What Will Work in the World as It Is?
81
rulers are too weak, too scrupulous, too inexperienced, or too
pure, their innocent pursuits of the good, however conceived,
will sooner or later be disrupted.”
16
This means that, when
you are working your way through a gray area issue, you have
to be able to answer this question: Do I have a plan that will
actually work or will I fail the people who are depending on
me and, at the same time, get my head handed to me?
Machiavelli wouldn’t mind if you and others ignored his
lessons, as long as you stayed in private life. But as soon as
you take on responsibility for the lives and fortunes of oth-
ers, you have to see and deal with the world as it is—a place
in which all sorts of things happen: good and bad, evil and
noble, inspiring and contemptible, planned and chaotic.
Practical Guidance: The Resilience Test
What does this worldview mean—in practical, on-the-
ground terms—when you have to make hard, gray area deci-
sions? What did it mean for Becky Friedman, who needed
a way to handle Terry Fletcher and the pressure from her
bosses? The basic answer is that, when you think about ways
to resolve a gray area problem, you should ask yourself this
question: How resilient is my plan and how resilient am I?
Five steps, all grounded in time-tested insights, can help
you answer these questions. Each step is rooted in the long-
standing tradition of eyes-open realism about the world and
people around us, the perspective that Machiavelli articulated
so brilliantly.
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82
Map the Territory of Power and Interest
This guidance says you have to think hard about who wants
what, how much they want it, and how powerful they are.
Whether you like it or not, you are almost always surrounded
by a force field of power and interest. You have to understand
this force field and the options and risks it creates. This will
help you anticipate the maneuvers of other parties, so you can
respond to them more effectively. It will also help you devise
a plan that will be resilient across these possibilities.
When you try to map the terrain of power and interest,
be sure to think hard and realistically about your own self-
interest. If you don’t, the chances are that no one else will.
Management isn’t a job for martyrs. If you want to make con-
tributions in the longer run, you have to survive the shorter
run. If you aren’t a player at the table, you can’t influence the
game. Machiavelli understood this clearly and put it bluntly.
“A man with no position in society,” he wrote, “cannot get a
dog to bark at him.”
17
In Becky Friedman’s situation, this analysis was straight-
forward. In personal terms, she liked her job and wanted to
keep it. But her bosses didn’t want Fletcher to get a bad eval-
uation, and they could make life miserable for her and her
unit in a variety of ways. In the worst case, they could force
her out of the company.
Jim Mullen was also surrounded by a force field of power
and interest, but it was far more complicated. Consider,
for example, just one element of it: the Food and Drug
Administration. This agency would play an important role
in whatever Mullen did about Tysabri, and it also regulated
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83
almost every aspect of Biogen Idec’s business. In principle,
the FDA was a neutral, independent, science-based arbiter of
drug safety. In reality, it was also a player in a very complex,
high-stakes financial and political contest. The FDA had
vigorous, well-organized adversaries. Some critics believed it
moved too slowly on promising new drugs. Others believed
it was the captive of large pharmaceutical companies. At the
time of the Tysabri controversy, the FDA was reeling from
its recent approval and embarrassing withdrawal of Vioxx,
a treatment for acute pain, that caused hundreds of deaths
and serious cardiac problems, and the agency badly needed
to restore its credibility.
In addition, Mullen knew that the FDA would soon be
besieged by MS patients, their families, legislators, physicians,
and others who wanted Tysabri to remain available, and these
groups would be able to make powerful, heart-wrenching
cases because MS sufferers urgently needed better treatments.
Investors, competitors, key employees, and other groups also
had strong interests in whatever Mullen did, so he would be
making moves on a very complicated chessboard.
In situations like this, understanding power sometimes
means looking accurately at the brute force—the “hard”
power—that you and other parties can use. In Friedman’s
case, she believed that her bosses could fire her or force her
out of the company. In Mullen’s case, hard power consisted of
the many ways a regulator like the FDA could make life mis-
erable for a company.
18
In most cases, however, sophisticated
parties rely heavily on “soft” power. They operate subtly and
obliquely. Instead of threatening, they nudge and entice. They
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84
orchestrate feelings, pressures, and inducements. Sometimes,
soft power involves revealing a sliver of the mailed fist inside
the velvet glove, but its practitioners usually prefer to advance
their interests in other ways.
These considerations matter from the very start of what-
ever process you create to deal with a gray area problem.
Before you decide who will be part of a process, you have to
understand what their agendas are and how much clout they
have. So the first piece of practical guidance tells you to make
a significant investment of time, thought, and imagination
in thinking realistically, politically, and shrewdly about the
power and interests of other parties. This will make you and
your planning more resilient—by showing you whether you
are operating in a minefield and indicating where some of
the mines are buried.
Be Modest, Flexible, and Opportunistic
The second piece of guidance describes the most helpful
mind-set for moving through complicated and hazardous
political territory. Machiavelli is often interpreted as a cynic,
but he wasn’t. People who are always cynical are sometimes
right, for the same reason that stopped clocks are right twice
a day. But they miss opportunities because they are vigilantly
paranoid and hunkered down, awaiting disaster. Stopped-
clock optimists have a similar problem: sometimes they are
exactly right and things turn out splendidly, but they can also
stride confidently into walls or get their pockets picked.
Understanding what will work in the world as it is means
thinking carefully, flexibly, and opportunistically. To be resil-
ient, you have to adapt, maneuver, and persevere through
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85
whatever hazards and opportunities you encounter. Future
events aren’t the calculable vector sum of power and inter-
est. Chance matters—sometimes greatly—as do complicated
interactions that can be very hard to anticipate. So you have
to be modest and even a little humble about how much you
can understand and control. The wisdom behind the third
question is an age-old view of life that the Renaissance essay-
ist Michel de Montaigne summarized with an engraving on
the necklace he wore. It said simply, “What do I know?”
19
The managers dealing with Kathy Thompson had no idea
what her real problem was. Jim Mullen didn’t know whether
the two cases of PML were a stunning coincidence or the
tip of an awful iceberg. Becky Friedman knew her bosses
wanted her to protect Terry Fletcher, but she had no idea
how aggressively they would insist on this or how they might
retaliate against her. These are hardly exceptional cases. In
fact, they are simply instances of a fundamental character-
istic of managerial work. C. Roland Christensen, a Harvard
Business School professor who spent his career studying
management, described the mandate for resiliency this way:
“The uniqueness of a good general manager lies in the abil-
ity to lead effectively organizations whose complexity he or
she can never fully understand, where the capacity to control
directly the human and physical forces comprising the orga-
nization is severely limited, and where he or she must make
or review and assume ultimate responsibility for present deci-
sions which commit concretely major resources to a fluid and
unknown future.”
20
Machiavelli and many other great thinkers would have
endorsed this perspective. For example, Machiavelli compared
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