It was a tricky class, a lot of it wasn't about explicit rules or frameworks, but reading chapters of biographies and other books, and identifying the sources of power and how they were used.
We didn't have a specific book, and it was a very unique class, my favorite after competitive strategy (essentially applied game theory).
Some of the readings were on Robert Moses, LB Johnson, the movie 12 Angry Men (Henry Fonda version), etc.
Essentially you can take any good biography of a powerful person and try to proactively identify the sources of power they had, how they harnessed and yielded it, and what impact it had.
It requires some suspension of disbelief, since power is usually seen as negative, so you need to be a bit cynical while doing it (just don't be cynical in real life, nobody likes an asshole).
You can do the same in you job (that was actually the final paper): who holds power (and which type of power) over you? Why? Where do they source their power from? Skill? Reputation? Formal authority?
What power do you have? Over whom? Why? Where do you get it from?
This was one of those classes where it would be hard to replicate the same learning by yourself. The other one was negotiations.
"The Power Broker" is very good, but I've only ever gotten about 200 pages into it. I'll have to try again.
You didn't happen to read Caro's work on LBJ, did you? It's surprising your class would use his work twice, but the guy is pretty fascinated with the sorts of powerful people that this topic of study would focus on as case studies.
We didn't have a specific book, and it was a very unique class, my favorite after competitive strategy (essentially applied game theory).
Some of the readings were on Robert Moses, LB Johnson, the movie 12 Angry Men (Henry Fonda version), etc.
Essentially you can take any good biography of a powerful person and try to proactively identify the sources of power they had, how they harnessed and yielded it, and what impact it had.
It requires some suspension of disbelief, since power is usually seen as negative, so you need to be a bit cynical while doing it (just don't be cynical in real life, nobody likes an asshole).
You can do the same in you job (that was actually the final paper): who holds power (and which type of power) over you? Why? Where do they source their power from? Skill? Reputation? Formal authority?
What power do you have? Over whom? Why? Where do you get it from?
This was one of those classes where it would be hard to replicate the same learning by yourself. The other one was negotiations.