The worst manager I ever had used to keep a copy of The Prince at his desk. He definitely looked at other people the way this article seems to encourage you to.
And you missed a chance to replace it with Le Petit Prince.
A bizarre choice if they were middle management; the running of a kingdom in the Prince is only really directly applicable to highest levels of C-suite management.
I guess it was their aspiration, but they behaved so apallingly to other people that they never went anywhere past middle management.
Well, according to one theory, the Prince was supposed to be a Trojan Horse fooling the reader into acting against their best interests, since Machiavelli wrote it as a gift for his arch nemesis.
Machiavellian principles like "it's better to be feared than loved" seem to be quite applicable to any level of management, not just the C-suite.