So I want to wrap up the course with a framework that I'm offering, though it's not, the framework. I think, anytime you take a class, you should go through the effort of distilling the key ideas, the ideas that are most important for you to carry forward yourself. So, I encourage each of you to do that. At some point in teaching this course, I decided to do that for myself. So as years end it's now been a few years since I've done it, but I still like this framework and I want to suggest it to you as one way of thinking about some of the themes in the class. But again I want to encourage you to do your own. I call these seven habits of the influential and I'll unpack each of these in a little bit more detail as a way of picking up on some themes we've talked about throughout the class. The first is pick your spots. This is a picture of Abraham Lincoln of course, we could use Lincoln to illustrate any number of the ideas in the class. But this first habit we're talking about comes from situation awareness. And this is the, yes, idea of using multiple lenses to understand the situation. Staying vigilant for changes in circumstances, especially changes in risk, uncertainty, and importance. And knowing when to invest and knowing when to let it slide. Basically, you've got to know when it's okay to stay with the daily routines and when it's time to do something different. Lincoln was a fantastic example of this. Situation awareness is a general set of skills that will help you and this habit of picking your spots is one that we see in influential people. Second habit, keeping others' interests in mind. We introduced this fancy term earlier, Allocentrism, this being interested in the other people's' perspectives. The opposite of egocentrism. We could use Robert Moses as an example for any number of our ideas. But he, kind of surprisingly for as forceful a guy as he was, was excellent at allocentrism. He realized the more you can give others what they want, the more they can afford to give you. And this involves keeping not only their ideas but their feelings in mind, this notion of pathos. A third habit, be willing to make trade-offs. The example we're using here is Sergio de Mello who was our first example in the course. And we used him to illustrate, again, a number of ideas but something we saw in him was Intentionality. He placed a premium on flexibility and adaptability. Samantha Power, the author who writes the chapters on de Mello, said that Sergio was "ruthlessly pragmatic". We carry away from him and other places in the course this idea that if you're not making trade-offs, you're not really working toward a goal. Number four: the fourth habit of highly influential people. This is Heidi Roize, a well-known networker, Silicon Valley entrepreneur venture capitalists. We talked about networks, and the habit here is to cultivate relationships before they're needed. This is a way of navigating what many people find squeamish about, thinking about networks at all, as opposed to just thinking about people and relationships. Well one way to fix that, because we need you to be strategic and thinking about how you allocate your time at some level. One way of navigating that is to be intentional about networking, but unintentional about relationships. Cultivating relationships before they're needed is a great way of pulling it off. Fifth habit, have the meeting before the meeting. For me, this really gets to the fact that these are habits. These are daily ways of living. Not complicated, just need to be folded into our routines. So the example here is Jane Jacobs. This is Jacobs sitting in a bar in Greenwich Village where she had the famous showdown with Robert Moses. There and she built a coalition, gave us a great demonstration of the value of coalitions. And a couple of ideas here that come out of that literature in these examples are the more disparate the group, the more important, the more valuable it is, the ability to build coalitions within the group. And you use these meetings, these meetings before the meetings, for gathering information, taking temperatures, laying down groundwork. These are not luxuries, these are not nice-to-haves. These are necessary bits to having influence in organizations. Number 6, sixth habit. Don't accept circumstances as given. The picture here is of Jeanette Sadik-Khan, who was a more contemporary transportation commissioner. She followed in Moses' footsteps in many ways. She showed great agency in doing things like getting these pedestrian only zones in New York City. Here she is sitting in the middle of Broadway. She shapes situation, she does not accept situations for what they were, she didn't accept them as set. And we find in our empirical work that agency is the #1 most influential strategy among people we've studied. Seventh and finally, See the World as it is, and How You Want it to be. This is a picture of President Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. strategizing about the civil rights legislation that they pushed through in the early 60's. Civil rights legislation had failed in the US congress since reconstruction, it had been 75 or 80 years since anything had been done. Johnson as President got that done. He did it through a rare combination of realism and optimism. Johnson was famous for sharp elbows, getting in the mud, the ability to win a street fight. But he paired that, at least at this point in his life, he paired that with clear-eyed inspirational vision of what he wanted to do. At that point, he wanted to advance the civil rights cause. So the notion here is that you need both, that realism without ambition is empty, but ambition without realism is feckless. We're pushing you to bring these two things together. We hope that we've tooled you up to be better on the realism side, more effective. But we'd like that to be paired with inspiration. Because, again, the realism without that ambition is empty. So, seven habits, and we call them habits because we really do think they're most effective as ways of living and they needed to be folded into your daily and weekly routines. These are seven. I hope you will distill some for yourself, what you find most meaningful and most useful. This is just one framework, one way of thinking about the material we've been talking about. A last note for the class is one more shot from Abraham Lincoln. This comes from a book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin called Team of Rivals, subsequently made into a movie, at least part of it was made into a movie called Lincoln. And the particular scene, there's a great scene, you might track it down if you haven't seen it before. I'm going to quote from it here, I'm going to quote from the book. Where it was near the end of the Civil War, so this is January 1865, the Civil War is going to go on a few more months, but they'd been three and a half years into the Civil War now. It's also near the end of Lincoln's life, he'll be assassinated in the same month that the war is over. They're strategizing at this point on how to pass the 13th amendment to the Constitution, which is going to ban slavery. So this has been a long debate in the north and Lincoln has issued the emancipation proclamation but that was just an executive order essentially, and now he's trying to codify it in the constitution, forever banning slavery. So he says at one of these meetings in the final hours before they get the vote on this, he says to his staffers, to his team. I am President of the United States, clothed with great power. The abolition of slavery by constitutional provisions settles the fate for all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come. A measure of such importance that those two votes must be procured. I leave it to you to determine how it shall be done: but remember that I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes. What do you make of this quote? For me, I'm blown away by, here he is, with the most noble cause a person can have. More right on his side than anybody's ever going to have. And yet he still has to go basically buy votes even with a cause this just he still needs influence tactics to accomplish his goal. The lesson is that being right is not enough. Being moral is not enough. Working hard is not enough, to achieve great things you'll need a range of tools, you'll need these tools. We wish you the best with your work, we wish you the best with your goals. Thank you.
