The Book

 
 
Princes become great by vanquishing difficulties and opposition.
— Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XX

Power in the workplace.

Not enough women have it, and they don’t know how to get it. Rarely handed over, power almost always has to be taken.

In her new book, Machiavelli For Women, NPR host of The Indicator from Planet Money Stacey Vanek Smith looks at how women can apply the principles of 16th-century philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli to their 21st-century work lives and shatter the glass ceiling once and for all. With charm and wit, Stacey uses Machiavelli’s The Prince as a guide to understanding behavior and power in Renaissance politics—demonstrating how women can use those same principles today to take and maintain power in careers where they have long been cast as second-best.

Through a fusion of old ideas, current research, and personal stories--the book includes Vanek Smith’s interviews with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, blockbuster screenwriter (Crazy Rich Asians) Adele Lim, Wall Street executive Sallie Krawcheck, Tech unicorn founder Neha Narkhede, Olympian Alysia Montaño, Michelin Star Chef, Niki Nakayama, and AI entrepreneur Vivienne Ming.

Why Machiavelli?

Stacey’s VERY beat up copy of The Prince.

Stacey’s VERY beat up copy of The Prince.

Granted, women taking advice from Machiavelli might seem strange. Like, do we really need another old white guy mansplaining power to us? “Hey, ladies, here is how you can finally be the cold-hearted, murderous tyrant you always dreamed you could be!” I mean . . . no. But I would argue murderous tyranny is not what Machiavelli is about at all. Machiavelli was an incredibly clear-eyed, original thinker who might just be history’s first true champion of real talk.

For that reason there could be no better guide for women in the workplace. If there’s something that is in short supply amid all the pay disparities, outrage, systemic harassment, and girl power rhetoric, it is data, research and real solutions. Machiavelli was a big believer in those things, and he might have been the greatest of all time at figuring out what obstacles stood in the way of people achieving their goals and how they could overcome those obstacles.

Today, Niccolò Machiavelli is best-known as a ruthless power monger, devoid of ethics and compassion. The phrase most often associated with him, “The ends justify the means,” (which Machiavelli never actually wrote, but probably would have heartily agreed with) has turned Machiavelli into an apologist for sociopaths, tyrants, and megalomaniacs the world over. Psychologists have even developed a category of personality disorder called Machiavellianism—part of the dreaded “Dark Triad,” along with narcissism and psychopathy—characterized by extreme duplicity, amorality, and manipulation. Conscienceless con men—that is what Machiavelli’s name has come to stand for.

I think this is a gross misunderstanding of both the man and his work. The Prince does not condone random cruelty or tyranny or violence. It is a remarkably sober look at how people take power and how they can best hold on to it and grow it.

In fact, I believe The Prince was not a book written out of cynicism or narcissism or power lust. I believe it was a book written out of love. Not love of people, but love of a city. Machiavelli loved Florence. He really loved Florence. He wasn’t big on warm, fuzzy-type feelings, but he actually wrote in a letter to a friend, “I love my native city more than my own soul.” Machiavelli wrote The Prince to try and save his city.