on your pad. If the other guys aren't
writing things down too, pretty soon you're in control of the situation.
When someone else is writing things down, I watch his pencil. If it's
moving fast, he's interested, but not very; if it slows down, he's getting
more interested; if he begins to underline things heavily, he's either
getting angry or preparing to say no; if the pencil moves erratically, in
circles or zigzags, the guy has lost interest altogether, he's doodling, he's
just letting you talk yourself out, jerking you off; and if he stops writing,
he's decided what he's going to do. It's important to watch for that
moment. You may have a guy ready to sign, but if you go on presenting
your case after his pencil has stopped, you can blow the deal. It's like the
old salesman's saying: 'When you've made the sale, shut up.' Another
thing: if two guys are negotiating and they both have legal pads, it's a
Mexican stand-off. Nothing gets done, because both parties are busy
protecting themselves. When you're selling or persuading, you just don't
use it—you have to go in empty-handed. It's a classic defensive
weapon."

Dictating machines are in a somewhat different category; at one time

they had a certain prestige, since their presence on a desk implied at
least that the person had the use of a secretary and needed to answer a
good deal of correspondence. They can no longer be said, however, to
confer any real prestige. A recent IBM advertisement shows three
"executives" (interestingly enough, a middle-aged white man, a young
woman and a black man) sitting at identical desks in a row, each
dictating into a small microphone. Two young women at smaller, less
impressive desks, are busily transcribing their dictation, by means of a
centralized system. The office contains no status marks of any kind,
except that the woman executive has a bowl of red carnations on her
desk. Far from serving as power symbols, the "dictating input system"
more or less puts the "executives" and the secretaries on the same level,
and indeed the only happy, smiling face in the picture is that of one of
the secretaries—everyone else looks like a zombie, In real life, of
course, each executive would manage to have distinguished his or her
desk from the others' in some way, and one of them would be leaning on
the smiling secretary's modesty-paneled, formica desk, persuading her to
type his memo first. Nobody in the picture seems to have a pencil or a
yellow legal pad or a. chair for visitors—it is an egalitarian view of
executive work, far removed from any recognizable reality.
The only IBM product that serves as a power symbol is the IBM
Selectric II typewriter, provided that it's used by the executive's
secretary, of course, and also provided that it's equipped with a carbon
ribbon and Bookface Academic type. Letters typed on such a machine
have more authority than those which are not, and most executives
would far rather fight to get their secretary the right kind of IBM
typewriter than a raise for her. In some companies, the use of such
machines is restricted to very senior executives, and certain typefaces
are reserved for the most powerful people—the chairman of the board or
the president, for example. Such small signs as these are quite often
reliable indicators of power. A woman I know, who had asked for a
$10,000-a-year raise, was offered $5,000, an IBM typewriter for her
secretary and the right to have her name printed on her office stationery.
"I accepted the deal," she told me, "silly as it sounds. Above a certain
level, they can only give you so much, and a lot of what you're offered
is symbolic. All the little things, like your own letterhead, or the right to
fly first-class, or a private telephone, count for something. The trick is to
find out what's important to the people who are at the top. If the people
who make up the inner power circle all use Pica Elite type for their
letters, then you can be sure it means something when they take away
your secretary's typewriter and bring back one with Pica Elite. It's not
just a sign of acceptance, it's a kind of marker, a promise that you're
being thought of, and will eventually get what you want in terms of
money, even if it can't be done right away. You have to read the signs.
"The first place I worked, the power symbol was a gold-plated water
Thermos. Some people had them, some people didn't, but you couldn't
just go out and buy one. That would have undermined the system, it
would have been an insult, an act of revolution. At a certain point, the
office manager simply put a gold-plated Thermos on your desk, with a
little tray and two glasses, and that was that. I never found out who gave
the order—maybe she just knew—but a guy who hoped for a big raise,
say $5,000, and deserved it, and who only got let's say, $2,500, would
get this Thermos, as if the management were saying, 'Don't worry, we'll
take care of you as soon as we can, here's our marker.' Other places, it
used to be the key to the executive washroom. That was a very big deal
in a lot of places in the fifties, and I remember that my ex-husband was
ecstatic when he found an envelope on his desk one morning with the
key in it. That wasn't all. Once you had the key, the head of the
mailroom put a clean towel in your desk drawer every day—no more
paper towels from the dispenser! These days, the executive washroom
bit has pretty much gone out of style, maybe because it automatically
excludes women, maybe because in the new office buildings the real
power sign is your own bathroom, with a shower.
"Nobody is immune. I know one guy who owned his own company and
was being wooed by a big conglomerate. They offered him everything
they could think of, stock, a lifetime seat on the board of directors, use
of the company plane, a limo—he turned it all down. Then they offered
him one thing more: a couple of floors in a new building, with a private
bathroom—a bathroom with a real bath, and a shower, and a heated
towel rack!—and a private elevator. That did it. He accepted. Afterward,
we were talking and he was a little sad. 'It's as if I'd sold my own child,'
he told me, 'but I couldn't help it. It wasn't so much the money —I'm
already a rich man, and in a real sense I'll have less power, because
they'll have control. But there was something about the idea of a full-
sized elevator all to myself, an elevator with just one button in it that
only goes to my office, that I couldn't resist. It was like being offered the
chance to play God.' "
At the top, the chance to play God is perhaps the greatest reward of
all. Nobody imagines that a corporation's profits will be significantly
increased by using a helicopter to transport the chairman of the board
from his home in Connecticut to the mid-town heliport and back, nor
can it be argued that the convenience of such an arrangement is worth
the enormous cost. As a symbol of power, however, it can hardly be
improved upon. "I didn't know how rich and successful I was,"
commented one company's chairman, "until I got into our new
helicopter and took off from my own lawn."
For others, the symbols of ultimate power are less grandiose. One
company president realized he had "made it to the top" when he put
down his brief case, never to pick it up again. "When you're in
management," he says, "you carry a brief case to meetings, and the brief
case, in a funny way, is more important than you are. You go there with
reports, contracts, documents, files, information, and your role is to
interpret them or deliver them. Someone else could take the same brief
case full of material; you're really a kind of thinking messenger boy at
$100,000 a year. But when you have real power, all they want is you.
You come with nothing in your hands because what you're bringing isn't
expertise, or information, but the right to say yes or no. The guy who
has the power is the one who walks in empty-handed. The ones with the
attache cases are spear carriers—they can argue the facts, present the
case, set the parameters of the deal, but the guy without one has the
power."
Of course there is a progression in the significance of brief cases as
there is in anything else. The bulkier the case, the less power its carrier
usually has, the lowest power status being that of a salesman's sample
case, a big, boxlike piece of luggage in heavy vinyl. Attache cases that
open up to reveal a complete desk, with files and a blotter, are only
useful for impressing elderly ladies on airplanes. Elegant, thin attache
cases, however expensive and magnificent, always look like
somebody's birthday present to a young executive on the make. Brief
cases with embossed patterns on them, whether genuine Vuitton or not,
are meaningless as displays of power. All one can say is that a man
making less than $50,000 ought to carry an ordinary leather brief case
that opens at the top and has two handles, and that it should be old,
battered and much-traveled; a man making more than $50,000 but less
than $100,000 should carry a thin leather portfolio, the simpler the
better; a man making more than $100,000 should never carry anything.
As Richard L. Simon, the publisher and co-founder of Simon and
Schuster, once said to an editor who was struggling home with a heavy
brief case full of manuscripts and contracts, while Simon stood empty-
handed in the hall, waiting for the elevator, "You editor; me publisher."
When in doubt, it is best to carry anything you need in a plain manila
mailing envelope; this suggests that you don't normally carry anything at
all, but have been obliged to take some documents along with you at the
last moment. By contrast, a brief case, even when it's empty, suggests
that you make a habit of lugging bulky work around with you like a
donkey.
It should be noted that women executives nearly always carry brief
cases. Theirs is a different position—having only recently emerged as a
power group, they feel the need to carry an unmistakable masculine
symbol of authority. A woman with a brief case is automatically
accorded executive power status, provided she does not also carry a
handbag.

One widespread use of symbols in business is as incentives to better

performance. An excellent example is Ewing Kauffman's system for
encouraging his salesmen to expand their sales of Marion Laboratories'
products. Kauffman, whose maxim is "Produce or get out," is a master
salesman himself, who has pyramided a $5,500 investment in a pill for
allieviating fatigue into a vast corporation and a personal fortune in
excess of $150,000,000—a fortune built up in part by the idea of
grinding up oyster shells discarded by food processors to make into a
calcium supplement pill, but mostly on an instinctive knowledge of how
to motivate people to perform. Although he sometimes calls executives
in and tells them that before they leave his office one of the three things
will happen—they will be fired, will quit or will change—Kauffman's
real genius in getting people to deliver for him lies in making them
accept a system of symbolic rewards as finely structured as those of a
European monarchy.
Fortune reported that "Many of the rewards for performing at Marion
have as much symbolic as monetary value. A man who increases his
sales enough to win a big bonus also wins a Marion signet ring. If he
wins rings for two years, plus a national or regional sales award, he
becomes a member of the Marion Eagles. The dozen or so salesmen
who are Eagles are entitled to special blazers, stationery, and calling
cards, as well as extra holidays, and a company-purchased Buick
Centurion (run-of-the-mill salesmen drive Fords, Chevrolets, or
Plymouths). An Eagle who wins three rings can become eligible to enter
the even more lofty ranks of the Marion M Club, which also has about a
dozen members. M Clubbers drive Oldsmobile 98's and are entitled to
other perquisites, including the "bumping privilege," which allows them
to take the seat of any Marion officer, including Kauffman, at company
banquets and other functions."1
These marks of approbation are duplicated, in varying forms, in
almost every large company. At National Liberty Life Insurance, there
are invitations to "Inspiration Breaks" in the company cafeteria, at
which astronauts, sports champions and evangelists encourage the
executives to "Come to Christ," and explain that the company's "senior
partner is the Lord"; special status attaches to meetings in what amounts
to a secluded prayer retreat, where, as one executive put it, "When we
have a problem, we pray." 2 At Holiday Inns' corporate headquarters in
Memphis senior executives are presented with "great sign lapel buttons"
(replicas of a Holiday Inn signboard), a greenbound book on
"Attitudes," listing 104 "positive personality traits," and invited to attend
"executive fellowship breakfasts" on Wednesdays at 7:30 A.M., presided
over by what may be the only "corporate chaplain" in American
business, The Rev. W. A. ("Dub") Nance.3

FURNITURE

Office furnishings have strong symbolic value. Take file cabinets —in
themselves, they are meaningless. Most executives, in fact, place them
out of sight, in their secretaries' offices or cubicles. Put a lock on the
filing cabinet, however, and it becomes a power symbol, however
unsightly and bulky. When you want to take a file out, you have to walk
over to it and unlock it, the implication being that it contains material of
great importance and confidentiality. Given a lock, the filing cabinet can
become a central power symbol, well worth having in your own office,
no matter how much space it takes up.
Furniture can tell one a great deal about the person. A New York
Times reporter remarked of one tycoon that "Callers, supplicants and
salesmen who make their way to [the chairman's] 42nd floor office get
swallowed up and find themselves peering between their knees at him,"
helplessly sunk in in deep, soft chairs.4 This is a fairly common power
game, and can be observed in many offices. One young lady, job-
hunting, noted that almost every senior executive in the publishing
business had a low sofa. "You go in," she said, "and they ask you to sit
down on the sofa, which is about four feet lower than his desk chair, so
he's looking down at you, and you're looking up from nowhere, with
your ass practically on the floor and your knees up in the air. You
couldn't arrange things better to make a person seem really
unimportant."
This is not altogether true. There are more elaborate ways of making
people feel unimportant. Harry Cohn, the tyrannical president of
Columbia Pictures, designed his office in imitation of Mussolini's, a
huge, elongated room with the desk at the far end, raised above floor
level. "The portal to the position of power was a massive sound-proofed
door which had no knob and no keyhole on the outside. It could only be
opened by a buzzer operated from Cohn's or his secretary's desk . . . In
later years Glenn Ford noted discoloration of the door jamb at mid-level;
it had been soiled by the sweat of innumerable palms of those who had
passed through to an audience with Harry Cohn."5
This is a somewhat extreme example of power decoration, but even
lesser power players will usually arrange their offices so that their
visitors are obliged to sit in as much discomfort as possible. It is
particularly helpful to make sure that all the ashtrays are just slightly out
of reach so that visitors sitting in low chairs and unable to rise have to
stretch awkwardly to dispose of their cigarette ash.
The disposition of furniture is a better indication of power than the
furniture itself. Some offices run to luxurious decoration, others do not,
but the scale of ] uxury is more likely to be dependent upon the
management's whim than the occupant's status. At Playboy's Chicago
headquarters, for instance, even the junior editors have "plush, cork-
paneled hideaways, many equipped with soft chairs, stereo sets and
stunning secretaries,"6 an atmosphere of sybaritic luxury that emanates
from Hugh Hefner's vision of himself, rather than from any power they
may have.
Power lies in how you use what you have, not in the accouter-ments
per se. All the leather and chrome in the world will not replace a truly
well-thought-out power scheme. A large office is pointless unless it is
arranged so that a visitor has to walk the length of it before getting to
your desk, and it is valuable to put as many objects as possible in his
path—coffee tables, chairs and sofas, for example—to hinder his
progress. However small the office, it is important to have the visitor's
chair facing toward you, so that you are separated by the width of your
desk. This is a much better power position than one in which the visitor
sits next to the desk, even though it may make access to your desk
inconvenient for you. When a small office is very narrow (and most are)
it is often useful to have the desk placed well forward in the room, thus
minimizing the space available for the visitor, and increasing the area in
which it is possible for you to retreat, at least psychologically. Thus, in a
typical small office, the alternative desk/chair relationships would look
like this—

Of these possibilities, number three is by far the strongest power

position for the occupant. Behind his desk, he has left himself plenty of
room, so that he isn't likely to feel that his back is against the wall when
arguing with a caller or a colleague, while his visitor is tightly enclosed,
with little psychological space and breathing room. In drawing number
two, the visitor is placed in an aggressive position, having more space
than the occupant, and being further forward in the room. In drawing
number one, the occupant has no power position at all, and is obliged to
turn to his right at an uncomfortable angle to talk to the visitor. Power,
let it be remembered, moves in direct lines. (Attempts to do without
desks altogether, though popular in the recording and the broadcasting
businesses, have never caught on. The desk performs a useful social
function in power terms that is hard to eliminate.)
In larger offices, power arrangements are more varied. Most people
prefer to divide their offices into two separate sections, one containing a
couch, which can be used for informal, semisocial discussions, where
decisions do not actually have to be made, and the other containing the
usual desk and chair, for "pressure situations" and confrontations, in
which the whole object is to reach a firm decision. In entering such an
office, it is therefore very important to notice in what area the occupant
wishes you to take a seat. If you have come to negotiate a deal, and he
moves toward the sofa, you can be fairly sure that he has decided to stall
you; if he asks you to sit at his desk, you can be equally sure that he is
ready for serious negotiation. At the same time, you can influence him.
By firmly seating yourself at the desk, you make it clear that you want
an answer; by sitting on the sofa, you demonstrate that you are not eager
to conclude the deal. A certain tug-of-war is often evident when the two
parties have different goals in mind, the "host" trying to push the visitor
toward the sofa, with the plea that he will be "more comfortable" there,
the visitor obstinately making his way toward the desk, or vice versa, of
course.
Some people are past masters at this game. When he comes to my
office, a well-known lawyer of my acquaintance always manages to sit
on the sofa between me and the telephone on the end table when he
wants to persuade me to do something I would just as soon not do. In
the first place, he has trapped me in a semisocial position, by getting us
both on the sofa; in the second place, he has effectively cut me off from
the telephone, so that I can't be interrupted by a call. In this position, he
has me at his mercy—we are seated side by side, at the same level, both
facing the window and away from desk and telephone. When he wants
to sell me on something, he sits on the chair in front of my desk, then
gradually works it around until it's beside mine, so that he's moved to
my side of the barrier, so to speak. There are several ways in which he
assures himself of this position, the first being to put his portfolio, hat
and coat on the sofa, so that we can't sit on it, the second being to plead
mild deafness, so that he has an excuse to come to my side of the desk,
which implies an invasion of my territory. An attempt to prevent his
moving closer by buying an armchair so massive and heavy as to be
practically immovable failed; he pleads a bad back and asks the
secretary to find him a simple, straight chair, which he then places
exactly where he wants it.
This subtle use of space can best be understood by seeing how the
two different areas, the semisocial and the pressure, relate to each other
spatially—

Typical office divided into "pressure area" and "semisocial area." If

the occupant is intent on serious business, he should try to place his
visitor in position A, squarely facing the desk. If he wants to delay a
decision or placate a visitor, he should try to place him in position D
 on sofa. An aggressive visitor will either move his chair to position
B, or assume position C on sofa, forcing the occupant to sit at D, cut
off by an intruder from his own telephone. Chair E is the weakest
power position, and is reserved for unimportant third parties. Note
that the coffee table separates one area from the other, and that the
sofa should be as low as possible.

Still larger offices are sometimes divided into three areas, one end
being set aside for a large conference table, with chairs around it. This is
frequently the case with the offices of chairmen of the board, and is
usually a sign that they want to maintain control over the board by
holding its meetings on their own territory, rather than having them in a
separate board room. As a general rule, boards that meet in an office a
corner of which is used as a board meeting area have less power and
autonomy than those that meet in a separate board room, and are to that
extent less valuable to be on.
 Board-room tables, it should be noted, are almost never round, since
it is necessary to have a very precise gradation of power, and above all,
imperative that the most important person, usually the chairman, should
sit at the end next to the window, with his back to it, while the second
most important person, usually the president or chief executive officer,
should sit to his right. If the latter sits at the opposite end of the table
(playing "mother," so to speak, in dining-table terms) he not only has
the sun in his eyes, but is almost always placing himself in an adversary
position vis-a-vis the chairman, a sign that there is either a power
struggle going on between them, or the likelihood that one will develop.
If the chairman has an armchair and all the rest have straight chairs, it is
an indication that the company is run along firm, authoritarian lines. If
all the chairs are the same, the prospects for acquiring power are
probably much better.
Even bathrooms can matter. It is obviously best to have a private
bathroom in your office, second-best to be close to a bathroom, and
worst to be miles away from one. As one literary agent said, in
explaining why he wanted a best-selling author moved from his present
publisher to another, "He should have a nice office to come and visit,
you know, someplace where he can sit down in a social way when he
wants without feeling he's in an office. The bathroom should be in the
same office, you know? If it's in the hall, it's a little less good. Where he
is now, he has to go down the hall to wash his hands when he visits, it's
not so nice."

Desks can tell us a great deal about people's power quotient. The
objects most people place on their desks are not there by accident, after
all, and usually give some clue to the power status of the occupant. One
successful conglomerator was described as having "his desk peculiarly
arranged—with a window at the back—so that outdoor light all but
blinds the visitor while striking two polished glass paperweights on his
desk, giving an impression that you have come under the scrutiny of two
translucent orbs, that your thoughts are being read and your capabilities
assayed in a second or two."7
Desk sets—usually a pen and pencil set in a marble or onyx base—
used to be potent power symbols, perhaps because of their phallic
appearance, but they have been eclipsed, partly because of the
popularity of the ubiquitous felt-tip marker pen, and mostly because too
many people finally acquired a set. Framed diplomas are definitely out
as power symbols, and so are stuffed fish, family photographs,
children's paintings, mezzotint engravings of Harvard Yard in 1889, all
posters, Audubon prints (unless they're originals), 37mm. cannon shells
converted into paperweights, anything made of plastic or lucite and
ashtrays stolen from famous restaurants or hotels. Simplicity is the best
way of suggesting power. It's also useful to maintain a certain amount of
clutter, just enough to make it clear that you're busy, but no so much as
to suggest you're a slob. A nice touch is to leave out two or three red
folders marked "Confidential" and to push them out of sight once any
visitor has noticed them. Stacks of magazines give a good impression,
particularly if they have slips of paper inserted in them, as if for future
reference. Care should be taken, however, to ensure that they aren't such
magazines as Playboy or Penthouse—Foreign Affairs carries
considerable prestige, Psychology Today suggests an interest in
alternative life-styles, a large stack of Fortunes looks very good, and
Forbes gives the impression of a serious interest in money, never a bad
thing. Television sets have become popular as power symbols, perhaps
because the late Lyndon B. Johnson had three of them in his office (so
he could see himself on all three channels at once). A television set in
the office is supposed to connote a burning interest in current events and
world affairs (nobody assumes the owner is watching reruns of I Love
Lucy during office hours), and also implies that the occupant of the
office works at odd and irregular hours, always a sign of power.
Indeed, semidomestic furnishings are very good power symbols,
since they suggest the office is a kind of home away from home, not just
a place in which one comes to work from nine to five on weekdays.
Even people who go home religiously at five-thirty like to give the
impression that they often stay to eight or nine at night, which explains
the popularity of radios, clock radios, bars, small refrigerators, blenders,
heating pads, exercise poles and Health-O-Matic scales, all of which I
have seen in people's offices. Electric hot plates, on the other hand, are
out, since they imply you haven't enough authority to send your sec-
retary out for coffee.
A special category of office furnishing would have to be established
for my friend Tim Hennessey, a successful sales executive who had a
convertible sofa bed installed in his office. This was a doubly potent
power symbol, since it suggested at once that he had to work late
enough to spend the night in the office, and that his sexual successes
with the office staff justified his having a sofa bed handy. To the best of
my knowledge, it was never opened, but he acquired a valuable
reputation as a hard worker and a daring cocksman, and became,
overnight as it were, a legendary figure. Hennessey also had a lock fitted
to his private telephone, a nice, small touch which certainly impressed
many people, and a rheostat switch under his desk so that he could dim
the lights, partly because he believed it would make it easier to carry out
a seduction, partly because he liked to think he could persuade the more
elderly executives that they were going blind by al-ternatingly dimming
and brightening the lights during a meeting. He was also the first person
in publishing to have three wall clocks, one for New York time, one for
California time, and one for London time, suggesting an international
scope to his job which was purely imaginary.
TIME POWER

Clocks and watches are in fact the ultimate power symbols; for time, in
a very real sense, is power.
For people who make an hourly wage, time is money in a direct
sense. Analysts, for example, inevitably see the day as being divided
into so many hourly sessions (fifty-five minutes actually) at so much an
hour. Freudian analysts tend to maintain a certain power over their
patients by not having a clock visible—the patient knows when his hour
is up when the analyst tells him it is, thus intensifying the analyst's
control over the patient, who can hardly look at his watch and is
therefore kept in suspense, unsure of how much time he has left to drag
out a boring dream or compress a whole, rich life experience into a few
minutes.
The greatest compliment a busy executive can pay to a visitor is to
take off his watch ostentatiously and place it—face down— on the desk.
It's a way of saying, "My time belongs to you, for as long as you need
me." Alternatively, taking off your watch and placing it face up on your
desk is a way of announcing that you're a busy man and can't spare
much time for your visitor's business, that he'd better damn well state his
case in a hurry and get out. I personally am such a taker-off and putter-
on of wrist watches that I have to go into Cartier's at regular intervals to
have my watchstrap retightened, and often manage to leave it behind on
my desk, or even on someone else's (leaving it in somebody else's bed
is, generally speaking, a dangerous thing to do and leads to bad scenes
and divorces).
One executive I know has a huge outdoor pool clock with numbers 2
inches high on the wall, and a second hand that clicks to signify passing
time. It is arranged so that it faces his visitor squarely, thus announcing
that his time is more important than yours, and has the same effect on
most people as the writing on the wall at Belshazzar's unfortunate feast
("God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it"). This somewhat
oppressive effect can be reinforced by arranging to have his secretary
come in at regular intervals to announce that he's running behind
schedule, or that Edward Bennett Williams is waiting outside to see him,
but the consummate time player shouldn't need anything as obvious as
this to fluster a visitor and give him the terrible guilt of wasting a busy
person's precious time.
Lawyers, who usually charge on the basis of time, have their own
ways of establishing their importance. At the lowest level, they have
clocks that face toward them, status being set by the kind of clock it is.
A round, wedge-topped battery-operated clock that sits flat on the desk
and is only visible to the lawyer himself seems to be this year's favorite,
though I greatly admire one lawyer who has a complicated Swiss "At-
mos" clock in a glass case on his desk with the dial facing him, leaving
the client to become mesmerized by the restless swing of the brass
pendulum and the endless clicking of the gears and wheels—without
ever being able to see what time it is. At this stage of power, the lawyer
wants to know how long the client has been there, but would just as
soon the client didn't know. More important lawyers announce that their
time is expensive by having the clock face the client, digital clocks
being favored by corporation lawyers and ancient, noisy grandfather and
railroad clocks by the more traditional old-line lawyers. The most
important lawyers have no clocks at all, the implication being that
everyone they see is on a retainer basis anyway, and if they're not,
there's a secretary outside to keep the log. Divorce lawyers, who have to
listen to endless personal Angst from their clients, like analysts, seem to
have no clocks and often no watches either, though one lawyer I know
wears a Mickey Mouse watch which he never winds, on the grounds that
it makes him seem like a simple, unthreatening figure, rather than a
symbol of authority or a husband.
 Just as there are fashions in clocks, there are fashions in watches,
which can tell you a good deal about the people who wear them. The
West Coaast watchpower symbol is to have the letters of your name
painted on the dial instead of numbers, though this only works when
your name has twelve letters, like Ernest Lehman, the producer, unless
you can abbreviate your first name, like Irving Mansfield, the late
Jacqueline Susann's protean husband, whose watch reads "Irv
Mansfield." This fashion does not seem to have made it to New York,
where the status watch is still the old Cartier tank watch, with one of
those Cartier hinged gold buckles that is almost invisible except to the
connoisseur, who knows. On the whole though, watch wearers are
divided into two basic categories: those who like watches that are
impossible to read, either having no numbers or four almost invisible
dots, and those who like the kind of watches astronauts, pilots and
skindivers wear, with enormous luminous dials and bezel rings that
allow you to compute how much air you have left or what GMT is, in
case you need to know. One executive I know wears a watch that
actually tells the time in London and New York simultaneously at the
push of a button, but my own experience is that the less powerful the
executive, the more intricate the watch. The lowest power rating goes to
those who wear little miniature calendars on their watchbands, thus
indicating both that they can't afford an automatic date adjusting watch
and that they need to be reminded what day it is. A complicated watch
like a Rolex "Submariner" usually shows the wearer is prey to extreme
time anxiety, and thus fairly far down the scale of power. More
powerful executives wear watches that hardly even show the time, so
thin are the hands and so obscure the marks on the face. People who are
really secure in their power sometimes show it by not wearing watches
at all, relying on the fact that nothing important can happen without
them anyway.
Styles of wearing wrist watches are pretty limited—after all, we only
have two wrists—but I have noticed that a good many men now wear
their wrist watch on the inside of the left wrist, an affectation that
puzzled me for some time. In my youth it was one of those mysterious
British military customs, like a rolled up handkerchief in one's right coat
sleeve, and indicated membership in the professional officer caste. I
think officers wore their watches on the inside wrist so that the luminous
dial wouldn't be visible to the enemy at night, or possibly so that you
could look at the time while keeping the reins of your horse in the left
hand (most military affectations are cavalry inspired). None of these
reasons seemed to me to apply to modern businessmen, who could
hardly have been inculcated in the sartorial traditions of Sandhurst and
Cranwell, but close observation has shown that this habit has its purpose
in the modern world. A man with a watch on the inside of his left wrist
can put his arm around a woman and kiss her while looking at his watch,
which will then be facing him at about the level of her left ear, invisible
to her. This custom can be observed in a great many midtown bars and
restaurants at lunchtime, when men are making the difficult decision of
whether to stay and suggest an afternoon in bed or go back to the office
and answer their telephone calls. It is obviously callow to look at one's
watch openly; still, at a certain point, say, one forty-five, or just about
the time one is thinking of ordering coffee, it's necessary to know what
time it is and move accordingly. An arm around the shoulder and a kiss
will quickly establish whether a proposition is likely to succeed and
simultaneously, if one's watch is in the correct position, whether one has
time to follow through.

Time has its own rules, its own victories and defeats, its own
symbols. In a city like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, you can see
the losers every day at lunchtime, if you care to, sitting at restaurant
tables (usually too near the entrance—winners sit as far away from the
door as possible), glancing at their watches and trying to look as if they
had all the time in the world or intended to eat alone. They are the
people who arrived on time for a luncheon and are going to be kept
waiting for at least half an hour because their guest or host is still on the
telephone in his office while they're already on their fourth Rye-Krisp,
and wishing they had brought a magazine along.
Lunches, of course, and meals in general, are very much connected to
time concepts. The late M. Lincoln Schuster, for example, used to fit as
many as four lunch dates into one day's lunch, arranging to meet several
different people at the same restaurant, taking soup at one table, main
course at the next, dessert at the third and coffee at the last. Had he been
a drinker, he could no doubt have managed a cocktail at the beginning
of the meal with a fifth person. To get through this kind of gastronomic
relay race takes an iron digestive system or a total indifference to food.
Still, it can be done, and allows one to have as many as twenty lunch
dates in a five-day work week.
The power trick in lunch dates, apart from making sure that you're
never kept waiting (even if this involves lurking in a telephone booth to
watch the doorway of the restaurant), is winning the preliminary battle
to fix the meeting at a time of your choosing, and in many businesses,
particularly those in large cities, a great deal of the morning is spent in
determining whether to meet at 12:30, 12:45 or 1:00; the point being
that the person who proposes to win must not only establish the time but
arrange to arrive last.
Whether in a restaurant or elsewhere, the most important aspect of the
time game is making people wait, the most familiar example being the
old one of not speaking on the telephone until the other person is already
on the line, a power struggle which can occupy many otherwise
unproductive minutes in a busy executive's day. "Buzz me when X is on
the line," says the power player, while X is naturally telling his secretary
to buzz him when Y is on the line. Some people play another form of
this game by answering all their telephone calls themselves, asking the
caller to wait "just one second," then putting everyone on hold, until
they have three or four people backed up waiting to speak them.
Those who play the power game seriously can never be free from the
tyranny of time, and don't even want to be, since a tightly packed
schedule not only gives them a sense of importance, but is a perfect
excuse for not doing whatever it is they don't want to do. A full calendar
is proof of power, and for this reason, the most powerful people prefer
small calendars, which are easily filled up, and which give the
impression of frenetic activity, particularly if one's writing is fairly
large. One of the best power symbols is a desk diary that shows the
whole week at a glance, with every available square inch of space filled
in or crossed out. It provides visible evidence that one is busy—too busy
to see someone who is anxious to discuss a complaint or a burdensome
request. At the same time, one can confer a favor by crossing out an
existing appointment and, in the current phrase, "penciling in" the name
of someone who has requested an appointment. A close inspection of
such diaries often reveals that a good many of the entries read "Gray suit
at cleaners" or "Betsy's birthday—present?," but the effect from a
distance is awe-inspiring.
 Many executives stroll to work in a leisurely fashion, stopping to look
in shop windows and pausing to glance at pretty girls, then, as soon as
they pass through the revolving doors of their office buildings, gather
themselves up in a kind of Grou-cho Marx crouch, as if they wanted to
run but felt constrained to hold themselves down to a fast, breathless
walk. By the time they reach their offices, they are moving at top speed,
already giving dictation while they're struggling out of their topcoats.
Men who could quite easily allow themselves a good hour to get to the
airport for a flight will happily waste time until they have to leave in a
dramatic rush, shouting out last-minute instructions as they run down
the hall and pursued to the elevator by people with telephone messages
and letters to be signed.

STANDING-BY

Another excellent tactic is to allow half an hour for meetings that are
sure to last at least an hour, so that the people who have to see you
afterward are obliged to wait without knowing quite when they'll be
called for. This is the familiar "stand by" game, in which people are
warned to "stand by" for a meeting that was supposed to take place at 10
A.M. and probably won't begin until noon, or may even be postponed

until next week. In the meantime, of course, they are more or less
obliged to stay close to their phones, and may even have to cancel their
lunch dates. The busier you can make yourself, the more you can im-
pose your schedule on other people; the more you impose your schedule
on other people, the more power you have. The definition of power, in
fact, is that more people inconvenience themselves on your behalf than
those on whose behalf you would inconvenience yourself. At the very
summit of power—the President of the United States, for example—
almost everybody will wait, go without lunch, "stand by" or give u p
dinner with a beautiful woman on your behalf. One doubts, for example,
that everyone in the White House necessarily wants to rush through
lunch in order to fly to Camp David in the Presidential helicopter at the
last minute, canceling their weekend plans and their golf dates. But
when power beckons, most people follow, at whatever cost to their
comfort and private lives. The important thing is to keep moving and
drag as many people along in your wake as possible.
A tight schedule is a guarantee of power, as anyone can tell from the
description of David Rockefeller's departure from his office. "The man
who runs the garage at the Chase Manhattan Bank Building has been
keeping watch. When he saw David Rockefeller leave the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York . . . he shouted, 'O. K., Chester!'8 No sooner
has Chester pulled up the maroon Cadillac limousine than Mr.
Rockefeller is into it (his aides are already waiting in the car,
presumably having been sitting there for hours in the underground
garage to be ready for the moment), and opening his scarlet folder
marked 'For Immediate Action,' he proceeds to give his orders for the
afternoon on the way to a waiting helicopter, its rotor blades already
turning, which will carry him to a cocktail party in Albany."
One might well ask whether a cocktail party in Albany is worth this
kind of mobilized effort, but worth it or not, the elements of time power
are perfectly illustrated in Mr. Rockefeller's breathless rush to the
helicopter, involving the time of the pilot, Chester, the chauffeur, the
aides who have been waiting in the car, the garageman who gives
Chester the warning, and presumably a host of other people at both ends
of the journey, all of whom are at "stand by" for hours in order to
convey one man to a party. David Rockefeller's power would hardly be
emphasized if he had strolled out of his office with time to spare,
whistled at a passing girl, bought himself a Hershey bar and a copy of
Penthouse and left himself plenty of time to walk to the Wall Street
heliport. The higher up one goes, the more valuable one's time must
appear to be.
Closely allied with time, is the ability to make other people perform
the small demeaning tasks of life for you. Men do not necessarily ask
their secretaries to get a cup of coffee for them because they are lazy, or
because they are male chauvinists, or even because they don't know
where the coffee machine is. Getting one's own coffee is a sign that
one's time is not all that important, that it can be wasted on
inconsequential personal chores. People who are power-conscious
would rather sit at their desks with their eyes closed "thinking" than get
up and go for their own coffee, or collect their own dry cleaning, or
fetch their own mail. In extreme cases, they insulate themselves from
any trivial task; as John Z. DeLorean, the flamboyant former general
manager of General Motors' car and truck division, put it, "I don't think
the heads of state of many countries come close. You travel like an oil
sheik." G. M.'s senior executives travel in private jet aircraft, limousines
carry them to and fro, teams of PR men fly in a day or two before their
visits to ensure that everything is in order, and check the hotel suites "to
make certain, among other things, that flowers are in place." 9 One PR
man, Fortune reported, found what seemed suspiciously like semen
stains on a sofa in the suite reserved for the president of G. M., and
spent the afternoon before the great man's arrival cleaning the furniture
off with his hankerchief.
Not everyone can aspire to this kind of insulation from everyday life,
but it represents the ultimate symbol of power in our culture, the notion
that one has no time for mundane details and that one's comfort and
convenience are the responsibility of other people.
In the words of one executive, "I've always somehow associated
power with cleanliness, maybe because at heart we're all afraid of falling
back into manual labor, of having to get our hands dirty, like our fathers
or grandfathers. Right from the beginning, I've always noticed that
powerful people never b-eem to get dirty. You take a rainy day in the
city, when everyone arrives with wrinkled, wet trousers and wet shoes,
pov/erful people appear magically with knife-edged creases and shiny,
dry shoes. How do they do it? I don't know. I can't ev&n imagine it,
which is the reason, I suppose, that I'm down here on this floor, and
they're up there. Do they change when they arrive at the office? Do they
walk around sealed in plastic Baggies? Is it just that they don't have to
take the subway or stand waiting for the Fifth Avenue bus in the rain?
Who knows? But it's true—they have this magic gloss to them, they
don't sweat, you don't see them coming in after a taxi has splashed
muddy water all over them. I know, deep down in my rational mind, that
it isn't altogether true, and that a lot of it has to do with limos and
company planes and things like that, but for me, powerful people are
forever defined as those who can walk to work without stepping in a
puddle. When all is said and done it's like the old vaudeville routine
about sex appeal—'Some people got it, some people don't got it. I got
it'"

Chapter Eight
 WOMEN
AND
POWER
It is customary in the Province for the daughters of the citizenry not
to marry early.

—Hermann Hesse
THE GLASS BEAD GAME

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely
given them little.

—Samuel Johnson

At first sight, the largest visible group of people who "don't got it"
consists of women. It is not so much that women do not have power—in
many ways they do, and many of them are beginning to take on power
roles that until now have been traditionally masculine—as the fact that
the symbols and the mythology of power are predominately male-
oriented. Our ultimate image of power is the President, a man
surrounded by men in a male-oriented world and sustained by the
artifacts and trappings of a masculine society and technology—soldiers,
lavish jet aircraft, secret servicemen, helicopters . . .
The main reason why women find it hard to break into the world of
power is not so much that men put obstacles in their way but rather that
power is thought of as being essentially male. The rituals of power are
those of a male-bonding group, and however successful a woman may
be, it is difficult for her to project a corresponding degree of power.
"Power people," in the words of one woman executive, "tend to be
father figures. Their whole approach to life is patriarchal, like a
demanding, difficult, stern father, who can reward or punish as he
pleases. At our agency we have a new executive, a very powerful man
who can't be more than thirty-five years old, and the first time he
collected us all together, he took off his glasses and said, 'Well, kids,
let's review the situation.' Some of the people sitting there were forty or
fifty, but nobody seemed to notice how odd it was. He was the person
with the power, and we were his children, to be judged, rewarded, loved
or punished. He was just what everyone expected a power figure to be, a
dominating father who is difficult to please. A woman would have had
to have extraordinary physical presence to establish her power and
authority as easily and quickly as he did, and would have had to find a
style of her own to bring it off successfully. Most of the successful
women I know either try to charm or nag because they haven't found the
authentic voice of power."
In part, the problem lies in the fact that "the authentic voice of power"
we are used to hearing is of course that of a man. From childhood on, at
every level, the symbol of ultimate authority tends to be a man, in one
guise or another; the President of the United States is a man, most
judges are men, when we think of the police, we see them as men, even
in schools where the teachers are women, the chances are excellent that
the principal is a man, even that special figure of power in the popular
culture, the Mafia don, is not only a Godfather but a father. Wherever
we look, men, as one woman puts it, "have the keys," both figuratively
and literally. In banks, a woman may process your application for a
safe-deposit box, but the person behind the bars who lets you in to open
it is a man in a dark business suit, with a bunch of keys: he has symbolic
authority, as do doormen, security guards, train conductors and most
other uniformed figures. During the televised hearings of the Ervin
committee on Watergate, a stranger to this country might have supposed
that American women were still imprisoned in the circle of Kinder,
Kirche and Kiiche, so conspicuous was their absence on both sides. The
stern figures of authority were all men, the lawyers were mostly men,
and the subpoenaed witnesses, from Cuban burglars to Presidential
advisors and former members of the Cabinet, were men. The faces of
power and authority that appeared daily on the television screen,
whether as interrogators or delinquents, were men to a man. This is true
at almost every level of our national life. The justices of the United
States Supreme Court are men, the governors are men, the big
corporations are run by men, and while black men have begun to take
their place as big-city mayors, few women have yet to do so. Though the
president of the Washington Post is a woman, Mrs. Katherine Graham
(her father bought the Post, and until his death her husband was its
publisher), and though Mrs. Dorothy Chandler is an executive of the
Los Angeles Times Mirror Co. (which her family owns), the newspapers
of America are controlled by men and most of the major political
commentators are men. It is therefore not surprising that in nearly 1,300
companies required to file proxy statements by the Securities and
Exchange Commission there were 6,500 officers and directors earning
over $30,000, of whom eleven—that's right, eleven—were women!2
Under the circumstances, the odds against having to deal with a
powerful woman during the course of one's career still remain very high,
though of course they are decreasing at lower levels of power and in
certain industries and professions. At the top, however, men still retain
power, and their view of power and the ways in which they symbolize it,
continue to determine the picture that most of the people below them
have of power itself. As one successful woman vice president told me,
"The biggest thing I have to fight against is that people assume the real
power and authority in my job is somewhere else. I've got the job, I do it
well, I make the decisions, but because I'm a woman, men tend to feel,
'Oh yes, she's a vice president and all that, but she probably reports to
some guy who really makes the decisions.' And of course the guys
above me feel that too, they really believe they're responsible for
whatever I've done. I make a lot of tough decisions, and I make them
myself and carry them out myself, and I think I'm pretty well respected
for it. But men still feel that they're in touch with power. I make a
decision and they'll nod and accept it—they have to. But they want to
have it confirmed for them by another man, in a power situation that
they can understand—a 'man-to-man' confrontation. What they get that
way they believe. What they get from me, whether it's Yes or No, they're
not quite sure of."
Women are constantly confronted with demands to "review,"
"discuss" and "finalize" their decisions. Men will go to extraordinary
lengths to invent power structures that exist primarily to deprive
successful women of their autonomy. In any organization that contains a
successful woman executive, the committees, meetings and "decision
review structures" magically proliferate, as if the male power hierarchy
were throwing up spontaneous defenses to protect itself. Enormous
efforts are made, for example, to deprive women executives of the
right to adjust the salaries of those who work in their departments, since
the ability to deliver raises is essential to any executive's firm control of
a department. A man who has a woman department head working under
him is likely to give her the hardest possible time when the end of the
year comes by and it's time to deal with raises, or worse yet, to insist on
calling in members of her department to talk money behind her back.
The important thing is to undermine her by suggesting to her staff that
promotion and money are controlled elsewhere—by a man. In
microcosm, this is part of the basic male-chauvinist game against
women at work, which is to suggest that anything "serious" must be
handled by a man, particularly questions of money—as a rule "serious"
questions are those that get settled at a level immediately above the
most successful women in any organization. Whatever women cannot
decide themselves, or are prevented from deciding, is by definition
"serious." Thus, if a woman is running a department that involves
millions of dollars annually, and has the right to make decisions about
six-figure contracts, these matters automatically become "unimportant"
matters of day-to-day business routine, whereas the things she isn't
concerned with, salaries, or shipping, or billing, for example—become
grave and weighty matters of the utmost importance. Any job a woman
does is downgraded the moment she has proved she can do it. If a
woman were elected President and chose a male Vice President, we
would doubtless see the Vice Presidency transformed into a position of
serious responsibility and power, while the Presidency was downgraded
until the President and Vice President could be treated as if they were a
"team" of equals.
The means by which men tend to exercise control are many, but the
need is constant and almost instinctive. Take committees: the moment a
woman is appointed to one, there is a natural tendency to downgrade its
importance, and to transfer whatever executive functions it has to a new
and smaller subcommittee on which, by some strange coincidence, there
will be no women. This explains why the nomination of one woman to a
committee —however much it is hailed as a triumph—is often followed
by the arrival of a great many more women. It is not that an act of sexual
equality is taking place—far from it, the men who run the committee are
simply abandoning it to women, and replacing it with another, more
exclusive one. This is a very common procedure, with endless
variations. Let us assume we have an eight-person committee for the
purpose of "developing long-range goals." The committee has a
chairman, a secretary and a vice chairman, and these people naturally
form an inner power group, effectively controlling the committee by
establishing the agenda and preparing the minutes.

An eight-person committee on plans, with an inner group of three,

about to be increased by the addition of one woman member.

Let us assume that it becomes necessary to add a woman to the

committee, either to prove that the organization isn't male chauvinist, or
simply to accommodate a successful woman who wants to join it. We
now have a nine-person committee, run by the same three men. They are
still in control, but in their eyes it is no longer a meaningful power
group, since a woman has joined it. Their solution will be easy and
natural—since several more women would like to get on the committee,
the power group decides to take on four more committee members, three
women and one man.
 In 2 and 3, we see the new committee of 9 members expanded to 13,
at which point the inner power group re-forms as a new, separate
committee, opening up the old one to so many people that it becomes
powerless.

The committee has been "democratized," but at the same time it is

now possible to argue that it is too large to function effectively in
making decisions or recommendations. The inner power group will now
re-form itself, perhaps beginning in an informal way, with the intention
of becoming an "executive" committee. They will argue, quite rightly,
that a small group is always more efficient, without pointing out that
they deliberately diluted the original committee. They are now free to
turn the enlarged, original committee into an "advisory group," allowing
so many people to join (which, by the way, is an easy means to repay
old debts) that it becomes a "talking shop." Overgrown and reduced to
an impotent advisory role, the committee will sink of its own weight—
meetings will be held less frequently, busy peopie will fail to attend, and
it can be allowed to vanish into obscurity. This tactic is repetitive: if it
ever becomes necessary to add a woman to the new "executive
committee," then it too will expand until it's too big to serve any useful
or decisive function, and the inner power group will once again abandon
it to its fate and resume business as the same three-man team under
some new title.
"I've seen it happen again and again," said Jane Shields, a major
magazine executive who has made her way up to a corporate vice
presidency in an organization that has never been lavish with titles for
women. "It's a kind of Totentanz around here. The big issues are
whether researchers should have to answer phones, which is all very
well in its way, but is entirely concerned with young women who don't
want to be mistaken for secretaries. Everybody is willing to talk about
'women's problems' in terms of twenty-two-year-olds, but when it comes
to giving up real power—forget it! We had one executive committee
that was very important, and when I got my vice presidency, I said I
wanted to be on it. Well, there'd never been a woman on it, but the vice
president I was replacing had been a committee member, so there was a
precedent. First they told me I couldn't be on it because some of the
members would feel embarrassed discussing important financial matters
in front of a woman! I said bullshit to that! Then they explained that the
meetings were held in a private room at a club that doesn't allow women
in at lunchtime. Well, I fought that too, and it was moved to a room in
the restaurant upstairs, which was a little less luxurious, but what the
hell.
"Then, all of a sudden, the meeting began to get larger and larger.
They were making it so big that it wasn't a distinction to be a member of
it any more, and we moved to a conference room because there were so
many of us, and had food ordered in, which was messy, and gave the
men an opportunity to let the women do all sorts of catering chores and
worry about who gets what sandwich. By the time the committee had
reached the chaos point, the original members were beginning to meet
again by themselves in their old private club, and every woman who had
ever wanted to be a member of anything was sitting in the conference
room with us. When I got on the committee, the men sank the
committee by letting everyone in. And afterward they even went around
saying that you couldn't expect anything else once you opened
something like that up to women!"
Jane, a handsome woman in her late forties, shakes her head and
lights a cigarette, tapping the end impatiently on the back of her hand, a
male identification gesture from the 1940's which she must have picked
up somewhere along the way, along with a gunmetal Zippo lighter. Jane
is a tough, experienced lady, who put in a lot of time to get from a
secretary's desk out in the hallway to this office high above Manhattan,
with primrose yellow walls and a deep red carpet and three yellow
telephones. She runs a tight department, and watches every penny, even
though she knows that these characteristics are held against her by men
on the next rung up the ladder, who describe her as "a housewife
looking for bargains, a real penny-pinching broad, who'd rather save a
nickel than make a dollar." Jane can't help it. She's been earning her
living since she was eighteen, and spent most of her life on a low salary
—a woman's salary. Easy attitudes toward money don't come naturally
to her, and never will. Like a great many successful women, she has
learned to do her job supremely well, but still knows very little about
power, and can never quite understand why she always ends up being
controlled by men who work half as hard as she does and earn twice as
much. Committees, meetings, the precise editing of minutes, the delicate
process of "stroking lunches" at which new power alliances are formed,
all these things bore her; she wants to get on with her job and be left
alone, to be paid and respected for work well done. "They're all playing
games up there on the floor above," Jane says, pointing a finger at the
ceiling. "Me, I don't play games. I work."
Unfortunately for Jane, playing the games is as important as doing the
work. Men are trained to know this; they learn it in team sports, in the
Army, at school. It's part of their make-up, a sense of power is natural to
them if they have any intelligence and ambition. Some of them make the
mistake of assuming that power is enough, that you don't need to work
at all, but most of them learn, somewhere along the way, to live with
power. And since they think of power as a male prerogative, their
fiercest games are fought with women.

These games are sometimes very subtle indeed, and need consist of
nothing more than an adroit use of sex at the proper moment.
Accomplished players can easily put down a woman and flatter her at
the same time, and the use of sexual signals is a basic tactic in a whole
series of complex power games that have nothing to do with sex.
Flirtation, flattery, seduction innuendo, all can be turned into a
technique of control.
In office life, such signals have a specific function: they establish a
sense of intimacy, which by its very nature becomes conspiratorial.
Because of this, sexual signals in office power games often tend to be
played from the bottom up, organizationally speaking, and can even be
used by women against men. We thus picture an office meeting that has
been called in order to permit a senior executive to give his "staff" a pep
talk about their failure to follow through on certain contractual details.
Ten people are placed around his desk in various positions of
discomfort, since there aren't enough places to sit and most of the chairs
will have been automatically been taken (Male Chauvinism, of course)
by the more senior male members, who feel that by sitting comfortably
in a chair, as close to the desk as possible, with their feet firmly planted
on the ground, they will appear to be part of management—that is, they
will seem to be part of a subgroup, of which the senior executive is
merely the spokesman, rather than part of the larger group which has
been called in to be criticized and told to get on the ball. For this reason,
they all wear their jackets and smoke pipes reflectively, anxious to have
it seem that they already know what is going to be said and agree with
it. The women, of whom there are four, stand, or lean against the radia-
tor grills by the window. The senior executive takes a quick phone call,
in order to show that he has more important things to do than talk to his
"staff," and that he can make them wait if he wants to, but while
speaking he waves to them, to indicate that he is also one of them and
that they have to understand the demands that are made on his time and
therefore be sympathetic even when he's about to chew them out.
He hangs up, and proceeds to his subject. "Listen," he says, "there's
no excuse for not getting these forms through on time. I'm going to go
over the steps you have to take one by one, and from now on it's going
to be done, and done right. Understood?" He glares at the men seated by
his desk to show them that they're included (to their discomfort), then
looks at the women standing by the window, all of whom look down at
the floor but one. She stares straight back at him with fixed and
rapturous attention, then fingers a gold chain around her neck, hanging
as it were on his every word, admiring the power of his delivery. Being
a man, he cannot fail to notice, and as he launches into the subject, he
occasionally looks back at her, then, almost instinctively, signals his
sexual interest by removing his glasses and chewing at the end of one
sidepiece (an obvious oral display). A tacit bond has thus been
established, a kind of secret communication, and before long the
executive has turned his attack on the men seated before him, pouring
the blame, the threat and the scorn on them, much to their surprise, since
they are unable to realize that in fact their tormentor is now performing
for someone else. He has effectively been diverted from an attack on the
group as a whole and from any fundamental attempt to solve the issues
at hand into making an empty show of power.
In the hands of an experienced player, the sexual signal can be very
effective in power games, and has the enormous advantage that it
needn't be followed up. It's understood that neither party is obliged to
escalate a signal into an affair—it merely serves to produce a
momentary feeling of intimacy and understanding, thereby deflecting an
attack or an unwelcome piece of work onto someone else.
In most cases, when women use sexual signals, they are weapons of
defense; when men use them they are weapons of attack. What is more,
most men expect women to use their sex as a weapon; it's part of their
ingrained distrust of women in general. A man is not expected to play
what is generally thought of as a "feminine" game, and therefore gains
the advantage of surprise when he does. Nor is it difficult: a man can
easily become a father figure (thereby making the woman he's talking to
a surrogate daughter), or a husband figure (which gives him a spurious
right of intimate authority), or a lover (in which role he will attempt to
replace tangible benefits with charm, affection and understanding). The
main thing is to establish one of the existing social male-female
relationships as the basis for a business or professional relationship.
Hence, men flirt outrageously with their secretaries in order to make it
difficult for them to ask for a raise or refuse to perform an unwelcome
chore. They will show a "fatherly" interest in a woman executive's work
so that in any disagreement they will have the advantage of parental
authority. It is sufficient to get the woman to think of her role in the
organization as the equivalent of her role in the outside world. A woman
who puts up with a domineering husband may soon find that she has a
second one as a boss; a woman who wants protection, love and flattery
will soon get it from men at work, at the expense of raises, titles and
power. Men are adept at forcing women to become stereotypes.
Let us take an example: A distinguished consultant on financial
matters in an office is called in to a meeting by a very hotshot whiz-kid
executive who wants to get rid of the consultant so that he can operate
more freely within the company. There are several people around the
table, including an attractive young woman. The consultant expresses
his opinion about the first item on the agenda, and the executive makes
no comment. Nor do any of the other men, of course, since they neither
want to expose their lack of original ideas, nor commit themselves until
they know who is likely to emerge the victor from this particular power
game. On the second item, the consultant explains his point of view and
the executive turns to the young woman, and asks her to say what she
thinks. At the same time, he nonchalantly takes a cigarette from her
package and lights it with her lighter, flipping it back to her casually and
looking straight at her, very intently, as he exhales. A signal! But the
sexual signal is not the point (though it is worth noting that the
borrowing of objects, particularly when they have an oral significance,
is very often a display intended to suggest further intimacy).
In this case, male chauvinism being what it is in managerial circles,
the distinguished consultant is being put down, shown that in the
executive's eyes a young woman's view counts for as much as his, which
will lose him status among the other men at the table, while at the same
time he can't help thinking that if there is a sexual or emotional link
between the executive and the young woman, he would do well not to
get into a vehement argument with her. It should be enough to throw
him off-balance, which is all that's needed, and to reduce the effective
hammering out of ideas between the two principal opponents to a
confused and polite discussion, which can afterward be used by the
young executive to argue that the consultant is slipping, that he no
longer has forceful ideas or presents them forcefully. Note that the
young woman doesn't even need to be aware of what has happened. A
very high proportion of sexual power games are played out between
men, with women not even realizing that they're part of the game, that in
fact they're being used.
Examples of this abound. It is very effective for a man to bring in a
young woman to make a presentation, and to imply, by a host of small
attentions and an air of familiarity, that there is some kind of attachment
between them. If the presentation is successful, it will be thought that he
allowed her to present it because they're having an affair, and since
every man understands this, he can still get credit for the success. In
addition, the more he insists on giving her credit, the more other men
will assume that the ideas were his, and the more they will respect him
for being generous to the woman he's involved with. A man I know re-
cently went to a meeting to present a graphic design for an advertising
campaign to a group of male executives, and took along with him the
young woman who had in fact done the work and whose idea it was. As
they came into the room, he put his arm around her shoulder casually,
and said, "Gentlemen, this is Jane. I'm going to let her present this
project to you, and I want you to know that it's her project, and I think
it's terrific." Every man automatically assumed that the intimate gesture
(the arm around the shoulder) implied a close relationship between
them, and inferred from that the project was in fact his.
Note that if the project should fail to please, the man has already
established an alibi for himself—it was hers, not his, and he can then
join in rejecting it, perhaps murmuring to one of the other men, "Yes, I
can see you're right, I had some doubts about it myself, but I wanted to
give her a chance, you know how it is with women. What the hell, we
can always try something else . . ."
This game of providing oneself with a fall-guy—or rather, a fall-gal
—is very popular in all the so-called "creative" businesses. It perfectly
illustrates a way in which men prevent competition from women by
seemingly making them accomplices. Radical feminists are thus right in
questioning the purpose of the traditional man-woman courtesies in
working situations. A woman would do well to be on her guard when a
man who is a colleague at any level goes out of his way to praise a
dress, admire her appearance, open the door for her or make a thing of
lighting her cigarette. Many men use these small courtesies to
emphasize to their male colleagues and to themselves that the person
they're dealing with is in a category apart, so that deference to a woman
becomes a means of excluding her from the group. This is particularly
true at large meetings. The men are all sitting there, coats off, hard at
whatever work they're doing. A woman comes in and they rise to their
feet, pull up her chair for her, someone lights her cigarette: it looks like
politeness, no one can accuse the men of excluding her—on the
contrary, they have behaved with perfect courtesy, made all the correct
socio-sexual gestures, but have effectively segregated her all the same.
One sees the more extreme forms of this kind of put-down taking
place still today, despite women's liberation. I have watched men reach
over and gently pat a woman's hair to emphasize their agreement or their
approval, or put their arm around her when going into a meeting or a
restaurant, as if to show her that there's nothing to be afraid of, or even
pat her on the cheek. If these sexual signals were designed to lead to in-
timacy one could not reasonably object to them, but their purpose in
working life is much more likely to be that of reducing the woman's
importance in the eyes of other men, of implying that there is a
protective role between oneself and the woman, that the old biological
differences transcend the job. A sound rule of thumb would be to ask
whether a man would offer comparable gestures of intimacy to another
man in the same situation— would he pat a male colleague on the back
to indicate approval, would he shake hands to mark his agreement?
Usually, the answer is No. Gestures of physical intimacy are very rare
on a man-to-man basis at work which isn't to say that men don't make
them—it's just that they're considered more appropriate to the sports
field, the party and the bar, where physical contact between men
establishes a certain sense of solidarity, and of course equality. At work,
this kind of physical familarity is used only to emphasize that the fellow
who is being touched is a subordinate.
A vice president may make his point by playfully tapping his finger
against a man's chest, but he is in effect pointing out that he is the
superior, that he can touch the other man's person without being touched
back. A senior executive may put his arm around a male colleague's
shoulder to indicate approval, but the subordinate can hardly do the
same to him. Such gestures are either patronizing or threatening, and the
great master of them was the late Lyndon B. Johnson, who used to
squeeze his subordinate's knees, punch them, stab his finger in their
stomach, and generally use every physical means to show just who had
the power.

Of course, many women fight back with sexual-signal games of their

own. In certain industries and businesses, they have great power and
wield it ruthlessly. I well remember the woman editor of a major
magazine, who had developed over the years the authority and the sense
of command of a Borgia Pope. Her office was designed to startle men—
to make them feel as if they had blundered into the ladies' room by
mistake with their flies unzipped. The carpet was imitation leopard-skin,
the walls were covered in bright, flowered paper, great bowls of lilies
were placed on every Parson's table, and the tables themselves were
covered in snakeskin. She had no desk—just a large, circular rattan and
glass garden table, and all the chairs were small, delicate objects of
bamboo and lime velvet, the kind of things on which most men sit
gingerly, afraid of breaking them with their weight. A small woman, she
had all the furniture cut down to her size, a fact that was not at first
apparent to anyone entering the office, but but which tended to give any
man over 5'2" the hallucinating feeling of being out of scale, as if he had
suddenly been changed into a clumsy and grotesque giant by the wave
of a magic wand. A non-smoker herself, she had no ashtrays in her
office, so that a visitor who lit a cigarette would find himself searching
hopelessly in the clutter for a place to put his match or ashes, while the
lady affected not to notice his predicament. Every square inch of table
space was covered in bric-a-brac— bird's eggs, sea shells, crystal bowls
full of glass beads, porcelain, carved animals, Battersea boxes, dried
flowers pressed in plastic, carved ivory fish swimming in jade ponds,
icons, swatches of fabric, small green enameled frogs (her trademark—
everything she owned, wrote on or gave away was marked with a small
green frog) and crystal paperweights. The only working space was the
table area immediately in front of her chair.
Both her secretaries sat in the office, rather than outside, at lime-green
desks, with lime-green IBM typewriters (they had been specially
sprayed) and lime-green telephones. They were always present during
any meeting or conference, which tended to give male executives the
feeling that Mrs. Lynch (as her name was during her marriage of that
time) feared rape at their hands, and wanted to have two female
witnesses to any conversation or interview, like the matrons who stand
by during a police interrogation of a female subject. In moments of
stress, Mrs. Lynch would turn to her secretaries and say, "I don't think
we can do that, do you, girls?" and they would reply in chorus, "No,
Mrs. Lynch!" It was enough to freeze the blood of any man, and most
male executives felt about an interview with Melissa Lynch as a French
aristocrat might have about meeting Mme. Defarge and the tricoteuses.
Like most magazine editors, Mrs. Lynch had limited power; her
control of the magazine itself (and its staff) was absolute and dictatorial,
and for that matter, unquestioned. On the other hand, she had little or no
power in the corporation that owned the magazine, which was composed
entirely of well-connected men, without exception members of the
University Club, the Metropolitan Club and the Coffee House.
Tyrannical though she might be over the layout of her magazine and its
content, Mrs. Lynch was merely a corporate employee like her
secretaries. Above her there was a corporation, with an executive
committee, a financial committee and a board of directors, all made up
of men whose fathers had shared rooms at Groton and Harvard. On the
whole, Mrs. Lynch was content to leave them to their business,
whatever it was, and get on with her own job; she had no ambitions to
move to the executive floor and spend her day worrying about stock
issues, dividends and the price of paper. However, on rare occasions the
corporate executives would venture into her domain with a timid
suggestion or two, perhaps a report showing how many millions of
dollars a year could be saved by cutting the magazine's huge, elegant
margins a fraction of an inch, perhaps a suggestion that it might be
cheaper not to rewrite every story after it had been set in type, possibly
even the ultimate threat of an advertiser who wanted to be mentioned in
a feature article as the price of million-dollar campaign. Mrs. Lynch was
equal to such challenges—she simply insisted that any emmissary from
the executive floor should come to her office —after all it was no more
than politeness, since she was a woman and a widow (two of her
husbands had died).
Most of the senior executives found it difficult to cross the threshold
of her office, and found themselves standing at the door with an uneasy
and guilty sense of being out of place, like men who have taken the
wrong elevator at a department store and find themselves by accident in
the intimate lingerie department. It was one thing to promise they would
be firm, even "hard-nosed," in the calm supportive atmosphere of the
executive floor, where the walls were covered in sporting prints, the
chairs were large, heavy and upholstered in tufted leather, the desks
solid, masculine fortresses of mahogony and brass. Here, in the fauv-
erie of Mrs. Lynch's lair, it was a different story. Determination ebbed
as they tiptoed across the leopard-skin carpet looking for a chair to sit on
that would bear their weight, trying not to brush any of the breakable
objets d'art with their sleeves. Since there was no place to put their brief
cases, they were obliged to leave them in their laps, like insurance
salesmen. If they approached the subject at hand in a hearty, aggressive
tone, Mrs. Lynch's secretaries would frown and cough. If they
approached it delicately, Mrs. Lynch would reply with the vigor of a
tugboat captain, throwing them off-balance.
 She had, in any case, a gift for the vivid, dramatic turn of phrase. On
one occasion she sent me to explore the possibility of using a woman
skydiving champion as a model, the idea being to photograph
her in midair wearing a variety of new sportswear. I returned from a
disagreeable afternoon of hurtling through the sky above New Jersey,
doubtful of the practicality of dropping the lady skydiver and a
photographer out of an airplane simultaneously. What was more, I
pointed out, the lady was not built for modeling clothes, either in the air
or on the ground; she had the shoulders and muscles of a Marine judo
instructor. Knowing that Mrs. Lynch did not like "pessimism," I
lightened my report with the comment that the lady skydiver had
informed me, during an evening spent touring the New Jersey
roadhouses, that she always had an orgasm on the way down. "Why do
you think that is?," asked Mrs. Lynch. I said that I thought it had
something to do with the excitement of jumping, the fact that she was
pushed out of the airplane by a handsome jumpmaster into the void, the
speed of the fall. The whole thing, I reasoned, was a very Freudian
experience. Mrs. Lynch thought about this a moment, then shook her
head. "No," she said firmly, "It's the way the parachute straps rub on her
crotch when she pulls the rip cord."
In the face of such frank logic and language, the senior executives of
the corporation were helpless. Powerful men on their own floor, they
were reduced to impotence on Mrs. Lynch's. From the moment they
entered her office, their one thought was to get out as soon as possible,
and return to the safety of their own offices, where they were respected
as executives, men, husbands and fathers. "A spineless lot," Mrs. Lynch
would say, as they retreated from her domain in defeat, and she was
right. If they could have forced her to come to their floor, she would
have been powerless.

Some women try to fight it out with men on a mano a mano basis;
where men are tough, they are tougher. My friend Carla runs her
department of a major television network with force and energy,
swearing like a trooper, slamming down the telephone when she's
finished one of her short, sharp conversations, lighting one Camel from
another as she dictates the pungent and strongly worded memos that
have made her famous in her industry. Carla ostentatiously refuses to
accept any of the small courtesies usually extended to women. Long
before women's liberation she would push men into the elevator before
her, sometimes with considerable force, as if to show that they were the
weaker sex. She refused to have any man pay for her meals, and was the
first woman in her company to carry a brief case and use a dictating
machine. As one executive said, "I'd always thought of dictating
machines in a very traditional way, as if the separate units were of
different sexes. You know, the male unit has a microphone, the female
unit has a little plug that fits in the ear. When I saw Carla dictating into
her machine, holding that microphone, it gave me a shock. I'd never
seen a woman use one before, and it didn't seem to me natural. It was a
very Freudian reaction, I guess." Since then, Carla has gone one better:
she has a male secretary and dictates to him, and on occasions, when
there are men in her office, sends him off to get coffee. Nothing stops
her. When a senior executive broke off an argument by going into the
men's room, Carla followed him in, and stood there talking while he
answered the call of nature. "I wasn't embarrassed," she said, "and if he
was, that's his problem. He couldn't show me anything I haven't seen
before."
There's no doubt that Carla is a powerful woman, but the means by
which she asserts and maintains her power are self-limiting. Nobody can
take away from her what she's got, but at the same time, there's no way
she can move up to something better. Like most women, she plays
power games defensively— aggressive games interest her less. Her
outspoken combativeness more or less precludes her being promoted to
a job that requires a tactful supervision of several different departments,
and her success at her own job, since she's a woman, gives men an
excellent reason to keep her there. Carla has reached the highest level to
which her power games can carry her. She is stuck.

Many of the games women play to secure power are similarly limiting
and defensive, which explains why so few women, however talented
and hard-working, get to the top. Perhaps the real reason is that they
have to fight too hard at the beginning of their careers merely to be
noticed; there is no easy path of promotion for them, they start at a
lower level than men, spend longer in subordinate positions and have to
rise against far greater odds. Since they are seldom welcomed into the
inner circles of power, they have to fight their way in, which makes men
resist them all the more. Above all, they have no model of power to
follow. Most men learn early on to imitate their elders in positions of
power, but it is difficult for women to imitate men, and in many
respects, impractical. A woman wearing a skirt can hardly put her feet
up on someone else's desk, or share fishing stories and football scores
with the chairman of the board in the elevator. In a world where men are
at the top, she remains an outsider.
Many women, of course, are content to accept a limited amount of
power and preserve it in their own ways. A good friend of mine, for
example, is an executive in a motion picture corporation, a world of
ruthless and fiercely fought power games, in which women have seldom
played a part except as actresses. Surrounded by people who curse,
scream and spend their days and nights empire-building, she remains
cool, calm and collected, firmly ladylike, implacably polite and soft-
spoken. She never raises her voice and seldom argues. When opposed,
she quietly repeats her point of view, always in a reasonable tone,
making it perfectly plain that she will, if necessary, sit there explaining
what she wants until she has got it. With her firm, determined mouth
and her large, clear, slate-gray eyes, devoid of any guile, she is as
immovable as a rock. She cannot be humored, shocked, threatened or
won over by flattery. One look at those eyes tells you that—even if
you're a man who has grown up in a business where wheedling,
screaming, whining and Oriental flattery are the norms of behavior.
A part of her strength is that she is always perfectly dressed, in perfect
control of herself, her hair and her pleats, one of those people whose
clothes never seem to get wrinkled after a taxi ride in mid-August and
who never seems to sweat, get smudged or even rained on. "It's as if she
were always wearing a pair of little white gloves," complained one man,
"no matter how angry I am at her, I see these white gloves, and it's like
talking to a determined, obstinate child. She reminds me of my
daughter, God help me, and I can't win an argument against either of
them. They just look at me patiently, then go right on with what they
want, in a nice, reasonable tone of voice as if I had to be humored. If she
came on strong, I could throw her out of my office, but I know when I'm
up against a brick wall, and that's what she is. And patient! Every time I
say No to her over something, she comes back again and again, always
very politely, and tells me that I'm wrong. The trouble is that I get to
admiring her for her stubbornness, then I'm lost. You show me a man
who can stare down a woman who's used to getting her own way! It's
built into us. We give in. That's why the best agents are women now.
Most men are simply programmed to give in where women are con-
cerned."
Perhaps women do make good agents—certainly a great many of the
major literary agents are women—but if they do it is hardly because
men are "programmed to give in." When men do in fact "give in," it's
usually a conscious trading-off of small concessions to protect their
larger interests. Quite frequently men will seem to be in retreat when
they are merely withdrawing to new positions. Pushed hard enough,
they will give way on money, titles, large offices, expense accounts—
anything but power. So long as a man can have the final word, he is
reasonably content to give up anything else, though not of course
without a struggle. Many women, anxious to rise and succeed, get
bogged down in the struggle for the small things they want and know
they deserve. Thus, a woman who has been made a vice president may
find in succession that her new office is smaller than those of the other
vice-presidents, that she needs someone else's authorization to have her
name on the company's letterhead, that her secretary is making less
money than the secretaries of her colleagues (a very neat way of
humiliating a woman executive), that her name is still mysteriously
omitted from all sorts of invitations and communications, that the
announcement of her promotion in the trade press is unusually short and
appears without a photograph . . . None of these things alone amounts to
much, but the cumulative effect is to make her feel that her promotion is
less valuable than a man's.
A woman who fights each of these small injustices may soon find that
her energies are being drained in meaningless and protracted quarrels
over minor matters, while at the same time she's acquiring a reputation
as a nag and a malcontent. At the same time a more subtle game is
taking place in any exchange of this nature—all these small distinctions
are being deliberately blown up into important matters. Few people,
when you come to think of it, care much whether or not their name and
title are embossed on their stationery, unless they've been told they don't
have a right to this privilege, or find they need somebody else's
authorization to order it. It then becomes important, of course, and a
minor matter of prestige has been turned into a major issue. Men are
adept at setting up these traps for women. A woman is promoted, an
event which should, in principle, make her happy. She orders stationery
with her name and her new title on it. Her secretary returns to say that
the office manager can't put the order through without the authorization
of a more senior executive—a man, of course. Furious, she now has to
humiliate herself by getting the authorization from him. The beauty of
the game lies in the fact that it is about a trivial issue. Men can make it
as difficult as they please for her to get what she wants, then concede
without having given up anything important. At the same time they can
argue that it's typical of a woman to get so upset about such a trifling
matter—"Haven't we got more problems than getting her name on her
stationery, for Christ's sake?"
By turning small issues of prestige, comfort and tradition into major
confrontations, men not only divert the attention of women from the
larger issues of power and control, they build up an endless supply of
small privileges they can offer, when the need arises, as if they were
major concessions. You want an electric pencil sharpener? Fight for it,
baby! Ten bucks a week for your secretary so she makes the same as the
other girls on executive row? We'll talk overhead, six-month figures,
restraint, until your mascara has run and your secretary has threatened to
quit and take up free-lance weaving!
Of course, all these things, and many more, will eventually be
conceded, but not before every one of them has been fought out —and
how many concessions can you ask for? You want a raise? We gave you
a new carpet, more money for your secretary, didn't we? You want to
join the management board? We let you go to the convention after you'd
nagged us to death on that one, didn't we? . . . And anyway, just between
us boys, a woman who spends all her time making everyone's life a
living hell over a bunch of chickenshit issues like these isn't exactly the
kind of voice we need in a group that's supposed to discuss matters of
policy, the big picture, in a reasonable, cooperative way, is it now? Isn't
business the art of compromise?
All the same, there are women who have learned to use this game to
their advantage, though it requires talent and perseverance to do so.
They respond to these small digs by stubbornly arguing that they
wouldn't have to waste other people's time with this kind of trivia if they
had real power.

Cynthia Ransom, an executive in a medium-sized advertising agency,

has carried this tactic to its extreme limits. She has talent, and works
hard; without these attributes she couldn't operate at all, but how many
women who work hard and have talent get power? Very few. Cynthia
has it. She carries on a never-ending war of nerves against the
management and all senior male executives, beginning every week,
often every day, with a new demand, sometimes trivial, sometimes (but
very rarely) major. She rightly anticipates that each demand will be met
with anger, disbelief and rejection. She is careful to demand only what
someone else, usually a man, already has—she never breaks new
ground. If a man has a wall-to-wall cork bulletin board installed, she
demands the same for her office; if the senior executives have telephone
credit cards, she insists on one; if the top management take the first-
class American Airlines flight to Washington instead of the shuttle, so
must she. Each small demand for equality is accompanied by tears, rage,
threats of resignation and interoffice Angst, and in almost every case the
point is eventually conceded. Nobody wants to lose Cynthia, and few
men have the stamina required to resist her for long. After all, she cares,
and they don't, and what she's asking for, they usually have themselves
already, which makes it hard for them to refuse it.
Her real cleverness is that she mixes major demands in among the
minor ones as if they were on the same level of importance. The
management has become so used to this guerrilla warfare that nobody
now can distinguish between a meaningful demand from Cynthia and
the usual piece of dramatic trivia. Thus, after several months of raising
hell and tempers over the right to have an account with a limousine
service or the right to have engraved business cards instead of the
ordinary printed ones, Cynthia will slip in a request for a $5,000 raise,
or ask to be made a member of the management committee, on which
there has never been a woman executive. Such a demand, which would
ordinarily cause horror and consternation, is treated as if it were merely
another of her difficult whims, simply one more skirmish in the long-
range battle of extortion that Cynthia carries on with her colleagues.
They are so used to giving in to her on small things, that they give in on
the large ones by reflex action, without even noticing that they have
made a substantial concession that will materially increase Cynthia's
power. What she has done is to conceal each demand for real power in a
thicket of tiresome complaints. The fact that she has now managed to
get onto every important committee, that she has a title, and that her
autonomy is probably greater than that of any other executive in the
company, has all but passed unnoticed. As Cynthia points out, when
they do notice, it will be too late—she will have acquired enough power
to protect her position in the agency, and a salary large enough to make
it possible for her to "jump off," as the phrase goes, to a very lucrative
job elsewhere, if she wants to.
"I'm careful," she says. "No parties to celebrate promotions, no public
displays of power, nothing that could possibly frighten the men or make
them think of me as a rival. I let them 'humor the little woman.' And I
don't often ask for money, either. Money always scares them. The thing
to do is to ask for the title, the respect, the power, without even
mentioning money. That way they think you're an innocent, naive,
you're willing to be bought off with a title or a bigger office, you don't
know what's really important. But once you have the title and the office,
they can't very well turn you down on the money. Go for the vice
presidency if you think you deserve one, but don 't ask for more money.
They'll eventually give you the title without a raise, and think they've
gotten off cheap. But once you're a vice president, you can ask for the
same salary as all the other vice presidents, and they can't very well say
No to you. The money comes by itself, which is the way it ought to
happen. Men are different. They always talk about money and power
together, but I think that's a mistake. Get the power; then the money
comes by itself."
In general, men suspect women of being more involved in trivia than
they are, and are inclined to give in to minor demands after a brief
and symbolic struggle. If a woman's major demands can be put in such
way as to make them seem minor, she is likely to get what she wants.
Women have, in any case, certain advantages over men. In the first
place, men are seldom inclined to see them as rivals, male chauvinist
pride being what it is. In power struggles they consistently underrate
women. Worse, men talk too much. Even those who have learned to
keep their mouths shut in front of other men (and they are few) will talk
openly in front of a woman, supposing that she is automatically "on
their side," and of course anxious to impress her with their power and
their plans. There is a natural tendency to confide in women, as if they
were destined by nature to be approving listeners, and any intelligent
woman can exploit this fairly easily, no more being necessary than a
sympathetic air and a few words of encouragement. It is astonishing that
men who won't tell their colleagues anything will tell a woman every-
thing. "The smug bastards," Cynthia says, "they really think women
don't count. They're so damned happy to tell you all the wonderful
things they're doing, as if you were a high-school girl on a date, or a
housewife washing dishes while her husband tells her what happened
during the day . . . They just don't believe in their heart of hearts that a
woman counts. When we were making a secret play for a big account—
it was really a hush-hush thing and only top management were supposed
to know about it, one of the executives told me the whole thing, I guess
just to prove that he was important enough to be in on the secret and that
I wasn't. Naturally, I found out I wasn't being included in the account
group, so I went and complained. They wanted to know how I found
out, and when I told them, they went to this guy and asked him why he'd
opened his mouth. 'I didn't tell anyone,' he said, 'the only person I
mentioned it to was Cynthia.' Naturally, I'm a no one! A woman who
keeps her ears open hears everything. She knows far more about what's
happening than any man does."

Since men don't as a rule consider women rivals for power, they have
no way of mentally fitting them into the existing local power structure,
which can be a great advantage to a woman. Men know exactly where
another man should sit at a meeting, for example, but often find it
impossible to know the right place for a woman, and are reluctant to tell
her where they want her to sit. A man going into a meeting can look
around and find his place in the power group instinctively; indeed, his
major concern will be to place himself correctly, not too high and not
too low, the former being dangerous, the latter weak. A woman, on the
contrary, can usually sit anywhere she pleases, upsetting the power
arrangement and often acquiring a power position that can have
dramatic effects on her career. Men who would tell a presumptious
young male to move are reluctant to tell a woman the same thing—the
old habit of respect and politeness dies hard, if at all. More than one
woman, new to a meeting and to the ways of power, has sat down in a
power spot and stayed there, and gone on to acquire the salary and title
appropriate to the spot.
Imagine a meeting at which everyone sits in a rough circle, like this:
 A (the desk) is obviously the position of control. The person whose
office this is sits here. B, a straight chair without arms, is the second
power position, since it is closest to the desk, and also isolates the
person sitting in it, so that he or she will tend to dominate the room. It is
also worth noting, in situations of this kind, that a straight chair is more
powerful than a large armchair, like C and D. A person in a straight
chair looks and feels more alert, and is raised higher than a person
sitting in a low armchair. If one person is sitting in a straight chair and
two people are slumped in armchairs (and most modern armchairs of the
kind found in offices are designed for slumping), the person who is
sitting high and straight will appear to be commanding and dominating
the people in armchairs, and more important, they will feel that this is
the case, however senior they are.
The sofa, E, is not a position of power, partly because it faces the
wrong way, but also because people sitting on a sofa can never be sure
how many more will have to sit down beside them. They may find
themselves squeezed into an uncomfortable subgroup, and will, in that
case, look powerless even if they're all senior vice presidents. In most
meetings, the sofa is the last place to be taken, and will often remain
empty until there's no place left for latecomers to sit. F, of course, is the
position of least power, and a person sitting here may feel he ought to be
taking notes and may in fact be asked to do so. Being asked to take
notes reduces one, naturally, to the level of a stenographer, and elimi-
nates one as a power factor in any group.
B, therefore, had always been the place where the second most
powerful person sat, and it was that person's function to read off the
items for discussion from a prepared agenda, and to present the various
options and whatever information was available. It was the treasured
place of one particular senior vice president, until the day when a
woman, newly elected to the group, walked in and sat down there. No
man would have done this, and in the unlikely event that one had, the
senior vice president would simply have asked him to move. Since he
was unable to ask a woman to move, partly because a woman did not
seem to represent a serious threat to his power, but primarily because he
was hindered by politeness (What is the etiquette of asking a woman to
give up her seat?), he was obliged to squeeze himself in on the sofa, thus
making himself part of the audience (for every meeting consists of
players and audience).
Unfortunately for him, the chair itself, and the place it occupied,
represented a power symbol. People were used to looking toward that
chair, whoever occupied it, when they wanted facts and the next item for
discussion. The young woman, surprised at being asked so many
questions and treated with such unlikely respect, answered as best she
could, and prepared herself better for the next meeting, at which she
managed to take the same place by arriving early. By the third meeting,
the place was hers, and with it all the responsibilities that had previously
been those of the senior vice president. Before long, she was actually
made a vice president, and the person whose seat she had taken was
squeezed off the sofa, relegated to position F and reduced to keeping the
minutes of the meeting. A successful career had been launched by
sitting in the right chair.
No man could have gotten away with this, nor would any man have
tried. As the woman herself remarked, "Women are just more free to
break the rules and get away with it. They're not even expected to know
what the rules are."
 Not knowing what the rules are—and not wanting to know— can be
very useful. One of the main fears that men have of women is precisely
that that they won't abide by the rules, whatever they are. The hierarchy
of respect and power that men live in (and live by) differs from
institution to institution, but is based on convention. A major executive's
power is dependent on people's willingness to consider him powerful.
He may of course be feared because he can fire people and because he
can give or withhold raises, but ultimately his power depends on respect
for his position and his person. By and large, men understand this
convention, and are careful to give the proper respect to authority, if
only because they can't enjoy their own places in the hierarchy unless
they take the hierarchy itself seriously. This explains why men so often
lose their tempers when women, even their wives, make fun of a man in
their organization. No matter how much they may hate or despise a man
in their own power group or hierarchy, they cannot allow an outsider to
ridicule him —even though they may do it themselves all the time. No
matter how ridiculous we may find our fellow members, we are obliged
to respect them before strangers. If we don't, the group loses its
meaning, and our membership in it then becomes meaningless. The
chairman of a major conglomerate may be a short, unprepossessing and
unpleasant neurotic, "a small, skinny hatchet-faced, vengeful child . . .
a lumpen sadist, a mad god,"2 but even though his executives may see
him as such, they can hardly admit it to themselves, let alone allow
others to say it. They must believe in each other and in him, whatever
their innermost feelings and doubts. Above all, they must accept each
other at face value. If they have to (and they often do), they will go to
any lengths to overlook eccentricity, bad manners, physical grace-
lessness, lack of charm, bad breath or offensive personal mannerisms,
since the very existence of the group depends on maintaining
relationships among its members. When our own interests are at stake,
the emperor's new clothes always look good to us.
What alarms men is the possibility that women may be more clear-
sighted. They can be fairly sure of respect from their male colleagues in
the hierarchy, who hardly even see them as human beings, after all, and
can therefore accept or ignore their physical and emotional peculiarities.
But might not a woman see them somewhat more plainly? They are all
too aware that this is the case with their wives, their girl friends, if they
have any, even their secretaries, and the notion of a woman as a
colleague, as a member of the group, is therefore disquieting. One
executive of a major financial institution told me that his chairman's
behavior at meetings altered radically when he had to accommodate the
first woman vice president. "Up until then," he said, "we hardly ever
looked at Harry, I mean, who cared? He was chairman, and that was
that. I guess I could have told you that he is fat, wears glasses and is
going bald, but I never thought much about it, and neither did he. He
had power in the hierarchy, and I had a place in it, and I thought of him
as this—powerful person. When Sheila began to come to meetings, I
suddenly noticed that Harry was nervous, and particularly that he had
developed this special habit of stroking his head, as if he was trying to
hide the fact that he was bald. Also, he began to take off his glasses a
lot. It took me a while to work it out, but eventually I understood—
Sheila made him unsure of himself. It wasn't anything sexual— she
herself isn't exactly a beauty, and she's no spring-chicken either—but
Harry was afraid she could see him in a way that the rest of us didn't. He
wasn't sure that she respected him the way we did. In her presence his
baldness mattered to him, whether it mattered to Sheila or not, and I'm
sure it didn't. It threw him off-balance, which wouldn't have mattered,
except that he became very sensitive to anything Sheila said at meetings,
so that he took even the most harmless remarks as if they were personal
criticisms. In the end, it taught me something: in a male hierarchy, a
woman is always an outsider and a threat, no matter how talented she is.
There's no way a woman can be one of the boys."

On the other hand, there are a good many ways in which she can
outwit them. Men will do almost anything to avoid a face-to-face
confrontation with women, and a woman is well advised to insist on
them, rather than doing business by memoranda. Men have a tendency
to dismiss anything in writing from a woman, but will usually give way
rather than argue. As one woman says, "Men mostly want you to get out
of their offices as fast as possible, so you can often get what you want
by just going in and asking for it. The big thing is to sit down, put your
handbag on the floor and look as if you might stay there forever. The
handbag is important. Men have a horror of handbags, for some reason,
and the sight of one in an office, particularly if you can put it right
smack on the desk, tends to distract them." Cleavage is equally distract-
ing, perhaps more so, not so much because men find it attractive (that
depends on the man and the cleavage), but because in a world geared to
power symbols, cleavage is a symbol of some other force, possibly more
potent, but not easily assimilated in hierarchical terms. Men are so
morbidly afraid that women may use their sexuality in negotiating for
power and money that the slightest sexual signal is likely to frighten
them: a woman doesn't have to do anything but be a woman.
With all due respect for the position taken by most women's
liberationists, the imbalance between men and women in terms of power
is so great that they would seem entitled to use any weapons they have.
If you can move upward by exploiting men's fears and weaknesses, it
seems foolish not to, especially since it's easy enough to do. After all,
even so "successful" a woman as Katharine Graham, of the Washington
Post, has commented that "Women aren't a minority, but they are in the
business world . . . There's still prejudice on the part of men everywhere,
it's in our society, in ourselves—in women themselves." And Dorothy
Chandler, described by one Los Angeles businessman as "the strongest
individual who's been at the Times Mirror in the last twenty to twenty-
five years," can still say; "I think I've proven my worth here, but even I
have never been compensated the way a man would be . . . Here I am
with a title that's a nonentity, and compensation below the men." If Mrs.
Chandler, who raised $18,500,000 to help build the Los Angeles Music
Center, is a major executive of the Times Mirror Corporation and a
wealthy woman in her own right, can feel that way about her job, it is
easy to imagine the feelings of ambitious women in most companies.3
Under these circumstances, it makes sense to fight back, to play the
power game twice as hard as a man would, to take advantage of being a
woman in every possible way. Ample proof exists that dedicated hard
work alone will get a woman nowhere, that money will be given to her
grudgingly, that every effort will be made to prevent her from having
real power. Until women have their proportionate share of power—
which, to take an example, would imply something like fifty women
United States Senators—they will more or less be obliged to fight their
way into the world of power by clandestine methods, infiltrating what
remains an obstinately masculine structure, with masculine symbols,
traditions and laws.
I used to have a good friend named Dee, a handsome young woman
with limitless energy and ambition. Her looks were, to put it mildly,
striking (though she was not, as one says, "my type"), but what was
most extraordinary about her was that she simply failed to recognize that
being a woman could possibly be a disadvantage. I don't mean that she
was unaware of being a woman—far from it, as we shall see—but she
simply operated on the principle that no obstacles existed in her path, no
discrimination was possible. It was as if she were deaf and blind to
reality, which sometimes made her seem naive and innocent, but as a
tactic it worked.
It has to be said that Dee was smart and a hard worker, you couldn't
fault her. She was eager to learn, so much so that she managed to
frighten a number of the executives of the large financial firm that had
hired her as an assistant to a security analyst in a half-hearted decision to
comply with the demands of equal opportunity employment. She was, as
it were, the token woman, though her job amounted to yet another
Radcliffe summa cum laude doing clerical work that no Harvard
graduate would have touched. Dee mastered with ease the
comparatively simple tasks of her job, then pressured her boss—a fish-
faced fellow, with damp, nervous hands and glasses so round and thick
that they looked as if the lenses had been made out of the bottoms of
Coke bottles—into allowing her to visit clients and attend meetings with
him. Her mastery of facts, forceful manner and appearance soon put him
in the shade, in addition to which he was widely assumed to have given
way spinelessly to the demands of a woman, with the result that his
reputation waned as hers waxed. Dee simply never accepted no for an
answer. When she was refused an expense account on the ground that no
young woman her age and rank had ever had one, she simply went out
and opened house accounts at the restaurants she wanted to use and had
the bills sent to her boss. No arguments, no pleas; she simply acted. And
of course it worked. The accounts were in his name, all at restaurants he
was in the habit of visiting, and he could hardly refuse to pay them
without damaging his own reputation.
Dee spoke up where women were supposed to remain silent, treated
men as equals and simply refused to behave like a woman or be treated
like one. Within a year, she was ready to take over her boss's job, and he
was ready to abandon it, even eager. At this point, she ran into the
opposition of his superior, a male chauvinist in the old tradition, who
had managed to avoid Dee as much as possible. They had, in fact,
reached a working truce by each pretending that the other didn't exist,
but it was now necessary for him to have a "heart-to-hearter" with Dee
and explain why she couldn't have her boss's job—the main reason
being, of course, that she was a woman, and a "pushy" one. Efforts to
get through to Dee by means of an intermediary failed, and in the end
Dee and the executive were obliged to have a confrontation in his office.
Had she been a man, the whole thing would have been simple. A man
would have respected the executive's power, argued perhaps, but with
respect. A man would have sat at a distance, to show respect and
recognition of his inferior position, and placed one hand on each knee,
feet planted on the ground, the usual male posture of respectful
submission, just one step above the humble position, in which the hands
are clasped just in front of the stomach, while the whole torso inclines
forward. (This is an important distinction: bending backward is a self-
assertive, aggressive position, bending forward is an act of surrender,
like offering one's neck to a conqueror, sitting upright is halfway
between, and allows the sitter to adopt either of the two extreme
positions quickly if he needs to.)
Dee did none of these things—she couldn't, it wasn't in her, and they
wouldn't have seemed natural in a woman. She pulled up a chair so that
she was next to the executive's desk (thus infringing on his space), put
one arm on his desk, and leaned forward to expose a somewhat generous
bosom, while looking him straight in the eye. Disconcerted, he
proceeded to sum up the many spurious reasons why it was felt wiser
not to give her the job she was entitled to. She listened gravely, in rapt
and breathless attention. Then, when he had finished, she smiled like a
little girl, mischievously and joyfully, and said in a clear, distinct voice,
"I know you have to say that, and you know you have to say that, but
now tell me why the fuck I can't have it, without any shit!"
There was an awful silence. It is one of the conventions of hierarchy
that one always accepts a given reason for a decision from above,
even when one knows it isn't true, one operates within the rules. The
executive had no answer. He had prepared "the story," the explanation
that a man would feel obliged to accept, but he couldn't bring himself to
say, for example, "We recognize that you're qualified, but we're not
about to give the job to a broad, so forget it." How can you reason with
someone who won't accept your reasons? Possibly he could have fired
her, but he hadn't prepared himself for that either, so he sat silent for a
few moments, and his silence was a form of surrender. At last, he
sighed. "We'll reconsider it," he said, and anxious to avoid a second
interview he shortly afterward gave her the job.
She now has his.

PART THREE

LOVE □F
POWER
Chapter Nine

POWE
R
RULE
S

A man can be a star of the first magnitude in gifts, willpower and

endurance, but so well balanced that he turns with the system to which
he belongs without any friction or waste of energy. Another may have
the same great gifts, or even finer ones, but the axis does not pass
precisely through the center and he squanders half his strength in
eccentric movements which weaken him and disturb his surroundings.
 —Hermann Hesse
THE GLASS BEAD GAME

He did not want R . . . as a successful rival, but he did not want him as
an enemy either.

—Douglas
Hurd
TRUTH
GAME

You can't learn to acquire power by rules: it has to come from inside.
But by following certain rules, you can develop an awareness of it. We
all have a power potential, but few of us use it, or even know it's there.
In more "primitive" cultures, youths are initiated into the rites of
power, sometimes in very complicated ways. The rules are absolute and
clear-cut, and must be followed exactly, but they are intended to
increase the initiate's awareness of himself— simply carrying out the
rituals isn't enough. If in certain American Indian tribes young men bury
themselves in pits up to the neck on lonely hills in the desert, it is to
learn patience, concentration and the ability to stay motionless when
necessary, however uncomfortable it may be. There's nothing
mysterious about the process—a hunter who is fidgety or has to scratch
himself when bitten by flies is unlikely to trap much in the way of game.
Survival lies in the ability to control one's body and one's mind.
Our world is not so very different, noisy and complex as it seems, but
we are less fortunate than the Indians. We are educated, at considerable
expense and effort, but no wise teacher prepares us for the world we will
face as adults. If we are lucky, we learn how to do a job, but for most
people the price of survival is surrender. There is a place for almost
everyone in our world, but usually on other people's terms rather than
our own. Some of us learn how to succeed and may even become rich
and famous; few learn how to use the world, instead of being used by it.
Those who grow up on the streets learn to rely on themselves, but pay
a high price for the knowledge—the street teaches hard lessons. For
most, the idea that we are personally responsible for our own lives
comes late, if at all. Our system of education teaches us to put our faith
in something else—a corporation, a marriage, a trade, a profession, a
religion, politics, something, one might almost say anything, which
offers us a set of rules we can obey and rewards us for obedience to
them. It's safer to be a domestic animal than a wild one.
By the time we reach middle age the notion that we have an existence
apart from what we do, the people we're married to, our children, our
colleagues, our associates is hard to accept. The most we can do is to
change our attachments with a new marriage, a new job or, more
daringly, a new profession. We have been submerged in a community
and spend most of our lives satisfying its demands.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that a good many therapists
specialize in teaching successful, sophisticated modern men and women
roughly what an Indian knows at the age of sixteen. One analyst has
constructed an elaborate and ingenious layout of electric trains, with
control boards at opposite ends of the room. Married couples "in
difficulty" are given two trains, and asked to run them in opposite
directions. Obviously, the trains will crash into each other if they meet
head-on, but it requires skill and cooperation to shunt the trains onto
sidings so that both can move freely without a collision. Needless to say,
people with no sense of power find their train is always on a siding
while their partner's is moving swiftly around the track. People with an
overdeveloped sense of power try and force their partner's train off the
track, and even invite collisions in a clearly self-destructive way. Those
who understand power manage to work out a system that allows both
trains to move freely at equal speeds. An Indian would probably have
learned that one can cooperate without sacrificing one's identity and
without paying fifty dollars an hour.
One well-known existenialist analyst forces his patients to accept
responsibility for their own actions by using a large blackboard, on
which he outlines the foreseeable consequences of any given act. His
specialty is middle-aged businessmen who feel their careers have
bogged down. "That's not why they come to see me," he says, "they're
usually here because of some sexual problem, mostly impotence or
premature ejaculation, but when you get them to talk about themselves,
it isn't sex they have on their minds at all. They're suffering from a
feeling of inertia, helplessness, powerlessness. Their jobs and their
offices are much more real to them than any of the women in their lives,
and they're far more likely to talk with passion about their work than
their wives or girl friends. Their sexual problems are secondary most of
the time. They've simply lost all sense of identity. They see their lives as
completed, finished, run by other people. Often they're strong, decisive
men, but their ego is at the service of others, and when they need it
for themselves, it isn't there."
 The doctor, a thin, wiry and energetic man, questions everything they
do and say, strips away the compromises and evasions of a lifetime,
makes them aware they exist. He favors a hard-backed chair, not a
couch, and sometimes lets his patients sit behind his desk while he takes
the chair. "Let them take the position of power," he says, "they have to
learn that I'm not a wizard or a magician who can solve all their
problems. When they start fighting me, when they don't altogether trust
me any more, they're on the way to being cured." At one end of the
small, windowless room, brightly lit by overhead spotlights, is the
blackboard. If a patient complains that he has been overlooked for some
promotion he wanted (a common source of despair), the good doctor
goes to the blackboard and brutally demonstrates the existing
alternatives and their consequences. "A—you stay where you are and do
nothing about it; B—you start looking for another job; C—you stay
where you are and try to recoup your losses . . ." Swiftly he lists the
consequences of each decision, probing for the facts: Could you afford a
period of unemployment while you were hunting for a new job? How
much money do you really need? Do you really want to be promoted?
Have you really exploited the potential of the job you have? Is this an
opportunity to do something else, to change your whole life? The patient
is cross-examined, forced to ask himself what he wants to do, to accept
the fact that he is both free and responsible for the consequences of his
freedom. "Life," says the doctor, "presents choices and demands
courage. We have to learn not to complain, or blame other people, or
waste time fighting things that are inevitable. No self-pity! Skill,
courage and power!"

Of course the trouble with this kind of therapeutic advice is that no

analyst can share our experiences: he has to take our word for the nature
of our work and the structure of our lives. In an Indian tribe, the teacher
and the pupil share the same communal heritage; the wisdom of the old
hunters is passed on to the young, the questions of the young have been
asked in each generation. It's easier to be wise when life is simple and
uniform, but very difficult when your pupil has to explain to you the
workings of the international bond business before he can describe why
he's unhappy with his life. Still, the rules of power are not very different
from one culture to the next, when you strip them of their mythology. A
good friend of mine is a student of "primitive" cultures (which are not,
of course, primitive at all), and has spent most of his life living with
obscure tribes, around the world. A tall, thin, ascetic man, a New
Yorker by birth and education, he always looks as if he would be more
at home in an Eskimo village or in the middle of an Indian ghost dance.
He has the innocent look of a scholar, an impression strengthened by his
green canvas bookbag and wire-rimmed spectacles, and one might
easily suppose that there was something unworldly about him. Cynical
city dwellers, stepped in the urban defenses, worry about him when he's
here, as I did, until I noticed one evening the cautious way he walked
down Amsterdam Avenue, not afraid, but keeping close to the edge of
sidewalk, his eyes searching for danger, aware of every movement
around him. He walked like a hunter, swiftly, purposefully, never letting
anyone get too close to him, and did it without apparent thought or
effort. In the streets of violence, he looked like, he was, a man of power.
But of course, he is. He understands power; when he gives a lecture (a
rare and celebrated event), he enters the hall with the audience and sits
down among them until it's filled, until everyone is beginning to ask
where he is. Then, when they're staring expectantly at the empty stage,
wondering if perhaps he's hiding behind the podium, or not coming at
all, he rises from his seat and walks onto the stage. Powerful people
have the ability to dramatize themselves and their actions so that even
the most unimportant events acquire meaning. It's a talent, but it can be
developed. My friend likes to arrive without warning, making his way
past receptionists and secretaries so that he appears to have arrived by
magic, and when he wants to go, he waits until I've left my office to take
a telephone call or use the bathroom, so that when I come back, he's
vanished. No goodbyes: he has simply gone, and it's difficult to believe
he was ever there. He has placed himself beyond other people's control,
without giving up a successful and busy career, and as a result he's as
much at ease in New York as in the jungles of New Guinea.

My friend and I are sitting at the Central Park Zoo, on the terrace of
the cafeteria, one of those hot summer afternoons when the park is so
crowded with people that the animals seem more human than oneself.
To our right are the towers of commercial New York, a high, brutal cliff
of great buildings, rising through the layers of haze like the dreaded
tower of Barad-Dur in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I can understand
how one can become a powerful man in simpler societies and cultures; it
may be a long, hard initiation, but the distractions are fewer. The sheer
size of the city distorts the ego. We are either reduced to the impotence
of a meaningless daily routine—sleep, eat, work— made even more
painful by the knowledge that we have no power over our lives; or
worse, we destroy ourselves by trying to become bigger, more famous,
more powerful than the city itself. Can one have power here, I want to
know, in a life full of compromises, decisions, worries, pressures, in a
place where even the mayor seldom seems able to control anything at
all? I can understand the meaning of power in the desert, the
significance of the rites of power, the sudden illuminations of self-
awareness that come when one is alone with Nature—all that makes
sense. But in an office on the thirty-eighth floor of a huge building in
which thousands of people work? How does one seek power there?
My friend smiles. There are rules, they are the same for everybody,
this terrace is not so very different from a jungle clearing. The rules of
power do not change because one is on the subway, or in Central Park,
or in an office without windows, where everything is made of plastic.
"The first rule," he says, "is simple. Act impeccably! Perform every act
as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered."
I can understand that all right. It's an old Zen principle—you put your
whole soul and being and life into the act you're performing. In Zen
archery your entire being wills the arrow into the bull's-eye with an
invisible force. It's not a question of winning, or even caring, it's making
the everyday acts we all perform important to ourselves. No matter how
small the task, we have to teach ourselves that it matters. If we are
going to intervene in a meeting, we must do so at the right moment,
prepare for what we want to say, speak up at the crucial point when our
intervention will be heard and listened to, make sure that attention is
paid. Otherwise, it's best to remain silent. It is better to do nothing than
to do something badly.
"Second rule: never reveal all of yourself to other people, hold
something back in reserve so that people are never quite sure if they
really know you."
I can see that too. It's not that anybody seeking power should be
secretive—secrecy isn't the trick at all. It's more a question of remaining
slightly mysterious, as if one were always capable of doing something
surprising and unexpected. Most people are so predictable and reveal so
much of themselves that a person who isn't and who doesn't
automatically acquires a kind of power. For this reason, it is important
to give up the self-indulgent habit of talking about oneself. The power
person listens instead, and when he does talk about himself, it is in order
to change the subject of conversation. Good players can always tell
when someone is about to ask them to do something they don't want to
do, and they effortlessly but firmly move the conversation onto a
personal level. One of the best players I know can talk about himself for
hours at the slightest sign of opposition or a demand about to be made
on him. Even so, he reveals nothing. Sometimes he gives the impression
that he has two children, sometimes three, occasionally none, and he has
at various times given people to understand that he was graduated from
Yale, Harvard, Stanford and 01' Miss. Some confusion exists as to
whether or not he is Jewish or Protestant, since he has claimed to be
both, and also crosses himself when he passes St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Nobody really knows the truth about him, and he is therefore respected.
Once we know everything about a person, we have squeezed him dry
like a juiced orange, he is no longer of any use or interest to us, we can
throw him away.
"Third rule: learn to use time, think of it as a friend, not an enemy.
Don't waste it in going after things you don't want."
Using time! Of course, but how seldom we do! Time uses us, we are
merely its servants. We fight it as if it were the enemy, trying to force
two hours' work into forty-five minutes if we're ambitious, or to stretch
forty-five minutes' work into two hours if we're not. Powerful people
devote exactly as much time to what they're doing as they need to or
want to. They do not try to answer two telephones at once, or begin a
meeting and then end it before a conclusion has been reached because
"time has run out," or interrupt one conversation to begin another. They
are willing to be late, to miss telephone calls and to postpone today's
work to tomorrow if they have to. Events do not control them—they
control events.
"Fourth rule: learn to accept your mistakes. Don't be a perfectionist
about everything."
True enough. Half the people we know are rendered powerless by
their need to be perfect, as if making one mistake would destroy them.
Powerful people accept the necessity of taking risks and of being wrong.
They don't waste time justifying their mistakes, either, or trying to
transform them into correct decisions. Nothing makes one seem more
foolish or impotent than the inabilty to admit a mistake.
"Last rule: don't make waves, move smoothly without disturbing
things."
That makes sense too, even in our world. Half the art of power lies in
arranging for things to happen the way we want them to, just as a good
hunter stays in one place and draws the game toward him, instead of
wearing himself out pursuing it. The skills of the hunter are not out of
place in our world; they must merely be applied differently.
My friend smiles again. "What more can I say?" he asks, waving to
the buildings south of the park. "It's your world. You picked it—
telephones, Telex machines, credit cards and all. Myself, I wouldn't
care to live in it all the time. I'm not interested in negotiating contracts,
or buying a new car, or running a corporation—we don't have the same
ambitions and desires. But I could live here as easily as I can anywhere
else. You only need power. And since you live in it, you have to
examine this world of yours coldly and clearly, as if you're life
depended on it. Because it does."

We live in a mass society, like members of a herd, and conventional

wisdom teaches us that safety lies in following the herd. But my friend
is right: man is not a herding animal; his safety lies in his skill as a
hunter, his ability to act, and be, alone. To understand the herd is part of
the hunter's skill, to hide in the herd is a useful deception, but he cannot
join it without sacrificing his essential nature.
The more mechanical and complicated our world is, the more we need
the simplicity of power to guide us and protect us. It's the one gift that
allows us to remain human in an inhuman world—for "the love of
power is the love of ourselves."1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My special gratitude and affection to Lynn Nesbit, Erica Spell-man, Nan

Talese, Mildred Marmur, James Silberman and Selma Shapiro, for
urging me to undertake this book after helping me through the
experience of writing MALE CHAUVINISM! HOW IT WORKS. I am indebted to
Phyllis Grann, Joni Evans and Joan Sanger for their suggestions, and to
Paul Gitlin for his invaluable help, support and interest. For many
conversations on the subject of power and encouragement, I am
particularly indebted to: Barbara Bannon, Helen Gurley Brown, Ned
Brown, Harvey Cox, Digby Diehl, Jonathan Dolger, Philip Evans,
Robert Evans, Clay Felker, Elaine Geiger, Burt and Margaret Glinn,
Tony Godwin, Dan Green, Henry A. Grunwald, Marc Jaffe, Phyllis S.
Levy, Christopher Macleose, James Mills, Leona Nevler, Marie Reno,
Morris Rittenberg, Deborah Rogers, Cornelius Ryan, Richard E. Snyder,
Phyllis Starr, Irving Wallace, Jay Watnick, Patricia White, Ruth
Whitney and Sir George Weidenfeld. Finally, I thank those I love for
their patience and understanding.
NOTES

CHAPTER ONE

1 Quoted in Frederick Meinecke, MACHIAVELLIANISM, THE DOCTRINE OF

RAISON D'ETAT AND ITS PLACE IN MODERN HISTORY, London, 1957
(originally published as DIE IDEE DER STAATSRASON, Munich, 1924).
2 Frederick Nietzsche, THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.
3 Lord Acton, letter to Bishop Creighton, as quoted in Louis
Kronenberger, ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MINERAL, New York, 1972.
4 Edgar Z. Friedenberg, COMING OF AGE IN AMERICA, New York, 1965.
5 Silvano Arieti, THE WILL TO BE HUMAN, New York, 1972.
6 Alfred Adler, as quoted in THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ALFRED
ADLER (edited by Heinz L. Ansbacher, and R. Rowena), New York,

1956.
7 Rollo May, POWER AND INNOCENCE, New York, 1972.
8 Roberto Assagioli, THE ACT OF WILL, New York, 1973.

CHAPTER TWO

1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE LAST TYCOON, New York, 1925.

2 As quoted by Percy Sutton, NEW YORK TIMES.
3 NEW YORK TIMES.

4 NEW YORK TIMES.

5 FORBES,February 15, 1972.
6 NEW YORK Magazine.
7 Anthony Sampson, THE SOVEREIGN STATE OF ITT, New York,
1973.
8 Anthony Sampson, OP. CIT.
9 Erich Fromm, THE ANATOMY OF HUMAN DESTRUCTIVENESS, New York,
1974.
10 Adolf Portmann, DAS TIER ALS SOZIALES WESEN, Zurich, 1953.
11 Bertrand Russell, POWER, New York, 1962.
12 FORTUNE, January, 1973.

13 FORTUNE, May, 1973.

14 FORTUNE.

15 FORT

UNE.

CHAPTER

THREE

1 NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, October 28, 1973.

2 Harvey Cox.
3 Louis Spears, as quoted in Harold Nicolson, THE WAR YEARS, New
York, 1967.
4 Erik H. Erikson, YOUNG MAN LUTHER, New York, 1958.
5 R. D. French Jr. and Robert D. Caplan, "Organizational Stress and
Individual Strain," from THE FAILURE OF SUCCESS, edited by Alfred J.
Marrow, New York, 1972.
6 Dale Tarnowski, THE CHANGING SUCCESS ETHIC, New York, 1973.
7 FORTUNE, June, 1974.

8 William Makepeace Thackeray.

9 Patrick Anderson, THE APPROACH TO KINGS, New York, 1970.
10 NEW YORK TIMES, June 2, 1974.
11 NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, September 16, 1973.
12 James David Barber, NEW YORK TIMES, November 8, 1973.
13 As quoted in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, November, 1973.
14 FORTUNE, November, 1973.
15 Erik H. Erikson, OP. CIT.
16 Rollo May, POWER AND INNOCENCE, New York, 1972.
17 Carlos Castaneda, JOURNEY TO IXTLAN, New York, 1972.
CHAPTER FOUR

1 FORTUNE, January, 1974.

2 FORTUNE, January, 1974.
3 PARIS HERALD TRIBUNE, AugUSt 10, 1973.
4 Thomas A. Leemon, THE RITES OF PASSAGE IN A STUDENT CULTURE,
New York, 1972.
5 Niccolo Machiavelli, THE PRINCE AND THE DISCOURSES, New York,
1950.
6 "The Peter principle" itself is: "In a hierarchy every employee tends
to rise to his level of incompetence."Laurence J. Peter, and
Raymond Hull, THE PETER PRINCIPLE, New York, 1969.

CHAPTER FIVE

1 Marquis de Vauvenargues.
2 Lao-tse, as quoted in Rudolf Flesch, THE BOOK OF UNUSUAL
QUOTATIONS, London, 1959.

3 Baltasar Gracian.
4 William Hazlitt.
5 Knute Rockne, as quoted in Robert H. Schuller, YOU CAN BECOME
THE PERSON YOU WANT TO BE, New York, 1953.

6 Adolf Portman, DAS TIER ALS SOZIALES WESEN, Zurich, 1953.

7 Bartolomeo Vanzetti, as quoted in THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF
QUOTATIONS.

8 Magazine, March 25, 1974.

NEW YORK

9 Edmund Burke, SPEECH ON CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA, March 22,

1775.

CHAPTER SIX

1 Robert Graves, THE GREEK MYTHS, New York, 1957.

2 Harold Nicolson, GOOD BEHAVIOR, Boston, 1955.
3 Colin M. Turnbull, THE MOUNTAIN PEOPLE, New York, 1972.
4 William Shakespeare, AS YOU LIKE IT, II, i, 56.
5 William Lamb, (Viscount Melbourne), as quoted in THE OXFORD
DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS.

6 Logan Pearsall Smith.

7 Ladislas Farago, AFTERMATH, New York, 1974.
8 William Shakespeare, MACBETH, III, iv.
9 William Shakespeare, KING LEAR, V, ii, 9.
10 John Bradford, DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1 FORTUNE, October, 1972.

2 FORTUNE, November, 1972.
3 NEW YORK TIMES, August 26, 1973.

4 NEW YORK TIMES, July 17, 1973.

5 Bob Thomas, KING COHN, New York, 1967.

6 TIME, July 30, 1973.

7 Alan Harrington, PSYCHOPATHS, New York, 1972.

8 NEW YORK TIMES.

9 FORTUNE, September, 1973.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1 FORTUNE,April, 1973.
2 Alan Harrington, PSYCHOPATHS, New York, 1973.

3 FORTUNE, April, 1973.

CHAPTER NINE 1 William Hazlitt,

POLITICAL ESSAYS.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MICHAEL KORDA was born in London, England, in 1933, and

educated at Le Rosey, in Switzerland, and Magdalen College,
Oxford. He served two years in the Royal Air Force and moved
to the United States in 1958. Mr. Korda has written for national
magazines for several years. His first book was Male Chauvinism!
How It Works. He is Glamour's monthly motion-picture reviewer, a
member of the National Society of Film Critics, and vice-presi-
dent of a major publishing house. Mr. Korda lives in Manhattan
with his wife and child.