Power Intelligence:

Insights on Power and Leadership
Beware the Underdog

Beware the Underdog

We love to cheer for the underdog. Their struggle mirrors our own deepest hopes, that we can overcome doubt, adversity, and the odds stacked against us. Watching someone with less power, privilege, or preparation rise to the occasion stirs the belief in us that effort and heart can outweigh advantage.

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Jumping Into the Deep End

Jumping Into the Deep End

We’re here on earth for just a short time. And the time we have is a privilege. And a responsibility. A responsibility to do something with your “one wild and precious life.” 

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Side-stepping power

Side-stepping power

Most misuse of power is seen as its overuse: dominating discussions, micromanaging others, coercing or threatening to get your way. But the underuse of power—timidity, hesitation, fear of making the wrong decision—is just as costly. Holding power means having a responsibility to use it. And side-stepping your power, ceding your authority to be seen as nice, or to avoid making a wrong move, can have negative, even dangerous consequences.

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Staying True to Your Voice

Staying True to Your Voice

Praise, approval, and positive feedback is attractive—and addictive. When you have an audience, it’s tempting to bend toward their expectations, to dilute your voice, your truth to earn their approval. We see artists sellout, teachers lower their standards to get better ratings from students, even managers turn a blind eye to things, to stay in the good graces of others. But real power comes from resisting that pull: from staying true to your own voice, even when it’s uncomfortable, unpopular, or unrewarded.

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Oh. I guess it’s me.

Oh. I guess it’s me.

My mother died last month, and now I’m confronting the strange sensation of being the eldest generation in my family. Along with my sister and brother, I’m suddenly the person at the top of the tree, the elder. It’s an odd feeling, and one I haven’t quite grown into.

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Between Conscience and Compromise

Between Conscience and Compromise

When institutions are threatened by corrupt or corrosive forces, leaders face a difficult choice: resist or acquiesce. Do they defy the regime or accommodate to protect and preserve the institution? Is compromise a form of quiet resistance, or is it ‘bending a knee,’ binding us too closely to the very forces we oppose?

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The Power of Reading the Room

The Power of Reading the Room

We often think of leadership as bold action, but it’s just as much about quiet sensing, tuning into unspoken dynamics, the mood, the tension in the room, and responding to what’s actually happening. Caught between the economic and legal consequences of a moment, it’s easy to lose touch with reality and instead follow a script that feels safe and expedient, rather than truly reading the room.

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The Seduction of Success

The Seduction of Success

Success is intoxicating. When you’re praised and celebrated, it’s tempting to fall for the stories others tell about you: you are invincible, destined for ever-greater triumphs. It’s not risk itself that undoes us but the illusion that risk no longer applies.

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Blooming in Your Own Time

Blooming in Your Own Time

Life often feels like a series of prescribed phases: entering adulthood, building a career, raising a family, retiring. It can seem as if we’re expected to move through them in lockstep. Everyone around us appears to be doing the same thing, whether getting a job, getting promoted, starting a family. But there is no single arc of development that fits us all. We each march to the beat of our own drum. Maybe you don’t feel ready to settle down until your fifties. Maybe you launch a new career at seventy. Maybe you dive into work as a teenager, only to discover college calling in your forties.

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Inner Freedom

Inner Freedom

It’s important to take a stand. To fight for what you believe in. And fight against what’s wrong. But the everpresent danger in fighting your enemy is becoming the enemy. Hatred can colonize your inner life just as your enemy can occupy your outer one. How do you resist without letting your adversary live in your head, consuming your heart?

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