Success Quote by Robert Shea

Power doesn’t corrupt so much as it clarifies. Shea’s line has the cold snap of someone who’s watched idealists age into stakeholders and then quietly rewrite the rules to fit their appetites. The phrasing is surgical: “As such people achieve influence” suggests a predictable progression, not a moral failure but a career trajectory. Influence is treated like gravity; once you have it, it pulls decisions toward you.

The quote’s bite comes from its refusal to flatter institutions. “Organization” is an abstract noun that begs for reverence - mission, culture, legacy - yet Shea punctures it with a blunt premise: when self-interest meets institutional interest, the person wins. It’s not a warning about a few bad actors; it’s an operating principle. The subtext is that systems recruit and elevate the very traits they later pretend to be shocked by: ambition, self-protection, positional bargaining. If you want influence, you learn what incentives actually pay; once you have influence, you protect the incentives that got you there.

Contextually, Shea wrote in an era when bureaucracies, corporations, and state agencies were expanding and professionalizing, selling the promise of rational management while breeding new forms of office politics. The line reads like a postwar hangover: the myth of the neutral institution meets the reality of human leverage. It also hints at a darker corollary: if you want an organization’s “interest” to matter, you must build structures where personal gain is genuinely tethered to collective outcomes - otherwise the mission is just decoration on someone’s résumé.