Managing With Power

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Even the Mighty Fall: How Power Is Lost

Organizational change often, if not inevitably, involves changes in the distribution of power. For Apple Computer to crack the corporate market and to build individual products and systems that were compatible, it was necessary for power to pass from counterculture computer jocks to someone like John Sculley, with his Wharton MBA degree and traditional corporate career at Pepsico—to someone, in other words, who understood corporate America and who saw the company more as a business and less as a cause or mission. For Xerox to regain its lost momentum and solve its quality problems in the copier and office products business, power had to pass from the finance types to David Kearns, an ex-IBM executive ...