Works
- Power Failure in Management Circuits, Harvard Business Review, 1979
- The Change Masters: Innovation for Productivity in the American Corporation, 1983
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Sources of managerial power. Kanter treats power as the capacity to get things done and locates it in a manager's position and access to resources, information, and organizational support. Positions that carry discretion, recognition, and relevance to central tasks confer power, as do connections with superiors, peers, and subordinates, while routine, rule-bound jobs leave people relatively powerless.
Corporate entrepreneurs and coalitions. Kanter studied innovation inside large American companies, carried out by managers she called corporate entrepreneurs. Innovators had to gather support, money, and information for their projects beyond their own authority, and organizations that innovated well were those whose structures let people build coalitions and teams across units to back and carry out new ideas.
What it explains
Kanter explains why the same proposal fares differently depending on who carries it: people whose jobs give them discretion, visibility, and connections can mobilize resources, and those without them cannot. Her study of innovators shows that new initiatives inside companies succeed by assembling backing across units before they need formal approval.