One of the most often quoted phrases that you will hear in the corridors of success is the phrase, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

And one of the most consistent lies in business and in life as they say, would be, ” even if I am successful, I would never change.”

When we succeed, and have some amount of influence, we WILL change. That is for sure.

The insidious thing is that we can be corrupted, or in some word, deranged from normal — we may just not know it.

Of course, we have heard about the cordon sanitaire, and the yes men. These are people who will b e so anxious to please that they will agree to you no matter what you say. These are people you should be careful to put up with- because they can corrupt, and make you feel that you are the best person in the world, and that you can do no wrong. They will say you are right, even if you are not, and they will willingly shift the blame to something or somebody else if only to make you feel good.

IF these were our only problem, it would have been easy. But many people are wiser than that. Of course, they are yes men, but they don’t want to make it too obvious as to b e easily spotted and discovered. These however, are people, whom a book called courtiers - who arrange a world of continuous approbation for the world of power in a very cunning way. They are the persons who see to it that their boss will never lose time in traffic, will never have to stand in queue, or endure a whole morning of seminars before being called upon to speak. These are people who make sure that when you prefer expresso coffee with milk, cream will never be there, and that you have your artificial sweetener.

They make sure that you are not inconvenienced by the little things that otherwise bedevil little people. They will take care of your notebook computer so that when you change one, they will be the one to lose time to backup data and make sure it is available. Or they are the ones that if you can’t log in to the internet in your office, will waste that precious hour trying to fix your settings.

Of course all of us want to have that kind of service, and the longer and better people are adjusting to that ( all in the name of maximizing our precious time, and not losing time on rather ‘unimportant ‘ things) to that extent, we are now ceasing to behave like normal people, and to that extent, we are being ‘deranged’ or ‘corrupted’ by power.

The thing is we may say we will always have that common touch, and we think we understand. Yes, we understand intellectually, but all of us, when we succeed, we will be startingto live ina world, by choice, that will slowly corrupt us by the arrangements we ourselves seek.