Machiavelli

1. Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, in Florence Italy. For a majority of his life, Machiavelli worked in government. His first writing was in late 1513, when he wrote the book The Prince. Machiavelli wrote The Prince, to help regain his status in the Florentine government, because the Medici overtook the Florentine government and Machiavelli was exiled. Machiavelli first started writing because he was forced out of the government, so with all his free time he took up writing about politics.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/

2. " Tardiness often robs us opportunity, and the dispatch of our forces." This quote was said by Machiavelli and it represents relevance to leadership today. Many leaders around the world punish their followers if they are not happy with their performance. One of the most common things that followers do is being late. When people are tardy the ones waiting for them are usually angry with the late person. Because now the leader looks bad in front of important people or they run out of time for something they were planning on doing. An example of this would be on a sports team, when the players are late to practice and aren't as focused, the coach would be angry because the coach wouldn't have time to do everything they wanted to get done. the coach then will punish the team by being harsh and strict all practice or make them run sprints or do push-ups, something that the players don't enjoy.


3. " War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes his ability to execute military plans." This quote was said by Machiavelli in the book The Prince. This is bad advice for leaders today because there is too much money spent on military across the world. This money, that is being spent on military, should be being spent on health care and the economy. The United States spent 46% of the worlds spending on military in 2009. We are spending the most money on military in the entire world. Other countries are balancing their spending but the U.S. spends majority of money on military and not on health care or something else that is important to people.

http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/us_vs_world.gif

4. "Before all else, be armed." This quote, said by Machiavelli in the book The Prince, would have been good advice to give the Incas. Because the Incas were sitting, waiting for Pizarro and his men to come. The Incas knew nothing about Pizarro so they should have been very heavily armed, so they would have been able to deal with anything that came their way. But the Incas didn't have a lot of weapons and they were conquered easily by Pizarro. The Incas consisted of 80,000 men, Pizarro 168 men. That is a huge difference, the Incas should have been able to easliy defeat the Spanish but they didn't becuase they knew nothing about what the rest of the world was doing; they were isolated. Therefore, they were unable to be prepared for the Spanish and their advanced technology in weapons.