A powerful person calls you.
"Go to Abuja immediately."
There is a reflex many intelligent people have cultivated:
"But I'm in Paris."
Factually correct.
Perhaps strategically premature.
There is another response I have increasingly come to appreciate:
"Okay."
End the call.
Then send the message:
"Just to flag, I'm currently in Paris. If the objective is to meet them today, I can have X attend physically while I join remotely. Alternatively, I can arrive tomorrow evening. I suggest the first option so we don't lose time."
What changed?
You did not lie about your location.
You did not promise the impossible.
You did something subtler.
You affirmed the objective before negotiating the method.
Powerful People Often Listen for Resistance First
When somebody is accustomed to making decisions, the first thing he may hear in your response is not your logistical explanation.
He may hear:
Are you with me or against me?
This is especially true under pressure.
The chairman has a problem.
The governor wants something resolved.
The CEO is angry.
The client has an emergency.
They are not necessarily asking, in the first five seconds, for your complete operational analysis.
They are seeking alignment.
The adviser who habitually begins with:
"No."
"But..."
"That is impossible."
"Unfortunately..."
may eventually become experienced as friction, even when he is frequently correct.
The more sophisticated approach is often:
Say yes to the objective. Then qualify the route.
This is not sycophancy.
Sycophancy would mean pretending impossible things are possible because power wishes them to be so.
Strategic service means understanding what the principal actually needs and then helping him achieve it within reality.
Preserve Access
This connects to a larger principle:
You cannot influence a room you can no longer enter.
A junior executive publicly embarrasses the CEO because the CEO is wrong.
Perhaps everyone privately agrees with the junior.
The junior may also have ensured he is excluded from the next conversation where the decision can actually be influenced.
A nightclub owed money by a major celebrity may possess one devastating weapon: public shame.
Before deployment, the threat of embarrassment may be leverage.
After deployment, the celebrity may decide that payment now looks like surrender.
The club has won the Twitter argument and lost the receivable.
Sometimes righteous anger spends tomorrow's leverage to purchase today's applause.
This is why Esther fascinates me.
She does not confront Xerxes at the first possible moment.
She preserves access.
Then she uses it.
But Access Has Its Own Corruption
There is a danger here.
"Preserve access" can become the sophisticated language through which cowardice justifies itself.
You tell yourself you are being strategic.
In reality, you are afraid of losing favour.
You begin laughing at jokes that are not funny.
You stop offering uncomfortable advice.
You defend things privately that you would condemn publicly.
Eventually, access becomes more important than conscience.
This is where another biblical character becomes useful.
Obadiah served in the household of King Ahab.
Ahab's court was hardly a spiritually healthy environment. Yet the biblical account goes out of its way to tell us that Obadiah feared God greatly.
When Jezebel persecuted God's prophets, Obadiah secretly protected a hundred of them.
That is an extraordinary picture.
A man inside the palace who did not allow the palace to determine whom he worshipped.
Serve Without Worshipping
There is a lesson in that for anyone who spends time around concentrated power.
You can serve a politician without making politics your religion.
You can advise a billionaire without making wealth your measure of human worth.
You can work for a difficult founder without becoming cruel because cruelty is rewarded around him.
You can remain in an imperfect institution without allowing every imperfection of that institution to reproduce itself inside you.
That requires a distinction between service and worship.
A powerful person may deserve your professional loyalty.
He does not deserve your soul.
The moment your continuing proximity requires you to repeatedly violate your deepest convictions, the economics of access have changed.
Something much more valuable than a relationship is now being spent.
The Sycophant and the Adviser
From the outside, a good adviser and a sycophant can occasionally look similar.
Both may be courteous.
Both may understand hierarchy.
Both may avoid embarrassing the principal publicly.
Both may know when not to speak.
The difference is internal.
The sycophant wants favour.
The adviser wants influence in service of an objective.
The sycophant therefore changes his belief to remain acceptable.
The adviser changes his method of communicating the belief so that it can be heard.
One has no centre.
The other possesses one.
This may be one of the hardest disciplines of life in the corridors of power:
Remain flexible in method without becoming flexible in identity.
Esther could navigate Xerxes without becoming Haman.
Obadiah could work for Ahab without bowing to Baal.
That is a much higher standard than simply "speaking truth to power."
Sometimes truth must be shouted.
Sometimes whispered.
Sometimes demonstrated.
Sometimes timed.
Sometimes wrapped inside a solution.
But after all the strategic calculation is done, one question must remain:
When I leave this room, am I still myself?
Preserve access.
But preserve yourself too.