"You need both — but substance without visibility means no one knows your substance"
Evidence from the Archive
Stanford GSB
Omid Kordestani stopped doing his job at Netscape to network, became employee #11 at Google, earned $2.5 billion
Pfeffer teaches NFL players from underrepresented minorities in Stanford's program for the league
As a Stanford professor who teaches the most oversubscribed course in the MBA program (Paths to Power) and has written four books on organizational power backed by decades of empirical research, Pfeffer brings academic rigor to a topic most people navigate through intuition alone. Their core argument: You need both -- but substance without visibility means no one knows your substance.
The evidence is specific: Omid Kordestani stopped doing his job at Netscape to network, became employee #11 at Google, earned $2.5 billion. Furthermore, pfeffer teaches NFL players from underrepresented minorities in Stanford's program for the league. Laura Esserman, a breast cancer surgeon, uses the same tools (power) as a mugger but to cure cancer -- illustrating tools are neutral.
In Jeffrey Pfeffer's own words: "If you have visibility without substance, people will know you're useless. But if you have substance without visibility, no one will know the substance that you got." (On the visibility-substance balance.)