A Spy's Guide to Strategy

Excellent approach to strategy and game theory.

Both of his books are interesting and to the point. I’ve read entire shelves of books on strategy and game theory. This brief book is the most common sense and applicable approach. I highly recommend this and his other book on thinking.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Really great read, highly recommended !

Loved the narrative, anecdotes, deduction and the breakdown of the process of tradecraft strategy. Gives the reader a informative insight of modern day espionage.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Excellent Companion to Kindle Book

The narrator is awesome. I like this as much as a Spy's Guide to Thinking. Definitely get the Kindle book because a lot of the information is visible.

The scripting is excellent either spoken or read. Very in depth and entertaining which makes it easy to master the material.

Very practical

This is a very practical strategy guide. I find it very interesting relative to other guides and it’s especially useful to think about game planning other people’s end game and how it interacts with yours.

it was ok

good simple models for thinking, strategizing, and living in general. recommend to anyone really anyone

Not really a guide

I enjoyed the book overall. This really isn’t a guide on strategy development and the useful information is really obvious. The stories are interesting and it’s an overall fun book to read anyway.

Great short and to the point, my end game strategy

Great insight into reasoning back type of strategy, a it all over the place when starting but all part of the big end game

Too repetitive and hardly bareable

Very hard on the ears, easy words, too predictable. Every kind of boring thing seems to be in this speaker's voice.

Good. Not Bad. Not Great.

I found this book interesting and the naration was good.

The best way I can describe it is this. Have you ever written a really good paper? One you know hits all the marks and is gonna get you a high grade? Have you then looked and realized you missed the page/word count requirement? So you then have to go back and add a bunch of fluff that gets you there but kind of now makes your great paper repetitive. that is how you will feel about hearing the words "people, places, and things" or "zero. sum. game.". There are times it makes valid and perfect sense, and then times you feel like it was a "I can throw that phrase in here for word count" moment.

Still overall I enjoyed it.

Look forward, Reason backward...

For a very short book, there is far too much repeat speak and redundancy - Look forward, Reason backward..., my boss, my boss's boss, my boss's boss's boss...et al.

Look forward, Reason backward is the hallmark statement of the book and is repeated over and over. Yet it is exactly what every competent planner does whether planning a wedding or an invasion.

The BEST piece of advice from the book is this (paraphrasing) - "Never engage in any game where the best outcome you can achieve is zero."

Braddock should've cut the liar loose after the second meeting and saved himself the pain.

I paid very little for this book. It was nearly worth the price.