Success Quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Power, here, is stripped of its cosplay. No throne, no title, no intimidating mystique just a blunt performance metric: can you make reality move? Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s line lands because it refuses the common corporate hallucination that authority equals influence. In her framing, “power” isn’t a possession; it’s a capacity. The phrasing quietly demotes status to a means, not an end, and it’s a provocation aimed at every org chart that confuses hierarchy with results.

The subtext is especially pointed in a business context shaped by committees, matrix structures, and the modern art of decision paralysis. “Ability to get things done” implies navigation: aligning incentives, building coalitions, clearing bottlenecks, translating vision into execution. That makes power relational rather than merely positional. You can have the corner office and still be powerless if your initiatives die in meeting notes. Conversely, the person with no formal authority can be powerful if they can convene, persuade, and deliver.

Kanter’s background in organizational behavior also peeks through: real power is often infrastructural. It lives in access to resources, information, and networks, and in credibility built through follow-through. The line carries an implicit critique of performative leadership the speechifying, the branding, the “thought leadership” fog. If nothing changes afterward, it wasn’t power; it was theater.

It’s also quietly democratizing. If power is execution, then it can be built, shared, and measured not just inherited or granted.