Power and Influence

I've written a piece elsewhere asking What is Power? We have this online concept of influencers and I think people imagine it's basically manipulating people or conning people into just agreeing with your opinions or something like that.

Odds are good that the author of The Devil Wears Prada probably got one detail about Anna Wintour correct. She probably heard something like it and put it in the book.

When Christian Thompson tells Andy Sachs that Miranda Priestly is going to be replaced, Priestly apparently blocks this attempted takeover and at some point tells Andy about "the list" of photographers and writers and others that would abandon the magazine Runway and follow Priestly elsewhere.

Anna Wintour likely has power from two sources:

1. Her father was an editor and he handpicked Vogue as the publication she should take over. She likely knew more about editing at age fifteen than a lot of seasoned editors.

2. There probably is "a list" of industry people loyal to Anna Wintour because she helped their careers.

I don't know anything about the fashion industry. I have read that when they made the movie The Devil Wears Prada, they had difficulty getting filming locations in New York because no one wanted to offend Anna Wintour.

Anna Wintour helping the careers of people in the industry and thereby establishing a relationship to them and loyalty from them isn't the same as what people seem to imagine influencer means.

That's a kind of power akin to if you become a self-made millionaire because you brought something new to market and proved its worth as a product and earned the trust of people who wanted your product.

A lot of wealth today is inherited and the people who inherited wealth may or may not have any of that insider knowledge and insider expertise that daddy had who actually created the family wealth. So people today seem to think merely having money is the same as power and it's absolutely not.

If it were, everyone who wins the lottery would magically be an important mover and shaker and I've never heard of anyone turning lottery winnings into a Fortune 500 company or political career.

In most cases, you make scads of money by improving the lives of other people. Your product in some way adds to their bottom line.

So typically a self-made millionaire created a great deal more value than the paltry sum their net worth represents.

If they are worth a billion, they may have created a trillion dollars in value. And the rest of that value is in the pockets of other people.

So those other people are loyal because the unseen trillion dollars in everyone else's pockets. Power and influence is about one person's word impacting the behavior of the other people who are shareholders in that larger pool of wealth.

Simply having millions doesn't automatically get you that part of the equation. Sometimes even if Daddy had that piece of it and you got your money from daddy.

Businesses or individuals who profit off the misery of other people doesn't get you that loyalty. It gets you headlines about "Someone shot the CEO and we are MYSTIFIED as to why."