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“Yes, Prince.” Machiavelli’s Echo in Management

by

Dr Michael Jackson, Professor Emeritus

and

Dr. Damian Grace, Honourary Associate

Department of Government and International Relations

University of Sydney

Presented at the

Australian Political Studies Association

Annual Conference

Canberra

2011
“Yes, Prince.” Machiavelli’s Echo in Management

Long before “Yes, Prime Minister” there was “Yes, Prince!" Before Antony Jay gave television viewers “Yes, Minister” and its successor “Yes, Prime Minister” he published a ground breaking and vastly successful book called Management and Machiavelli (1967). Though Niccolò Machiavelli never managed anything, and said nary a word about business or commerce, he has become a frequently invoked spirit in management study. His DNA now marks a good deal of both the popular and professional literature in management following Jay’s book. A steady stream of other works have since appropriated Machiavelli to management, commerce, and business. By means of parallels, analogies, metaphors, long bows, sleights of hand, and other literary tropes, including even some downright lies, he has been resurrected in the corporate world's book trade. Whatever the means, Machiavelli now occupies a place in the pantheon of management thinkers. There he sits somewhere between Peter Drucker and Alfred Sloan. Comprehensive encyclopaedias and crisp dictionaries of management feature an entry on the Florentine, and a surprising number of trade books feature his name, as do articles in business research journals. Despite the number and variety of references to Machiavelli in the management literature, this conscription of Machiavelli passes unnoticed by students of Machiavelli in political science and history. This paper surveys what is said about Machiavelli and management. It notes that the two most important steps in the induction of Niccolò is to equate Sixteenth Century Florence with contemporary life and then to assert that business is analogous to war and diplomacy as experienced by Machiavelli. While documenting the ways Machiavelli is used and abused in the management literature, this paper will concentrate on these two master narratives as a nested equation: F = M, where “F” is Florence of the 16th Century and “M” is contemporary life, and then P = B, where “P” is politics as Machiavelli witnessed it and “B” represents business, commerce, and management today. We show that these equivalences are hallow, self-serving at best and deceptive at worst. Yet the questions remains: Why does Machiavelli continue to exercise such an allure over the imagination? One simple answer is that his popularity in the management literature arises less from his penetrating insights into his own world, though these were many, than with his salacious reputation, which is largely undeserved.

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A middling Italian civil servant died on 27 May 1527. Having served on a number of foreign missions, his only published book was on the organization of a civil militia, where he had no success himself. Within less than a generation his name became and remained an adjective for evil, but that is another story. Apart from that infamy, Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli’s subsequent place in Western consciousness has been confined to those few dedicated to the study of the history of political thought, Renaissance history, and Italian literature, and mainly it has been based on his unpublished works, particularly The Prince and The Discourses. Successive generations of students required to do History of Political Thought (HPT) for a political science major have provided a sufficient market, together with students of Renaissance and Italian history and literature, and some Great Book readers to keep Machiavelli’s books in print. No doubt some other readers are titillated by that reputation for evil.

There has always been a black market for Machiavelli’s Prince, which ignores the exchange rate and other regulations of the specialist markets in history and political theory. This dark readership, it has been alleged, includes Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, and Benito Mussolini. And if they did, so too perhaps did other politicians of lesser infamy. Even so, all in all, it is a small slice of the reading public.

However, Machiavelli has developed a whole new second life in other fields, largely neglected by the gravitas of political theory and kindred specialities. Machiavelli has been conscripted in management. That he had no management experience, or any interest in business has not barred him from a place of increasing prominence in this field.

It all began with a thunderclap. Antony Jay, he of “Yes, Minister” fame (so uncritically favoured in political science departments) published Management and Machiavelli (1967). With that book Machiavelli was reborn an avatar, and since then Niccolò’s shade has known no rest. For a start Management and Machiavelli has remained in print since then, and that is now more than forty years to date, and gone through an array of editions to astound we who publish academic monographs in runs of five hundred, usually less, in these days of on-demand publication (with no numbers given). If Jay had published his books the other way around, with Yes, Minister first, he might have capitalized on the success of that title by at least subtitling Management and Machiavelli with Yes, Prince. Who knows, perhaps a future edition will be so titled!

Once Machiavelli was thus re-born others followed Jay integrating him still further into the service of management. As we shall demonstrate presently, Machiavelli enjoys a considerable following among management writers, scholars, and readers, but this fact is all but invisible among political theorists. But when university research managers demand evidence for the impact of political theory might one point to Machiavelli and management?

Is Machiavelli’s fame among managers really unknown to the specialists? Here is some evidence. An examination of twelve translations and editions of The Prince at hand (called an opportunity sample in some scientific fields) reveals no reference and though each of them has some editorial and scholarly paraphernalia, there is in none of them a word in the introduction, forward, afterword, notes, or essays to indicate that Machiavelli has a following among managers. (These editions are: Gauss 1952, Bull 1961, Richardson 1979, Donno 1981, Atkinson 1985, Mansfield 1985, Skinner 1988, Alvarez 1989, Nederman 2007, McMahon 2008, Constantine 2009, and Marriott 2010). In addition, we consulted an array of textbooks on the History of Political Thought, since most students learn the political thought that they learn from such tomes, and found not one single reference to management and Machiavelli. (The texts are: Bluhm 1978, Strauss and Cropsey 1987, Plamenatz 1992, Sabine and Thorson 1993, McClelland 1998, Ebenstein and Ebenstein 1999, Wolin 2006, and Haddock 2008). Finally we turned to the gold standards of the Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (1991), the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (2006), the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2009), and the OxfordHandbookoftheHistoryofPoliticalPhilosophy (2011). They are likewise mute on Machiavelli’s second life on the shelves of management. (Indeed the only source we have found in the specialist literature on Machiavelli that refers to his second life is The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli (2010), whose editor John Najemy has a paragraph about it (p. 6). That said, this paper brings to light in political theory some of Machiavelli’s second, double life.

This paper (1) catalogues the extent of Machiavelli’s moonlighting in management with an emphasis on Jay's book, (2) identifies the main themes in this appropriation which are the equation of his times to our own and business to politics, of F=M/B=P, (3) it evaluates these appropriations, and (4) it closes with a few comments on the integrity of Machiavelli’s very distinct and limited political thought, and a note on some of the most egregious factual errors made in this management literature.

Along the way, we try to steer clear of the Charybdis and Scylla, those absolute poles of contextualism and textualism. We neither wish to confine Machiavelli to 15th Century Florence, nor to license his aphorisms for eternity. But we do advocate moderation, caution, and qualification in the embrace of his ideas, arguments, and examples. Machiavelli himself was neither a contextualist nor a textualist. He took maxims from ancient Rome with enthusiasm and occasionally revised them for his own purposes. As we read the works of the Williams Shakespeare and Faulkner to reflect on the human condition and our own experiences of it, so we can read Machiavelli.

  1. The thunderclap. Management and Machiavelli fused.

First came the thunderclap, then the rain, and finally the flood. Make no mistake that it has become a flood, with our admittedly broad definition of the management literature we have added eight-five (85) items to a bibliography of management and Machiavelli. There is only one isolated title that associates Machiavelli with business, commerce, or management before 1967: as we noted, it is the publication of Antony Jay’s Management and Machiavelli that announced his entry into the field of management. That makes it the thunderclap.

It is safe to say that Jay’s book had no precedent; it is equally safe to say that it was itself a precedent quickly followed. We have found only two previous references to Machiavelli by those examining management (the ecumenical term used in these pages to incorporate business, career, and commerce as well as management), though to be sure there were some and these will be noted. It is a credit to Jay’s ingenuity and wit, and no doubt to his salesmanship, that he connected Machiavelli to management in the first place and convinced a major British publisher to market the book.

Our efforts to compile the metadata of his book yielded six editions. The first edition had no subtitle and neither does the current Kindle edition. Between those bookends, four subtitles have been used. They:

•An inquiry into the politics of corporate life (1976),

•Power and authority in business life (1987),

•Discovering a new science of management in the timeless principles of statecraft (1994), and

•A Prescription for success in your business (2000).

Subtitles both attract the interest of prospective buyers and readers, and indicate the intentions of the author and publisher. Subtitles usually sharpen the focus of a work. In this case the focus is management, though ‘politics’ and ‘statecraft’ are mentioned, they are in a lesser key. We found no changes in the substance of the book through these editions. Short, new forewords are inserted and pagination has changed over the years from one publisher to another but not the content. The subtitles and other metadata came from searches of online catalogues of the Library of Congress, the Canadian National Library, the Australian National Library, and the British Library.

Amazon’s web page claims, as does the cover the 1994 paperback edition that 250,000 hardcover copies have been sold, parroting the claim made on the cover of the 1994 paperback edition. We may safely assume many more copies have been sold since then. Moreover, that total refers to hardcover only and the book has been available in paperback for many years. Subsequent hardcover sales along with paperbacks must add considerably to that figure. In addition, the cover also claims it has been translated into twelve languages, though they are not listed. We can confirm that translations of the book appear in the online catalogues for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, Biblioteca Italiana in Rome, and Deutsche National Bibliotek in Leipzig. Perhaps that is enough to make the point that though the rebirth of Machiavelli in management begin in English it has echoed in other major languages. Management and Machiavelli has indeed been a very successful book in this respect, too. Few, if any, of the learned works on Machiavelli’s political thought like Leo Strauss Thoughts on Machiavelli can have equaled these sales. These sales figures and the dissemination they imply stand partly as a surrogate measure of readership and impact more generally. Many of the hardcover copies are no doubt in libraries. We found Management and Machiavelli in many university library online catalogues, too many to list, starting with our very own University of Sydney library and others in the city of Sydney.

The book has also been successful in another sense. It has made a major impact on the literature and study of management. This claim is four-legged: (1) citations in social science literature, (2) references in the popular press, (3) mentions of Jay's book in standard reference works in business and management, and (4) the flood of subsequent titles that press Machiavelli into the service of management, though not all of the subsequent works cite Jay, and some claim to themselves to have discovered the pertinence of Machiavelli to management! Such is on fate for prophets, as Niccolò Machiavelli said.

First, we did a Cited Reference Search on the Web of Science. Of course, the Thomson databases that underlie the Web of Science have limitations yet they are used as a measure of everything, as those engaged in the research evaluation exercise, under its changing names, well know. The Web of Science is but one tool but it suffices to indicate the impact of Management and Machiavelli. To provide context we compared it to The Prince by Machiavelli and Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli, as one of the seminal studies of Machiavelli in political theory, only counting citations for each book after the publication of Management and Machiavelli in 1967.

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Author / Title / Hits
July 2011
Niccoló Machiavelli / The Prince (1532) / 425
Leo Strauss / Thoughts on Machiavelli (1959) / 244
Antony Jay / Management and Machiavelli (1967) / 118
TOTAL / 787

(Notes. Any edition of Jay’s Management and Machiavelli was included. This process is cumbersome, and so the counts are subject to a slight error. We noticed increases in citations for Machiavelli in years when new translations appeared.)

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Jay’s Management and Machiavelli has about a quarter citations of the citations of Machiavelli’s ThePrince itself. This would seem to be noteworthy. Likewise, it has nearly half the hits of Strauss’s landmark work on Machiavelli. The serious students of Machiavelli can take comfort in the fact that the book itself and one of the most serious studies of it have more citations in the publications included in Web of Science. But we would do well to remember, as many researchers claimed throughout the recent Excellence in Research Australia exercise, that there is much outside the Thomson world.

Second are references to Jay in popular press and media. For one example, Ken Roman in the Wall Street Journal in 2007 names Jay’s Management and Machiavelli as one of the best five business books listing it second. This seems to mean best, period, of all times and places: Platonic. At the least, Jay was at the head of this trend, if not the sole creator of it. While an on-line magazine published by the University of Chicago says it offers a digest of the book. ( The book is also recognized in the academic world. An online course description at Indiana University refers to Management and Machiavelli as a classic (

The third leg is this, there are a number of important reference works in the study and practice of management and business. Invariably these mention Machiavelli and in so doing they also mention Jay. Since nearly all of these reference works have appeared since the publication of Jay’s book, we conclude that Jay brought Machiavelli into the world, of management. Of course, reasoning from a hypothetical counterfactual is risky but our reasoning is nonetheless that had Jay not published his book, Machiavelli would not have been deemed important enough to be included in most the management reference works in which he is now included. The reference works that include Machiavelli with a reference to Jay are: Price (1996), Witzel (2003), and Harris (2009). Other surveys of management thinkers also include Machiavelli without explicit mention of Jay’s Management and Machiavelli, like George (1968), Swain (1998), and Crainer (1998). We suspect the latter would not have included Machiavelli if it had not been for the impact of Jay’s book. George’s inclusion seems to be independent of Jay’s influence both by timing and by content.

Fourth, is the flood of subsequent works enfolding Machiavelli into the embrace of business, commerce, and management taken broadly and in combination. Included are: Calhoon (1969), Buskirk (1974), Brahmsedt (1986), Funk (1986), Legge (1991), Griffin (1991), Johnson (1996), McAlpine (1997), Wren (1998), Bing (2000), Gunlicks (2000), Hill (2000), Borger (2002), Demack (2002), DiVanna (2003), Galie (2006), Diehl (2007), Harris (2007), Demack (2008), and Marsh (2009). These works are mostly trade books, though some are journal articles. Some mention Jay and some do not. Calhoon (1969) in the pages of the authoritative Academy of Management does, but Funk (1986) says “nothing has been written I have read restating, in current terms, the concepts expressed by Machiavelli” (vii), this twenty years after the first publication of Jay’s book. This list includes the more substantial works available but it is by no means comprehensive.

We have then established that Jay’s Management and Machiavelli proved to be the first of a rapidly increasing number of works that claimed to apply Machiavelli to management. The impact of Jay’s book was in no way impaired by the very critical review Chris Argyris gave of it in Administrative Science Quarterly (1968). Argyris acknowledged the creativity, wit, and engaging style of the author, and so do we, but noted that it relied on a few anecdotes and hearsay. Its prescriptions were inconsistent where they were not too vague to understand. Reviews in popular business publications were and still are far more positive and the book has indeed been a success. It is now routinely accorded the status of classic.