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Power Intelligence:
Insights on Power and Leadership
Power Intelligence®: The Link Between Compliance and Commitment
This doesn’t need much explaining, but post #MeToo, the compliance training industry is booming. Andrew Rawson, Chief Learning Officer of compliance training company Traliant, reported a 150% increase in demand for training since the wave of high-profile harassment...
Building Your Base of Power
Whether you closely followed this year’s Winter Olympics or simply caught snippets on TV or social media, it’s hard not to be thrilled by the performances of the world’s greatest athletes. My favorite moment came when Ester Ledecka from the Czech Republic, ranked 43rd...
Mind the Gap
Humans are often irrational. And why shouldn’t we be? After all, reason is just one of our many cognitive abilities. But sometimes irrationality is troublesome. Consider this foible: what we feel, we tend to think of as real. For instance, if I was on a subway and the...
The Cost of Doing Business With You
"It is truly strange how long it takes to get to know oneself. I am now 62 years old, yet just one moment ago I realized that I love lightly toasted bread and loathe bread when it is heavily toasted. For over 60 years, and quite unconsciously, I have been experiencing...
The Hero Trap
A few years ago, I worked with an extremely intelligent CEO named Robert (not his real name). Robert had just taken over the reins of a startup, and under his guidance, the company doubled its revenue and added over 35 new positions. In that year, Robert changed, too....
Catching Yourself in The Act
I recently blogged about the Recode/Decode interview between Kara Fisher and Frances Frei about changing the culture at Uber (it's a great podcast episode, by the way). One thing that impressed me was Frei’s reluctance to embrace a zero-tolerance policy towards toxic...
Power and Organizational Culture
2017 is not yet over, but is on track to go down as one of the most natural disaster laden years on record. But there have been some spectacular man-made disasters as well, especially scandals relating to abuse of power. Here’s just a few of the headlines of this...
Underdogs and Alpha Dogs
In his well-known book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove, Silicon Valley pioneer and former CEO of Intel, recounts the story of the Pentium FDIV bug, an error in one of the earlier versions of the Intel Pentium processor. Intel was aware of the bug, but made the...
Shining a Light on Misuse of Power—Is It Enough?
Earlier this year, following months of headline-generating incidents of alleged sexual harassment and gender discrimination, legal disputes, and public protests, Uber underwent a change in leadership. As new people, including former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder,...
The Shadow Side of Organizational Culture
Last year, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins successfully defended itself against a discrimination lawsuit filed by former partner Ellen Pao, by embracing a defense rooted in “culture fit.” It’s open to discussion what “organizational fit” or...