In closing, I wanted to tell you about a dream I had a couple of months ago–I mean the kind of dream you have in your sleep. I dreamt that it was the year 2070 and that I was walking on the crowded streets of some city. People seemed…

Now, as I was writing about Napoleon Bonaparte for my book The 33 Strategies of War, in 2003 and 2004, I became intrigued by a company that seemed to exemplify–in an almost uncanny way–the Napoleonic model I have just outlined. That company was Google. I initiated an informal study–gathering…

Napoleon came to power in one of the most chaotic moments in history–the French Revolution. The French people had overthrown a monarchy that had existed for hundreds of years and established a new kind of political order. But because it was so new, nobody quite understood what it all…

Now, I know that this is not the usual way that people discuss what is currently taking place in the world. Instead, we hear much about the banking industry, the corruption within it, and its preying upon helpless consumers; the new trading technology that makes it harder to think…

Now at the same time that this wave was building something else was going on, something rather strange. We have gone through two economic bubbles in a very short period of time. Economic bubbles generally occur for two reasons. The first and the one that most people focus on…

Now, in the 1990s something else came into being that sped this process along even further. And this was more like warp speed, a sudden acceleration into the future. I am talking about the Internet, or more specifically the world-wide web as it evolved in the early 1990s. The…

In anthropology there is a concept known as historic fatality. What this means is that occasionally there emerges a certain idea, a certain way of doing things that is so immensely seductive to human beings that eventually it spreads around the globe and forever changes our way of life….

The following is an amalgamation of two talks I gave recently: the first at the Emirates Festival of Literature in Dubai, and the second at the American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore. Both of these talks were geared for a business audience. I plan on posting in eight digestible…

Chapter 1

See Things for What They Are – Intense Realism

Reality can be rather harsh. Your days are numbered. It takes constant effort to carve a place for yourself in this ruthlessly competitive world and hold on to it. People can be treacherous. They bring endless battles into your life….

We’ve gotten several requests to publish a summarized version of the lessons laid out in The 50th Law. Here is a free ebook version of The 50th Law, composed of the chapter headings and some quotes from the book. Hopefully it’ll be useful for anyone who wants to sample…