The Prince by Niccol Machiavelli and the Story of Amazon.com - Book Report/Review Example

The Prince and the Story of Amazon.com The Prince is a book by the prominent Italian scholar of the sixteenth century, Niccolo Machiavelli. In it Machiavelli mainly addresses the best practices for a prince ruling a state. The writing is dedicated and addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, an Italian statesman of the time. Machiavelli was known for a pragmatism-based cynical worldview that is expressed bluntly through his writings. And the points of view of the book The Prince were no exception to his general way of looking at things. Some say that The Prince was a guide for Lorenzo de’ Medici intended to serve an additional purpose of inspiring Lorenzo to rally the people of Italy for the build up of a strong Italian state (like Italy was before) (Gilbert 6). The Prince is written (in part) as a set of dos and do nots for the prince; like a scripture stipulating the rules for reign and the punishments for disobedience; referring to the fates of disobeyers. It is this quality of the writing that makes it adaptable as a description of affairs of corporate nature. The book is both a depiction of the corporate reality and serves as a guide for corporations and people. In this regard one can deem the discourse relating to the prince in Machiavelli’s book remindful of the dealings of a corporation, or an individual or people in the corporation respectively, depending upon the contemporary situation of the prince in the book. Amazon.com and The Prince For one thing, for example, the unsparing allusions to the cruel nature of practical governance by Machiavelli in the book are applicable almost universally to the workings of large for-profit corporations. The corporation has adjusted morals, or no morals from a humanitarian’s perspective (Eisenberg 11), just as personal acts intended for the achievement of an end have no regard for the means of achievement. Any consideration in thought or action by the prince is a trade-off with increased inefficiency of work just as it is for a corporation. Hence since Amazon.com fulfils the aforementioned criteria for conforming to the description of the subject of The Prince’s: a corporation, for profit and large, it can be related to many of the realities that Machiavelli refers to in the book and to the state of proceedings he espouses. The question then arises: In what ways specifically does Amazon.com (or people at Amazon.com) emulate the prince in Machiavelli’s work? A step in answering the question could be explanation of the self-stated goal of Amazon.com to become ‘the’ one-stop shop for consumers. There is an undertone to this motto that is very reminiscent and typical of Machiavelli’s preference of the use of fear over love for control of the prince’s subjects. Machiavelli suggests that infusion of fear into the minds of the subservient populous by a ruler as a tactic stands better the test of time than evoking affection of the people through good deeds. The premise is that while the fear of punishment is always true and active, the affection might make way for selfishness during a time of crisis. And agency to make people dependant on oneself, which is what Amazon.com and some other market-dominating companies as well, certainly, practice is surely, at least in part, intended to be a way of inducing fear into the hearts of consumers. In contrast, the aim of companies to offer the highest standards of quality and reliability to consumers might be regarded as the pursuit of love of the consumer. And while the use of fear tactics is a suggestion by Machiavelli that is well acted upon by Amazon.com, Machiavelli also proposes a quality that princes and men in general often lack, and which is also found lacking in the working of Amazon.com. The previous assignment talked about the need for Amazon.com to institute flexibility into its systems of administration and function. And a lack of responsiveness to change is exactly what Machiavelli cites as the reason for people attributing their failure to bad luck. Machiavelli holds the opinion that while a person’s fortunes are half predetermined fate, half are contributed by the person’s own doings. He says that people fall into disbelief when a consistently successful practice stops bringing success and resort to a belief in determinism to explain their failure; what really results in the failure, according to The Prince, is the neglect of temporal necessities. Another type of inaction that often results in failure, according to Machiavelli, is the sparing of old customs and heritage of a newly annexed state by its ruler. The Prince states that the only reason to keep intact the old institutions of the state is to not incense the local populous of the scarcely controlled land. It assures that “so long as their old ways of life are undisturbed and there is no divergence in customs, men live quietly” (Machiavelli and George, “Composite principalities” 32). Hence in the pragmatist approach of Machiavelli even measures for the public good should be justified as beneficial for the consolidation of the state (which essentially is the prince according to the book). The aforementioned reasoning could be used as yet more evidence for the sceptics’ view that firms only employ the principles of a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a PR tool to further their business interests (McWilliams, Abagail, and Siegel 17). And Amazon.com is no exception to the group of subjects of the CSR debate; only last month the company launched a grand initiative by the name of AmazonSmile whereby 0.5 percent of the cost of every purchase through AmazonSmile would go to charity ("AmazonSmile: You shop. Amazon gives.."). It is no secret that companies have benefited financially from CSR practices and some CSR initiatives have been proven to be aimed at attracting customers (Schroder and Christian 26). The Prince includes a whole chapter on the building, occupation and destruction of fortresses for maintenance of order in a principality and safety and security of the prince. The writer’s focus is on disproving the utility of the fortress, which most usually comes into use in times of lurking danger of an anarchic situation developing in the province. Machiavelli believes that the value of material equities like fortresses is trivial compared to the value of handling of the situation that leads to the equities coming into use. Similarly he states that the amount and sophistication of weaponry is of little value compared to the distinction of the origin (local, mercenary or auxiliary) of the force armed with the weaponry. Hence overall he sees human feelings and behaviour as the prime determinant of the happenings in a political scenario and assigns very little weight to the value of material possessions. This however is contradictory to the lessons from the story of Amazon.com for whom the handling of material assets has been crucial for succeeding in business. It was demonstrated in the previous assignment that Amazon.com’s ability to manage a system of goods storage and delivery without the accumulation of considerable private inventory has been key in its progressing beyond the reach of land-based retail competitors. The benefits of this system of stock handling are owed to an effective distribution system. Most retailers either frequently fail in delivering products to the customer on time or give themselves enough time to accommodate for any untoward delays in the delivery. Amazon.com has built up a reputation for customer service with measures such as a consumer-friendly purchase return policy. However if any one factor could be regarded as decisive in Amazon.com’s solidifying its reputation, and building and expanding its customer base it is its selection and management of distributors. The distributors or distribution system enable(s) Amazon.com to formulate ground-breaking policies such as those of concessions for late deliveries and availability of items regardless of location. Hence an inefficient distribution system implies a weakness of consumer policies while a strong base of distributors indicates effectiveness of policies. This concept is akin to Machiavelli’s notion of the soundness of a state. He says in this regard: “You cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow” (Machiavelli and George, “Military organization and mercenary troops” 73). Conclusion Most of the ideas expressed in The Prince carry perennial relevance. Their applicability extends laterally as well from observation of animal instincts to hypotheses of the New World Order. Yet generalization is not the means Machiavelli uses to achieve this perpetuation of thought; the depictions and lessons in the book are specifically for a prince of a certain region of a certain era and most often supported with empirical information. That is why it is astonishing that Machiavelli’s proposals are so adaptable and his assertions so true for a modern day organization. Historians also claim that The Prince was not even meant for the audience that now relishes it and that it was a private letter to the politician Lorenzo de’ Medici. However there are not one but many misalignments among Machiavelli’s discourse and the realities of not only today but of the days of the writer. For instance Machiavelli assumes early in the book that there are only four specific kinds of governance systems: a republic and three types of principalities: “All the states, all the dominions under whose authority men have lived in the past and live now have been and are either republics or principalities” (Machiavelli and George, “How many kinds of principality there are and the ways in which they are acquired” 29); an assumption that forms the basis for his later arguments. Similarly in some ways the discussion regarding the prince may seem completely incompatible with the realities of an enterprise like Amazon.com. But it is the nature of the corporation that is extremely well depicted by the cold, pragmatist viewpoint of the writer. For instance it seems that Machiavelli’s descriptions had already addressed, from one school of thought, the recent, budding concept of Corporate Social Responsibility some hundred years ago. The school of thought in question is the pragmatist view. Similarly in the early twentieth century, it was declared by the supreme court of the United States that corporations were to be treated, in terms of legality, as persons. Astonishing, while legal and business experts formulated theories and strategies based on this ruling, The Prince had done it before the advent of the determination. Hence, The Prince proves that at least in some ways elementary knowledge and understanding of human science is independent of the age and determined mainly by intellect. Works Cited "AmazonSmile: You shop. Amazon gives.." Amazon. Amazon.com, Inc., 1 Nov. 2013. Web. 2 Dec. 2013. . Eisenberg, Melvin Aron. "Corporate legitimacy, conduct, and governance-Two models of the corporation." Creighton L. Rev. 17 (1983): 11. Gilbert, Felix. Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence. New York: Norton, 1984. 6. Print Machiavelli, Niccolo?, and George Bull. "Composite principalities" The Prince. Reissued with revisions. ed. London: Penguin Books, 2003. 32. Print. Machiavelli, Niccolo?, and George Bull. "How many kinds of principality there are and the ways in which they are acquired" The Prince. Reissued with revisions. ed. London: Penguin Books, 2003. 29. Print. Machiavelli, Niccolo?, and George Bull. "Military organization and mercenary troops" The Prince. Reissued with revisions. ed. London: Penguin Books, 2003. 73. Print. McWilliams, Abagail, and Donald Siegel. "Corporate social responsibility: A theory of the firm perspective." Academy of management review 26.1 (2001): 17. Schroder, Kim Christian. "Cynicism and ambiguity: British corporate responsibility advertisements and their readers in the 1990s." Buy this book: Studies in advertising and consumption, London: Routledge (1997): 26. Read More