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Comment by mikpanko | Hacker News Reader

Highly recommend Jeffrey Pfeffer’s books about power and leadership. He has developed a great mental model about how leadership works in the real world, which explains the pitfalls of common ways to think about it.

Humans want to believe in a just world and those in power are happy to provide narratives to that end. Meanwhile they are not correlated with how power is actually gained in the real world.

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Just read some summary of his points elsewhere and had a hard time taking it seriously. For instance,

> rule seven—which is basically that once you have power, money, and success, people will forget and forgive how you got there—is such an important rule is that it frees you to do everything else. This rule says that at the end, if you are successful, success excuses almost everything.

Saw the release date of said books and I was just about to ask if it applies to 21 century ideas. Thanks for answering it.

This is an accurate theory of mind for the vast majority of people.

Could you explain why you think that's not worth taking seriously?

Not the parent, but I wonder if it's too simplified. It's true for absolute power, but that's effectively impossible to obtain in reality, and a far cry from middle managers climbing over each other. Donald Trump is powerful but far from immune from everything he's done to obtain power. Mark Zuckerberg is powerful but doesn't have full control over his reputation. More broadly, I think seeking power will likely create enemies, whose behavior you can't control even if your power increases. Lots of leaders fall from grace all the time, in part for things they did to obtain power.

The higher you climb the larger the screwups and violations you're excused from. But as you say, this is a ladder, not an absolute.

The "rule" is about how people behave. Not a moral judgement. It's more like:

"People excuse almost anything for those in power got into power."

instead of:

"It was morally OK to do the things that led them to obtain that power."

Indeed, it's descriptivism versus prescriptivism.

This is what social proof looks like: everyone believing that everyone else signed off on a successful person, thus they should continue to be seen as successful.

The cyclic nature is unavoidable, and to some, a feature, not a bug.

Pfeffer's book "Power" will let you know pretty fast whether you are suited to or ready for leadership. +1

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