Foreword

The concepts seem so obvious, so basic.

1. Be clear on your own goals and objectives before you start—no Ready, Fire, Aim!
2. Assume that everyone is a potential ally, that each of your colleagues can help you achieve your goals in some way.
3. Understand their reality, their situation, in some detail. Know how they are paid, how they are “goaled,” and how their interests align with yours.
4. Keep the deeply held human value of reciprocity—of quid pro quo—firmly in mind, and while doing so, think about what you have that they might want, and vice versa. And it never hurts to build up a bit of credit with someone. You never know when you might need to collect.
5. Be willing to trade, to give something, in order to get what you need.

Would anyone argue with these simple ideas? Of course not.

And yet, in the workplace with our colleagues, when it matters most for our professional success, so many of us fail to keep these ideas in mind or to use them as the foundation of our actions. We complain that “Kira doesn't work for me, so how can I get her to deliver what I need?” Or that “Malhar won't attend the meetings of my cross-functional task force. Please tell him that he has to come.”

We have grown from fewer than fifty to over fifteen hundred Boxers in the past seven years. Many of the largest companies in the world, including GE, P&G, and Coca Cola rely on Box, as do tens of thousands of smaller businesses. We have seen the problems that we face grow exponentially in complexity, and watched our colleagues struggle when we demand crisp and effective cross-functional execution in the face of, and despite, that complexity.

In order to grow rapidly, we have always known that we must invest heavily in “skilling up” our leaders to thrive in an increasingly complex world of more partners, more customers, more departments, and more products. And at the center of everything that we teach is one simple concept—we expect you to get stuff done at breakneck speed whether the people that you depend on report to you or not.

The ideas in this book around the concept of influence without explicit authority lie at the heart of our success as a business, and at the heart of the design of our service—which enables coworkers to easily collaborate around documents and other forms of content so that they can work together without hierarchy or information bottlenecks.

Influence is the foundation of success in the modern world of business and this book is a straightforward guide. We rely on it, we teach it, and you should, too.

—Aaron Levie, CEO, Box Inc.

Dan Levin, COO, Box Inc.