Hard power is about coercion, command and control, yell and tell. It is also the carrot-and-stick approach, rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad. Every society needs to impose some level of hard power. Our police and defence forces, for example, are bastions of hard power that are tasked with keeping our streets and country safe.

Our world is replete with institutions, edifices and symbols that support the exercise of hard power. One of Australia's biggest companies has recently custom-built a 6-star green energy–rated headquarters in Melbourne's CBD. The foyer is an example of pure hard power on display.

The scale is colossal. Acres of glass and steel immediately dwarf you as you climb a towering set of marble steps. A vast, cold, echoing space channels you towards Reception. If you're not yet sufficiently intimidated, the reception area is set up for maximum security with physical barriers and commanding signs. All these expressions of power signal clearly and unsubtly where the control lies, and it's not with you.

The corner office, organisational charts and reporting hierarchies are all hard power at work.

When did our love affair with hard power begin?

We've already met Machiavelli, that doyen of hard power, but the tools he championed were shaped by a very specific historical and cultural context.

In more recent history, the command and control mindset re-emerged in a different form following the industrial revolution. Frederick Taylor's pioneering work in industrial settings in the late 19th century spawned Taylorism, or scientific management, which paved the way for a range of efficiency measures that governed much manufacturing output through the 20th century.

Taylor saw it as the task of factory management to determine the best, most efficient way for workers to do the job, to provide the proper tools and training, and to deliver incentives for good performance. He broke down each job into its individual components, analysed them to determine their relative importance and priority, and timed workers and processes with a stopwatch.

Taylorism saw skilled managers and technicians overseeing semi-skilled or unskilled workers engaged in simple, repetitive chores.

Inspired by Taylor's scientific management theory, Henry Ford revolutionised the American automobile industry in the years leading up to the First World War by introducing a system of mass production that saw further division and control of labour while offering workers greater financial reward.

English writer Aldous Huxley's chilling futuristic novel Brave New World was published in 1932. In it he portrayed these trends towards economic standardisation and conformity as serious threats to the freedoms associated with individualism and emotional expression. Charlie Chaplin, who had experience of the automobile industry, showed in his film Modern Times (1936) how the soul-destroying monotony of assembly-line work drove workers insane.

Hard power and incentives

These performance metaphors referenced machines. Machines were obedient, uncomplaining, untiring, but also unimaginative.

But the machine metaphor doesn't work for humans, who are not programmed to be identical. We are all individuals, who respond to stimuli across a broad spectrum of emotions, from fear to love to incentives and rewards for good work. In the end, unlike machines, we're also unpredictable.

The carrot-and-stick approach, or incentivising desired behaviour through reward and (the threat of) punishment, is another unreliable form of hard power.

Poorly designed incentive schemes can produce unintended consequences.

In one famous story, the colonial authorities in British India, concerned about the numbers of venomous snakes in Delhi, offered a financial reward for dead cobras. Entrepreneurial natives quickly recognised a business opportunity and started a breeding program that saw ever larger numbers of cobras produced to claim the reward. Here was a classic case of a solution that only exacerbates the problem.

Behavioural economists identify three kinds of incentives:

• financial or physical rewards, through which money, goods or services, or rebates induce you to adopt or desist from certain behaviours
• social incentives, which make you feel liked, respected or appreciated
• moral incentives, which appeal to your shared or community sense of right and wrong.

In their 2005 bestseller, Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything, Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner cite an experiment involving fees charged to parents who arrive late to pick up their children at day care. Researchers had conducted a 20-week disincentive experiment at 10 day-care centres in Israel, penalising unpunctual parents financially for their behaviour.

‘What they find is, if you charge a small penalty — $3 a day for coming late to day care — more parents come late, not fewer,' Levitt notes.

‘You start with a situation where there's no charge for coming late; there's only a social or moral penalty associated with knowing you made the day-care providers wait longer with your children. But once you put a dollar value on it, the financial side actually crowds out the social and the moral side of it and makes the problem worse, so it's very difficult indeed to combine the three types of incentives.'

Dan Pink's research, as recounted in his business blockbuster Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, reached similar conclusions. Pink believes the carrot-and-stick approach worked well in the early 20th century for tasks that were typically routine, unchallenging and highly controlled. But these industrial age tools fail to motivate people today who are driven by autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Hard power in a knowledge economy

Traditionally hard power has relied on an unequal balance of power and on the control of information and knowledge by a few people (as in 16th-century Italy and, especially before the invention of the printing press and popular literacy, the Church).

Today's global communications networks and information technologies have turned this paradigm upside down. Fear, intimidation and bullying haven't gone away by any means. Alain de Botton recognises this in his TED talk ‘A kinder, gentler philosophy of success': ‘The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge.'

But the transparency produced by digital technology has significantly undermined power modes based on the monopoly of information, exposing such a strategy's moral deficit and creating a shift towards more inclusive leadership styles.

In the new information era, anyone with an internet connection can access knowledge. Not only can you source information quickly, economically and accurately, but you can also contribute to it and (usually) freely share your opinions online.

Many websites are dedicated to encouraging employees and customers to post reviews on companies.

Airbnb encourages both travellers and hosts to post reviews. If you stay in Airbnb accommodation you can post a review and rate your stay, but your host can also post a review on you — on what type of guest you are. In her ground-breaking book What's Mine Is Yours, Rachel Botsman says companies such as Airbnb, Taskrabbit and Uber are transforming the traditional landscape of business and society. While the currency of hard power is fear, Botsman argues the currency of this new economy is trust.

Hard power is tough on leaders

Hard power is tough on leaders too, because it makes three exacting demands on them. They must:

• always know the answer
• always be right
• never make a mistake.

This is an unsustainable trifecta. The use of hard power creates an environment in which people do the right thing, or what is expected of them, as long as a figure of authority stands over them. The cost of supervision is high for both supervisor and supervised. It suppresses or even kills creativity and innovation, and discourages or destroys discretionary effort. Yet so often it is the discretionary effort by employees — going that extra mile — that makes all the difference to the bottom line of an organisation.

Excessive hard power can result in fear and bullying, sometimes with tragic consequences. In October 2015 journalists in Melbourne reported on how the dysfunctional culture in a regional hospital in Victoria, coupled with failures of an antiquated system, may have resulted in a spate of infant deaths in 2013. Staff who sought redress from the unions were labelled as troublemakers, nurses were strongly discouraged from reporting clinical risks, full-time staff were denied promotions and part-time staff were refused additional shifts. In a statement Lisa Fitzpatrick, the Victorian secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, said, ‘It was a real culture of fear and intimidation, rather than one that was supportive of a learning environment'. At the time of writing, this tragedy was still being investigated by both the regulator and the health department. Sadly, any lessons learned will come too late for the parents involved.

For most of us our roles do not revolve around decisions of life and death, but we may still be tempted to use hard power inappropriately.

Limitations of hard power

Like it or not, we are all to varying degrees driven by ego. A little autocrat within still tempts you to tell your neighbour exactly what to do. Wouldn't that make your life so easy? But what if the shoe was on the other foot? Do you like being instructed, commanded, ordered about?

I often ask groups this question: ‘On a show of hands, how many of you like being told what to do?' No hands ever go up. I then ask another question: ‘How many of you, no matter what I or anyone else tells you, like to do your own thing?' Most hands go up.

In business, some situations favour the application of hard power, even demand it. When an emergency calls for immediate or urgent action, hard power is the right tool for the context. But mostly hard power offers limited results, because of the following restrictions.

One of the more serious potential consequences of applied hard power is outright rebellion. David Sinclair has experience of this.

Sinclair, an Australian-born and -educated molecular biologist, is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. In 2014 Time magazine included him on its list of the world's 100 most influential people. He made the list because he has discovered a way to rejuvenate human cells. You read that right. He has come across something approaching the proverbial fountain of youth.

In scientific terms this discovery is monumental. But in a TV interview he contrasted working in collaborative teams with the challenges of parenthood.

‘While it is an honour to be on the [Time] list, frankly I can't get my kids to pick their stuff up off the bedroom floor.'

He is one the world's most influential people, yet he still faces rebellion from his children when exercising even a mild form of hard power.

Exponents of hard power also have to deal with grudging compliance or even sabotage: people say ‘yes' but do ‘no'. In other words, they undermine initiatives while appearing cooperative.

Don Argus, an Australian corporate titan and financial visionary, says banking involves getting three components right: people, technology and risk. He is right to place people at the top of the list, because they make or break everything that follows.

Hard power doesn't work on all people across the human spectrum and can damage your chances of success. Hard power means you'll always be pushing uphill in terms of influence. With influence, you want people who turn up to turn on, and hard power can unintentionally but effectively turn them off.

Hard power is dumb power, it's grunt and muscle. Power players are too smart to be lured by the short-term results of hard power on their influence journey.

Use hard power at work sparingly and for the right reasons, such as where you and your people follow rules around critical operations or issues. In an emergency, for example, there should be zero tolerance where lives or safety could be endangered.

Table 3.1 summarises when and why hard power is used, and when it should not be relied on.

In most other contexts, hard power comes up against its biggest barrier — people. If you work with people, lead people or have people as clients, take particular care to keep the use of hard power to a minimum. Simply stated, hard power hurts — it hurts you, other people and your chances of success. Power players understand this and seldom reach for hard power as an influence tool. Hard power is a hammer — use it only for nails.

Soft power, as the following chapter will show, is both smarter and stronger.