Over the course of my successful career as a software engineer, professional consultant, author and business owner, I’ve started to master the art of the power play. I define them as actions and modes of thinking that tip the balance of power within business relationships in your favor. Note that I don’t recommend power plays for personal relationships.

Granted, the actions and modes of thinking related to power plays tend to come naturally to assertive, confident individuals, as they did to me, but it wasn’t until one particular morning in New York City that the concept of naming and defining particular power plays crystallized. I must give credit to my colleague Jon Larkowski for actually coining the term in the way that it is used throughout this book, and I’ll use its inaugural example to introduce the basic concept.

It was a crisp springtime morning in Times Square. Jon and I were in town to meet executives from Reuters, an important new client for our consultancy, Hashrocket. To be clear, the deal was closed, but this was our first day consulting on site and kicking off the new project.
As we hustled over from the hotel to the Reuters building, just a few short blocks away, I decided we should buy some authentic New York bagels for breakfast.
Thing was, we didn’t quite have time (nor space in the cramped bagel shop) to actually eat the bagels and enjoy our coffees before 9 am, the scheduled time we were to meet the client people. Instead of waiting to eat breakfast later, or skipping a meal, we took our bagels to go, in little brown paper bags, and continued on our way.

At the lobby of the Reuters building, we were held up by the fact that the person we were meeting was delayed and unavailable to let us up to the appointed floor. So we stood there, hungrily, debating the timing of our breakfast.

One the one hand, a warm bagel is much better tasting than a cold bagel. On the other, it would be easier to sit down for breakfast once we made it upstairs to an office, rather than awkwardly chowing down in the Reuters building lobby.

I told Jon, “You know, we could just wait until we got upstairs and then we could eat our bagels as we met the new clients.”

“That... would be quite a power play,” responded Jon, with his signature wit, adding “there’s nothing like eating during personal introductions to really establish who’s in charge.”

He was right. If you think about it, in situations where you’re meeting a new client or business partner for the first time, polite protocol dictates that you dress well and be on your best, most attentive behavior. You are paying attention to the person you’re meeting – they are your main priority, at least until introductions are over.

How does eating during an introduction alter that equation? Well, it essentially says to the person that you’re meeting: “See here, I was hungry, and satisfying my hunger was more important than respecting protocol regarding introductions, even at the risk of pissing you off.”

The underlying principle is that your behavior will constantly affect the power dynamics of your business relationship with your clients. From the moment you first interact with a potential client, you are either helping or hurting your ultimate chances for success and satisfaction in a client relationship. I firmly believe that both parties can be happy with the balance of power resting on the vendor side, your side, as the consultant, the provider of services.

Conversely, I believe that you will never be happy when the balance tips over to the client side, because their temptation to screw you over is ever-present and extremely tempting. Ideally, you want to do a good job, while cultivating a healthy fear in your client that they might do something to piss you off, and to cause you to fire them, not the other way around. Normally, clients do always have the upper hand, because no matter how much they depend on your services, no matter how afraid they might be of losing you, they are the ones that pay you, and not the other way around. You depend on your clients to make your money, your living, and that leaves you at a disadvantage right from the start.

In fact, given the nature of billing cycles, you’re always one or two mistakes away from not getting paid – and collecting after a disagreement can be near impossible in practice. (If any of you reading this have discovered a foolproof way to always get paid up-front, please let me know.)

“But wait a minute,” you might counter to this line of reasoning, “isn’t pissing off your client with power plays a mistake?”

That would assume that power plays result in anger, but executed correctly power plays should not draw the ire of any client. The most important aspect of a power play is undeniably subtlety! If something is too obviously a power play, then you’re doing it wrong, and putting your client relationship at risk. At its most fundamental level, a power play is simply a way to send a subliminal message about who is in charge.

Let’s go back to the bagel example. If Jon and I had started eating in the atrium of the Reuters building, not only did we run the risk of being interrupted by our due-to- arrive client, we would subject ourselves to the undeniable inconvenience of eating in a public place, standing up, bundled up in jackets, and carrying backpacks and briefcases.

We can extrapolate the messages that course of action would send to onlookers and the thoughts it might provoke:

• You didn’t leave enough time for breakfast prior to arriving to your destination, perhaps indicating lack of preparation or foresight. Are you a late riser, or did you stay up too late the night before, or maybe you’re just lazy?

• You’re not necessarily allotting enough time to finish your meal, since you might get interrupted. And if you got interrupted, you might not be able to finish until much later, if even at all.

• You don’t mind inconveniencing yourself, which might be an indicator of lacking confidence or self-esteem.

• Rushing a meal, particularly in a highly visible public place, might betray a lack of social refinement.

Bagels (particularly a toasted everything bagel with a generous helping of cream cheese) is a messy meal, and risking a mess before an important meeting without an easy way to clean up is a potentially foolish course of action and certainly risky.

On the other hand, what if you waited until reaching your meeting? That’s what Jon and I did, and I think it made for a successful power play. (Mind you, it takes some amount of practice and hubris to do this sort of thing.)

“Man, we’re hungry. Mind if we eat our bagels as we talk?” I asked the client once our bags were on the floor and we were settling into an impromptu meeting space within the office of a vacationing executive.

It was a reasonable request, and the client granted it without any obvious displeasure. We’re all friends, right?

The context makes all the difference in the world. Just play it like you meant to do this all along, and here are some of the signals you will send:

• Sleep (your comfort) was more important than waking up early to be able to have breakfast before this meeting.

• Satisfying your hunger is more important at this moment than waiting for introductions and meetings to break or be over

• You’re okay with the risk of talking with your mouth full, or leaving crumbs on someone else’s desk or meeting table.

Essentially, you want to gently send the message that you’re in control, that you’ll manage this relationship the way that you want, and that you can break unwritten rules whenever you want to do so. You’re special, just like your Mom told you when you were a child.

On the other hand, you don’t want that message to come across in a crass manner, only matter-of-factly, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for you to always get what you want.

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Excerpted from my book "How to Eat Nachos and Influence People, a guidebook for business (and life)" which has a bunch of stories about my life in tech consulting. https://leanpub.com/nachos