Machiavelli's Sage Advice to Transformational Leaders

Looming over the entire reformist enterprise are the costs and risks posed by debt.

Machiavellian has negative connotations--cynically unscrupulous scheming to gain or maintain power--but this misses the mark of Machiavelli the man who sought a livelihood in the cutthroat political street fighting of Italy's city-states circa the late 1400s and early 1500s.

As he made clear in other writings, Machiavelli favored democracy over competing…