Managing With Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Author:Jeffrey Pfeffer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780875843148
Publisher: Boston, Mass. : Harvard Business School Press, c1992.
Published: 2010-09-14T13:30:15+00:00

To Atkinson’s list of speaking tips I would add one important suggestion: use humor to the extent possible and appropriate. As the novelist Salman Rushdie noted on a radio program, “If you make people laugh, you can tell them anything.”31 Humor is disarming and also helps create a bond between you and your audience through a shared joke. When Ronald Reagan ran for reelection in 1984 against Minnesota senator Walter Mondale, he was the oldest person who had ever run in a presidential election (John McCain in 2008 would be older when he ran). During one of the presidential debates, Reagan was asked if he thought age would be an issue in the campaign. Reagan replied, with a smile, that he would not make an issue out of his opponent’s youth and inexperience. Everyone laughed as Reagan used humor to diffuse a potentially troublesome issue and transform a serious concern into a laughing matter.

Sentence structure is also important for making language persuasive. During the 2004 presidential election, University of Illinois professor Stanley Fish had his students examine some of the speeches of the two candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry. The students perceived Bush to be more effective, regardless of their own political views. Bush would be begin with a simple declarative sentence, “Our strategy is succeeding.” Bush would also use the repetition of sounds. As Fish noted, “There is of course no logical relationship between the repetition of a sound [as in alliteration] and the soundness of an argument, but if it is skillfully employed, repetition can enhance a logical point or even the illusion of one when none is present.”32 By contrast, Kerry would use more convoluted sentence structure and words that did not seem presidential (for instance, “stupid”). Kerry often presumed his audience had information he had yet to provide.

We often avoid situations in which we feel uncomfortable, but if we are going to get better at talking and acting with power, there is no substitute for experience. Seek out opportunities to make presentations for your company, give talks at clubs or professional groups, and find someone to observe you and provide feedback on what you are doing well and poorly.

Social ties and how you present yourself through language and demeanor are components of creating a reputation and an image. We will examine other aspects of creating a reputation, an important source of power, in the next chapter.

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