"Hard" and "Soft" Power

Last Saturday I went to a lecture by Joseph Nye. His premise was that there are two types of power: hard power, characterized by coercion, and soft power, characterized by persuasion. I thought his ideas were good, but his presentation was soft-headed (way too "soft science"). So my summary here probably reflects more my thoughts about the subject than what he said directly.

The premise is that power is the ability to compel others to do what you want them to do. You can accomplish this through coercing them, either through threats or bribes, or you can do it by changing their fundamental feelings about the task, through persuasion. The former is accomplished through exogenous stimuli (carrots and sticks) and the latter through endogenous stimuli (he called this honey, but I think that's a lousy metaphor. It's more like uncovering and exciting latent desires). He further suggested that "hard" power has been the bread and butter of industry and military organizations for the past 200 years, but that "soft" power is currently ascendant and will be increasingly important as organizations shift from being "pyramids" to being "networks."

As a result of this duality of power, Nye outlined six skills that he sees as necessary in order to lead effectively. Three he correlates with "soft" power, two with "hard" power, and one with balancing between the two.

Soft Power Skills: (1) Emotional IQ (in his formulation, but I'd call it more like self-knowledge or self-mastery). A clear knowledge of and control over yourself. (2) A vision which is inspirational and realistic (his phrase was "grand but not grandiose) and (3) communication (verbal and non-verbal). What it boils down to is, if you want to persuade people you need to discover and exploit something you are personally passionate about (self-knowledge), formulate it in a way that others can buy into it (vision) and then communicate it to them in a way that resonates (communication). Being quantitatively biased, I see this as an energy transfer problem: persuasive leaders have within themselves large stores of potential energy on some subject. They create a mechanism to transfer that energy to others. Then they jumpstart the process. And the tighter the resonance, the purer the energy transfer. Anyway, kind of geeky but it's the way my mind works.

Hard Power Skills: (1) Organizational ability (but what he really means is ability to acquire information, whether it supports or weakens your own agenda) and (2) Machiavellian insight into others fears and desires. I don't have any snazzy physical analogy here, perhaps because he spent a lot less time here, and being a more standard view of "power" it's less intellectually interesting.

The final skill: contextual intelligence (essentially the meta-skill of knowing what recipe to apply in any given situation).

In relation to previous subjects of discussion, I go back to our reaction to the Paul Farmer book. Here is a leader who offers no carrots or sticks to us (he has no ability to reward or punish us directly), but who seemed to inspire a degree of devotion and desire to change behaviors among us. Other examples of "soft" power leaders given during the seminar were (as you would expect) Ghandi, MLK, and the Dalai Lama.

I'm not completely convinced that there is a qualitative difference between "hard" and "soft" power. In some ways I see "soft" power as just another form of coercion, in which the bribe is the approbation of the charismatic leader. I guess it gets to whether people's private utilities can really be changed through endogenous stimuli.