Does Machiavelli\u27s The Prince Have Relevant Lessons for Modern High-Tech Managers and Leaders?

When we think of Machiavellian conduct in technology companies, we think of cut-throat, cunning, behaviour. Cut-throat competition in technological innovations can be the barrier to market entry (Lee, 2014). The lean philosophy is that managers and leaders are to strive for the efficient and effective use of resources in order to overcome this barrier and gain competitive advantage. In order for there to be cut throats, there have to be cut-throat technology innovation leaders and managers. What the lean philosophy lacks is guidance on how to achieve an efficient and effective use of resources in a cut-throat competitive environment. The challenges posed by that type of environment do not go away and cannot be swept under the rug

Does Machiavelli’s The Prince Have Relevant Lessons for Modern High-Tech Managers and Leaders?

When we think of Machiavellian conduct in technology companies, we think of cut-throat, cunning, behaviour. Cut-throat competition in technological innovations can be the barrier to market entry (Lee, 2014). The lean philosophy is that managers and leaders are to strive for the efficient and effective use of resources in order to overcome this barrier and gain competitive advantage. In order for there to be cut throats, there have to be cut-throat technology innovation leaders and managers. What the lean philosophy lacks is guidance on how to achieve an efficient and effective use of resources in a cut-throat competitive environment. The challenges posed by that type of environment do not go away and cannot be swept under the rug. But can a 16th-century political treatise provide any guidance on today’s competitive environment? There are two camps among scholars regarding the relevancy of Niccolò Machiavelli’s book The Prince (Machiavelli, 1992) to modern day management and leadership

Leadership Lessons from Machiavelli Enhanced with Strategic Orchestration

The purpose of this article is to explore the fascinating similarities that can be found between the Renaissance era and nowadays. In both moments in time, the ways of doing of the era before, were no longer valid for the new challenges the world was having at that moment, and completely new solutions were required. There is an analysis of the Renaissance and Machiavelli and his leadership learnings about appearance, influence, honor and self-ambition, gloria or public recognition, structure and flexibility and about chaos as a trigger for change. Study on modern leaders like Barack Obama and Steve Jobs shows that there are important similarities between their leadership styles and Machiavelli’s learnings. However, where Machiavelli leaned on hierarchical power, modern leaders need to enhance his learnings with an orchestrated leadership style rather based upon Influence than power, more suitable for today’s environment. Nowadays, like at the beginning of the Renaissance, we appear to be again in a chaos situation marking a turning point to a new era, the transition to which demands increased flexibility carefully balanced with existing and new structures, until a new status-quo is created

Leadership, innovation and strategy development in military hard structures: Bringing chaos to order

This thesis is a critical engagement with the development of leadership for officers in the United States Air Force (USAF) at the USAF’s Air University (AU) through specially designed graduate level education courses in leadership and innovation. These programs have been in regular demand and requests for their dissemination to various other parts of the military are frequent. They are also the seed bed for a number of change initiatives and graduates are to be found at the highest level of decision making. This responsibility to anticipate the future and contribute to supporting officers to lead in increasing complexity, requires me to be constantly questioning myself, my own leadership, my ideas and the ideas of others to inform the design and ongoing evolution of these programs. This evolution is nudged not only from questioning but from the input of students, faculty, and staff in a collaborative endeavor. The context is leadership in, what I refer to as, a ‘hard structure’, one that is heavily regulated and bureaucratized with non-negotiable expectations of its members in service to the protection of systems of security, from economy and law enforcement to trade and civil liberties. In the context of this particular hard structure of the military, the mandate to safeguard a nation’s institutions and alliances can also be a mandate to kill on small and large scales, if ordered to, in the interests of national and international security. This critique has brought into greater awareness the ambiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes faced by military leadership; it questions whether existing formulaic models are relevant to practice in field conditions and tracks my search for concepts as translational devices to negotiate opposing tensions and to see the possibilities in ‘the middle way’. I collaborate with students, peers, and literature to enable leadership and innovation education to shift from a monoperspective to a multi-perspective lens and from leadership as some form of mono-discipline to a multidisciplinary one. I explore the relevance of approaches and concepts including transdisciplinary perspectives as complementary ways to approach leadership for the future. While innovation is part of the leadership portfolio, I arrive at the need to introduce strategy into that portfolio and have set in motion an initiative to integrate all three into a Master’s program that stretches not only the skills of young officers but their imagination. I can now articulate more clearly the concepts, ideas and distilled experience that informs the content and the delivery of the leadership and innovation programs– a transparency of my own understanding including (i) context is pivotal (ii) once leaders understand and are comfortable with their ‘being’ they will be confident to seek cognitive diversity to complement any perceived or actual ‘weaknesses’ in themselves (iii) this in turn results in strong, cohesive teams where individuals can feel less inhibited in expressing and comprehending their strengths and can strive to help each other flourish with an understanding that leaders can only be as great as the teams they create

Why values are precious?

"There is a long-standing superstition that values calls for sacrifices in real life to be compensated by God in the eternal one. Consequently the picture of an honest follower of certain moral rules has been strongly associated with poverty, while success in creation of business and wealth has had to be based on a cynical approach to life. This idea refers much more to corporations than to individual people, since the former are often viewed to a greater extent as mechanical constructions rather than groups of people. Even if business founders, like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie or Andrew Mellon, claimed to follow clear moral guidelines, they faced an outcry from their critics, who insisted that such declarations were nothing but a mocking attempt to cover the reality of an undisturbed drive for money and power. Now, when some corporations, however changed, have existed and succeeded for more than 100 years, researchers can analyse in depth the foundations of their development, looking at the factors holding such organisations together and stimulating their development. This article attempts to show how the business sciences have evolved, starting from a completely technical approach to corporate structures and functioning, gradually recognising the importance of more tacit factors, and finally getting to the point at which values are considered to create the fabric of modern firms."(...

Professional development in coaching: towards a dynamic alliance of narrative and literature to transform the learning process

Coaching draws on disciplines such as psychology, management theory, and organisational development. From these disciplines, models that seek both focused solutions to problems and those that aim to effect transformative learning have been developed. My work with students has revealed some dissatisfaction with performance coaching models such as GROW (Whitmore, 2009) and a desire to connect more with their imagination and creativity. I offer a case study of working with mature students employed by an international software company, who used a unique approach to coaching that combined narrative and literary techniques to produce coaching projects that offered solutions to work-based problems

Batman the Noble Dog: The Costs of Spiritedness for the Individual and Society

Batman’s self-imposed mission to rid Gotham City of its criminal element has always presented the problem of vigilantism. From the perspective of criminology, Batman’s methods raise the problem of whether society can be governed, or govern itself, with extralegal law enforcement. The problem presented by Batman’s behavior is often stated, as the ancient Roman satirist Juvenal famously put it, “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (“but who is going to guard the guards themselves?”).1 The threat posed by selfappointed guardians, such as Batman and other super heroes, has been frequently analyzed by scholars and fans alike. Yet, there is an additional, less frequently discussed, problem presented by Batman’s behavior: what are the costs to Batman and the citizens of Gotham from a guard who refuses to govern? In this chapter, the authors discuss Plato’s conception of spiritedness and analyze how Batman’s behavior affects his soul and the souls of Gotham City’s citizens