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Summary: Great book.........wonderful reading and learning experience
Review: After 44 years in the corp world of DuPont, General Electric, Black & Decker, Sunbeam, and Steelcase, I relate to all of the laws one way or another.Many of my mistakes in my career could have been avoided if I had this book at my desk side. I was a naive, honest, ethical engineer, manager, V.P., and President.......and was blind sided by my inability to see the manipulations, dishonesty, political, manipulations of my trusted leaders. My wisdom came too late. Business ethics be damned.........the game is winning and gaining power forgetting the customer, company, the employees and pleasing the shareholders and Wall Street above all to gain personal reputation and be hailed by Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, etc. feeding the ego trips of top management, taking credit for all that is good and shedding the blame on others when things go bad. This should be preferred reading in the Business Schools. A great job done by the Authors. Al Lehnerd
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Summary: This is reality
Review: After 20 years in corporate IT I have suffered and seen every single law described in this book. There is no justice or fair play, "A job done well", "Pride in work", etc. For my next 20 years I shall live by this book rather than suffer the manipulative idiots that some how seem to float to the top in any corporate life. This book has probably saved my sanity and made me look forward to every working day.
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Summary: Power isn't evil, its how you use it.
Review: Collectivist weanies coming out against this book would have you believe that it is amoral and downright evil to be powerful. Yet President Clinton is one of the most "powerful" people in the world, didn't get there by selling girl scout cookies, and yet the "left" and the moderates love him. Why? Because he is damn good at the power game! Have you seen his taped testimony? If he was the least bit honest he could have wrote this book. Face it, whether you like it or not we are not all equal. Power will rest with a few individuals, and in most cases they earned it through hard dedicated application of the "48 Laws of Power". As with President Clinton many of the people trampled on the way to the top didn't even know it and still love the guy (velvet shoes?). You can also be powerful where it applies and also be caring and loving.
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Summary: Fascinating book
Review: This is an exceptionally well written book. The authors present not only interesting sociological 'laws' but also artfully associate them with actual historical events. The side notes of fables from various cultures are truly entertaining. This book is enjoyable and I will read it again and strongly recommend it to anyone!
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Summary: How to get your head out of the sand.
Review: It's great to think that being blindly and faithfully 'good' will allow you to live a happy life with good things coming back to you in time. If you would like to stop being surprised by manipulative tactics around you every day, then go and pick up this blood red book. Give it a thoughful read. Sure some of the 'laws' contradict but then so does life's infinite situations. It's a good book to broaden your scope, to remind you that not everyone sees or experiences the world as you do. Nothing wrong with doing your homework when it comes to understanding the world we live in and not just the one we wished we lived in. Understanding does not mean subscribing. I wish I had read it earlier in life. Initially in the bookstore when I picked up the book and read a page I snapped it shut and virtually threw it back on the shelf as something 'evil'. I was driving home and thought over and over again,..."this book would do me a great deal of GOOD!" I pulled a u-turn and immediately went back for it. I have not regretted my purchase. I LOVED the way the book was graphically presented, especially inside. Great reading, sometimes shocking but great reading. I followed this up with Principle Centered Power from the Covey Institute. They should sell them together as a package. Read it, you WILL get something positive out of it.
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Summary: Thought provoking, but an overall desolate view of life...
Review: Greene does a good job at making a compelling case for his argument...that it's a dog-eat-dog world and you've got to be coniving to make it. However, in order to accept his assertions you must subscribe to a worldview that is very shallow indeed. There is more to life than what Greene evidently sees, and to limit yourself to a paranoid existence based on works like this is saddening and pathetic. To a limited number of people out there, this book will be a manual of manipulation. To say that you need a book like this to guard yourself against this element is misguided. Trust in yourself, and trust in goodness. Those who follow the 48 Laws of Power may actually taste power for a brief instant, but their time on this earth will be a lonely, paranoid, miserable fight. What goes around comes around. This world is what you perceive it to be. Don't let books like this distract you from what great wonders our lives are.
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Summary: How Victims Can Make More Victims
Review: Books on power are most eagerly grabbed up by the vengefully powerless. There have always been a host of dysfunctions circulating in our species that are easily replicated as memes, immortalized as principles, and lapped up by immature folk who believe themselves victimized. After all, the cruel world somehow "happened to" them and there must be a "system of ideas and beliefs" behind the cruelty. A fairly robust inventory of dysfunctional principles can be found here and some rules contradict others. But then internal contradiction and defiance are the core qualities of dysfunction. But very few of us can be despots unaccountable to anyone in a democratic society, so the examples from monarchic times and places are somewhat out of date. Most "coping with difficult people books" will give you better results if you find yourself on the business end of one of these behaviors. This is a plausible "taxonomy of evil". Sadly, however, it will be used for years by the fallen and lost to explain their condition and the "true nature of the human world, as all such compendiums have been, from the Prince forward. What's ironic is that those who already practice these principles without guilt did not and will not get them from a book. So-o-o, if you don't practice these now, don't expect a makeover. If you try adopting them you'll just wind up more crazy than you are now. Greene's POV is a pastiche of many theories by which pinched, numb people justify living apart from others, scowling at all that is joy-engendering. Give me a laughing mother and child, a meal with friends or a Shakespeare sonnet anytime. And let Pandora Greene make his bucks opening this box of devils for those in his alternate universe.
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Summary: Bite-size pieces from the apple of power are easily consumed
Review: The rules are interestingly illustrated although the consequences for many in the text are quite brutal. If anything, I found it interesting in helping to identify the types of individuals who can be best understood today as following one or more of the rules...and how to avoid doing business with them or even associating with them. In many ways, the book amplified on stories told to me in my youth by my mother as to what types of people to avoid in life. The book is well done, easy to read, good for quick "chapters" if your life is busy. But these are hardly rules to live by and are not meant, I hope, to parallel the 10 commandments. In fact, possessing merely a quarter of these "rules" would hint at a reincarnated Attila the Hun...or maybe the antiChrist. I don't need a book to stay away from the likes of Chainsaw Al...but there are many others out there who are more subtle in their approaches and the book does help to measure these individuals.
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Summary: Not a legacy I'd want.
Review: While there are a few interesting things that interested me from a confrontation management aspect (eg: Make the oppponent come to you), most of it is amoral, ruthless, manipulative and just stinky. It's well-written and researched, and I have no doubt a lot of it would work, but then you'd be a powerful, amoral, ruthless, manipulative, stinky person. A very alone and/or unhappy one, probably. We all know a few of them, and in my experience their traits and methods are far more transparent to everyone around them than they think. I'd rather be known as a person who tried to move the world in a positive new direction than exploit its present weaknesses for my own selfish gain.
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Summary: A modern version of "Prince" of Machiavelli
Review: This is an easy book to read but the contents are not so easy to agree although those are suported by historical evidences. We are educated to behave in the opposite way of the 48 laws described in the book. Anyhow we understand that getting "Power" is not easy and the sacrifices paid by the powerful people are not so enviable. Anyhow this is a master-piece book, a must-read book of modern times. I should congratulate the authors for their extraordinary effort they brought together to explain the laws of the Power. I would expect more of examples in next editions from Ottoman History were the Palace and the Sultans had more of those practices to get power. I really wonder if I really need "power" after reading the book but one should read and learn.
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