Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both by Adam Galinsky, Maurice Schweitzer Read Free Book Online Page B

promotions, or threaten demotions and termination. Yet power is not static and fixed; it is dynamic and subjective, and it changes across contexts. For example, an associate in a law firm has power over summer interns who are trying to get hired for full-time work. But this same associate has less power when dealing with partners in the firm. But you only have power over another person when that person values the resource you control. In our law firm example, the associate has power over the interns only to the extent that they want a full-time job or a reference letter, and the partners have power over the associate, especially when the associate covets partnership.
    Power, in other words, is driven by the three factors that we detailed in the introduction: the fact that we are social beings vying for scarce resources that are unstable and dynamically fluctuate.
    To understand the effects of power it is helpful to consider a story involving a magical lock of hair. Samson was a biblical figure whose hair gave him unparalleled strength; he could rip apart a lion with his bare hands and escape any bonds of chain or rope. He was invincible, that is, until his head was shaved. Without his mane, Samson lost his power, and he spent the rest of his life in servitude. It was good to be Samson…until it wasn’t.
    In today’s modern world, power is a lot like Samson’s hair—it may not make us invincible, but it makes us
feel
invincible. It is an elixir of strength and confidence that gives the powerful a psychological leg up on their competitors. But it can also blind us to the consequences of our actions, producing egocentric, selfish, and uncooperative behavior, as we saw with Mark Hurd and King Louis.
    The interesting thing about power is that it’s often not how powerful we are, but how powerful we
feel
that determines how we think and how we act. In other words, your experience of your own power can matter as much or even more than how much power you actually have. Indeed, our research shows that across a wide range of situations, from interviewing for a new job, to asking someone out on a date, to impressing our boss in a meeting, we can gain a competitive advantage by increasing our
feelings
of power.
    By understanding how power affects everyone, we will show you how to harness the positive effects of power and mitigate its pitfalls. You will learn how to get power and how to keep it—how to remain the king even when others are vying to take your crown.
    It’s All in Your Head
    Let’s try a little experiment. Close your eyes and think about a time in which you had power—a time in which you controlled an important resource that others wanted or a time when you were in a position to reward another person. Really relive that experience and
feel
what it was like to have that power. Go ahead and take your time, we’ll wait.
    How did that memory make you feel? If you are like the tens of thousands of people who have done this exercise, it probably gave you a psychological dose of power—a feeling, at least temporarily, that you could accomplish anything. It may have made you feel more confident and more willing to take a chance you wouldn’t have taken just moments earlier.
    We stumbled upon this technique almost 15 years ago when we found that simply thinking about moments when someone had power actually made that person act as if they were more powerful. What we had done was to “prime” power in people’s minds. Once we realized that a key element of power was simply
feeling
powerful, it opened up the door for new ways of creating power.
    It was with this insight in mind that Dana Carney of the University of California, Berkeley, came up with another way to instill a sense of power. Simply stand up and put your hands on your hips. Stay in this position for a moment and think about how it makes you feel. Or sit down on a couch and lean back and spread your arms across the back. These are called expansive