This Week in Startups - The Blueprint E1: Branding yourself, + Jeffrey Pfeffer on the 7 Rules of Power | E1507

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Today we kick off our new series, "The Blueprint." Jason gives practical advice on how to brand yourself (1:33). Then, Jason sits down with Stanford professor and author Jeffrey Pfeffer to talk about his new book, "7 Rules of Power: Surprising--but True--Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career" (14:36). (0:00) Jason tees up today’s show! (1:33) The Blueprint E1: branding yourself (13:39) Visa. Learn more about Visa’s online Small Business Hub at Visa.com/smallbusinesshub. (14:36) Jeffrey Pfeffer speaks about his book “7 rules of Power” (28:26) LinkedIn Marketing -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (29:56) Break the rules: Why are people so uncomfortable breaking the rules? (37:41) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (38:58) Show up in a powerful fashion: body language (41:45) Building a brand (50:12) Use your power (53:53) Trump using his power  (56:46) Once you have power, what you did will be forgiven forgotten or both (1:01:42) Q&A: how do introverts exert power? (1:02:46) Best networking tips

Okay, everybody, we got a great show for you today. First up, I'm going to do a brand new series. It's called The Blueprint. Basically, I'm going to give you 10 lessons and frameworks on how to master your career. And then we're going to have an interview with the amazing Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. We're going to talk about his new book, Seven Rules for Power. It's basically how you can gain power in the business workplace. It's super candid.

We talk about all these features in business and life of how to become powerful. We also talk about how Trump did it, right? And how these applied to him. We go super deep on all seven rules. It's going to be an amazing show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Visa. Are you a small business owner?

Did you know that Visa's online small business hub has tools, discounts, and resources to help you run your business? Learn more at visa.com slash small business hub. LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free one. $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And open phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back, but using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Openphone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. Visit Open

phone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. Welcome everybody to a new 10-part miniseries we're doing here at this week in startups. We call it the blueprint. Shout out to Jay-Z. It's a 10-part miniseries. And the goal of this mini-series is to explain to you how to be successful in your career, whether you're a manager, a CEO founder, or an employee, a team member. This is based not just on what I've learned over the past three decades, but also what I've learned

from hanging out with interviewing on this podcast and investing in the most successful people on the planet. And today I want to get right into it. I want to talk about on the blueprint, branding yourself, but doing this in a very specific way. When people talk about personal branding, you know, it sounds a little cheesy, doesn't it? Perhaps you consider it vulgar or just, you know, smarmy or self-promotional. But today I want to teach you how to brand yourself with a specific breakout skill. Okay? So I'm not talking about your overall personal brand. We'll save that for another time. This is about targeting you with a very specific skill. You might remember Dennis Rodman from the Chicago Bowles, right? He was known as the best rebounder in the NBA and he could change a game just by ripping boards and passing it to the

offensive players. So Michael Jordan, the best player in history, actively recruited Dennis Rodman, even though he was an incredibly unique, difficult, crazy, you know, mercurial person, and they wound up winning a bunch of titles together. The same thing can happen in business, and I want to teach you how that works today. But first, let's set the stage. At an early stage startup, there are basically 10, 20, 30 job functions, depending on the complexity of the business. Let's just say there's 20 job functions, you know, sales, marketing, etc.

Accounting, operations, development, design. You know all the departments in a startup. Well, you might have five people. So what happens to those 20 job functions? Each person on average does four. Now you get to a larger company. And maybe the job functions increase, right? Maybe you got 30 job functions and you got 300 people.

I'm talking about a medium-sized company. Well, that means in each of those job functions, if there's 30 of them, you have 10 people. And we start to call them departments. So going to a startup is a great way for you to learn because you might be put in charge of HR, insurance, sales, marketing, any of those departments. And then over time, you would give up departments and hire people as you got more resources, either funding or revenue. So either way, in a small company, a medium-sized company, even a big one, you can be known

for being the best at something that is super useful to your company. So there's a couple of different techniques for you to figure out how to build this brand, how to be the greatest three-point shooter like Steph Curry, where the greatest rebounder, like Dennis Rodman, or the best on the court leader like a Draymond Green. Now, there's a famous Japanese concept. It's often displayed as a Venn diagram with three or four circles overlapping. It's called Ikegai, I-K-I-G-A-I. And this means roughly something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living.

And when you see the four circles in an Ikegai Venn diagram, it's what you love doing, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. Here's what it looks like if you're watching the video version of this. And you see when things overlap, it gets better and better and better for you. So in this technique, we're going to drop what you enjoy doing. Your personal enjoyment is not important in terms of this. And we're going to drop what you can get paid for because we're assuming you're already in the job and getting paid. And let's be honest again, nobody cares about your enjoyment.

In my technique, we're just going to overlap two circles. A skill you can learn quickly and tell. my coworkers hate doing. Okay? So what does the rest of your team absolutely hate? Maybe they hate sales prospecting, finding leads. Maybe they hate customer service. Maybe they hate legal.

Once you have a couple of these things identified inside your organization, you can figure out which one you can learn quickly. That may be like you can get to 50, 60% proficiency on. So here is that Venn diagram in the middle of tasks, my coworkers hate doing and skills I can learn quickly. is a star. And this is where you can become a star inside your organization. You can be known for something, like rebounding, which in the NBA, rebounding was considered like the least fun thing to do, like setting picks. The most fun thing to do, of course, would be putting the ball in the basket

and dunking or hitting a three-point shot. And so this is the equivalent of rebounding, right? And if you master that scale or a couple of scales that nobody wants to do, you are going to be so valuable to your company. It's a double win. Everybody doesn't have to do the job. job they hate and it gets done and you get the credit. So everybody's a winner. As but one example, after 20 years of meeting with lawyers and doing legal paperwork, no offense to lawyers, I understand it's like really important. I just deputized somebody on my team, Ashley. And she started as my EA and then quickly became a managing director at the company and she handles all the legal stuff. And she's great at it. And she actually manages all the legal documents for the fund and

investments that we do. And of course they come to me and say, hey, JCal, Well, somebody wants to change if we have a board seat or if we have an observer seat, right, two types of seat, a full board seat and an observer seat. And I can get into it, but I don't need to see the legal documents. She can read all of them and work with the lawyers. And what is that done? It frees me to do things that I need to do. And it makes her very famous inside of our organization as the person you go to for legal.

Now, here's another way, a second way for you to brand yourself. And that's to be the trainer and best practice maintainer. What does it mean? Well, let's say you do become so good at something inside your. organization that people automatically know that you're the expert, right? That should be your goal. So if it was legal and Ashley, people say, hey, something's going on illegal. They say talk to Ashley. Great. So that's your goal. And how can you actually codify that you're the best person at it? Well, this is a very simple thing to do. Every company needs to write down best practices.

They need to write down an FAQ, frequently asked questions, and they have to train other people. So if you establish that you're such an expert at legal or you're such an expert at customer support, if you write the manual, you literally write the manual and you do the training, you are going to get a massive amount of credit. So go ahead and do that. You're doing the work anyway. And now every quarter, every month, you maintain that information, you update it and you offer to train other people. Everybody in the organization is going to think so highly of you for doing this because you're not hoarding the information. you've now leveled up to being the trainer and the best practiced maintainer. So let's say everybody starts talking about, hey, Jane, she is the expert at onboarding new employees.

Well, she makes a document. Here's what new employees need to know. And you can put that on Coda. You could put it on Notion. You could put it in, you know, any other document management system. Then when somebody new comes to the organization, she says, Jane says, hey, welcome to the organization, JCal. Here's your new document. read this and ask, tell me if you have any questions or you can highlight something and

put a question there. Oh, that person asks, hey, well, do you pay for Android phones as well as iPhones and why or why not? And then she, Jane, says, oh, I keep getting that question. I'm going to add it to the document and I'm going to train everybody on why we only pay for iPhones or something like that because we need to be studying iPhone apps, not Android ones, whatever the case is. And so that is the second way. The first way is to find out what people don't love doing. The second way is to be the trainer and best practice maintainer. Here's the third one. That's awesome.

There's often somebody inside an organization that the CEO or founders look at in order to give a new task or solve a major problem, right? This is called a fixer. And if you can be the fixer in an organization, you are going to stand out massively. This is my third best way for you to stand out

and make a great career for yourself. The fixer is somebody who can research your project really quickly. They get to 60, 70, 80 percent proficiency at it. And then they find all the important people who work in that discipline. Finally, part four, they recruit people or find an outsource firm or consultant who can do that function for the company going forward. Right. So they might be brought in to set up this organization, this office, this department, but then they find the people to hand it off to who have 100% proficiency at it. And they do all of this with a sense of urgency, with speed.

And then they do it without complaining or causing any drama. These are the anti-snowflakes. These are the warriors. These are the scouts you send ahead on a risky mission. If you can establish yourself as somebody who learns quickly, takes ownership, has a sense of earn agency, and can learn new skills and can network, this can be you. And you can say to your boss, your CEO, your founders, if there's ever something new and you need somebody to run a project, I will crush it for you. And you can then go prove it to them. Let's just pick an example here.

Let's say you have a company and you need to open an office in a shrunk. because you got some huge contract, right? Your fixer would have no fear of getting on a one-way ticket to Sydney and the CEO would have no fear that the person would embarrass them or dilly, dally, or complain. In other words, there's trust there, right? And that person is such an animal that in the first two or three weeks, they would have everybody in Australia who needed to know about the company,

meeting with them having lunch, having drinks, and a positive vibe about the company. and when you are valuable and you add skills, that's when you become dangerous in your career. That's when you become legendary. It's about skills and it's about your intent, right? Do you have the intent to be great in your career? And will you do the hard work to add the skill and then do the hard work that needs to be done? And if you can do that, my lord, you're going to be great. In a basketball sense, you can think of this as being labeled for some elite skill, right?

That's a great way to be employed. Example, Kauai Leonard. He was known as an elite defense. in the NBA. But then he added a three-point shot and became a lead at that. And then he became such a great ball handler. He became one of the best all-around players in the league. Steph Curry, three-point shots, right? But he could also drive the lane. He could pass. Dremont Green. He was known for defense, rebounding. And then he became all about leadership. And then I was talking to him one time. And he then decided to be great at assists. And he started to lead the team in assists

like a point guard. And then he added his last year or two being the greatest mentor of the young players coming up. And these are the great examples of people. If you don't understand basketball, watch some games or look them up and watch YouTube videos. But being able to add skills, oh my Lord, is that a wonderful thing for you to do to become legendary in your career? Okay, that's it. That's the full episode one of the blueprint. You can send this to some young person. Maybe you got a kid, a cousin, a friend who doesn't have their shit together. They're trying to make it in the world. And they just need somebody to tell it to them straight. That's what I'm going to do in the series. I'm going to tell you in the blueprint.

Just straight up, straight facts, no BS, how to become legendary. If you're weak, if you're soft, if you don't want to work hard, this is not the series for you. It's going to be super triggering. But I'm going to do more of these. I'm looking for your suggestions. You can email producers at this week in startups.com or you can DM me on Twitter. If that's your jam, I'm at Jason, Twitter.com slash Jason. Follow me, DM me, your ideas, your questions.

But I'm going to do maximizing your earning. I'm going to do increasing your career upside, maybe being a better match. manager for people who are remote or working in offices. I got a lot of ideas for this, but I'm looking for your ideas as well. Remember, these are always going to be tight. Tight is right. They're going to be snappy. And we're going to put them out every Wednesday for the next 10 weeks. And now let's get to my amazing interview with Jeffrey Feffer, his fourth time on the show, so we can discuss his new book, The Seven Rules of Power, surprising but true advice on how to get things done and advance your career. And we'll also unpack how a lot of these seven rules

applied to Donald Trump's ascension to President of the United States for better or worse. Okay, everybody, enjoy. Are you a small business owner? Did you know that Visa's online small business hub has tools, discounts, and resources to help you run your business? So, whether you're a business beginner or an entrepreneurial expert, find the solutions tools and tips you need to take your business to the next level. Plus, if you have a Visa business credit card or debit card, you can get access to cardholder benefits. like Visa Savings Edge, a savings program which can help you save on everyday business expenses like Office Essentials, Travel, and more.

When you enroll your Visa Business Card in Visa Savings Edge, you'll have access to valuable offers, which can help you turn qualifying business purchases made with your enrolled Visa Business card into savings for your business. Learn more at Visa.com slash Small Business Hub. Once again, that's visa.com slash small business hub. Visa, a network working for everyone. All right, everybody, one of the topics that I have been obsessed with my whole life is how does power accumulate? Who gets power?

Well, I met later in my life a professor from Stanford, a school I can never get into. And his name is Jeffrey Feffer. And he is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's GSB. That's their graduate school of business. and he's been at Stanford since 1979. He teaches a course that is extremely popular and hard to get into at Stanford called The Paths to Power. And in fact, he's been on this show three times.

So now he's going to be on today for his fourth time. And in that time, he wrote a case study. And he said to me, hey, I'm writing a case study on how people accumulate power. I said, oh, I can't wait to read it. He said, well, I wanted to be on you. And I said, is that really a good idea? He says, well, you know, you're one of the top angel investors.

you have the top podcasts, you have the top events. How you did that not coming from Stanford, I think is what's notable. And I said, oh, that's interesting. I get it. And so for the past couple of years,

since this case study has come out, I think it came out in 2019, every year I get to go to Jeffrey's class and I come, I think, twice a year to two classes. And I get to hang out with a bunch of the most driven, hardest working, smartest future business executives

in the world. and talk to them about how power is accumulated. Jeffrey's got a new book out. It's called Seven Rules of Power, surprising but true advice on how to get things done in advance your career. And I listened to it this weekend while I was here in Tahoe going on bike rides and hikes,

and I was delighted to find out. I get a couple of mentions in the book, which is great. But the book is also candid about power. And people get very uncomfortable with the topic of, power and winning and networking. But Jeffrey does not have any hang-ups about that. He just tells it to you straight, which makes seven rules of power a must read for anybody who wants to become powerful in this world. Welcome back for his fourth appearance, Jeffrey Pfeffer. How are you, sir?

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you. You heard my little introduction there. You go to great lengths in the book to let people know. I think because maybe the culture has shifted a bit from the greed is good, you know, 80s, 90s, even into the 2000s, hey, accumulate power, change the world, this is a good thing, this is laudable, and maybe people were a little too cutthroat during those periods to now people are kind of, I think, very uncomfortable with power. Why did you take all that time in the book, and congratulations on your book. It's really great. Why did you take so much time to give these disclaimers? I'm curious. Do you get a little pushback these days in your class? Well, you would know that, Jason. You come to my class. And frankly, you know, not only do I make

people uncomfortable, but you make people uncomfortable, which is, of course, exactly why I want you there. Yes, there is a confusion in the world between how we want the world to be and how it is. And many people, I think, are living in some kind of fantasy world. I don't understand how, as you probably know, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Of the family that looted the Philippines has just been elected president of the Philippines. Vladimir Putin is still in power. Zee and China is president for life. By the way, Mark Zuckerberg is CEO for life.

Yes. Because of supermajority voting shares, but you know a lot. about because you live in the Silicon Valley and you understand how all these companies go public with these shares that permit the CEO to basically stay in power almost regardless of what percentage of the company they own. So in a world in which power remains important, the world is still hierarchical, the fewer positions on the top than at the bottom. It is important, I think, to tell people that their power has really not changed, that it's still important that if you want to do what Stanford Business School talks about, which is change lives, change organizations,

and change the world. You need leverage. You need power. Yeah. And it's particularly, I think, troubling to people after they saw the Black Swan event of 2016, I think you would agree, Trump getting into power was absolutely traumatizing to some people, disturbing, troubling. and you actually were going to write a book about Trump and his techniques for gaining power. You decided not to do that. Why? Because people can't really read anything about Trump and have any kind of objective reaction to it. And so the seven rules of power, the book that I did write, is essentially the book I could have written about Donald Trump. But instead of being it about Donald Trump, it's about a bunch of other.

people, including Elon Musk and many other people who basically do what he does, you know, basically do what is required to be done. And I'm sure we're going to go over the seven rules, but it's basically what you need to do, regardless of whether you're in politics or in business, or you're an angel investing, or you're a startup founder. And if he is a startup founder, by the way, you ought to be concerned because the statistics are the most startup founders get thrown out of their companies. And if you don't want to get thrown out of your company, you need to understand something about

how to prevent that from happening. Yeah. And it's just slightly uncomfortable. Some people think it's uncouth. But getting out of your own way is the first chapter. And it really does delve into this sort of first part of our discussion, which is just free yourself, permission granted to free yourself of wanting to have power

and to understanding how power is accumulated. That is kind of the point, right? The rules of how to get power might be disturbing to you, but they are what they are. You need to know them. These are the rules. This is the chess board.

You don't need to be comfortable with it. You just need to understand. Am I correct? That's really what you try to get at in that first chapter. That is part of what I try to get in at the first chapter. The second thing I'm trying to get into the first chapter is many people engage

in various forms of self-deprecation. They apologize. Pardon me for interrupting. Pardon me, I'm going to make a comment. I'm not sure it's valuable. You want to stop that behavior. Secondly, I think many people are overly obsessed with being liked. So I've taken walks with people who have been on your shows.

I won't mention any names. Sure. And I was taking a walk with one person one day and they said, I told them, they said they were on your show and they weren't happy about the interview questions. And they said to me, they said, you know, Jason is not necessarily very popular in the traditional VC industry. And I looked at this guy and he could see on my face. I said, why would Jason care about being popular in the VC industry? It's almost as bad as Jason being concerned about being popular at Bain or something.

a company that he always tells my students they shouldn't go into, they should do something useful and start a company. You know, I think getting, stop worrying about what everybody else is thinking about you. First of all, they're not. They're thinking about themselves. But secondly, hold on to say, this is so important. This point, I want you to unpack. We all get obsessed about what people think about us.

The truth is what? The truth is, number one, they aren't thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are. They're thinking about themselves. That's number one. Number two, most people are concerned not about whether or not you are likable or charming or cute or adorable. They are concerned about can you get stuff done? So if I'm an investor with Jason Calacanus, I don't worry about his hairstyle or his t-shirt. I worry about can he make me money?

If I invest or if I'm an appointed CEO of Stanford Healthcare, which is Stanford Hospital, I should be concerned about, you know, are we delivering high quality care? Are my physicians burned out? This is not about a, life is not about a popularity contest. It is about making stuff happen and getting stuff done.

But to go back to the question of which you started, yes, I use as an example, And I believe I use it as an example in that chapter. An article by Sam Borden in the New York Times, which is an article about U.S. men's soccer. And the problem with U.S. men's soccer, according to Sam Borden, is that U.S. men's soccer players will not do what the Cristiano Ronaldo will do, which is you barely touch them. They fall to the ground. They roll over. They basically try to draw a penalty flag.

In basketball, that's called drawing a fact. And soccer, for some reason, people don't want to do it. So the question that Sam Borden asked in this New York Times article is, are men's soccer players in the U.S. so concerned with appearing sportsmen like that they will not engage in the same strategies everybody else is. And those strategies, of course, permit the Cristiano and all those of the world to do better. Yeah. If you don't flop, you will then lose an edge.

And so the other piece of this that is so interesting, I think, number one, as you said, nobody is thinking about you. You're thinking that people are thinking about you and they're not actually thinking about you. Two, what people really care about is results. So if you stayed out all night drinking and partying and playing blackjack and then you go and you win the NBA final, as Michael Jordan was reportedly doing, you know, like he'd like to play a little cards now and again, but he still won. Nobody's telling him to stop playing cards.

Now, if he lost, then he's, you know, playing cards all night, you know, then people might have a problem with it. The truth is, also, as I tell people, nobody remembers how you got there. They just remember that you got there. Nobody remembers what happened. You think they remember. And then once in a while,

somebody will write an article about you if you get lucky and you're, you become famous. or whatever. And somebody might dredge up, you know, a little litany list of ABC, D, E, and they just put it in this like long preamble. Here's everything the person did wrong or that were challenging. It's like the controversy section on your Wikipedia page, which I call everybody you fired or beaten business and they're a grudge because they're the only ones who want to update your Wikipedia page and fight for those changes. The truth is, when I read those articles about somebody, I'm like, oh, some eggs were broken along the way to making the omelette. Yeah, that's how

business and life works. this is the other important point, is it not? Yes, that's correct. You give a lot of examples of this in the book. Some of the most successful people we know had so many failures and just people don't remember them. They remember the wins. So for the person who went on the walk with you,

if I introduced them to a great company, we're going to be best friends. And they're going to be like, remember the time I was on your show and you broke my chops and I was super uncomfortable? That was hilarious. They're literally going to reframe that in their mind, I think, Jeffrey.

and say, yeah, you know, we got off to a rocky start. But, man, look at all these wins we did together. That's kind of how life works. That is exactly correct. And also, I think implied in your comment, which I think is completely correct, is the most important qualities. And by the way, you exhibit both of these, persistence and resilience. I mean, as you talk about in the case, and as you talk about, you know,

as people who know you know, you were running this very successful magazine, And then the tech crash came and you went from running this, you know, huge revenue producing with 100 employees or something down to four or five people. I mean, you have gotten back up a number of times. And that is, I think, one of the secrets here is success. You don't give up. I mean, what choice do you have in life? Like, either you get knocked down and you give up and then maybe three or four years later,

you're going to get back to it anyway is the way I look at it. So why not just get up immediately? Now, I mean, some people might say when you get knocked down in the ring, take a second. I'm just like, pop back up. Just pop back up, get back in the fight. Because you're going to get back in the fight anyway. That's what I see happen nine times out of ten. Some founder gets their asses kicked.

And then they take two or three years off. They do some yoga. They kiteboard, whatever. And they're like, I need to get back in the game. And I'm like, what took you so long? You just burned four years of your life. You know, if you get your ass kick, start a company the next week. Or take two weeks off, whatever.

Go to Japan. Check out Hokkaido. Do some skiing. Get back in the fucking game. There's no reason to sit. around and cry in your coffee. It's a waste of time. And nobody, and if you do that, by the way, to your point, Jeffrey, about people are not thinking about you, I find when people then hear, like you failed and you're starting again, they're like, oh, yeah, he's that guy. She's that gal, right?

Oh, that, yeah, I know that type. Hey, everybody. I'm here with my pal, Tom Eshbacher. He is the senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. And today, we're going to talk about marketing for startup. And LinkedIn did a great new internal report called today in startup marketing. Welcome to the program, Tom. Thanks, Jason. One of the main topics covered in the report is validating product market fit. That's so essential. So how does marketing play a role in validating PMF? One of the challenges from the pandemic was it disrupted normal feedback loops that startups get, and particularly when trying to scale assumptions based on small sample sizes. You can't go to conferences

anymore, you can't do events. And so we've seen a clever adoption of LinkedIn's free analytics tools here. And one that's become table stakes, and I mean, 92% of Series A startups are using it, is the LinkedIn Insight tag. A feature here is the website demographics functionality that provides a valuable view on your site visitors' professional attributes. What's their job function, their seniority level, what company are they at, the industry, the company size.

This is all a bunch of actionable insight that you can use to back up your instincts around who your addressable market is and help inform early marketing strategies. Fantastic. Okay. And so if you would like to get this incredible report, you can go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And not only can you get the report for free, you're also going to get $100 off your first marketing campaign from Tom at LinkedIn. Way to go, Tom. Let's go to the next chapter. My favorite. Break the rules. this is so critical. Why are people uncomfortable with breaking and bending rules? I don't understand.

I think most people are trained and we certainly socialized them in school from a very early age to follow the rules. I mean, many people will tell you that what school teaches you is obedience to authority, to follow what the teacher says.

You get graded on. Do you play well with others? Do you get along well? But breaking the rules is essential. I think if you think about business models, many of the most successful business models have broken with conventional wisdom. Southwest Airlines issued the hub and spoke. Whole Foods markets had this idea, a simple idea, but important idea,

that people would pay more for food they wanted to eat, which meant that, you know, since tastes differ between Austin, Boston, and San Francisco, we were not going to buy stuff by the railroad car load and try to sell the same stuff everywhere. The men's warehouse, when George Zimmer ran it before it went broke, under his successor, had this idea that actually you only made money when you sold stuff, not when you bought it. So the power in retail is typically with the buyers and the men's warehouses with store operations. So with business strategy, we would, of course, immediately understand that, you know, if I bring out another black PC, it's not, you know, with using a Windows operating system, my chances of success are slim to none.

and therefore I have to find a way to differentiate. And that is true for people and their careers, as much as it is true for business strategy. You have to differentiate yourself. And to differentiate yourself, you have to break the rules. There's another aspect of breaking the rules. If you're going to accomplish profound social change, you are probably going to break the rules. Nelson Mandela became the father of South Africa while he was in jail. Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail,

occurred and he wrote while he was in the Birmingham jail. John Lewis, the late John Lewis, would talk about getting into trouble, good trouble. So if you're going to accomplish social change, you have to be willing to break with norms and conventions. Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus, not what she's supposed to do. She's supposed to sit in the back of the bus. So if you're going to do something, I mean, the rules are basically made by the people who are favored by the rules. So if you're know, if you're a typical, you know, person who's the rules are favoring, then you should, of course, follow the rules. But if you're an underdog, you need to break them. And so examples of that that have stuck with you over the years in terms of in business,

people who just are, let's say, unlikable? Because when you do break the rules, some group of people who are charged with maintaining the rules are going to be a bit perturbed about you doing that. So inherent in breaking the rules is being comfortable with being disliked. Am I correct? That is, and certainly being comfortable with also being a non-conformist. Because if when you break the, since most people follow the rules, when you break the rules, you are non-conformist. I still remember, again, to put this in the context of business strategy, when George Zimmer came to my class, when he was still running the men's warehouse, one of the most common questions he was asked,

because he ran his business, which was quite successful, very differently from most retailers. People will keep asking him, well, you know, what are your other retailers say about this? And finally, he said, I don't listen to the other retailers are too Republican for me. Kind of a political, whatever. The point being that no one benchmarks their way to the top. You benchmark your way to the middle by definition. If you do what everybody else does, you get a sense. their same result. So when I think about people who break the rules, I think of my friend,

Jason Calcanus, who's who's featured in that chapter. You broke the rules. I mean, you know, when you were trying to get into Fordham, you would walk in on the admissions guy. Edward Boland. Edward Boland, my guy. And he would say, do you have an appointment? And when you got your job at the computer lab, you walked in on the dean, and he said the same thing, do you have an appointment? So you would walk in and you have this line in the case, which I love, which is, you know, I figured out that, you know, the start, go to the top. The people in the middle don't matter. Go to the top. They can solve your problems. This, by the way, is a violation of conventional wisdom and a violation of norms. So you're a rule breaker, but many of the people

who have been the extraordinarily successful break the rules. It's really interesting, too, when you do that, the people at the top overwhelmingly appreciate it. You know, now that I am on the top of what I do, somebody on one of my teams is like, hey, you know, emails me on a Saturday and says, hey, I think we're screwing this up. Here's why.

I'm like, oh, thank you for speaking up. Like, to me, that is just amazing. But of course, everybody is trained head. I don't want to bother J-Cal on the weekends, etc. If one of my employees literally called my phone number and said, is this a good time? And I picked it up and I'd be like, yeah, why are you calling me on the weekend? What's up? Is there, are you okay?

And they said, no, I met a company. They're incredible. We need to invest in them. Here's why. I would cry. It's never happened. Nobody wants to break the rules like that. If I was working for me right now, I would be like, I got three companies.

Here's the ranked order. I got to queued up. I think they're going to take this amount of money. But nobody's aggressive like that. I think there's a generation. that has been in some way throttled, not just to be conformist, but to, well, what's the point? You know, they just, they don't have this desire to win or to make themselves more attractive than their contemporaries. And in my day and age, I'm an old man now at 51, I was like,

I need to distinguish myself against all these other people. I looked at everybody as competition. people who are not even competition. I was like, I need to do better. My magazine needs to do better than David Mase's magazine, the source, about hip-hop. Silicon Outer Reporter has to be bigger. It has to be better. It has to be better. This podcast has to be better.

I've got to have better guests. I got to get better ratings. I just looked at the whole world as a giant competition. I don't know why people are so uncomfortable with that concept inside of an organization. Yeah, I don't know either. But certainly, I think, you know, The analogy, I think with business strategy is exactly right. I mean, you are in competition.

There are fewer positions. There's only one president. There's only one school superintendent. There's only one CEO. And then the places, by the way, that have tried CEOs, they mostly don't last. So, yes, I mean, you are in competition. And, you know, people don't remember that Steve Jobs was one of three co-founders of Apple. Some people will remember Steve Wozniak.

Nobody remembers the third guy. People, Jack Dorsey was actually not the founder of Twitter, though of course he's made it look like he is. You know, I mean, you are in competition. You need to differentiate yourself just as you would in any other domain. People, in order for anybody to hire Jason Calacanus, an order for anybody to promote Jason Calacanus, is necessary, insufficient, but is necessary for them to know who the hell you are and remember you. Yes. Exactly. Listen, lots of founders of Lucy Goosey,

with all these personal phone numbers flying around. They put them in company documents. They'll use them for sales calls and more. And this makes things really messy. Okay, you don't know who's calling. Is it a sales prospect? Is it somebody from your kid's school? Should you pick up?

Should you not pick up? You don't want to get random calls at the summer barbecue, right? I'm doing multiple barbecues a week. I don't want to start getting the wrong calls and the wrong number. I want to be able to filter them. And if you're the company, you want to keep that professional phone number. Again, if somebody leaves the team and you just want to look professional, Open Phone can help you create business phone numbers right now.

It's super easy. It works to an app on your smartphone or desktop. You just pick a number. You install the app and you're done. No need to carry two phones like back in the day. And by the way, we can tell you Open Phone is amazing because our sales team uses it every day. An open phone is so affordable at just $10 a month. That's their starting price.

Really affordable. But Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months by signing up at openphone.com slash twist. And if you have an existing phone number with another service, no problem. Open phone will port that over for free for you, easy, peasy, lemon, squeezy. Head over to O-P-E-H-O-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash twist today to get 20% off and to make your life easy. All right, show up in a powerful fashion. This is about the clothes you wear or something else? It's about the clothes you wear, but it's also about body language.

We respond to how people look. You know, when Jim Collins got fired out of Stanford, he gave me a book called Chimpanzee politics. He said, I should have read your earlier book on Power Managing with Power. I would probably still be working at Stanford, though, by the way, not as nearly as successful as Jim Collins became. If you read about chimpanzee politics, you see they're pretty much the same as human politics. One of the things that chimpanzees do is the dominant chimpanzee or the dominant gorilla will beat their chest and whatever. and we have our own versions of doing that, body language matters.

I use for an example of this and people go online and find it, the example of Tony Hayward of BP, who shrinks into himself and reads his statement versus Lloyd Blankfine at around the same time who looks comfortable and is smiling and is... From Goldman Sachs. Yeah.

From Goldman Sachs, absolutely. Both of these companies were involved in huge crises. The Gulf oil leak that BP did and then Goldman Sachs the financial crisis, both in the same situation. You outline one of them is like cool, calm, and collected and basically teaching the center is questioning him. He's basically educating them and he's running the show.

Whereas the guy from BP is demurring and he does it know and he's unsure and he's throwing his own people under the bus. And his body language, you showed your students, I believe, these clips with no audio. And you can just tell from just their body language who's a boss and who's not. My colleague Dana Carney, who teaches at Berkeley, has an article in the California Management Review on body language, which I highly recommend to people. Her last name is spelled C-A-R-N-E-Y. She is writing a book on body language.

Body language matters. Amy Cuddy's TED Talk is, I think, one of the second or third most downloaded her to watch TED Talks. on her work on presence, body language matters. And people respond based upon how you look, number one, secondly, how you sound, and by far the least important, the content of what you say. You know, how you make people feel the tone of your voice, the same message can be completely taken in different ways. You know, you tell somebody, great job, or great job.

It's the same words. It's the same two words. they convey very different things. And so learning that and mastering that's super important for people. Building a brand, this is something that Jack Welch figured out how to do. Got a lot of credit for all the stuff going on at GE. People thought he was the greatest manager of all time. Of course, now people are reflecting like, okay, yeah, maybe not.

But there was a brand of Jack Welch, and there's been brands of other folks that have been explicitly created. And in fact, now it's become a bit of a playbook. Let's be honest. Everybody's starting podcasts. everybody's writing books. You know, they're all book about themselves, basically,

to kind of tell their own story. They're creating their own social media presences and, and, you know, it's become a bit of a playbook. But it is still important to have a powerful

personal brand, correct? That is absolutely correct. I mean, you are a good example of that as well, of course, with all of your events and podcasts. And one of the things that I sometimes say about you

is that I say, Jason Calacanis, was an overnight success over 20, 25 years. That I think one of the things that people don't do as they build the brand is if you think about Coca-Cola or Mercedes-Benz or Tesla or any of these powerful brands, they stay at it. They are consistent. They don't try to change. I mean, Tesla is about Tesla. It doesn't go from making electric cars to try to make airplanes or to make.

make soft drinks or something else. So the brand building requires, I think, a persistence, which you often don't see. Yeah. I was just thinking back to that, I remember the first time I was ever on the radio, 1994-95, W-EVD-108, I think was 1050 in New York, and I basically was on somebody had rented an hour of radio time, and I just made my list of the top ten, top five websites, and I would just list the top five websites. I was horrible.

If anybody has that tape, you would be, like, amazed at how. horrific I was on air, but here we are 25 years later, and I can get by with hosting a show or moderating a panel. And it really is, you know, the Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule. I have my own concept about that. I don't know how you feel about the 10,000 hour rule. I think if you get to 60, 70, 80 percent ability in a particular task, particular skill, good enough. You don't need to be the virtuoso. I don't need to be. you know, Oprah or Charlie Rose or whoever you consider, you know, Mike Wallace, the greatest interviewer ever.

But if I can be 80%, good enough because I'm doing it in a niche. And people are like, oh, he's the, you know, Oprah or the Mike Wallace or Charlie Rose of this genre, good enough. So you don't have to beat yourself up too much either. 60, 70, 80%, you know, to me feels like competency. And I feel you get to those numbers in 400 hours, 200 hours, 500 hours, 500 hours, a thousand hours. You don't need to do this for a thousand hours a year for 10 years. You can ramp up much quicker, so I wouldn't be intimidated. It's really, people ask me,

how do you become successful in podcasting? And it's like, show up. Literally, you just show up. If you do a show once a week for two years, you'll get good in my estimation, somewhere between episode 50, 60, 70. Somewhere, you know, early in the second year, you'll be good enough that they can't ignore you. So, but people get 10 episodes in and they quit. Yep. Okay. One of my favorite, network relentlessly. I mean, for people who are starting their career, what's the best advice? You have no network. You know the person who sits next day in class and you got two former employees or managers who like you. You got a network of three people, four people. Well, how do you cold start that? Well, I think there are two things. Number one,

I think many people do not spend sufficient time on building social relationships. Even though we know management, leadership is getting things done to other people, as I say, if management or leadership is getting things done to other people, then the more people you know, the better off you are. Because if you're going to get things done to people, you need to know a lot of people. And so people, I think, underinvest in social relationships, they overinvest in the technical parts of their jobs. One of the things that I've noticed about startups, I don't know if you've noticed this,

but many startups over-invest in the product itself and under-invest in marketing and sales. This is something that I consistently observe. I don't know if that's consistent with what you've observed. Absolutely. I see companies that have over-obsessed about the product, which is, I guess, great, but they have like no marketing or salespeople because they think a great product is going to sell itself, which, by the way, it does not. So in the similar thing I weigh, I think people underinvest in building social relationships.

And so the first thing you need to do is you need to just spend sufficient amounts of time. So you just need to invest a sufficient time on meeting people. And I think one of the principles of generosity, one of the important principles of networks is generosity. So people say to me, you know, how do I meet people? Do you know something? Do you have a connection? Do you have an insight that could be useful to the people that you want to meet?

And in almost every case you do. I have people at Stanford who say, I want to make a CEO. What can I do for them? You can tell them about Stanford Business School. You can tell them who to recruit out of your class. You can tell them, you know, I mean, you know lots of stuff because you've taken lots of classes. Presumably you have some technical knowledge. So share with people.

Do something that makes them think of you in a generous fashion. And then in the chapter on networking, I use to at least several examples. One is, of course, Keith Farrazzi, who wrote the book, Never Eat Alone, which is a good book. Keith is a great guy. And the other is a book by my friend John Levy, you're invited. John Levy is an influencer. He talks in his book about how to put on events that people want to come to. One of them is that the events need to be curated carefully.

Nobody wants to be an event which anybody can show up to. I think you did this when you – I think you told the story in class about doing dinners at Mexican restaurants. or something and inviting people? You know, I mean... It's a great playbook because everybody needs to eat a meal. We're social animals. And so it's not wasted time. You're going to do it anyway.

You're going to have lunch anyway. So to Keith Frazier's point, like, why would you eat alone anyway? Just turn it into a lunch and keep up to date with other people and keep that network growing. What I did is, and I liked, by the way, the Your Invited Author's approach, which was he did a dinner. You would know who's coming to the dinner, but you wouldn't. know who they were. You weren't allowed to reveal yourself and you had to cook and eat together

and then clean the dishes. So he actually had you do an activity together. And then at the end, you would try to figure out, oh, that person is this person. Hopefully they didn't look it up online and ruin the surprise. But he made an event that was compelling and interesting. The one I did that was super easy and efficient for me was I knew Mexican food was cheap. I knew that they handled big parties. That's kind of how Mexican restaurants are designed. You come in with 12 people. They're like, sure, you go to a fancy restaurant, 12 people. Oh, do you want to secure the private room and it's $5,000 extra. You've got to do the tasting menu, all this nonsense.

How much wine are you going to buy? I would go to the Mexican restaurant. I'd say, give me a table of eight. Then I would go and I'd get one or two people I know and say, hey, you want to have dinner. You know, I got a table at this restaurant. It's great Mexican. Oh, yeah, sure. Then I'd say, hey, do you know anybody who's in town who wants to come? And they say, yeah, I got this person. Then I get that person. Then I'd flip that person. Hey, do you know anybody interesting who might want to come

with us? I got an extra seat. Now, I had seven extra seats from the beginning. But I just tell people I got one extra seat. And then I just keep expanding. Then people come to the dinner and they'd be like, maybe one time I had somebody say, I thought it was like four or five or five of us. I was like, yeah, you know, it's snowballed. You know, like nobody cared.

And then the big secret, I ordered the food before I'd say, just bring me like this cassidias, then bring us fratitas, bring us, uh, two pitches of sangria, have it all on the table, you know, and keep bringing guacamole and chips because I was on a budget, you know, and so I could get out of there for 30 bucks a person, as opposed to 300 at some fancy restaurant. networking is incredible. In fact, every time I go to your class, one of these kids invites me. And so I finally said, like, they're like, hey, you want to have dinner with like 10 of us? And I was like, no, that's not efficient for me. But if you can get 100 GDSB students, I'll come down and do a Q&A with you if I can record it for the show.

And then we can go out and have a drink afterwards. And they're like, yeah, done. And so they're setting that up. So I'll be doing that in the fall. I'll let you know. All right. Network relentancy. We got it. Use your power. This is going to make people uncomfortable. But why acquire power and not use. it. Let's talk about using your power, demonstrating that you have power. Sometimes you don't have to take the lightsaber out, but once in a while, somebody's going to have to get a limb removed. So people remind, you remind people that lightsabers and Jedi can throw down. Let's explain why it's important to use your power. Well, to go back to a point that we earlier discussed, people want to associate with success and people want to associate with people who can

get stuff done. So the more you use your power to accomplish things, the more people want to work with you, the more people want to invest with you, the more people want to become your customers. So your ability to get stuff done determines, it becomes, I think people often call this the flywheel effect or the self-fulfilling prophecy, where you do something and you attract more resources because you're successful at what you do. So to the extent you use your power, and demonstrate you're powerful, people want to associate with power and success. And so more people are going to want to flock to you. And you see this, to use a bad example, but maybe a good example, you see this in the case

of the ex-president Donald Trump. Donald Trump used his power, you know, and basically you got rid of people who didn't, you know, weren't sick of fans to him. And that's not necessarily a good thing because then every, you'll be surrounded yourself with what yes people. But on the other hand, you then to get people who say, well, you know, I want to be close to this power and success. And so therefore, I am willing to debase myself as Lindsay Graham did and a bunch of other things in order to be close to it. So, you know, I think one of the examples of using power to my friend, Amir Dan Rubin, this is going to be a strange

example. He became CEO of Stanford Healthcare Hospital and Clinics in 2010. Stanford hospital and clinics was not working very well. He had an idea of how to take a team of talented people and actually have them work more effectively as a team. Three or four years later, 70% of the people running Stanford Healthcare, and we're now talking three levels down, were all new. And he said, to my class, he said, look, he said, I did not come in intending to fire all these people in an institution, which, by the way, doesn't let you fire anybody anyway. He said, I did not expect this level of turnover. But if you set high performance standards, the people who aren't going to meet those standards

will leave voluntarily and the people below them will leave also because they will say, you know, the person above me is now setting a higher standard. The question is, do you want to play on the varsity or the junior varsity? If you want to play on the varsity, you know, you've got to meet certain standards. And therefore, you have to as a leader say, look, Somebody's, particularly if you come in from outside, if you're an, if you've come in from outside, it is probably because the organization is having troubles and there's nobody inside to fix them. So you come in from outside, you need to get the team, Jim Collins would say get the right people on the bus, whatever phrase you want to use. You have to have a team that's competent to win.

And if you use your power and produce a winning team, people will give you all kinds of resources and good people will want to play with you on that. team. And if you don't use your power and you don't, therefore, do the necessary replacement to get the best people on your team, then you're going to fail. All right. I'm talking to Jeffrey Fyfer, who has written the seven Rules of Power here on his far appearance on the pod. I've given you a new subtitle for your book, Seven Rules of Power, How Trump Went from Nobody to President. We'll take three of your questions. I'll get three questions from the audience live. But I mean, running Trump through these lenses, it's just so great. And I think even if you really hate Trump and he triggers you, understanding how he accumulated power is a very important thing because we need to have,

you know, people who are competent accumulate power and, you know, people who have good intent. If you go through the lens, yeah, good. As a matter of fact, my opening quote in the book, which is attributed to me, I don't actually remember saying it, but I like it, which is, you know, if power is going to be used for good, more good people need power. Of course, that is a perfect way to phrase it. So get out of your own way. Trump does not care about acquiring power. Breaking the rules, he did it every chance he got.

You know, like, he would insult other people in the Republican Party. And he would literally come up with bullying nicknames for them and do it during a presidential debate. He was the least presidential, which goes to using your power. So he broke the rules and he used its powers. If you think about networking chapter five, he spent. His entire career networking, going to events, you know, whether it was like wrestling events or the Knicks game or people's weddings. I mean, he went to every event on the planet, hosted every event on the planet and showing up in powerful fashion.

I mean, he's got this giant plane that's not a corporate jet. He took a jet, Jeffrey, that was used for commuter service that's out of use and then redesigned and reconfigured it so that he would have the largest jet on the tarmac with his name on the side of it, which no rich person I've ever met, and I know almost all of them, and I've been on half of their planes, they are obscurifying whose plane it is.

They don't want you to know. Think about that showing up in a powerful fashion, but go ahead. You had another point. Well, he also built a brand, of course. Yes. As a matter of fact, late in his career,

he figured out that he was actually a pretty crappy real estate developer, but he was very good at putting his name on stuff. Correct. Yeah. I mean, and if you think about that, building a powerful brand, and nobody cares and nobody remembers the losses,

nobody remembers Trump University, Trump stakes, Trump water, Trump ties. I mean, there's a long list of Trump zeros, like a never-ending list of projects he did that went to zero. But the project of, like Trump, you know,

tower in New York or the Plaza Hotel or the presidency, see, those things they did get known by everybody. And then here, I mean, understanding once you have acquired power, your final chapter, what you did to get it will be forgiven, forgotten, or both. In his case, I mean, he seems to have gotten away with it all. We'll see how this January 6th stuff goes, but he might run again. Based on what you know about power, is he going to run again? And could he win again?

if he he will probably run again unless he's in jail and if he runs he has a reasonable chance of winning of course of course what does that say

but by the way it's not just I think it's important for the listeners to understand that it's not just Trump that Jeffrey Epstein a known convicted

sex offender was hanging out with the high society after his conviction Yes. A small number of people still hung out with him, but it's still mind-blowing. Yes. Martha Stewart went to jail.

Her brand has never been more valuable. Michael Milken went to jail. He's introduced on an Oakland Athletics game as a philanthropist. Yes. You can buy, you know, you look at the names on all of these buildings and whatever. Steve Schwartzman of Blackstone, I'm told he's not the sweetest person in the world. You buy legitimacy by putting your name. name on organizations and universities and buildings and whatever, that's number one.

And number two, because people want to be close to power money and success, they will forgive and forget. Nobody remembers, even though this is documented in several places, that Bill Gates stole the code on which the original Microsoft MS-DOS system was built. Yes, that's been documented, yeah. I mean, the Epstein one is interesting because I knew him in the early part of his career, the late 90s, he was at all the TED conferences. And if you put him through the seven rules here,

he did break the rules. He showed up at TED literally in jeans and sneakers and a sweatshirt, and he looked like a homeless guy. And showing up in powerful fashion, at that time, people didn't have a lot of planes. You know, he would fly all of these scientists from MIT, et cetera, Joe Edo, Marvin Minsky. He would fly them on his jet to the TED conference in Monterey,

which is where I met him. And he had this, like, very powerful brand to chapter number four because he was networking relentlessly. And he used his power because he would go around the TED conference. And I remember he would like ask people what they did. And then he would offer them money to, you know, especially scientists like, hey, can I back your next study? Here's a million dollars. Just $500,000. And MIT was like, yeah, we'll take all that money.

Sure. And it's really, really interesting, like putting it through the lens. And even after he was convicted, it's true. after he was convicted and Bill Gates still hung out with him in MIT and Joey Ito still hung out with him, took his money. So, but I think most people didn't. And I hadn't seen him after meeting him in those years, but I am in his black book, which now like literally every time I get an argument with somebody, not every time, but once in a while I get an argument. Like, why are in his black book? I'm like, this guy networked relentlessly. He was at everything. He used to come to

my conferences and you would just look in there. It'd be Jeffrey Epstein and Gillen sometimes and 10 people around them. And the 10 people they would bring with them would be scientists and authors, like really notable people. And you'd be like, whoa, he's with Marvin Minsky. He's with, you know, whatever famous person. It was really interesting to watch that happen up close. All right. Take three questions from our audience. It's an interesting question from Zen Profit. He asks, what percentage of Jeff's graduates create their own startups? And I guess, you know, the opposite, how many of them just go to work for somebody? Coming out of GSB, what do you see? I would say, I would say that was a percentage which has changed over time.

But now I would say somewhere between 10 and 20%. I think of our graduates at least try to start a startup. And not all of them, of course, get off the ground, as you would know, Jason. I mean, you know, I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to get funded even in today's environment. And many of them don't do what I think they should do. Many of them, I think, follow the crowd. So, you know, if the crowd is dating apps, and we now have like a billion dating apps

and many people are starting dating apps and everybody thinks they need to be in fintech though the most interesting startups I see are in industries which are not very sexy like construction or somebody I know is starting a company out of my class this year actually in the storage space business which is an interesting play

so but but I would say actually you know storage is really interesting because there's a real estate play there and it's reoccurring revenue and it's like at this great arbitrage I think it's a great business I'd love to meet them you're going to add something to that no I was going to say I would say I think now it's somewhere

between 10 and 20% great so here's a great question from Stanhope how do introverts exert power effectively I've heard this before like introverts or out of disadvantage is that true? No I don't think that's true at all so what I'm talking about

you know if I say when I give somebody, the Jason Calacanis case, or the Keith Farazzi case, or I introduced them to John Levy, who by the way, is himself kind of an introvert if you get to know him. This is not about, you don't have to become Jason. You don't have to do, if you're a woman, gender reassignment, or whatever. This is about behaviors. This is not about personality. Networking is about getting, meeting people, accumulating resources. I can learn from you about how you started magazines, how you build events, how you build a variety of events that play off each other effectively.

This is not about becoming Jason. This is about learning from what Jason does. This is not about becoming Keith. It is learning from what Keith does. So your personality, this is not about changing your personality. This is about changing your behavior. What are your best networking tips, Francis and Quora asks. Best networking tips? The best networking tips is, first of all, to spend sufficient time doing it. And second, my second best networking tip would be figure out what you're going to offer to the person that you want to meet. And everybody has something to offer. You have your energy, you have your intelligence, you have contacts that maybe the other person doesn't have. That would be tip number two.

Tip number three is get out of your comfort zone. Most of us spend most of our time with our close friends and family. And the problem with your close friends and family is that they know the same people and the same things that you do. So one of the things you need to do is you get more advantage out of weak ties than you do strong ties. So go out of your way to meet people who are

diverse in their industry, who are diverse in their background, who are diverse in terms of the people that they know. In other words, don't hang out with the people that you're most comfortable with. Very good advice. Dusty Green asks, who do you think is a good

example of a good use of power. So learning all these techniques, do you have any examples of people who've done this and really done great things in the world that come to mind? Yes. There's one person who always comes to mind. It's my friend Laura Eserman, who is a breast cancer surgeon, who has been named by Time Magazine in 2016 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, on whom I also wrote a case, who was the only person to win the Arbuckle Award, which is an award given to the outstanding alum of the Stanford Business School, who is not capable of nor interested in writing an eight or nine figures check to Stanford. She is changing medicine in a very profound way. You can find there's lots of articles on her. She was on the front page of the science section of the New York

Times, and I think she's using power in a very, very good way. By the way, when she took my class, she refused to do any of the things that we're talking about. She now does all of them. So she's using power for good. Yeah, that's, that's, I think, the people who maybe have the lower moral character or less ethics and more just blind ambition, they love these techniques. People who maybe are, you know, maybe more moral or ethical, they look at these and say, well, why should I have power over other people or this is too smar me? Is that still a little bit of the roadblock? People think this is just a too a sonic grotesque show of power,

but it's a, the word will come to me, but it's almost like flexing too much. I think that's part of it. But one of the things I saw on the little side chat is, do the ends justify the means? And I think this is, of course, a deep question in philosophy. You know, the famous

Robert Moses, who basically built most of New York, has his lovely phrase, if the ends don't justify the means of what does. But there is this issue, you know, and it goes back to my soccer example, you know, if you're in a game and the other people are playing in a certain way, are you willing to play that way, particularly if those techniques actually work? Are you going to hold yourself above the fray? You can do, of course, whatever you want, as I tell my students,

but you cannot say, I'm not going to play the game and then complain to me about the outcomes that you then confront. So you get to, you get to decide what you want to do, but you have to understand that those choices have consequences. Vulgar was the word. It's like a too vulgar display of power. No, I don't think, I don't think power is vulgar. I think, you know, I think, you know, when I, when people say things about you, which they do, believe it or not, even the famous stress me, they'll say to my face or on Twitter, yeah. What I say to them is, and this is my sense of you and you, because you should correct me if I'm wrong, my sense of Jason is that

Jason is someone who is seriously, seriously interested in startups and entrepreneurship. And startups and entrepreneurship are difficult things, and you are trying to create an ecosystem that gives the best chance for startups to succeed. And in your doing of that, are you always the most polite human being? No. Do you always follow the rules? No. But, you know, on the other hand, if you're serious about creating a startup ecosystem that works. I think this is true for founders in every domain, that they are so focused on the results that they often don't adhere to all the niceties about how they get there.

They're very serious about producing, getting the company launched, getting the product built, and they will drive people a little hard. People have accused you of doing that also. Yeah, you know. But it is for a purpose. That is, I think, ultimately, you know, when people complain, and I see people are complaining about a founder because they were too demanding. Or they were rough on their team or they spoke to people in a certain way that made them uncomfortable. It's like, well, you're in a competition.

And if, you know, I don't know, the point guard in the team gets everybody in the huddle and says, hey, listen, you guys are sleepwalking out there. Get your act together. We're going to lose this game. You guys are playing like you're in the YMCA. this is the NBA, these are the finals, get it together, we're embarrassing ourselves out here. People would look at that and say, wow, inspirational speech. Now you take the same inspirational speech,

you say, hey, listen, we're the away company selling luggage. You're the customer support department. You're the front line. If you don't treat people well, we're not going to have a record sales this winter in the holiday season. People are not going to get their stuff in time, and we're not going to get funding. Our option is going to worth nothing.

So let's stop playing like we're rookies here. this is our fourth, fifth, this is our fifth Christmas season. We know what we're doing. Play harder. And that's what the woman did. The CEO of the way did that. She got dragged in the New York Times, Jeffrey, like you would not believe. They did a cancellation piece on her and it worked.

And I looked at and said, what's her next company? I want to invest. If she's going to yell at the customer support team to get their shit together and to take it serious, and yeah, we're not taking vacation over the holidays because that's our big time. You can take three weeks off in February. nobody cares, you know, celebrate Christmas then. I looked at it and I was like, yeah, heck yes. That's the job you signed up for.

And if the CEO is going to get up in your face and say, hey, wake up people, we need to perform. That's the one you want to back. That's the proper use of power is to wake everybody up and say, let's perform better here. And I think that's where I think people with this like wanting to be liked and, you know, being kind to people, you're not being kind to people if they lose. and the company crashes and their options don't turn out well,

you need to be frank with people. Forget about being kind. Be candid with people, much better strategy for their long-term interests. And you know what? The real winners, Jeffrey, I find, when you tell them that, you could do better. You know what they say?

Thanks. Thanks for letting me know, I will do better. And particularly if you tell them how they could do better. Yeah, that's important, too. I mean, basically just criticizing people for not, you know, for not doing well is one thing. But if you think about it, your analogy, I think is excellent. If you're a good sports coach, you not only tell the people that they need to play harder,

but you tell them how to play harder and better. Yes, this is absolutely critical. You know, if your tone is intense and people feel like they're learning and they're inspired, and they then, after you have that intense discussion, performance goes up, great. But if you have that intense discussion and it's like, okay, he just yelled at us. He was intense with us. What are we supposed to do now? You know, you don't just come out to everybody and be like, you suck and then you're

out. It's like, you guys suck because you're not raising your hands. You're not communicating on defense. And you guys are just playing lazy and you're getting out hustled. So let's get our energy level higher. Let's communicate. I want to hear the sneaker squealing and I want to see your hands up and tell people if there's a switch or there's a pick coming.

That's when you get, oh, yeah, I could play better. And I got the roadmap to doing it. Jeffrey, congratulations again on. the book. It's another winner. It's your best book yet. It's a quick read. It's an essential read. If you want to get power, you know, and you spend 15, 20, 30 bucks on one of these books, you get one or two good things out of it. And trust me, you're going to get 20 good things out of it. Take some notes. It's a book you could read every two or three years in your career. So leave it on your shelf, give it to a friend. Buy the book right now. Okay, everybody. Jeffrey Pfeffer is the name. If you're wondering how to spell it, it's P-F-E-F-F-E-R. And if you can't get into Stanford, all the cumulative knowledge and work, Jeffrey puts into his books to share with the world. So you just get seven rules of power and find it on Amazon. I listen to the audio book. You didn't narrate it, Jeff. I think that's a miss. I think you should narrate it. People should hear your voice. That's what many people say, but unfortunately I have an agent who signs, you know, deals and, you know,

I've had many people say that I would do a better job. He's wrong. She's wrong. They're wrong. Yeah, they are. I should narrate the book. 100% redo it, narrate it yourself or whatever. Everybody, you know why? It's back to that authenticity. People, if the book was fiction and the author is just making the stuff up, yeah, go with the best narrator possible. It's evocative of, you know, the aesthetics of the book, fine.

But here, you want to hear the person. So whoever your agent is, send them this clip. Always the author should read the book. You know what the reason they don't want you to read the book? is they told me this when I did mine. They have this problem where people go through like the first day, they suck so much that they quit. Because reading an audiobook is kind of like skiing or golf.

Like it takes a couple of days to get good at it. So they know if they give 30 grand to somebody to just read the book, it's going to turn out great. They know it's a guaranteed thing and they got 100 books coming out. So why would they deal with the Musugina of you reading it or me reading it? But if you read it, get that authenticity, they hear your voice.

It's just, it's better. So you didn't read your book? I did read my book, but they fought me. Oh, yeah, and I said to them,

I said, permission to be, I'm giving you permission to be candid. Do you think my voice is terrible? Do you think I'm going to suck at this? What is the reason? And they said, well,

I said, okay, so you think I'm going to suck. It's not that we think you're going to suck. It's that in the past, we've had people suck, and then they quit, and we wind up going

with the other person anyway. I was like, all right, I'll tell you what, I'll get in their first day. We'll have a conversation at the end of the day. If I suck, you tell me, give me a rating 1 to 10. If I suck, you tell me I suck. No harm, no foul. We have the other person waiting in the wings. You have them do it. I will not be offended. If I'm good, let's go. And sure enough, I did it in two and a half days. They thought it would take five. Because once you get good at it, you know, it's, it's pretty easy. And also, no one will have the level, I mean, this is what I've heard from people who've listened to seven rules.

No one will have the same passion about your subject as you have. Yes, correct. And that absence of passion is the problem that you get with the professional narrators. That's exactly the point. The authenticity and the passion are taken out, and you do get a smoother delivery. So I do think there's a portion of the audience who wants this nice, buttery, smooth, you know, cadence or whatever. But, you know, that's quickly being done by AI and text to voice engines.

Like, I have a couple of apps that will take text and put it into voice, so I'll take long reads from, you know, the New York or whatever, and I'll make my own version of it with a computer voice and I'll listen to it on a bike ride. And it's totally serviceable now. So I think in the near future, narration is going to be gone. And it's either going to be the author or a computer speaks it. And then you'll pick. I want a British voice. I want an Australian accent. I'd literally have a piece of software that lets me do Mr. President.

which is Obama's voice. And it's also got the woman from Goop. I forgot her name, the actress. Gwyneth Paltrow. Gwyneth Paltrow has loaned her voice out now. So I was literally listening to a Wall Street. She's probably sold it. She sold it, yes.

So I literally am listening to a Wall Street journal article in her voice, and I was like, this is terrible. And then I put Obama's voice in, and I was like, that's super distracting too. And then I just found one that was like, I just like a British accent. A good British accent or Australian accent kind of feels good to me.

but yeah, you definitely read the next one. I don't think people want that except for when they're reading my book, you know, like we're listening to this podcast because, you know, it's context. But you know what? I'm writing my next book right now.

And the interesting thing about it, and I got, by the way, I was writing my book. I got a couple of ideas stylistically. I will tell you all fair. But I just like really liked your use of like, you were very,

I'll just tell it on there. You're very good about going from the social, behavioral science to a practical example. So I think you, there was, I tried to find an example where you didn't give an example after giving, you know, some scientific, you know, study or whatever. And you just did a good job of encapsulating other people's studies.

So I always like when an author is like, doesn't have this hang up about quoting other people. And like, hey, here's a really interesting resource. Here's what they said. Here's my life experience. That to me, I feel like it's such a big win. And I did that in my book. And I'm continuing to pull that thread because there's so many different opinions out there. I don't know if you have this experience.

And then you can build on them. And it's just better to build on them than to fake it and, you know, reword something like it's your original idea. So I just, I like that nuance of it. And what I do now, just writer to writer, author to author, I have been when I write a chapter, I'll read it myself into my voice recorder, or here on this professional microphone, make an MP3, I'll go for a bike and I'll listen to it and I'll listen to it and I'll listen to it on repeat play so I mean, listen to, you know, a 20 minute chapter three times. Just, you know, you find the moments where it drags or where it's exciting. And I think that's like the future of, you know, the future of

of this is I'm now thinking about my performance in that studio to do the audio book when I'm writing the book. I don't know if other authors do that or not. But I'm working backwards from that moment. All right, everybody go by the book. Jeffrey, great job. And we'll see you all next time on this weekend startups. Bye bye.