The Indian epic, Mahabharata, relating incidents beginning around 800 B.C.E., is a gripping saga filled with a multitude of chills and spills, vivid images of life and living, and of death and dying. With all of that, it is both a management guide and a code of operations too! It is a how-to guide to life; an ethical “do” and “don’t do,” as if the Mahabharata were originally written to be read as a leadership manual.
There are characters throughout the Mahabharata who combine amazing leadership skills with just a few flaws and there are other characters who are irredeemably flawed, but who show us flashes of leadership brilliance. It is the flow of these characters shown at war—their decisions and actions—that create their genius. It is that genius that this book explores and seeks to appropriate in conveying leadership technique.

No source for executive inspiration can be as definitive...