Rooted firmly in social science research, Pfeffer’s 7 rules provide a manual for increasing your ability to get things done, including For a directly contrasting take on power and its use for good, consider reading Power, for All by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro. Among other things, it argues that humility and warmth can increase a leader’s power. If you want to “change lives, change organizations, change the world,” the Stanford business school’s motto, you need power.

Remember, you don’t have to be conventional with the text on the slides. It is a presentation and not a word document. What Is The Goal Of The 7 By 7 Rule Remember, you want to use the slides only as visual reference to the points that you want to make during the presentation. Thus, it doesn’t make sense to stuff it with words when you are anyway going to talk about it. How to Create the 7 by 7 Rule in PowerPoint This clearly highlights that you will be talking about a fast car, but they still need to hear you out completely to fully understand the speed of the car and how it feels while driving the car. I would define power as the ability to get things done your way in contested situations. Different people and different functions will have different perspectives, different information, and different points of view. Almost every decision is going to be somewhat contested, so power is the ability to get your way in contested situations.Like a rousing slap of truth in the face, Pfeffer’s tough-minded, capstone book on power identifies 7 research-based, reality-revealing rules for hierarchical success. Anyone hoping to rise within an organization needs to obtain power and, therefore, needs to read this brilliant book.” Dr. Pfeffer’s 7 Rules of Power is a must read and highly useful for anyone at any stage of their career . . . It still stir your thinking and truly change your perspective.”

PowerPoint presentations are a powerful way of conveying a message to your colleagues, clients, and peers. The problem is if you do not know how to use PowerPoint in a way that grabs the attention of your audience, you might lose them by the second slide. This is where the 7 by 7 rule comes in handy. But, what exactly is it? Because perception helps create reality, wielding power in ways that demonstrate power, doing things that signal power, helps to ensure that power will be perpetuated. Robert Moses, New York’s master builder, who wielded immense power over a forty-year career, was a genius in employing the strategy of turning his plans into physical reality—even before he had permission to do so. Often Moses would start his projects prior to obtaining all of the necessary permits and sometimes even the funding to complete them. He understood that once a park or playground was constructed, it was much more difficult and less likely for others to undo his creations. Workplaces are mostly horrible,” he wrote in Leadership BS (p. 10). His contrarian view is that what leaders are told to do—be authentic and modest, for example—is often responsible for perpetuating that. Instead, Pfeffer contends that to get things done, leaders should understand how to amass and retain power. “If power is to be used for good, more good people need power,” he writes, (p. xix) but otherwise largely skirts questions of morality with his sometimes uncomfortable “real talk” about power.I once served on the board of a publicly traded portable ultrasound company. I noticed that whenever the board was effusive in its praise of a senior executive other than the CEO, that executive was soon gone under one pretext or the other. I commented to one of my fellow board members that the best way to keep talent in the organization would probably be not to overly praise them to the point that they might appear to be a plausible successor for the CEO role. Removing likely alternatives as a method for holding on to power is an old, and often effective, strategy. The 7 line rule is a guideline to help you keep your slides as clean and easily readable as possible. It is to reduce clutter in each of your slides so that when your audience scans the slide, they can easily navigate each point you are trying to make. A third very important source of power that I think people sometimes underestimate is how you show up. Are you able to act and speak with power? Do you show up in a powerful fashion? Many writers write about what they call “executive presence.” I think how you show up and how you talk is a very important source of power.