Our analysis will reveal why being at the top may well give people authority, but it doesn’t necessarily give them power.

self-esteem depends on our subjective assessment of ourselves, including how we view our personal competence, the social rank we occupy, the degree of influence we have, and how worthy of love and morally upright we believe we are.

what power ultimately is: the ability to influence another’s behavior, be it through persuasion or coercion.

While attraction and consolidation are both about increasing the other party’s dependence, expansion and withdrawal are the other two ways to rebalance power by decreasing one party’s dependence on the other party. Thus, withdrawal can be thought of as the countermove to attraction, and expansion as the countermove to consolidation.

How and why does power deviate from what the formal hierarchy dictates? To answer this question, you need to be able to identify both the resources the organization in question values, and the people who control them.

people are twenty-two times more likely to remember what you said if you weave in a personal story. So we trained our activists in how to tell their personal story to the media.”

Whether real or perceived, increasing the value someone sees in a resource you have to offer can be an essential strategy for rebalancing power in your favor.

To have power over someone, you must first have something, or some things, the other person values. Anything a person needs or wants qualifies as a valued resource. The resource can be material, like money or clean water, acres of fertile farmland, a house, or a fast car. Or it can be psychological, like feelings of esteem, belonging, and achieveme

Knowing what the other party values and whether they have alternatives to access what they value tells you how much power you have. But that is not enough to fully understand the balance of power between you. You must also account for whether the other party has something you value and the extent to which they can control your access to it. The eff