Managing With Power

Acknowledgments

I wrote this book mostly because of Gene Webb and Hal Leavitt, colleagues at Stanford. Leavitt had urged me for many years to write a book that would be more accessible to students and managers than much of my other writing. I ignored his advice for a long time. When Webb left the associate dean’s office at Stanford, he began teaching sections of the course, Power and Politics in Organizations, which I had originally developed and taught. He brought new literature and new ideas to the course, but one year he stopped using the text, Power in Organizations, which I had written some years ago and which I use regularly in the course. Gene Webb had served on my thesis committee in the early 1970s when I had been a doctoral student ...