Power and Asian Business - Commoncog

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The culmination of the Power in Business mini series. What it’s like doing business without the Rule of Law.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/power-and-asian-business
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Your point that the ruthless use of power is sometimes rewarded, not punished, as exemplified by the Stanley Ho case, reminds me of Jeffrey Pfeffer’s last rule from his book 7 Rules of Power:

  1. Understand that once you have acquired power, what you did to get it will be forgiven, forgotten, or both.

Once you have the power, you can launder it with generosity, rewarding your allies, and putting a kind face on your work. But that’s not typically how people get power, unless they are excellent talent scouts who have good protective instincts - I’m thinking of Adam Grant’s first book, Give and Take, where he observed that successful generous leaders were fiercely protective of their people and cut off anybody who sought to exploit them (another form of power - developing an amazing talent network and protecting access to it).

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I have been looking forward to the Asian Conglomerate series in part because a slightly less juicy version of this scenario occurred at the first company I worked for after college, a small IT consulting firm. Which is to say that the bookkeeper embezzled all the money in the business after having worked there for several years without incident

The embezzlement was discovered during the week I was relocating to start work, and, by then, the money had been spent

This was in the U.S., so the company had legal recourse, but no expectation of recovery

(The company scaled down and treaded water for a year but didn’t generate enough free cash flow to be a better alternative for the owner than a salaried job)

This experience and a few others motivated me to consider the rule of law as nice to have when one can afford it, but not as given

So I’m looking forward to exploring scenarios where the rule of law is effectively unavailable rather than nice to have, to stretch my thinking a bit

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