Bonaparte
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
"What he places above all: “Intellectual honesty.” The kind that creates duties more often than rights. As a boss, he must set an example. Like Bonaparte at the bridge of Arcole or Joan of Arc before Orléans. He must be at the forefront of his troops, the symbol of the firm and the virtues that have allowed it to rise to the top ranks globally by itself. If he travels by plane, it’s in economy class. In Paris, he takes the metro, lives in a small apartment in the 17the arrondissement, and has lunch with his tray at the canteen of the offices on Avenue de Breteuil, like any secretary or maintenance service agent."
"What he places above all: “Intellectual honesty.” The kind that creates duties more often than rights. As a boss, he must set an example. Like Bonaparte at the bridge of Arcole or Joan of Arc before Orléans. He must be at the forefront of his troops, the symbol of the firm and the virtues that have allowed it to rise to the top ranks globally by itself. If he travels by plane, it’s in economy class. In Paris, he takes the metro, lives in a small apartment in the 17the arrondissement, and has lunch with his tray at the canteen of the offices on Avenue de Breteuil, like any secretary or maintenance service agent."
""A land with a known heart and an uncertain periphery," according to Giorgio Bocca, another true Piedmontese. "From Pliny, who writes of it and its capital Alba as a 'fertile land and a distinguished city, among those that make the region between the Apennines and the Po splendid' to Saint Bernard who tells the bishop of Milan about this 'country of Paradise', to the Corsican Napoleon, rhetorical as much as greedy, who first joyously announces 'Alba is ours, we are here in the best and most fertile country in the world' and then immediately drains the municipal coffers and empties the pockets of the landowners." He then concludes: "Surely, to the starving and ragged sans-culottes who followed Bonaparte through the poor lands of Millesimo and Cairo Montenotte, Alba and the Langhe must have seemed like the promised land, just as they did to us partisans of the mountain when we came down in '45. A happy place, fertile, distinguished but, I repeat, within what borders? One of the mysteries of the Langhe, one of its charms, is precisely this indefinability.""