I’m also reminded of something that Val used to say: “power felt is power wasted”. Deploying a lot of force to make things go your way is very inefficient.
If you’re skilled, you should be able to get what you’re aiming for while deploying very little actual force (“speak softly and carry a big stick” for instance, but also using soft power and good leadership more generally). Someone with a little power and a lot of skill can often do as much (and with less collateral damage) as someone with a lot of power trying to muscle through.
Power is definitely useful, but the more you think that the thing you need to accomplish your aims, the more that indicates that you don’t have skill with using power efficiently.
I broadly agree with this comment too, though not as much as I agree with the other one.
Power felt can also be a kind of honesty—e.g. if a law is backed by force, then it’s often better for this to be unambiguous, so that people can track the actual landscape of power.
(Of course, being unambiguous about how much force backs up your laws can also be a kind of power move. I expect that there are ways to get the benefits of honesty without making it a power move, but I don’t have enough experience with this to be confident.)
In other words, I expect that the kind of inefficiency Val is talking about here is actually sometimes load-bearing for accountability.
I’m also reminded of something that Val used to say: “power felt is power wasted”. Deploying a lot of force to make things go your way is very inefficient.
If you’re skilled, you should be able to get what you’re aiming for while deploying very little actual force (“speak softly and carry a big stick” for instance, but also using soft power and good leadership more generally). Someone with a little power and a lot of skill can often do as much (and with less collateral damage) as someone with a lot of power trying to muscle through.
Power is definitely useful, but the more you think that the thing you need to accomplish your aims, the more that indicates that you don’t have skill with using power efficiently.
I broadly agree with this comment too, though not as much as I agree with the other one.
Power felt can also be a kind of honesty—e.g. if a law is backed by force, then it’s often better for this to be unambiguous, so that people can track the actual landscape of power.
(Of course, being unambiguous about how much force backs up your laws can also be a kind of power move. I expect that there are ways to get the benefits of honesty without making it a power move, but I don’t have enough experience with this to be confident.)
In other words, I expect that the kind of inefficiency Val is talking about here is actually sometimes load-bearing for accountability.