Even Power Has Been Subject to Change. Here's How

Look at any book of quotations, and the subject of power is one of the most discussed topics. Sometimes it seems everyone has an opinion on it. And why not? It is at the heart of all of our relationships, at home, with family, kids and spouses and at work, with our bosses and our coworkers.

Certainly the Me Too movement and racial politics have both provided fertile ground for both the understanding of and the exercise of power. It’s one of the things we most desire, and at the same time we are afraid, or put off by it.

Our relationship to power begins when we are young. It’s imprinted from grade school, right on through high school, which is everyone's mosh pit of power dynamics.

Power and how we talk about it has changed since the days of Michael Korda, and Cyndi Suarez understands this. She is the author of The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics

My conversation with Cyndi Suarez:

Power...it’s not what it used to be.

Whether we want to believe it or not, every relationship we have...with a friend, a spouse, a child or co-workers, has a power dynamic as a part of it. Power may shift and morph, but it’s a part of every relationship and often a force for good.

In understanding power at this most intimate level, we can better understand how it plays out, or should play out, on a more macro scale. It’s not something that comes from the barrel of a gun, or from bullying, but from empathy and social intelligence. As UC Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner points out, power is not something that’s won, but something that’s earned and given. The problem or paradox is that once we have that power, we act differently; often counter to the ways in which we earned it.

That what Dacher Keltner call the The Power Paradox

My conversation with Dacher Keltner:

The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government.

If any movement has defined our times, it is the movement towards power in both government and business and the balance between the two. In fact the occupy movement, protesting against the rising power of business and the tea party movement, protesting the rising power of government, are indeed two sides of the very same coin. In many way this could have been predicted, as globalization and multinationals first began their rise in the 1970’s.

David Rothkopf, acclaimed author, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the CEO and Editor-at-large of Foreign Policy Magazine, looks at this phenomenon in his new work Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government--and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead.


My conversation with David Rothkopf:

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Portraits of Power

                                                     













Scott Fitzgerald said that "the rich are different." So too are those upon whose shoulders rest the powers and responsibilities of global leadership. Different, yes; but also human. It is that human side, that world press photographer of the year and New Yorker staff photographer, Platon, has captured in his collection of portraits of 150 current international leaders; Power: Portraits of World Leaders. They are from across the political spectrum and together create a larger portrait of global power in the early 21st Century.  The introduction for the book is written by New Yorker editor David Remnick.

My conversation with Platon:

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Power!

As the election dust settles and a new Congress comes to town, some members will have power and others will not. We know from our own experience that power requires more than just hard work and intelligence. In politics like anything else, what are the skills we need to succeed, to acquire personal power and to effectively wield that power? Thirty five years ago Michael Korda laid out a predicate for power. Today, Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer is the leading thinker on the subject and his new book,  Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't, lays out a 21st Century guide to how power works today.

My conversation with Jeffery Pfeffer:

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