Case: Washington Square

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Influence

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University of Pennsylvania

Influence

95 ratings

Course 4 of 4 in the Specialization Achieving Personal and Professional Success

What does it mean to be influential? How does one persuade others to pursue a unified goal? How does one leverage power? In this course, you’ll learn how to develop influence and to become more effective in achieving your organizational goals. Professor Cade Massey of the Wharton School has designed this course to help you understand the framework of power and influence and the dynamics of effective networks, and shows you how to develop your skills of persuasion and leverage. By the end of this course, you’ll know your own strengths and how to use them to get what you need, how to gain power and influence, and how to leverage relationships and alliances to achieve your goals in both business and in life.

From the lesson

Module 2

In this module, you’ll examine social networks and relationships, and learn how they can help you accomplish your organizational goals. You’ll be able to differentiate between dense and disconnected networks, and weigh the benefits and costs of diversification within your networks. Then you’ll learn about both successful strategies and common pitfalls in cultivating a network, and see how authentic generosity will build reciprocity in your networks and vice versa. You’ll also explore coalitions and how alliances between parties with different perspectives can be very effective and efficient in achieving mutual goals. By the end of this module, you’ll learn effective strategies for networking, coalition-building, and leveraging, and will be able to form strong alliances and relationships both inside and outside your organization.

Module Introduction- Relationships1:10

Seating Chart Exercise3:56

Resource Dependence and Social Capital3:29

Network Structure15:06

Applications9:15

Cultivating Networks11:27

Organizational Perspective5:15

Common Mistakes3:07

Closing Thoughts on Social Networks2:52

Introduction to Coalitions4:08

Types of Coalitions11:58

Coalition Examples3:14

Prescriptions for Coalitions8:52

Case: Washington Square6:28

Meet the Instructors

Cade Massey
Practice Professor
The Wharton School

Let's do a mini case study, real world example and

ask how you might have gone about forming a coalition when one was needed.

The example comes from New York City,

Washington Square Park in the heart of Greenwich Village and

a battle that took place over multiple decades but really got heated in the 50's.

The key actor here is Robert Moses.

We've heard about Robert Moses in another lecture earlier in the class.

But he was the director of transportation,

the transportation commissioner in New York for decades.

And known as being one of the most influential men in the history of

New York.

He held power for something like 45 years.

He had never proposed a project that didn't get done until this point.

What did he run into? He ran into Jane Jacobs.

This is a picture of Jane from later in her life, this was in the 2000's so

this ia a good 40, 50 years after their battle.

But let's see what took place.

The setup was that Moses wanted to take Fifth Avenue through the park.

So Fifth Avenue comes down from the North and

ends when it hits the famous art there in Washington Square Park.

Moses wanted to run it through the park, wanted to divide the park.

And it would’ve dramatically changed not only the park but

the neighborhood by increasing the traffic through that area.

This is a highly congested recreational area.

And there was a lot of opposition from those who lived in the area against this.

So Jane Jacob lived in the area, and she was not the first to form this coalition

but she was early on in the coalition and she proved to be critical to it.

So ask yourself, if you were living in Washington Square Park in the 50's and

Moses wanted to build this avenue through your neighborhood is four lane,

big four lane busy street.

What would you've done about it?

You're facing the most influential guy in New York.

How could you stop him?

How would you've gone about stopping him?

So think about how you would hopefully form a coalition.

So one of the reasons we believe in coalitions is that when you don't power,

when you're in these relatively uninfluential positions,

it's one of the best resources you have.

So what are you going to do?

So one of the places you might think about well,

let's get my neighbors of course form a petition get some signatures.

And this of course is what they started with.

And then that may or

may not be sufficient depending on how strong the weight is behind the proposal.

Turns out it wasn't sufficient.

So what do you do next?

They started trying to bring media in and they did it in creative ways.

So for example they had protests and being wise to the ways of the media they

tried kids out and they really emphasized the impact on children.

And eventually people started writing about this.

This was the dawn of the Village Voice by the way.

The Village Voice, the first alternative weekly newspaper in the US

started in New York, started in this era, and of course they loved this cause.

They recruited those who wrote architecture columns for

some of the bigger newspapers, the dailies to write on behalf of their cause as well.

So they pull the media in here, what else are they going to do?

They start working with young politicians.

The big established politicians don't want to take on Moses but

maybe some of the younger guys would.

So Ed Koch for example, eventually the mayor of New York

got involved because he needed kind of a cause to get his name out there.

They started thinking about celebrities.

It turns out that one of the most famous women

in the country at the time Eleanor Roosevelt lived in Greenwich Village.

And she was very happy to throw her celebrity behind the cause.

And so with each of these steps,

each of these additions to their coalitions it added to their power.

Eventually and this was after years,

eventually they had a strong enough coalition.

And enough attention that they were able to go to probably the only politician in

the area who could actually stop Moses and that was Secretary of State De Sapio.

De Sapio was able to exert enough influence.

He saw what these guys wanted and the power they had mustered over years and was

able to stop Moses from actually extending Fifth Avenue down through the park.

So at the height of the battle Moses, in a final desperate and unsuccessful attempt

to keep the Board of Estimate from closing the park to the traffic said.

There's nobody against this, nobody, nobody, nobody but a bunch of mothers.

Well it turns out mothers,

if they're able to form a coalition can be very influential.

They had gone beyond mothers and children to politicians like Koch.

Eleanor Roosevelt and eventually to Secretary of State De Sapio.

Jane Jacobs by the way went on to much greater fame.

She has a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

She wasn't even trained in urban policy, urban development.

But she wrote the book that public policy schools all over the country

have used to teach in their schools.

What do we learn from this?

Some thoughts from Jacobs.

One reason her coalition was so effective is that it played at multiple levels.

She had street-level protests with individuals,

she had newspaper coverage and editorials.

Not just one newspaper, multiple papers.

She had political pressure from multiple offices and candidates, and

she had celebrity endorsements.

You see how many different levels there are to that.

The best coalitions do play at multiple levels.

Moses was of course trying to do the same thing.

Moses had all kinds of levers and he would say one thing in press and

he'd have quiet meetings behind the scenes also.

He was up against a lot.

They were up against a lot,

it took that kind of sophisticated coalition to get it done.

It was also an extremely strategic coalition.

She was intentional.

They were intentional in how they built this thing.

They earned each new layer of support.

They had to build it at one level before they could expand it to the next level.

One of the big ideas behind coalitions is that you often can't go directly at your

target you have to go sarcuniously, indirectly.

These guys couldn't have gone straight to De Sapio.

Had they just knocked on De Sapio's door on day one,

he wouldn't have listened to him, he wouldn't have cared.

But they built enough support until he kind of needed to listen to them.

So some closing thoughts on coalitions.

The first, and maybe the main lesson here is that you should look broadly for

potential coalitions.

They are the key resource for the weak.

And they are the key threat to the strong.

You will find yourself in weak bargaining position sometimes,

the number one lever in this situations will be a coalition.

On the other side you will sometimes be in these strong positions.

What is the greatest risk as a coalition against you?

So we all need to be on the lookout from both sides for these coalitions.

And finally failures of implementation are almost invariably

failures to build successful coalitions.

It's a critical tool in your influence tool box.

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