Jeffrey Pfeffer

When Vivas Kumar began his time as a student at Stanford GSB, he already had an inkling the lessons he’d long been taught about career success didn’t square with reality.

Kumar, MBA ’21, was born in India, grew up in Singapore, and moved to the U.S. when his family immigrated. Upon taking his first job out of college, he immediately began to doubt what he says his parents had repeatedly emphasized: “The path to success in life is in putting your head down and working really hard — and that’s it.”

“It became extremely obvious to me, from the moment I entered the workforce as a fresh engineering graduate, that that was just untrue,” Kumar said last year in an interview on the Pfeffer on Power podcast. “It was very clear [to me] that those who had reached the top of the hierarchy played with a different set of rules, a different set of skills, that they just don’t teach you in school.”

As it turned out, Kumar was about to encounter someone at Stanford who has long been teaching precisely the rules that Kumar suspected he’d been denied: Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB, designer and instructor of one of the GSB’s most popular electives, The Paths to Power. After teaching and tweaking the course for many years, Pfeffer recently collected its most important lessons in his 2022 book, 7 Rules of Power.

“When I heard about Jeff’s class at Stanford, I thought, ‘This is a class I have to take,’” Kumar recalled during the podcast interview. At the time, Kumar was on the brink of co-founding his company, Mitra Chem — an innovator of commercial battery materials — which he officially launched while he was taking Pfeffer’s class. Kumar was emboldened by Pfeffer’s third rule, “Appear powerful,” to introduce himself and his startup idea to a venture capitalist he’d long admired, who subsequently became his lead investor.

Another former student, Sarah Buchner, MBA ’22, shared on the same podcast that as she was working on building her company Trunk Tools — an AI platform for the construction industry — she took to heart Pfeffer’s fifth rule, “Network relentlessly,” and opted to get on an airplane to meet an important contact face-to-face, rather than via Zoom. Yet another of Pfeffer’s past students, Omar Shaya, MBA ’23, recounted in another episode the importance of the fourth rule, “Build a powerful brand,” which Shaya decided to act on last year when he paid for his AI-enabled personal-assistant startup, MultiOn, to be featured next to OpenAI as a “bronze sponsor” at the world’s largest AI conference.

Over the course of his 53-year career (most of it at Stanford), Pfeffer has written 16 books, including three others on power and the rest on a range of other organizational and human resource management topics. But his writing on power — and especially his 7 Rules, which he says he boiled down after observing students and successful leaders, and diving deep into the social science literature — have struck a particular chord.

Pfeffer acknowledges that plenty of students, readers, and even some colleagues describe his rules of power as “dark” and even “depressing.” (Consider, after all, rule seven: “Success excuses (almost) anything you may have done to acquire power.”) In his syllabus for the class, Pfeffer includes a disclaimer, bolded and italicized: This Class Is Not for Everyone.

In response to the discomfort around some of the starkness of his teachings, Pfeffer counters that he’s simply aiming to describe human behavior as it is, not as it ought to be. He has referred to his teachings on power as “physics applied to organizational behavior,” adding: “If you’re going to get anything done, you have to have power.… Things are in equilibrium, and if you want to get them out of equilibrium, you need some force.”

Therefore, as a pragmatist, he believes his rules of power are crucial to know and understand, even (and perhaps especially) for people who want to enact positive change in the world.

“If power is to be used for good,” Pfeffer has written, “more good people need power.”

Putting Received Wisdom to the Test

Pfeffer didn’t set out to become a physicist of power.

When he began his undergraduate education at Carnegie Mellon in 1964 he intended “to become a normal MBA following a normal MBA career,” he says.

He graduated at the height of the Vietnam War, and thanks to a diagnosis of flat feet, he avoided being drafted. He’d enjoyed electives in finance and research assistant work had piqued his interest in the field of organizational behavior. He considered returning to school to earn his PhD. But to study what, exactly?

“I decided that finance was already pretty well developed,” Pfeffer recalls. “I saw organizational behavior as a field with much more uncertainty, and one that was much less developed. Therefore, I could potentially have a bigger impact.”

He came to Stanford in 1969 and earned his PhD in organizational behavior in just two years.

Pfeffer’s doctoral thesis explored “resource dependence,” a concept that evaded the interest or understanding of most of the people he needed to impress at the time, and he struggled to find a job, eventually landing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Yet within the framework he built in his thesis around resource dependence — which refers to an examination of how companies deal with their reliance on environmental and societal resources — lie many of the themes and ideas that would later buoy Pfeffer’s career.

For one thing, he’d been drawn to the topic in part because of his frustration about what he believed was an overemphasis on individual leaders. This frustration has persisted ever since for Pfeffer, which is why he tries to counterbalance the plentiful discussions on leadership with less individual, more systemic studies on the force of power within organizations.

What’s more, Pfeffer was able to start publishing papers on topics from his thesis, catching the attention of a future friend and collaborator, the late Carnegie Mellon professor Gerald Salancik. In 1978, they co-authored The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective — which would go on to become one of the most widely cited books in the social sciences.

By 1979, the book had already helped launch Pfeffer into a full professorship at Stanford.

Already the seeds of his interest in power had been planted — and they had originated the way he says all his research projects do: through gut-checking his own observations against prevailing wisdom.

“Everything I have done has come from observation of the world,” Pfeffer says, “and asking if our understanding of what I observed is complete or even good — and then taking a new perspective and gathering data to shed insight.”

When he was still at the University of Illinois, Pfeffer noticed that the department chair was perpetually increasing student enrollments. Puzzled, Pfeffer asked why, and the department chair responded with the logic that surely increased enrollments would mean he could hire more faculty. Pfeffer conferred with Salancik, and they agreed about the dubiousness of this logic. “I figured some departments have more power than others, but power is largely independent of enrollment,” Pfeffer remembers.

Together, Pfeffer and Salancik developed questionnaires and measures to test the assumption and published a paper on power dynamics in university budgeting. There followed a paper on the determinants of power in university departments, and another on the effect of departmental power on salaries in universities. Those papers eventually led Pfeffer into related research topics on human resources practices.

When he arrived at Stanford 45 years ago, Pfeffer was asked to develop an elective, and he did — what would become The Paths to Power.

“I looked around, and it struck me that we were studying and teaching leadership, but we were not teaching students about power,” Pfeffer says. “I saw that as an opportunity to do something.”

Power vs. Autonomy

It would be easy to assume that, as someone who has made a profession of power, Pfeffer ought to be interested in accumulating plenty of it for himself. However, in contrast to former students like Kumar, Buchner, and Shaya, Pfeffer himself couldn’t be less interested in following his own rules of power.

He insists that his pull to power is better explained by his yearning to correct what he believes are deep-seated, fundamental misunderstandings about power and leadership — and their conflation.

Advice about leadership, he explains, concerns how an individual leader should behave — and in our culture, that advice would tend to promote authenticity, a servant leader mindset, and modesty. This is bad advice, Pfeffer insists. His book Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time dispels leadership aphorisms that he finds particularly untrue and unhelpful — e.g., that modesty is better than self-promotion and that complete transparency is always better than lying.

A shift away from conventional leadership advice and toward a study of power brings the focus, Pfeffer says, to “how things actually operate inside of organizations, and how you develop political skill and get things done.” As he sees it, our cultural discussions and common wisdom in this area have long lacked a basis in evidence and have, therefore, tended to be flat-out wrong.

In other words, he sees himself as more a social scientist out to correct the record, less a natural-born Machiavellian.

“I don’t worry about my own brand,” Pfeffer says, acknowledging that this is a clear violation of his fourth rule of power. He adds that in his own life, the rules of power are less a guide than is musician Ricky Nelson, who sang a line in Garden Party Pfeffer likes to quote: “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.”

Pfeffer also quotes late GSB professor James March who pointed out that “you can have autonomy or power; you cannot have both.”

“I have chosen autonomy,” Pfeffer says. “If I’d wanted power, I would’ve done some things differently” — like aiming to become a leader, perhaps a dean or provost. “But I am not interested,” he says. “I’m interested in having control over my own life. I love the life that I have; why would I do something else?”

Photos by Nancy Rothstein