Rules of Power delivers easy-to-digest, practical tips for how you can be more powerful in your own life. Using real-life examples of individuals altering their lives by following his rules, Pfeffer delivers his message with humor and humanity. Pfeffer shows us how often we give away our power and how we can reclaim it.” If you want to "change lives, change organizations, change the world," the Stanford business school’s motto, you need power. With 7 Rules of Power, you’ll learn, through both numerous examples as well as research evidence, how to accomplish change in your organization, your life, the lives of others, and the world.

Ultimately this book will help you people better understand the everyday dynamics and political truths of organizations of all types, public and private. The objective of this book is to make people learn how to apply these 7 Rules of Power and achieve their desirable goal, or moreover have a clarification at least. Melvin Lerner, the social psychologist, years ago wrote about the just-world effect, or the just-world hypothesis, where people want to believe that the world is just and fair, which gives them a sense of control. Unfortunately, the world is not just and fair, and we know that. The book is a brilliant take from multiple perspectives about a framework of power - what enables people to get power. How someone may want to use it to be powerful, or understand others. Jeffrey very brilliantly covered the biggest doubt in my mind - many of us do not want to get that kind of power - by just a simple quote “if you want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power”. He also clarifies that these rules are like tools to be used - the outcome is something he is not responsible for - whether it is for good or for bad. He also digresses on this matter to make some wonderful remarks about the impossibility of teaching ethics to students. All of these inputs are insightful and bring to the mind the need to think more about a lot of what is being taught in business schools today (on ethics). Surprise your competitors and advance yourself in the hierarchy by asking for things that others would hesitate to ask. Often, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission

Success!

Title: 7 Rules of Power: : Surprising--But True--Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career Power is a tool. It can be used for good. It can be used for evil. Don’t confuse the fact that it is sometimes used for evil with power actually being evil. These rules are rooted in social science research and will provide a manual for how to attain changes in our organization, life, and the world.

I have mixed feelings towards the book. Some chapters are pretty useful and can be applied well without questioning about it’s ethics. However I am still not convinced with some sections and research author has linked that sums up the person to be perceived with “power” Some of the advice in this book is unobjectionable, but then it's standard stuff that can be found in countless other management/leadership books. Recommend? YES. If you haven’t read anything on Power, this is where you should start with. As a beginner, you can read this book, and if you are someone who believes that one should not be in pursuit of power in the material world, this book might change that.

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I struggled for a long time with my inner sense of justice, relating leadership to morality. One does not necessarily go hand in hand with the other. Only until I accepted this fact, could I open my mind to understanding why some of the worst people on the planet obtain positions of leadership and clout. How does David beat Goliath? By breaking the rules. Goliath shows up with armor and swords. David figures that if he puts on all this armor, he won’t be able to move, let alone win the battle, so he fights by using a slingshot. A brilliant and provocative book mapping out the true nature of power rather than what we normally "want" it to be. Pfeffer (an authority on the topic) goes against conventional wisdom saying that leaders should exhibit confidence over authenticity and anger over vulnerability. "People want to be aligned with someone who they think is going to win, to prevail, so doing anything that disabuses them of that belief is probably a mistake. In 7 Rules of Power, Jeffrey Pfeffer outlines what he views as the (seven) most important strategies to achieve, accumulate, and maintain power. Unsurprisingly, because he is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, much of what he discusses is related to the implications and importance of power in professional settings. Here are what I viewed as the main points from the 7 sections:

Monika Stezewska-Kruk, CEO Corvus Innovation, Executive Coach and Facilitator, Stanford LEAD program graduate Even Robert Greene seems to have realized at some point that promoting gangster values was maybe a bad thing and wrote a success book to help people who have useful talents: Mastery. Some people do philanthropy after they get rich, but examples of that in this book are used to illustrate how to do public relations to boost your image after criminal convictions or other scandals. Is power the last dirty secret or the secret to success? Both. While power carries some negative connotations, power is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Don’t blame the tool for how some people used it. Things I hated about this book: the ethical dilemma that it creates. Some of the studies mentioned seem very "eurocentric" or western in their conclusions, specifically about women in positions of power. there are cultures in the world where women are considered second class citizens. How can they presume to create a power dynamic in those spaces?Things I love about this book: The research and further reading the author tells you to go study. He mentions case studies you can go look up, and both successes and failures of the powerful. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, founder and CEO of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute; Lester Crown Professor at Yale School of Management and Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies The title says it all. People don't like Jeffrey Pfeffer's books on power because they think the world shouldn't work that way, or that the power tactics won't work for them. This book lays out what works, and he takes pains to include stories from people without privilege or advantages using these tactics successfully. Dr. Pfeffer received his BS and MS degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University and his PhD from Stanford. He began his career at the business school at the University of Illinois and then taught for six years at the University of California, Berkeley. Pfeffer has been a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University, London Business School, Copenhagen Business School, and for the past 14 years a visitor at IESE in Barcelona. What’s the best way to move forward in increasing your own power? Among other things, Pfeffer advises: