Sunday Pick: Unlocking Your Power at Work: Kara Swisher on how to get what you want | from Fixable

A New Series on Power in the Workplace

Fixable hosts Anne Morris and Frances Frei are launching a special series on discovering and using your power at work, born from a shared observation: many listeners either don't feel powerful at work or are leaving the power they already have untapped. Their opening guest is Kara Swisher, who has covered the technology industry since the early 1990s for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and who now hosts the podcasts On with Kara Swisher and Pivot. Her book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story was a New York Times bestseller.

Frances and Kara's relationship traces back to 2017, when Frances joined Uber as SVP of Leadership and Strategy on the very day the company was in the middle of a public crisis. It was Frances's first day as a full-time employee after years of consulting, and a breakfast meeting with Kara had been scheduled before she ever set foot in the office. "Zero small talk," Frances recalls. "The hard questions started the moment we sat down."

The Most Important Lesson from a Reporting Career

The biggest insight Kara gained from decades of interviewing the powerful is about how to frame a question. She used to ask herself what a source was hiding from her. Over time she learned to ask instead: what is this person lying to themselves about? Every person tells themselves necessary fictions to get through each day, and learning to see through those fictions—rather than just probing for external deception—is what she says made her a fundamentally better journalist.

A Father's Death and a Life Without Everyday Fear

Kara describes herself as someone who experiences almost no everyday anxiety. She jokes that a dragon chasing her or a person with a knife would be another matter, but ordinary worry and regret are largely absent from her inner life. The source, she says, is losing her father when she was very young. "The worst thing happened, and I learned I could keep moving. So I can't panic over daily problems." That experience sharpened her sense of time and locked in a thinking pattern that goes straight to solutions rather than dwelling on fears. Her brother is an emergency-room physician, and she says all her siblings developed the same functional, problem-first coping style. "If feeling anxiety would bring my father back, I would gladly take it"—a line that captures just how much weight that early loss carries.

What Keeps Power from Corrupting—and What Doesn't

Kara has watched many Silicon Valley founders transform from awkward young men into some of the most powerful people on earth, and she has seen what that journey does to them. Among those she says did not get corrupted: Mark Cuban, who was somewhat arrogant early on but has grown noticeably more gracious; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; and Netflix founder Reed Hastings and current CEO Ted Sarandos. What they share, she says, is that they remain grounded and don't lord power over others.

When power concentrates in a single person, Kara warns, the result is always a "mad king." The circle fills with yes-men; people willing to tell the truth get pushed out one by one; and the more wealth accumulates, the more selectively flattering the information that gets through. She cites Howard Hughes as a cautionary historical example and adds, with characteristic bluntness, that some people were slightly unpleasant to begin with and simply become much more so once they have real money.

The Ethics Education the Tech Industry Is Missing

Around 2018, Kara wrote in the New York Times about a problem she considered glaring: ethics is not a required subject in technology degree programs. Engineers and entrepreneurs who will go on to hold enormous societal power graduate without any serious grounding in history, philosophy, or public policy. She says she was deliberate about nurturing her own son's interest in craftsmanship, history, and ethics as he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. She also takes aim at the factory-like structure of Stanford's entrepreneurship culture—drawing on journalist Theo Baker's book—in which venture capitalists recruit young founders the way college basketball scouts recruit athletes, then discard them when things don't pan out.