BUILT FOR WARStrategy for doing good in systems built against youMost good people don't lose because they're unskilled. They lose because they were handed the wrong manual.
Strategy for doing good in systems built against you. Ancient strategic thinking, brought into modern institutional life — to help practitioners survive the rooms where ordinary leadership advice fails.
Or try the Situation Room free — the book’s method as a live AI coach.
You were trained to believe that if you bring a good idea to a system, the system will eventually respond. But when your success threatens something the other side cannot survive, you are no longer in a slow process.
You are in a war that does not look like one.
Eyes you do not currently have. Hands you have not been trained to use.
This is not a book about becoming ruthless. It is a book about becoming harder to destroy without becoming the thing you are fighting.
- Tell collaboration, negotiation, and war apart before the misdiagnosis costs you
- Read what people stand to lose if your work succeeds
- Treat information as a strategic resource, not a debt you owe everyone
- Build coalitions, protect allies, and preserve your supply lines
- Give opponents exits instead of turning them into permanent enemies
- Choose which fights are worth fighting, and do good without being destroyed by it
Written by people who watched good leaders break.
Creator, Agile Action Strategy Process
For more than thirty years, he has been in the rooms where institutions decide what is really allowed to happen — and what quietly will not. His work has informed the redesign of more than 700 public schools and the deployment of over $1.6 billion in investment capital.
University of Houston–Clear Lake
At twenty-seven he ran for governor in Venezuela, then chose his family and left when the cost of staying grew too high. He carries twenty-five years inside institutions — teacher, administrator, professor, executive coach — into the work of preparing leaders to read the system clearly.
Bring a situation you’re actually in — and get a strategic read from the book.
The Situation Room is the book’s method as a live coach: describe a real fight you’re in, and it reads it through Built for War— which game you’re in, what the other side stands to lose, and the moves that actually apply. It’s a separate, free-to-start subscription — not the book itself.
The manual the authors wish they could have handed every leader they watched break.
Join the briefing list for the launch date and a sample chapter.