Without Asking Permission

Alice closes 38 service tickets a day. The team average is 26, and fewer than 1% of her cases come back with a complaint. When the coordinator job opens up at Vetta, a cleaning-supplies distributor with thirty employees, the owner gives it to Lucas, who averages 24.

None of what got Lucas the job is on the spreadsheet. On the bus home, Alice starts to remember it: Lucas staying fifteen minutes late on exactly the nights the owner stays late. Lucas asking about the owner’s son, who had just started college, with details Alice didn’t have. Lucas volunteering to build the holiday schedule, the job nobody wanted, because it put his name in front of the owner every week.

Without Asking Permission follows Alice through thirty-four chapters as she works out what she missed. Her sister Sofia, a self-employed manicurist, understands power without ever having studied it. Her husband and her young daughter run into their own versions at home. The book moves from seeing how power works to building it, using it, defending yourself against it and keeping it from changing you.

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