The End of Power (6 page)

Nowadays, as we will see in the pages ahead, the accumulation and exercise of power are headed into uncharted waters.

In
Chapter 1
, I offered a practical definition:
Power is the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals.
This definition has the benefit of clarity, and better still, it avoids misleading proxies such as size, resources, weapons, and number of supporters. But it does need elaboration. After all, the actions of others can be directed or prevented in many ways. In practice, power is expressed through four different means. Call them the
channels
of power.

•
The Muscle:
The first channel of power is the most obvious and familiar. Force—or threat of force—is the blunt instrument through which power is exercised in certain extreme situations. The muscle can take the form of a conquering army, a police force with its handcuffs and jail cells, a bully in a schoolyard, a knife to the neck, a nuclear arsenal to deter attack, or someone's ability to bankrupt your company, fire you from your job, or expel you from your church. It can also dwell in the exclusive control of some essential resource that can be proffered or denied (money, oil, voters). The presence of muscle is not always bad. We all celebrate a police force that catches criminals even if doing so at times requires the use of force. The legitimate use of violence is a right that citizens grant the state in exchange for protection and stability. But whether in the service of tyrants or enlightened leaders, muscle ultimately relies on coercion. You obey it because if you don't, the consequences will be worse than those of obeying.

•
The Code:
Why do Catholics attend Mass, Jews observe the Sabbath, and Muslims pray five times a day? Why do many societies ask elders to mediate conflicts and consider their decisions just and wise? What causes people to follow the Golden Rule and refrain from harming others even when no law or punishment exists to deter them? The answers can be found in morals, tradition, cultural mores, social expectations, religious beliefs, and values handed down through generations or taught to children in school. We live in a universe of codes that we sometimes follow and sometimes do not. And we allow others to direct our behavior through their invocation of such codes. That channel of power does not employ coercion; instead, it activates our sense of moral duty. Perhaps the best example is the Ten Commandments: through them, a higher and unquestioned power unequivocally tells us how to behave.

•
The Pitch:
You hear a lot about the power of advertising. It gets the credit when people switch from McDonald's to Burger King or when Honda's sales surge as those of Volkswagen dwindle. Billions of dollars go into advertisements in television and radio programs, on billboards and websites, and in magazines, video games, and every other possible vehicle for the express purpose of getting people to do something they would not otherwise have done: purchase the product. The pitch requires neither force nor a moral code. Instead, it gets us to change our thinking, our perception; it persuades us that some product or service is worth selecting over the alternatives. The pitch is just the capacity to persuade others to see the situation in a way that leads them to advance the persuader's goals or interests. Real estate agents who induce potential buyers to value the advantages of living in a specific neighborhood are not applying force, exerting moral suasion, or changing the structure of the situation (by lowering the price, for example). They are changing the clients' behavior by altering their
perception
of the situation.

•
The Reward:
How many times have you heard someone say “I wouldn't do that even if you paid me to”? But typically the opposite is true: people accept payment to do things they would not otherwise do. Any individual who can provide coveted rewards has a major advantage in getting others to behave in ways aligned to his interests. He can change the structure of the situation. Whether in the form of an offer of fuel oil to North Korea in exchange for letting its nuclear reactors get inspected, the addition of hundreds of millions of dollars to the foreign
aid budget to buy another country's support, or a bidding war for a top banker, singer, professor, or surgeon, the deployment of material benefits to induce behavior is perhaps power's most common use.

These four channels
—muscle, code, pitch
, and
reward
—are what social scientists call ideal-types: they are analytically distinct and extreme renderings of the category they seek to represent. But in practice—or, more precisely, in the exercise of power in specific situations—they tend to mix and combine and are seldom so clear-cut. Consider, for instance, the power of religion, which operates through multiple channels. Dogma or moral code, whether enshrined in age-old scripture or propounded by a latter-day preacher or guru, is a big part of what earns an organized faith its adherents—along with their commitment of time and belief, their presence at services, their tithes, and their labor. But when churches, temples, and mosques compete for members, they often do so on the basis of a pitch—as in advertising. Indeed, many institutions of faith stage elaborate campaigns managed by highly specialized advertising firms. And they offer rewards as well—not just the immaterial reward of promised salvation but tangible here-and-now benefits such as access to the congregation's job bank, child care, singles' nights, or access to a network of members in prominent positions. In some societies, religious participation itself is enforced by means of muscle; consider, for instance, the laws in certain countries that require certain forms of behavior and punishing others, enforce the length of women's abayas or men's beards, or excommunicate physicians who perform abortions.

Nonetheless, each of the four channels—muscle, code, pitch, and reward—operates in a distinct way. And understanding those differences offers a glimpse of the atomic structure of power.

My formulation of these four channels adheres to the compelling framework first presented by a distinguished scholar of business and management from South Africa: Ian MacMillan of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (see
Figure 2.1
). In
Strategy Formulation: Political Concepts
, published in 1978, MacMillan sought to educate business students about the complexities of power and negotiation. He observed that in any power interaction, one party manipulates a situation in a way that affects the actions of another party.
¹
But various kinds of manipulation are available depending on the answers to two questions:

•
First, does the manipulation change the
structure
of the existing situation, or does it instead change the second party's
assessment
of the situation?

•
Second, does the manipulation offer the second party an
improvement
, or does it instead lead the second party to accept a result that is not an improvement?

The relative role of
muscle
(coercion),
code
(obligation),
pitch
(persuasion), and
reward
(inducement) determines the answers to those questions in any given real-world situation.

F
IGURE
2.1. M
AC
M
ILLAN
‘
S
T
AXONOMY OF
P
OWER

SOURCE:
Adapted from Ian MacMillan,
Strategy Formulation: Political Concepts
, 1978.

Professor MacMillan's approach has three big advantages. First, it goes straight to the practical side of power—its effect on real-life situations, decisions, and behavior. In his assessment of power, MacMillan is not blinded by the image of the leaders posing for the photograph on the red carpet, projecting the pomp of their office. Instead, he asks (a) what tools are available to each leader—and to his or her opponents and allies—in addressing a particular challenge, and (b) what scope and what limits exist for changing the situation.

Second, because his approach is strategic and focuses on power as a dynamic, it is applicable—beyond geopolitics, military analysis, or corporate rivalry—to just about any other domain. A scholar of business, MacMillan devised his framework in the context of his field—business and management—and thus goes on to examine power dynamics within firms. But there is no reason why his approach cannot be applied to other fields—which is what I do in this book.

A third big advantage of this way of looking at power is that it lets us distinguish among concepts such as power, might, force, authority, and influence. For instance, people commonly confuse the difference between power and influence. Here, MacMillan's conceptual framework is very helpful. Both
power and influence can change the behavior of others or, more specifically, make others do something or stop them from doing it. But
influence
seeks to change the
perception
of the situation, not the situation itself.
²
So the MacMillan framework helps show that influence is a subset of power, in the sense that power includes not only actions that change the situation but also actions that alter the way the situation is perceived. Influence is a form of power, but power can obviously be exercised through means other than influence.

To illustrate: Extolling the virtues of a neighborhood in order to change a buyer's perception of a deal's value in a way that leads to a closing is different from reaching that goal by lowering the house's price. A real estate agent who changes a buyer's perception has the
influence
to do so, whereas an owner who drops the price to sell the house has the
power
to change the structure of the deal.

Think of power in terms of the ability of different players to affect the outcome of a bargaining situation. Any competition or conflict—whether a war, a battle for market share, diplomatic talks, recruitment of believers by rival churches, even a discussion of who washes the dishes after dinner—hinges on a distribution of power. That distribution reflects the ability of the competing parties to rely on some combination of muscle, code, pitch, and reward to get others to act in the way they desire. Sometimes a distribution of power stays steady, even for a long time. The classic nineteenth-century “balance of power” in Europe was a case in point: the continent avoided all-out war, and the boundaries of nations and empires changed little or only by agreement. So, too, was the heyday of the Cold War: the United States and Soviet Union, using plenty of muscle and also plenty of reward, built and maintained global spheres of influence that, despite local conflicts here and there, stayed remarkably consistent.

The structure of the markets for cola beverages (Coke and Pepsi), operating systems (PC and Mac), and long-haul passenger aircraft (Boeing and Airbus), each with a couple of dominant players and a few also-rans, is another example of a distribution of power that is quite steady—or at least not volatile. But as soon as a new party rapidly gains the ability to project muscle more effectively, invokes tradition or moral code in a more alluring way, presents a more persuasive pitch, or offers a larger reward, power will shift and reorganize the landscape, potentially in drastic ways. That's
when things become interesting—when opportunities crop up, industries transform, political systems are upended, and cultures evolve. Indeed, when enough of these changes happen simultaneously, daily life changes for all of us.

But what causes the distribution of power to change? It can happen with the advent of a talented, disruptive newcomer like Alexander the Great or Steve Jobs, or that of a transforming innovation like the stirrup, the printing press, the integrated circuit, or YouTube. It can happen through warfare, of course. And natural disasters may well be a cause: Hurricane Katrina, for example, led to the marginalization of New Orleans's once all-powerful local school boards and the rise of the city's new charter-school movement. Don't discount dumb luck or accident, either: a previously unshakeable incumbent may make a strategic mistake or personal blunder that leads to a precipitous downfall. Think Tiger Woods or David Patreus. Sometimes, illness and age simply take their toll and alter the distribution of power at the top of a company, a government, an army, or a sport.

On the other hand, not every smart innovation gets traction. Not every well-run new business with a desirable product and careful plan acquires the financing or sales opportunities it needs to make its mark. Some giant corporations or institutions prove vulnerable to nimble new competitors; others seem to ward them off as if swatting flies. It will never be possible to predict every shift in power. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the eruption of the Arab Spring, the decline of erstwhile newspaper giants like the
Washington Post
, and the sudden emergence of Twitter as an information provider attest to the impossibility of knowing what power shifts await around the corner.