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Such a great book. I've seen his tactics play our over and over again during my working lifetime.

• rhizome 10y ago
  From what I've experienced, I'd like to see both "The Prince" and "The Art of War" banished from the world of business.
  • aioprisan 10y ago
    What do you mean by banished from the world of business? I've seen variations of the core principles applied at every company I've worked for so far.
    • rhizome 10y ago
      Me too, and I think they cause more problems than they solve.
      • btilly 10y ago
        I agree, but why? My take is that the advice in those books is great advice for those seeking to gain and hold power in organizations. All else being equal, you should want the person running your organization to have mastered those ideas and be able to apply them productively for your organization. That said, having an organization full of people who want to gain and hold power is a very, very bad thing. While you want the people at the top to do so, you don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry with a big ego doing so. So you are going to see an anti-pattern where a bunch of people who have no business trying to play Machiavellian games, attempt to do so. And part of the the reason why they should not do so is that they are not suited by temperament or competence.
        • rhizome 10y ago
          you are going to see an anti-pattern where a bunch of people who have no business trying to play Machiavellian games, attempt to do so. We aren't going to see it, we already see it every day. The books are poison.
  • nvader 10y ago
    Might as well ask for the concepts of arithmetic, the necessity of work, or the 24 hour cycle of day and night to be banished. Machiavelli's aim was to catalogue how people actually acted, rather than dictate how they should act. He makes an observation of human nature, and suggests ways of dealing with it. That's not to say that there may not be better approaches, in some aspects. In my mind I organise Getting to Yes and How to Win Friends as books that are complementary, yet approach the problem from a co-operative perspective. But we haven't totally vanquished that part of ourselves that the Art of War and the Prince were written to deal with. Even if you banned these books, people would independently derive their principles.
  • 1123581321 10y ago
    I want to be sure I understand your central objection to these books. I take it that your objection isn't that trying to succeed is bad. You also probably wouldn't say that the particular advice in these books is bad, though that's an interesting discussion if you do. I'm also guessing you don't have an objection to old books in general, or to business advice in general. Is your objection that these books give advice for preventing and resolving competitive situations, and you believe it's better to not compete in business than to compete and win? This is an opinion I've encountered in places like Metafilter. (Seen you there!)
    • btilly 10y ago
      The Prince in particular is full of advice that runs counter to nice things we wish to believe about ourselves. That is where the phrase "Machievellian" comes from. For example who among us wants to believe that once we come to power we should distrust those who got us there, and look for our best allies among those who had opposed us? Yet again and again in actual organizations those who think they are owed will try to take advantage of the situation, while those who have reason to fear that they never can be trusted will overcompensate for that.
  • nibs 10y ago
    Art of War is only useful in a short list of highly competitive scenarios. Most business is surprisingly not that zero-sum. And The Price is mostly useful dealing with the father/son business dynamic. Not that relevant otherwise.
    • btilly 10y ago
      Not so. The Prince is relevant in any organization where a strict hierarchy needs to be maintained. Which is why it was relevant here to the question of how a CEO who needs to implement a painful decision (in this case big financial cuts including laying people off) should go about it.