Book Excerpt: Consiglieri: Leading from the Shadows, by Richard Hytner (Profile Books)

It is easy to want the top job; less easy to know whether being the ultimate decision-maker is
right for you. Do you really wish to be an A, the main attraction and the ace of absolute
accountability, or might you prefer to be a key C, on whom the A depends, the kind of person
who leads, influences, counsels, guides, and helps the A deliver?

Perhaps there was a villain lurking among my interviewees who played me like a violin. Maybe
they so eagerly volunteered the Machiavellian monsters they most ‘reviled’ in a spirit of
confession by projection. Scar’s murder of his brother Mufasa and his manipulation of nephew
Simba to become King of Pride Rock gets its fair share of admirers; a few were enthralled by the
eunuch in Game of Thrones, Lord Varys, member of the king’s council and royal spymaster,
officially known as ‘Master of Whisperers’ and Darth Vader’s relationship with the dark side,
according to the American Film Institute, ranks him as the third greatest movie villain in cinema
history, the ruthless cyborg denied the opportunity to have a lightsabre duel with either
Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates.

Devious deputies feed their A’s inappropriate appetite for power. Bob Haldeman, White House
chief of staff and one of the seven indicted by a grand jury in 1974 for their role in the Watergate
scandal, was considered the second most powerful man in the government during Nixon’s first
term and was ‘loved like a brother’ by the president. He could have shown some brotherly love
and tempered Nixon’s ambition. Instead he authorized criminal activity, the cover-up of which
brought about his A’s downfall.

Along with former CEO Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling transformed Enron from a pipeline
company into the world’s largest energy trading company. The two leaders were also responsible
for arguably the largest accounting fraud in history, one that cost investors and employees
billions of dollars. Was there no sinister second working in the shadows of Lay and Skilling?

Cs rarely carry criminal intent but it is useful to be able to predict dark art deputyship and gauge
its contribution to inappropriate outcomes. Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out to make the
world’s information universally accessible and useful, a noble cause which has led to people
making five billion Google searches every day. Now they need to keep a very close eye on
possibly wayward Cs who might treat our petabytes of user-generated data with impropriety,
and make money at the expense of our privacy.
It was his C’s casual disregard for privacy that embarrassed Gordon Brown when he was Prime
Minister. Damien McBride, former Whitehall civil servant and former special adviser to Brown,
has at least come clean about the rumors he fabricated concerning the private lives of some
Conservative Party politicians and their spouses. His confessional memoirs, Power Trip: A
Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin, would make good bedtime reading for those who mistake
Machiavelli’s The Prince as a primer for the practice of evil.

And yet, your C can have been your rival. William H. Seward, who overcame his disappointment
at losing the Republican nomination to Abraham Lincoln, accepted Lincoln’s invitation to
become Secretary of State and emerged as Lincoln’s most prominent adviser, friend and right-
hand man. In an echo of Lincoln’s invitation, Barack Obama asked Democratic nominee and
acrimonious rival Hillary Clinton to become his Secretary of State, a role she fulfilled for four
years. Unlike Seward, Clinton still harbors a desire for a go at the top job and may yet decide to
replace her current life of ‘want’ with a future life of ‘should’.

This is a relationship of profound reciprocity, in pursuit of a cause that is greater than either of
you. We may not like some of Niccolò Machiavelli’s reflections on the state of play in the early
fifteenth century, but as Segretario of the Second Chancery of the Republic and Secretary of the
Ten of Liberty and Peace, he had thirteen years to see close up some of the most important
political leaders shaping the future of Italy and Europe. One observation in The Prince, which he
wrote as former secretary, and with which it is unwise to disagree, is on the need for this
reciprocity between prince and minister, A and C: ‘When ministers and princes are related in
this way, they can trust each other. When they are otherwise, the outcome will always be
harmful either for one or the other.’