Every so often a business motivational book appears that takes inspiration from an historical figure. I even think there was a management handbook that drew lessons from the corporate style of Genghis Khan, whose personnel file no doubt includes a few words on his “inability to get along with his colleagues.” While not sweating the small stuff, managers can absorb the leadership style of George Patton, Vince Lombardi, Sun Tzu, or, for all I know, Jay Gatsby, who like most bosses never knew anyone’s name and called even his friends “Old Sport.”
One of the more popular business consultants is Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomatist and writer, who published The Prince toward the end of his life. From Machiavelli, we get the adjective Machiavellian, which has diverse meanings, but would include traits such as cunning, duplicity, ruthlessness, and power for power’s sake. Henry Kissinger would, for most people, be a walking definition of the word Machiavellian; Jimmy Carter would not. As most chief executives live like princes, it makes sense that someone like Niccolò Machiavelli should act as their personal fitness trainer.
Until this summer, I knew little about Machiavelli’s personal life. I knew he had written The Prince, which I was unable to finish when I tried it in high school. Later I read it with more appreciation. I associated him with the Florentine republic. I suspected he had written his handbook on princely behavior at the request of a wealthy patron, perhaps one of the Renaissance oligarchs who every year lost a few food tasters. But beyond general impressions, I did not know whether Machiavelli deserved his reputation until I had occasion, in June, to spend a day in Tuscany.
I was in Florence to study the decline and fall of the Medici’s bank, which flourished during the 15th century and then collapsed around 1480, when Machiavelli was a boy. Having spent twenty years of my life in the company of both banks and wannabe Medicis, I was curious to learn that Florence’s leading family had gotten rich on papal deposits and then lost the bank through what is now called sovereign lending: loans to governments, including the likes of the Vatican. The original Medici fortune came from taking deposits in one city, and then extending loans in another. For that they charged silk merchants and others the equivalent of 20 percent per annum. In the end, principalities turned to the Medici to fund their wars (Iraq isn’t the first war launched by a dynastic family), and when it came time to collect, the borrowers were either dead or in prison, and the Medicis themselves needed mercenaries just to call in their loans.
While walking the stations of the Medici cross in Florence, I found myself drawn to the life of Machiavelli. At first I found his tomb in the cathedral of Santa Croce, which is the burial ground of the Renaissance dream team, including Michelangelo, Donatello, Cellini, and Vespucci, the mapmaker with the first name Amerigo. That prompted me to ask in a bookstore if Florence had a Machiavelli museum. No, the shop owner said, nothing in Florence celebrated the life of the famous writer. But she sold me a new account of his life with the subtitle “A man misunderstood.” Another customer in the store circled his native Tuscan village, Sant’Andrea in Percussina, on my map but said it was hard to get there without a car and suggested I find some Machiavelli paintings at the city hall, Palazzo Vecchio.
Although I had seen Machiavelli’s portrait on various book jackets, I did not expect, in various pictures and a sculpture I tracked down, to encounter a slight man with a humane expression. One biographer described his portrait this way: “His face is that of a small wild animal, a fox or a lynx perhaps, all skin and bone...He has thin lips and his fraction of a smile is almost impossible to read…it is a rather cynical smile.” Indeed, in his few recorded images, Machiavelli looks less like a ruthless prince and more like James Boswell or Jonathan Swift—an observer rather than a participant in the worlds of power politics.
Machiavelli was a friend of Leonardo da Vinci as they were contemporaries in Florence. He was also a wit and a womanizer, and enjoyed evenings of cards and conversation. He was more a literary man and a politician, in the sense of Thomas Jefferson, than someone cut from the mold of Otto von Bismarck. Alas, I am not saying The Prince is only a satire on princely conduct. At the same time, as my day in Tuscany progressed, I grew sure it wasn’t just a handbook for those whose management style included slow poison and the garrote.
As lovely as Florence is, days there can grow long, especially when you are standing in museum lines. I lingered with my maps and book over lunch, strolled to Dante’s house (“Midway along the path of our life” was the line there) and then made up my find to find the house where Machiavelli had written The Prince. A waiter suggested I hire a taxi, but the price quoted was, well, Machiavellian, and bus service, I found, would have gotten me there but not back. In the end I rented a bicycle, strapped on a helmet, and set off south of Florence into the Tuscan hills, much like those you can see in the background of the Mona Lisa.
Just across the Ponte Vecchio, which one guide I had describes as a “squalid mixture of souk, airport lounge, and dormitory,” I found the neighborhood where Niccolò Machiavelli had grown up. His father was middle class, but maintained useful political connections. In school Machiavelli excelled at expressing complex thoughts concisely on paper. After his formal education, he became a secretary in the equivalent of the ministry of foreign affairs, and later Florence’s chief diplomat—there to negotiate alliances that would allow the republic, without a professional army, to co-exist alongside such fortified city-states as Milan and Rome. He traveled often, observed wars and princes first hand, and sent eloquent diplomatic impressions to the Palazzo Vecchio, from which Florence was governed by a rotating city council. During this period the Medici were banished with their bad debts and, in the Palazza Vecchio, Savonarola ignited his bonfire of the vanities—before he, himself, was burned at the stake.
Had Machiavelli written The Prince when in the pay of a powerful family, it would make sense to read it as a primer on power politics. Indeed the model for The Prince is thought to be Cesare Borgia, Duke Valentino, who committed murders in the casual way that executives today shut down divisions. Borgia engaged Machiavelli’s keen interest in political animals. He had led armies across the Italian peninsula, and, indeed, had threatened the independence of Florence. Machiavelli describes the prince exactly as he saw him during many nights of diplomatic dinners and exchanges. “He did not invent Machiavellianism,” one biographer has written, “he observed it.” The style he employed was that which today we would call a briefing memo, advice to those less skilled in the political arts of how to be a “lion and a fox.” But it is no more a consultant’s report than Babbitt is an account of a Rotary meeting.
Alas, Machiavelli wrote The Prince in Sant’Andrea, at this family’s farmhouse, while in a form of exile. He had lost his patrons in government and had served time in prison on an exaggerated charge of disloyalty. Maybe he was hoping that the primer on political artistry would return him to favor? More likely, he was disparaging those who had cast him away, and The Prince was a measure of all they were not. In exile, he passed his days chopping wood and evenings finding solace in his writing. “…For four hours at a time,” he wrote a friend about his books, “I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not afraid by death.”
Even with a good map, Sant’Andrea is hard to find. On the bike I made a series of wrong turns, labored up Tuscan hills, and finally, after almost two hours, arrived parched and breathless in the village. All it has is a tavern bearing Machiavelli’s name and a small general store where I bought two bottles of water. A local man showed me the farmhouse where Machiavelli wrote and then walked me along the main road, from which I could see the skyline of Florence and Brunelleschi’s dome. During Machiavelli’s fourteen years of exile, he looked down each day on the city where he had achieved diplomatic fame and some fortune. As Dante wrote of another purgatory:
You shall find out how bitter
someone else’s bread tastes,
and how hard is the way
up and down another’s stairs.
Toward the end of his life, Machiavelli tried to escape exile by currying favor with restored Medicis. But eventually they decided they did not want him, and he decided he didn’t want them. He died in 1527, attended only by his family. The Prince and another book, the Discourses, had circulated but had yet to be published. Only later was his grave moved to the cathedral of Santa Croce, where he was entombed near Michelangelo and Galileo, perhaps because no one was ever quite sure if he was feared or loved. Machiavelli dreamed of a world of Roman republicanism, but as a diplomat he had to confront French kings, corrupt princes, and ambitious popes, including the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leo X, who upon his election as pope wrote to his brother, the Duke of Nemours: “god has given us the papacy…now let us enjoy it.”
I am not sure how useful Machiavelli would be today as a management consultant, or what might be his hourly rates. To be sure he would recognize modern corporations as successors to the city-states of Renaissance Italy. Nor would princely avarice come as a surprise to someone who traveled with mercenary armies. But while I Machiavelli’s clients were paying him for advice on routes to success, he would be making notes on management’s weaknesses and strengths. A recent biographer, Michael White, writes that he defined his subjects as “the definition of a princedom, the categories of princedoms, how they are acquired, how they are retained, and why they are lost.” What mattered to Machiavelli was character, as he writes in The Prince: “Therefore it must be inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels.” That’s not a bad way to judge a company.
