Let's begin with what seems like an easy question. I've got pictures here of 11 world leaders. And who do you consider the most influential on this page? If you were to pick one and make an argument for he or she being the most influential, what would you say and on what basis? How would you decide who you believe is the most influential? Let's just take a few examples. Many people, given this selection, might choose Xi Jinping, the head of China. It seems an obvious choice given just the sheer number of people in his country that he has pretty strong influence over. Others might choose, take something more provocative and say Mark Zuckerberg. He created and heads one of the most valuable companies in the world, one of the companies that is interacted with by more people on a daily basis than anyplace else in the world probably. Someone whose products are looked at first thing in the morning by many people around the world. That sounds influential in a different way. What about Pope Francis? A lot of folks are going to take a stand for Pope Francis. After all, he's the leader of the Catholic Church, an organization that influences millions of people every day. In this case, that influence is, in many cases, a very internal, deeply bought into one and so you might think, well, just on depth of influence, you might think the Pope. Along those lines, you could go with somebody like Osama Bin Laden, which has been an interesting one for me to consider over the last few years. I used this exercise before Bin Laden was killed and when I came around to it the first time after he had been killed, I had to consider do I want to [LAUGH] leave him on there or not? Every year we talk about this, somebody makes a case that even though he's dead, Bin Laden is the most influential on the page. In fact, you might argue the fact that he's been able to continue to influence after his death says something about the degree of influence that he has. We could keep going and I urge you to make the case for whoever you think is most influential here. Because I think it's eye opening. The point of this is to help us realize how multidimensional power is. Power and influence are things that we tend to think of in kind of simplified ways. This exercise helps us understand that in fact, it's a little more nuance and complex than we might first think. In general, observing and measuring influence, we need to to understand what influence is and we're going to define it the following way. Someone who gets others to take actions that they would not otherwise. This is going to help us appreciate who we consider to be influential, who doesn't have influence. It's about getting people to do something they might not do otherwise. We can think about influence along a few different dimensions. The sources of influence, the means of influence, the extent of influence, and the scope. Let's unpack each of these. Sources reads pretty much like the structure of this class. You can think about sources of influence as the situation, the needs of the moment, personalities of those involved. You can think about the structure, the structure of an organization that the person is embedded in or leads, where they're placed, what's the nature of the organization. You can think about the culture that a person's in, and in particular, the organizational culture. Some cultures will favor different kinds of influence. Relationships are a very important source of influence. It's going to one of the main topics we take up in this course and is a critical component as you think about the influence you have in your life. Many people think about traits as being sources of influence and we're going to consider that argument. We're also going to consider the downside of that argument and perhaps generalize, and we're going to generalize to something we consider to be tactics and the need for a wide range of tactics to be influential. These are all sources of influence. Another dimension is the means of influence, and the simplest way to think about this are the formal means of influence, laws, rules, incentives you might have control over in an organization. But they're also informal means of influence, persuasion, alliances, guilt, ethnic relationships. See these are all the more nuanced ways of influencing people and having power that we want to better understand. Another dimension is the extent of influence, and again, we're going to think about this in a very precise way. What is the probability of compliance, if you ask someone to do something? How likely is it that your desires will be followed? This is part of the way we always encourage our students to think about the world probabilistically. We're not going to talk about anything in this course that guarantees that other people will do what you want them to. But we'll talk about a lot of things that will increase the probability that people and organizations do what you're interested in. If your request for some kind of action increases the likelihood of something happening from, say, 20% to 60%, we're going to consider you very powerful. Even though there's still a 40% chance that doesn't get done, it was a dramatic increase in the likelihood that it would get done and we encourage you to think about influence in the same way. Finally, the scope of influence. You can think about this as the number of people say, or organizations effected by your goals or the range of preferences one can satisfy. Do you have control over many substantive areas of people's lives? Go back to our conversation with the various leaders around the world. We thought about Xi Jinping and Pope Francis in different ways. They're controlling different substantive areas of people's lives. These are some dimensions. We can think of other dimensions of influence. We can think about duration, how long is someone going to comply with your wishes? How much resistance can you overcome? Of course, everyone doesn't want to do what you want them to do and so, how much resistance can you overcome? How quickly will people act on your desires? With what immediacy can you influence people? Can you transfer your power to other people? Can you delegate it to your underlings, for example? One last dimension is reserves. How often can you go to the well? Some folks without much power can't go to the well very often, while others have great reservoirs of power. They can go back as much as they need to. This is an initial list. You may have thought of other dimensions. We wanted to start here, at least, to help appreciate how many dimensions there are, when we start thinking about power, how many nuances there are. If we think about power in too superficial a way, in too simple a way, then we won't be able to cultivate it, and use it. We won't understand it well in the world. And, in general, to understand power and to use it, you must appreciate its dimensions and its nuance.
