Executive Warfare: 10 Rules of Engagement for Winning Your War for Success
David D'Alessandro's Executive Warfare: 10 Rules of Engagement for Winning Your War for Success, written with Michele Owens, is a truly awesome book.
Much of it involves tales of executive power struggles in large corporations like John Hancock, a realm I will never inhabit, where D'Alessandro became chairman, CEO, and president! His sense of tactics and strategy are truly amazing and based on actual experience with lots of examples.
Though I don't anticipate being in such settings, there were plenty of examples that resonated with my life in the lower echelon of much smaller corporations, such as the games that are played in meetings. I'm definitely going to check out Career Warfare, where I'm sure I'll get a wide range of examples of the mistakes I've made in corporate and academic settings, as well as Brand Warfare, from which I hope to learn some lessons for the future.
I highly recommend Executive Warfare to actual executives, past, present and future, as well as those fascinated with tactics and strategy as a field of study. There's a lot here that fits human behavior in other settings and, whatever D'Alessandro is really like, he presents his game in a manner that suggests a positive path to seizing power, if such a thing is possible.
