The uncomfortable truth about power: why merit alone is not enough

In 1847 a Vienna doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis made medical students wash their hands, and deaths among new mothers in his clinic fell by almost 90%. Two years later he was out of a job. Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer argues that doing good work and getting people to adopt it are two different skills, and that the second one can be learned.

In May 1847, a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis introduced a new rule at the Vienna General Hospital. Its maternity department was then the largest in the world. Before medical students examined a woman in labor, they now had to wash their hands in a chlorine solution.

His reasoning was simple. Each morning, the students dissected the bodies of women who had died of childbed fever, a fast-moving infection that struck new mothers. Then they went straight to the maternity ward without washing. Semmelweis suspected they were carrying something from the dead to the living on their hands. Nobody yet knew that germs cause disease.

The hospital had two maternity clinics, and together they made a natural experiment. Doctors and medical students worked in the First Clinic. Midwives, who did not dissect bodies, worked in the Second. Women were sent to one clinic or the other depending on the day they arrived, yet far more of them died in the doctors’ clinic. In 1846, 459 of the 4,010 women who gave birth there died, about one in nine. In 1848, the first full year of handwashing, 45 of 3,556 died, about one in eighty. That was almost exactly the rate in the midwives’ clinic.

Figure 1. The share of mothers who died after giving birth in each of the hospital’s two maternity clinics, by year. Doctors and medical students worked in the First Clinic and midwives in the Second. Handwashing began in mid-May 1847, so the 1847 point mixes months before and after. Each clinic had about 2,400 to 4,000 births a year. The counts come from Semmelweis’s 1861 book, as translated into English in 1983.

You might expect Semmelweis to have become a hero. Instead, in 1849, he lost his post at the hospital. The handwashing seems to have carried on without him, because deaths stayed low after he left. When two researchers went back through the numbers in 2017, they concluded that the opposition he faced came from somewhere other than doubts about the washing.

Semmelweis did not help his own cause. He waited 13 years to publish his findings, and his 500-page book spends long stretches attacking his critics. Irvine Loudon, a historian of medicine, describes a man who could not bear “the slightest criticism.” In 1865 Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died two weeks later. In his lifetime, Loudon writes, his work barely changed how doctors delivered babies.

Semmelweis had the right answer and the numbers to back it up. What he could not do was get other doctors to act on it. That gap, between being right and getting something done, is what Jeffrey Pfeffer has spent his career studying.

A course that tastes like cod liver oil

Pfeffer is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he has taught since 1979. His field is organizational behavior, the study of how people act inside companies and other institutions. After he arrived at Stanford, he decided to teach a course on power, a subject he felt mattered but that almost nobody was teaching.

The course, now called The Paths to Power, is one of the most popular at the school. In 2021 it turned away two students for every one it admitted, even though the syllabus warns in bold type that “This Class Is Not for Everyone.” Pfeffer recalls a student who called it the cod liver oil of the business school. “You know it’s good for you, but you feel a little nervous about it.”

Pfeffer has written two books on the subject for general readers, Power (2010) and 7 Rules of Power (2022). Their message is uncomfortable for anyone who believes in pure merit. Pfeffer argues that power may matter more for a career than job performance does. Most of us resist that idea because we want to believe the world is fair. Psychologists call this the just-world belief, and Pfeffer thinks it leaves people unprepared for the competition of the real world.

Rule 1

Get out of your own way

Self-doubt is often the first obstacle.

Rule 2

Break the rules

Following every rule keeps you in the crowd.

Rule 3

Show up in powerful fashion

People judge your ability by how you come across.

Rule 4

Create a powerful brand

A clear reputation brings opportunities to you.

Rule 5

Network relentlessly

Acquaintances bring news your friends don’t have.

Rule 6

Use your power

Influence changes nothing until someone uses it.

Rule 7

Forgiven, forgotten, or both

Once people win, others forget how they got there.

“This stuff is all learnable and teachable.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer, 2022

Figure 2. The seven rules from Pfeffer’s 7 Rules of Power (2022), each with a one-line summary in plain words. The seventh rule’s name is shortened. The drawings are illustrative.

His most hopeful claim is that none of this is a fixed personality trait. “This stuff is all learnable and teachable,” he told Stanford’s business school in a 2022 interview. “You’re not born one thing or the other.”

By power, Pfeffer means the ability to get things done. A job title is one source of it. Controlling something that other people need is another. A postdoc who maintains the only working copy of an important dataset in her lab has this kind of power. Whatever her title, every project that needs the data has to go through her.

Being right is only half the job

Pfeffer’s first target is the belief that good work speaks for itself. The people who decide on promotions and grants rarely have time to study everyone’s work closely. So they rely on shortcuts, such as what a trusted colleague says about someone.

Two engineers solve equally hard problems in the same year. One of them also explains her work at the meetings where managers decide what to fund next. When a team-lead job opens, the people choosing have heard of only one of them.

The just-world belief makes this outcome look fair after the fact. If good work is always rewarded, then the engineer who was passed over must not have been as good. Pfeffer’s view is that making your work visible is part of doing the work. There is nothing noble about staying invisible.

Semmelweis is an extreme case. His handwashing seems to have survived in his own clinic, but almost no one else took it up. Hospitals did not routinely use antiseptics, chemicals that kill germs, to protect new mothers until the 1880s, more than 30 years later.

Asking works twice as often as people expect

Pfeffer’s first two rules, get out of your own way and break the rules, are about habits most of us pick up as children. “Most people will follow the rules, because that’s what they’re taught to do,” he said. “In order to acquire power, you have to be brave, which is why most people don’t acquire power.”

One of those habits is assuming that strangers will turn us down. Francis Flynn, who now teaches alongside Pfeffer at Stanford, put that assumption to the test. In a 2008 study, he and Vanessa Bohns sent students out to get five strangers each to fill out a questionnaire. The students were allowed one line, “Will you fill out a questionnaire?” Before they started, half of them guessed how many people they would have to ask. The average guess was about 20. They actually needed about 10.

Figure 3. The first experiment in Flynn and Lake (2008). Each student had to get five strangers to fill out a questionnaire. The 23 students who guessed first expected to ask 20.5 people on average and actually needed 10.5. Each figure is one person asked, and green means yes. Where the yeses fall in each row is illustrative.

Later studies with more than 14,000 strangers found the same thing. On average, people expected only about half as many yeses as they actually got. The reason, Bohns found, is that we forget how awkward it is for someone to say no to our face.

One former student, Christina Troitino, told one of his classes how she talked her way into a dinner with Martha Stewart. “I’m not the loudest person in the room,” she said, “but I’m shameless.”

Not everyone starts in the same place

In that same class, one student pushed back. The advice was fine, she said, “if you’re a tall, good-looking white guy.” Pfeffer agrees that people start from different places. As he put it in 2022, people from underrepresented groups “don’t start off on the 50-yard line,” meaning they start the game further back. For that reason, he argues, they need these skills even more. Research supports the student’s worry too. In a 1998 study by the psychologist Laurie Rudman, women who promoted themselves were seen as more competent, but also as less likable and often as less hireable. Pfeffer’s rules leave that bias in place.

Conflict comes with the job

In Power, Pfeffer lists seven personal qualities that help people gain influence. He sorts them into will, the drive to take on big challenges, and skill, the ability to turn that drive into results. Two of the qualities pull in opposite directions. Empathy helps you see a disagreement the way the other side sees it. A tolerance for conflict lets you keep pushing after the other side says no.

Many capable people avoid disagreement because they want to be seen as easy to work with. Pfeffer has little patience for that. When a student asked where being assertive turns into being “just plain annoying,” he replied, “You could be called much worse things than annoying.” In the same class, he said that being likable was “not really relevant.”

Semmelweis had plenty of tolerance for conflict and very little empathy. The doctors he attacked in his book were the same doctors he needed to persuade. Influence, in Pfeffer’s account, takes both qualities at once.

Reputation arrives before you do

Reputation matters most when people have to decide before they can judge. Investors fund founders before the product works. Hiring committees choose people without knowing how they will do over the next ten years. In both cases, people go on what they have heard.

In 1968 the sociologist Robert Merton showed how this works in science. He drew on interviews with Nobel Prize winners, who kept describing the same pattern. When a famous scientist and an unknown one do similar work, the famous one gets more of the credit. “The world is peculiar in this matter of how it gives credit,” one prize-winning physicist said. “It tends to give the credit to [already] famous people.”

Merton named this the Matthew effect, after a verse in the Bible’s Gospel of Matthew, “For unto every one that hath shall be given.” In plain English, the rich get richer.

1 · The paper

Three people share the work.

2 · The reader

“You usually notice the name that you’re familiar with.”

3 · The credit

The credit goes to the name people already know.

Figure 4. The Matthew effect, as Nobel Prize winners described it in interviews that Robert Merton reported in 1968. The quote in panel 2 comes from a prize winner in medicine. The names and people are made up.

Pfeffer’s fourth rule, create a powerful brand, works the same way. Once people see you as competent, more of them want to work with you. That helps you attract talented people, and working with them makes you more competent.

His third rule, show up in powerful fashion, is about how you come across. The truth about someone’s ability is usually hard to see, Pfeffer argues, so appearances fill the gap. “Appearance is always reality,” he said. He tells a story about meeting the head of business intelligence at a large accounting firm. Afterward he told a friend that the man didn’t seem to have any business intelligence at all. The friend replied, “He looks good in a suit.”

Experiments back him up, uncomfortably well. In a 2012 study at the University of California, Berkeley, students placed 15 US cities on a blank map. Each then rated how well they thought they had done compared with the others. Next they did the task again with a partner, and afterward each rated the other’s skill. Students who overrated themselves were judged more competent. Being overconfident helped about as much as actually being good at the task. In a follow-up study, people kept respecting the overconfident even after they learned how they had really done.

That finding is about the people doing the judging, and organizations pay for it when they promote people who are confidently wrong. For scientists, there is a useful line to draw here. Being honest about the limits of your results is part of good science. Doubting whether you belong in the conversation is something else entirely.

Good ideas travel between groups

Pfeffer’s fifth rule is to network relentlessly, and his reasoning is blunt. Your close friends tend to know the same people and hear the same news that you do. “So what the hell good are they?” he said in 2022. “You need non-redundant people and information.” In other words, you need people who know things you don’t.

He was drawing on a famous 1973 paper by the sociologist Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties. Weak ties are acquaintances, people you know only a little. They matter because they connect you to circles your close friends never reach. In 2022 an experiment with more than 20 million LinkedIn users tested the idea, as I described in How to get luckier. Acquaintances with a moderate number of mutual connections led to the most new jobs. Weak ties helped most in digital industries, and close ties helped more in less digital ones.

Structural holes

The sociologist Ronald Burt’s name for the gaps between groups that rarely talk to each other. People inside a group tend to share the same ideas. So a person with friends on both sides of a gap hears things that neither group has heard. Burt calls that person a broker.

Burt tested what brokers are worth. He studied 673 managers who ran the supply chain at one of America’s largest electronics companies and asked each of them for their best idea to improve it. Two senior executives rated the ideas. Managers whose contacts spanned separate groups came up with ideas the executives rated as more valuable, and they were paid more than peers in similar jobs. Burt called this “creativity as an import-export business.”

Figure 5. A broker sitting on the gap between two groups. People on each island talk mostly to each other, and the broker knows one person on each side. The drawing is illustrative.

The value came from what crossed the gap. An idea that is old news in one group can be a breakthrough in another. As Burt put it, an idea is only as valuable as the people hearing it believe it to be.

Success snowballs, up to a point

Pfeffer’s sixth rule is to use your power. His reasoning sounds like a physics lesson. “If the world could change without the exercise of influence, it already would have changed,” he said. Put simply, things stay as they are until someone pushes. Using power also tends to earn more of it. “Most people who have power use it to get more power and to keep their power,” he said.

Some of that snowballing has nothing to do with merit. In a 2014 experiment, a team of researchers gave randomly chosen people an early success on four websites and then watched what strangers did next. On Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, they donated to 100 of 200 new projects picked at random. Of the projects they skipped, 39% went on to get money from other backers. Of the projects they funded, 70% did. The other three sites showed the same pattern.

Figure 6. Results from a 2014 experiment by van de Rijt and colleagues. On each website, the researchers gave a small early success to randomly chosen people, and the labels on the left say what it was. Dots show the share in each group that later won support from strangers. Samples ranged from 200 to 521 on each site.

There was a limit, though. Giving people a bigger head start didn’t push them much further ahead. The researchers concluded that this kind of snowballing explains less of the gap between winners and losers than many had assumed.

Pfeffer’s seventh rule is the hardest to like. Once someone has power, he argues, “what you did to get it will be forgiven, forgotten, or both.” People are drawn to success and want to be close to it, so they find reasons to excuse how it was won.

This rule describes how people judge winners after the fact. It is a poor guide to how to win. We hear about founders who ignored their critics and succeeded. We rarely hear about the many who ignored their critics and failed, because nobody writes their stories. Statisticians call this survivorship bias. Even Stanford’s summary of Power warns that advice from people at the top “often puts a rosy spin on their ascent.”

Where rule seven runs out

Pfeffer’s example of powerful people protecting their position is the super-majority voting share. This special kind of stock gives a founder extra votes, which keeps them in control. Elizabeth Holmes, who founded the blood-testing company Theranos, held such shares. In 2018 the SEC, which polices US financial markets, charged her with raising more than $700 million through “an elaborate, years-long fraud.” To settle, she gave up her control of the company. In 2022 a jury convicted her of defrauding investors. As the SEC put it, there is no exemption from fraud laws for a company that is “the subject of exuberant media attention.”

Power is a tool

Pfeffer insists that power is neutral. “Power is a tool that can be used for any different purpose to which you want to apply it,” he said.

That neutrality is also the strongest criticism of his books. The same advice helps a manipulator as much as a reformer. A manager can gain influence by intimidating people, and then stop hearing bad news because nobody dares to bring it. A researcher can get attention by overselling a result, and use up the trust that makes people believe research in the first place.

Refusing to learn how power works leaves it in other people’s hands. Decisions about who gets hired and what gets funded are made by people with influence. Those who understand how such decisions are made are better placed to argue for good work. Power expands what a person can do. What it is worth depends on what it is used for.

How the mothers were saved

Semmelweis’s idea did eventually reach the maternity wards, by a route he never saw. In Glasgow, a surgeon named Joseph Lister was trying to work out why so many surgical wounds became infected. A chemistry professor suggested he read the French scientist Louis Pasteur, who had shown that tiny living organisms make things rot. Lister guessed that the same organisms were infecting wounds. Starting in 1867, he published a series of papers on killing them with carbolic acid, an early disinfectant.

Lister’s evidence was weaker than his legend suggests. His famous numbers came from his own ward. Before he used carbolic acid, 16 of 35 patients died after amputations. Afterward, 6 of 40 did. British surgeons argued for more than a decade about whether his method worked at all. Lister kept going anyway. He kept publishing, and in 1877 he moved to London, where the leading surgeons were the most skeptical. When a rival surgeon was still demanding better statistics in 1890, Lister, who disliked public fights, politely ignored him.

By the 1880s, hospitals had carried Lister’s methods from the operating room into maternity wards. Within a few years, Loudon writes, deaths among new mothers fell dramatically. Lister had not even heard of Semmelweis until long after his own method had caught on.

Figure 7. Two careers and one idea, on one timeline. Semmelweis’s career is in red and ends with his death in 1865. The dotted line runs to 1887, when his reputation began to recover. Lister’s career is in blue. The green band marks the 1880s, when hospitals brought his methods into maternity wards. Dates come from the histories listed under Further reading.

Semmelweis’s reputation was rescued only after 1887. By the 1920s, Loudon writes, his story “had all the elements of a Hollywood epic.” It is usually told as a story about stubborn doctors who refused to listen. Pfeffer’s books suggest another way to read it. Semmelweis had data on thousands of births. Lister had 75 amputations and a pile of case reports. What Lister also had was more than twenty years of patient effort spent persuading other surgeons to use his method.

Doing good work and getting it adopted are two different skills, and the second one can be learned. Semmelweis had the first. Mothers who gave birth in hospitals in the 1880s owed a great deal to a surgeon who had both, and who spent his influence on something worth spreading.