Book review of 7 Rules of Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer

I read 7 rules of power, by Jeffrey Pfeffer, who's a researcher on power and orgranizational dynamics at Stanford as an audiobook over the course of 2 days. Review.

At the start, I was quite skeptical of the content, so played it at 3x the speed. The author acknowledges that the content of the book is going to make many readers uncomfortable and squirmy, and he's had that experience with former students of his at the business school. But, he says, not being informed about how the world works doesn't make you better or keep you safe, it only keeps you uninformed, and unable to play the game everyone else is playing.

Pfeffer lists the 7 'rules' of power that are practiced / one must follow to obtain power. Or just be interested in organizational politics. If you are uninterested in power or organizational politics, the author argues, you will soon find yourself out of the organizational. Over the six hours of the book, he gives dozens and dozens of examples of former students and collaborators who were originally skeptical about his thesis, but eventually came around to his way.

The rules themselves are:

    Get Out of Your Own Way.
    Break the Rules (Carefully).
    Show Up in Powerful Fashion.
    Create a Powerful Brand.
    Network Relentlessly.
    Use Your Power (Cautiously).
    Understand that Once You Have Acquired Power, What You Did to Get It Will Be Forgotten.

They could be condensed down to five, maybe six rules, but 7 is always the magic number, specially with self-help books of this sort.

And yeah, they make sense. I was super uncomfortable acknowledging the reality of some of those rules, but so works the world, and it would be unwise to reject reality to stay safe inside one's cocoon of ignorance. We must understand the rules and play by them to get wield power and use it for the good, the author argues. Yeah, sounds true.

I don't have much to complain, it was an easy read, interesting too, this was all so new to me, and yeah some of it will be novel and one will want to argue or dismiss some of those points, but these have been discovered and identified after years of research. Ignore at your own peril!

I don't know if I'll end up reading a lot more literature in this niche, but I certainly enjoyed this book and it made me want to be a lot more ambitious and get more things done. And just for that, this book has been worth it.