Power: The Art of Partnership, Negotiation and Getting What You Want
A 1904 cartoon depicted Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick Foreign Policy.
In international politics, Soft Power is the ability to co-opt, rather than coerce, by shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. In the astute words of my late International Politics Columbia professor and President of the American Political Science Association, Robert Jervis, Soft Power is “the ability to ask for what you want and get it.”
The key to flexing an entity’s Soft Power, whether in politics and business, is an alignment and demonstration of shared incentives. Put simply, the initiating party needs to thoroughly explain and demonstrate how both benefit from mutual cooperation. In contrast, hard power, or coercive power, takes place when one entity exerts a force on an unwilling subject. In business, these take the form of lawsuits, hostile takeovers, media leaks and defamation. In international affairs, these include sanctions, blockades, and war.
Hard Power: Examining Russia, Ukraine, and Amazon
The current conflict between Russia and Ukraine displays these two distinct forms of power at work for the world to witness, but of which few understand. The first and most obvious is Russia’s assertion of hard power over Ukraine.
NATO expansion since 1955.
Russia’s decision to use hard power to coerce it’s neighbor comes after a decades long struggle to maintain authority and claw back a sphere of influence in the ex-Soviet republics. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, ex-Soviet states have increasingly succumbed to Western Soft Power, driven by the promises of open markets, access to capital, free-trade, and cultural norms of personal liberties and liberalized policies.
The massive influence of Western Soft Power continues to be the driving force for democratization across the globe. This has resulted in the steady advancement of NATO encroachment into Russia’s old sphere of influence. In 2014, Ukraine overthrew their Soviet backed President, Viktor Yanakuvych, in a populist uprising after he rejected the Ukrainian-European Association Agreement. A pro-Western government was elected in his place.
From the Russian perspective, the largest country on their Western border joining the EU and NATO is a line in the sand. Months after the ousting of the pro-Russian government, Russia turned to Hard Power and captured the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas regions of Eastern Ukraine. Russia's current full-scale invasion of Ukraine last week marks their second attempt to remove the pro-Western government by force after failing to destabilize the country with their incursion into Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
Business Hard Power, Amazon Corners the Book Market
Businesses also use hard power to coerce rivals, subsidiaries, or other entities to bend to their demands. This is market power. By 2020, Amazon had launched the Kindle, bankrupted Borders, and owned 50% of the total book market, 75% of electronic book sales, and opened its own publishing house.
Originally, Amazon was welcomed by many independent publishers as a new revenue stream. By 2020, their concentrated market power allowed them to force publishers to lower their prices, erasing their margins while charging below market rates to put competitors out of business.
The few publishers who refused were removed from Amazon completely costing them and their authors millions in lost revenues until they acquiesced to their demands. This market assertion of hard power transferred value from one entity to another by force. Outsized market dominance allows large entities to force others to the table for terms favorable to them at the expense of others.
When entering into contracts, agreements, or partnerships with larger entities, diversity is key. Reliance on one supplier, customer, or distributor is a dangerous deal. It tilts the balance of power to the party that controls the rails of commerce, opening you to forced negotiations and unfavorable terms in the future.
Soft Power: Ukraine Fights Back By Attracting Public Support
Soft Power is the too often disregarded and unstudied brother to Hard Power. Teddy Roosevelt spoke to this distinction of Power when he said, “Speak softly but carry a big stick.” Soft Power exists in the silent and subtle ways one can attract or persuade others. Soft Power informs overall perceptions, behaviors, and habits over time. The inevitable progress of Western ideals and democracies quickly filled the vacuum of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the USSR’s collapse. Vietnam, Taiwan, and Thailand have all moved towards democracy by their own accord.
Ukraine is fighting back, using effective communication to appeal to the Western World for help. These appeals have been calls to Soft Power - shared ideals, aspirations, hopes, culture, and desires. They have staged dramatic calls in the UN and public forums, used impassioned speeches directed at both Russian and non-Russian audiences, and leveraged social media to broadcast the war to millions of people abroad.
Their pleas have not been unanswered. The entire global community has passed the most sweeping suite of sanctions ever imposed, international companies have cut all ties, Russian air traffic has been strangled, and Russian banks have been removed from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). As a result Russia’s Rubble lost about half its value in a day, there’s a general run on Russian banks, and about $500 billion dollars in Russian owned foreign currency is inaccessible. These are hopeful progress towards an eventual peaceful resolution and a major miscalculation of the Soft Power wielded by the Ukraine Nation and public.
Business Soft Power: Public Relations, Publishers, Verizon, and Disney
In business and politics, healthy partnerships arise from mutual incentive alignment. The practice of Public Relations generally works on this principle. Publisher appetite for content, stories, and ideas to feed their demanding schedules is insatiable. The best PR experts serve as conduits of information for these publishers, providing them news and stories in exchange for coverage for their clients.
In this case, both the PR professional and publishers’ incentives are aligned. PR professionals want exposure for their clients and publishers need content and access to those clients. It is up to the PR professional to clearly explain and demonstrate how their clients’ stories apply to the publishers’ magazine, newspaper, or coverage as well as only share certain materials.
Another form of Soft Power is the marketing discipline commonly called Brand Partnerships. These partnerships are more complicated because incentives must be weighed on both sides and require extensive negotiations to pull off; however, the rewards can be immense. Take the Verizon and Disney partnership in which Verizon customers get Disney+ for free.
The partnership is a great example of Soft Power at its finest. Both companies recognize the mutual benefit of leveraging each other – namely in subscriber growth. Verizon gains by adding entertainment benefits to its customers to lower their churn rate. Disney+ desires distribution and receives access to Verizon’s 120 million worldwide customers. The partnership co-opts power to bolster both parties for mutual benefit.
For brands, agencies, and publishers looking to exert Soft Power, we suggest beginning by listing out the traits, value, offerings, or access that you can grant to potential partners. All of these characteristics are unique to your company and can be leveraged to extract mutual benefit through the creative applications of partnerships. The partnerships you engage in should both benefit your underlying business objectives but also supply value to your partners.
It's a worthy reminder that both forms of power are at one’s disposal. Hard Power is necessary when bad actors cause harm or threaten another’s destruction. Ukraine is justified in defending themselves by force, and foreign governments should do everything in their power to discourage the incursion against sovereign nations. The realities of Hard Power are the necessary destruction of the opposition's value or position for one entity to grow.
Yet, in the end, Soft Power triumphs. Although harder to muster and less conspicuous, Soft Power unlocks value for all parties involved, generating more growth, prosperity and common good where none existed before. To this political scientist turned marketer, that mutual prosperity is worth the effort.
Robert Jervis, Columbia Professor and President of the American Political Science Association
In memory of professor Robert Jervis, who taught thousands of International Politics students how to wield Power. You can read his full obit in the Washington Post.