Citations & References:"Then our autocratic President said, 'How do you know when you're getting old? I truly believe that age is a state of mind. I know an octogenarian who has more energy enthusiasm and drive than others half his age. I am also familiar with people in their thirties and forties who look like they already have one foot in the grave.''But Mr. President,' the journalist interrupted, 'what are the warning signs, the tell-tale indicators that the years may be catching up with you?'Scratching his head, the President said, 'Yeaa ... maybe your kids try to light the candles on your birthday cake, but the candles went out because it was blown away by the wind. Or you call the ambulance dispatcher and he tells you your address. Or you begin to lose hope of ever finishing your Biography. Or you stop buying green bananas. And or ... you don't think 'getting older' jokes are funny.'"Let's carry on!" said the Tulip. "The world is sometimes not a very nice or fair place, says Jeffrey Pfeffer, and while you've got the position you wanted, you had to expend effort and demonstrate patience and interpersonal toughness to do so—to hang in with people who initially didn’t particularly respect your abilities. Why not just eschew power, keep your head down, and take what life throws at you?However, almost anything is possible in attaining positions of power. You can get yourself into a high-power position even under the most unlikely circumstances if you have the requisite skill or competence.So, why you should want Power? First of all, having power is related to living a longer and healthier life. When Michael Marmot examined the mortality from heart disease among British civil servants, he noticed an interesting fact: the lower the rank or civil service grade of the employee, the higher the age-adjusted mortality risk. Of course many things covary with someone’s position in an organizational hierarchy, including the incidence of smoking, dietary habits, and so forth. However, Marmot and his colleagues found that only about a quarter of the observed variation in death rate could be accounted for by rank-related differences in smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure, obesity, and physical activity. What did matter was power and status—things that provided people greater control over their work environments. Studies consistently showed that the degree of job control, such as decision authority and discretion to use one’s skills, predicted the incidence and mortality risk from coronary artery disease over the next five or more years. In fact, how much job control and status people had accounted for more of the variation in mortality from heart disease than did physiological factors such as obesity and blood pressure.These findings shouldn’t be that surprising to you. Not being able to control one’s environment produces feelings of helplessness and stress, and feeling stressed or 'out of control' can harm your health. So being in a position with low power and status is indeed hazardous to your health, and conversely, having power and the control that comes with it prolongs life.Second, power, and the visibility and stature that accompany power, can produce wealth. Rudy Giuliani, following his tenure as mayor of New York City, became a partner in a security consulting firm, and through that firm and his speaking fees, he too quickly transformed his economic status for the better. Not all power is monetized—neither Martin Luther King Jr. nor Mahatma Gandhi traded on their celebrity to attain great wealth—but the potential is always there.Third, power is part of leadership and is necessary to get things done—whether those things entail changing the health-care system, transforming organizations so they are more humane places to work, or affecting dimensions of social policy and human welfare. Leaders are invariably preoccupied with power.Power is desirable to many, albeit not all, people, for what it can provide and also as a goal in and of itself. The social psychologist David McClelland wrote about a need for power. Although the strength of that power motive obviously varies across individuals, along with a need for achievement, McClelland considered power seeking a fundamental human drive, found in people from many cultures.8 If you are going to seek power, you will be happier if you are effective in that quest.To be effective in figuring out your path to power and to actually use what you learn, you must first get past three major obstacles. The first two are the belief that the world is a just place and the hand-me-down formulas on leadership that largely reflect this misguided belief. The third obstacle is yourself.The belief in a just world has two big negative effects on the ability to acquire power. First, it hinders people’s ability to learn from all situations and all people, even those whom they don’t like or respect. Many people conspire in their own deception about the organizational world in which they live. That’s because people prefer to believe that the world is a just and fair place and that everyone gets what he or she deserves. And since people tend to think they themselves are deserving, they come to think that if they just do a good job and behave appropriately, things will take care of themselves.Second, this belief that the world is a just place anesthetizes people to the need to be proactive in building a power base. Believing hat the world is fair, people fail to note the various land mines in the environment that can undermine their careers.The next obstacle you will need to overcome is the leadership literature. Don’t automatically buy into advice from leaders. It could be accurate, but more likely it is just self-serving. People distort reality. One study found that out of 1,000 resumés, there were substantial misstatements on more than 40 percent. Therefore, if there is public servant who will be a jury but still intervene, and he says, 'Ho oh, I will be neutral!' Will you immediately believe him? OMG, please ...What you should trust is the social science research that provides help on how to acquire power, hold on to it, and use it. And you should trust your own experience: Watch those around you who are succeeding, those who are failing, and those who are just treading water. Figure out what’s different about them and what they are doing differently. That’s a great way to build your diagnostic competence—something useful in becoming an organizational survivor.The third big obstacle to acquiring power is, believe it or not, you. People are often their own worst enemy, and not just in the arena of building power. That’s in part because people like to feel good about themselves and maintain a positive self-image. And ironically, one of the best ways for people to preserve their self-esteem is to either preemptively surrender or do other things that put obstacles in their own way.There is an immense research literature about this phenomenon—called 'self-handicapping.' The logic is deceptively simple. People desire to feel good about themselves and their abilities. Obviously, any experience of failure puts their self-esteem at risk. However, if people intentionally choose to do things that could plausibly diminish their performance, then any subsequent performance decrements can be explained away as not reflecting their innate abilities.There is evidence that the tendency to self-handicap is an individual difference and predicts the extent to which people make excuses about their performance. Research shows, not surprisingly, that self-handicapping behavior negatively affects subsequent task performance. Therefore, our desire to protect our self-image by placing external impediments in our way so we can attribute any setbacks to things outside our control actually contributes to doing less well. Keep this idea about self-handicapping in mind—you will be more open-minded and also more likely to actually try some of the things you learn.People often think that whatever qualities are needed for building a path to power, either you have them or you don’t, at least by the time you are an adult. But change is always possible. You can change, too. The best creativity is the result of habit and hard work. Of course people have personalities and individual attributes that come from some combination of genetics and upbringing. But strategically changing individual attributes to become more personally effective is both possible and desirable.Asking about the qualities of people already in power can confound whether the qualities created the influence or whether they were a consequence of holding power. There are two fundamental personal dimensions and seven qualities that are both logically and empirically associated with producing personal power. The two fundamental dimensions that distinguish people who rise to great heights and accomplish amazing things are 'will,' the drive to take on big challenges, and the capabilities required to turn ambition into accomplishment, accoding to Pfeffer, skill, but I'd rather to choose competence. The three personal qualities embodied in will are ambition, energy, and focus. The four skills useful in acquiring power are self-knowledge and a reflective mind-set, confidence and the ability to project self-assurance, the ability to read others and empathize with their point of view, and a capacity to tolerate conflict. These things are the determining factors why not everyone can have power.'There is no free lunch.' Nothing comes without cost, and that is certainly true of power. People who seek and attain power often pay some price for the quest, for holding on to their positions, and confronting the difficult but inevitable transitions out of powerful roles. So, there is an important lesson: you will be the object of constant attention by peers, subordinates, superiors, and the media.It’s not just the big things that draw scrutiny when you are in power. Holding a position of power means that more than your job performance is being carefully watched—although that happens as well. Every aspect of your life, including how you dress, where you live, how you spend your time, who you choose to spend time with, what your children do, what you drive, how you act in completely non-job-related domains, will draw scrutiny.People are interested in their reputation and image. Consequently, they spend time on impression management. This need to spend time and other resources on image maintenance increases as public scrutiny increases. And time spent dealing with scrutiny and managing appearances is time that cannot be spent doing other aspects of one’s job.Under the pressure to 'look good,' people and companies are reluctant to take risks or innovate, opting to do what seems safe.At first, in a powerful role, all the demands for your attention are flattering—after all, it’s great that so many people want to see you. Therefore people who have recently been promoted tend to be overwhelmed by the time demands of their more powerful job. Not wanting to refuse requests by groups and individuals whose support they may need and whose attention they value, powerful people can easily find themselves overscheduled and working too many hours, something that drains their energy and leaves them unable to cope with the unexpected challenges of their job.Building and maintaining power requires time and effort, there are no two ways about it. Time spent on your quest for power and status is time that you cannot spend on other things, such as hobbies or personal relationships and families. The quest for power often exacts a high toll on people’s personal lives, and although everyone bears some costs, the price seems to be particularly severe for women.Remember this simple truth: the higher you rise and the more powerful the position you occupy, the greater the number of people who will want your job. Consequently, holding a position of great power creates a problem: who do you trust? Some people will be seeking to create an opportunity for themselves through your downfall, but they won’t be forthcoming about what they are doing. Some people will be trying to curry favor with you by telling you what they think you want to hear so you will like them and help them advance. And some people will be doing both.To be a public figure and perform at a high level requires an intensity that produces, in Nick Binkley's words, 'a caffeinated high.' When you leave such a position and that level of activity ceases, it is almost, as Binkley put it, 'like a car going from ninety miles an hour to a dead stop.'Power is addictive, in both a psychological and physical sense. The rush and excitement from being involved in important discussions with senior figures and the ego boost from having people at your beck and call are tough to lose, even if you voluntarily choose to retire or leave and even if you have more money than you could ever spend. In a power-and celebrity-obsessed culture, to be 'out of power' is to be out of the limelight, away from the action, and almost invisible. It is a tough transition to make. And because it is, some executives seek to avoid switching to a less powerful role. You should not necessarily eschew power, but it is important to recognize the potential downsides. The balance between the advantages and the costs is something each individual must weigh in deciding his or her own particular relationship with power.Then how—and why—people lose power? Even after achieving a powerful, top-level position, staying on top is scarcely guaranteed. Although each case of lost power has its own peculiarities, there are some common factors that you need to avoid. While it is inevitable that everyone will lose power eventually—we all get old and leave our positions—it is not inevitable that people will lose power as often or as quickly as they do.The old saying “Power corrupts” turns out to be mostly true, although “corrupt” is probably not quite the right word. Berkeley social psychologist Dacher Keltner and his colleagues talk about power leading to “approach” behavior—in that people more actively try to obtain what they want—and diminishing “inhibition,” or the tendency to follow social rules and constraints that might limit what people do to obtain their goals. Such behavior is a logical consequence of what happens to people in power. The obsequious and less powerful flatter the powerful to remain on their good side. Those with power have their wishes and requests granted. They get used to getting their way and being treated as if they are special. Although the powerful may be conscious that the special treatment comes from the position they occupy and the resources they control, over time these thoughts fade.Studies of the effects of power on the power holder consistently find that power produces overconfidence and risk taking, insensitivity to others, stereotyping, and a tendency to see other people as a means to the power holder’s gratification.One lesson from the growing number of studies on the effects of power is how little it takes to get people into a power mind-set where they engage in all kinds of disrespectful and rude behavior. Just having them think about a time when they were in power and able to get what they wanted (in contrast to having them think about a time they had little power and could not) or giving them even modest control over meaningless rewards in temporary groups of strangers seems to be sufficient. Overconfidence and insensitivity lead to losing power, as people become so full of themselves that they fail to attend to the needs of those whose enmity can cause them problems.When you are powerful and successful, you are overconfident and less observant—and one specific manifestation of such tendencies is to trust what others tell you and rely on their assurances. As you become less vigilant and paranoid about others’ intentions, they have the opportunity to take you out of your position of power.It is hard work to keep your ego in check, to constantly be attentive to the actions of others, and obtaining and keeping power requires long hours and lots of energy. After a while, some people get tired; they become less vigilant and more willing to compromise and give in. We always tend to see what we want or expect to see, but as people get burned out, the tendency to project desires onto reality becomes stronger.People—and companies—fall into competency traps. They are successful because they do certain things in a certain way. Companies and leaders can fail to see the changes in the social environment that can make old ways less successful than they once were. The tendency of power to diminish the power holder’s attention and sensitivity to others with less power compounds this problem. The combination of diminished vigilance and changed circumstances often leads to the loss of power. The world changes, but tactics don't.And finally, in the end, of course, everyone loses power. As organizational behavior professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld noted, some individuals make way for their successors. Others hang on past the time when they are effective. Some senior leaders prepare successors and leave to do other things. It is both possible and desirable to, 'leave before the party’s over' and to do so in a way that causes others to remember you fondly. You cannot always completely control how much power you maintain, but you can leave your position with dignity and thereby influence your legacy. And Allah knows best.""I think it's enough for now, Wulan. Look, Dawn is approaching!" said Tulip while pointing at the sign of Subh."Okay, we'll end our session!" said Wulandari, then they sang,Takkan selamanya, raga ini menjagamu[It won't be forever, this body will guard you]Jiwa yang lama segera pergi[Elder souls will soon be gone]Bersiaplah, para pengganti![Be ready, the substitutes!]Tak ada yang abadi[Nothing is eternal]Tak ada yang abadi **)[Nothing is eternal]
- Dov Roller, The Restless Plant, 2011, Harvard University Press
- Richard Wilford, The Plant Lover's Guide to Tulip, 2015, Timber Press
- Ghillean Prance. (Ed.), Cultural History of Plants, 2005, Routledge
- Dana Sajdi, Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, 2007, Tauris Academic Studies
- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Anatomy of Power, 1983, Houghton-Mifflin Trade and Reference
- Michael Korda, Power! How to Get it, How to Use it, 1975, Random House
- Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2005, Palgrave
- Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why some People have it—And Others Don't, 2010, International and Pan-American
*) "Bintang di Surga" written by Nazriel Irham
**) "Tak Ada yang Abadi" written by Nazriel Irham
[Session 1]
