Games Without Thrones

In Games Without Thrones, entrepreneurship professor David Lingelbach and oligarch researcher Valentina Rodríguez Guerra show how we can all learn from oligarchs, even if we don’t like them. These masters of uncertainty have found their moment again in the early 21st century, when several existential threats have overturned our ability to predict the future. Paradoxically, oligarchs hold the intellectual keys that will enable the rest of us to exploit the coming storms. This book describes these keys as eight leadership lessons that can become a new playbook, enabling all of us to play and win the new games without thrones. This book makes three major points: • Oligarchs are at the center of our worlds now, shaping the global economy in which we all work and the politics that help determine our life choices. Understanding their centrality is key to understanding how the world works. • Oligarchs provide us with eight lessons to enable us to be more effective leaders. The first three lessons comprise their distinctive Weltanschauung or worldview. They see the world very differently than the rest of us. • Oligarchs offer us five specific strategies—four of which were first elaborated in our The Oligarchs’ Grip and developed further in our forthcoming The Oligarchs of the Americas—to lead during times of crisis and turbulence. Those times are likely to dominate our professional lives, no matter where we live.