Politics & Power Quote by Warren Bennis

Power is supposed to buy you agency; Bennis flips that fantasy with a domestic image that lands like a quiet insult to the whole leadership-industrial complex. The line starts with a confession that’s almost taboo in polite management writing: “I wanted the influence.” Not service, not duty, not vision - influence, the cleanest word for craving outcomes without admitting to craving control. Then comes the anti-climax: “I wasn’t very good at being a president.” The candor is strategic. Bennis, a major voice in modern leadership theory, uses self-implication to undercut the myth that authority automatically confers competence.

The window detail is the masterstroke. Leadership is usually framed as panoramic: big picture, long horizon, “from 30,000 feet.” Bennis weaponizes that cliché by literally putting himself at a remove, behind glass, watching real work happen. The lawn cutter becomes a symbol of bounded autonomy: a small domain, clear feedback loops, visible progress. He’s not “more important” than the president; he’s just less trapped by abstraction, committees, and secondhand information. The president’s power is diffuse - everyone else’s hands are on the levers.

Context matters: Bennis spent a career distinguishing “leaders” from “managers,” and this reads like the scar tissue behind that framework. It’s also a critique of institutions that confuse titles with traction. The subtext is bracing: the higher you climb, the more your job becomes persuasion, negotiation, and theater - and the more seductive it is to mistake that for control.