Women and power: understanding power

I’d tried to do things the correct way: I’d learned negotiation, toughness, analytical know-how. But all those skills did was dig me into a deeper hole. When women negotiate, we give up too much. When we play by the rules – men’s rules – we don’t win much worth having. Was there another way for a woman to win? To make the rules in our image?

That’s when I started studying the great women of history.
Machiavelli wrote The Prince by studying the Caesars and Napoleons and Sun Tzus and drew conclusions on what made those despots great. I studied women leaders and found that those who triumphed used a single strategy of their own: they combined the arts of love and war to triumph against impossible odds.

Let’s get one thing straight before we begin. The little bullet of a word: war. We can hate war and still acknowledge that life is full of conflicts – wars of intimacy, if you will. If we act as if each action of our life has critical consequences – as it does in war – then we would have a much better chance of thriving. The art of war that women must fight is not the bloody kind, not the wars of ego and greed, but the wars of intimacy, when the opponent is often close enough to hurt you.