For five hundred years, people have called this book wicked, usually while reading it carefully. Machiavelli’s advice to rulers set aside how power should work and described, with shocking honesty, how it actually does: when to be generous, when to be feared, and why good intentions lose to good positioning.
Modern readers apply it everywhere power moves: politics, corporate life, negotiation. You do not have to agree with The Prince, but you cannot afford to be the only person in the room who has not read it.
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