Games Without Thrones: 8 Leadership Lessons from Oligarchs

In Games Without Thrones, entrepreneurship professor David Lingelbach and oligarch researcher Valentina Rodríguez Guerra show how we can all learn from oligarchs, even if we don’t like them. These masters of uncertainty have found their moment again in the early 21st century, when several existential threats have overturned our ability to predict the future. Paradoxically, oligarchs hold the intellectual keys that will enable the rest of us to exploit the coming storms. This book describes these keys as eight leadership lessons that can become a new playbook, enabling all of us to play and win the new games without thrones.

This book makes three major points:

• Oligarchs are at the center of our worlds now, shaping the global economy in which we all work and the politics that help determine our life choices. Understanding their centrality is key to understanding how the world works.
• Oligarchs provide us with eight lessons to enable us to be more effective leaders. The first three lessons comprise their distinctive Weltanschauung or worldview. They see the world very differently than the rest of us.
• Oligarchs offer us five specific strategies―four of which were first elaborated in our The Oligarchs’ Grip and developed further in our forthcoming The Oligarchs of the Americas―to lead during times of crisis and turbulence. Those times are likely to dominate our professional lives, no matter where we live.

David Lingelbach is a professor of entrepreneurship at The University of Baltimore’s Merrick School of Business and co-author of The Oligarchs’ Grip: Fusing Wealth and Power, which was a finalist for a 2024 Business Book Award and a 2023 Goody Business Book Award and has been reviewed by outlets such as Financial Times, L’Opinion, and Times Literary Supplement. This book was also listed on several 2023 “best books of the year” lists. David is also the founding executive chair of The Center for the Study of Oligarchs (www.oligarchcenter.org), an independent research center dedicated to the study of the causes, dynamics, characteristics, consequences and strategies associated with oligarchs. He has also taught at the Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Dr. Lingelbach was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Exeter, from which he received a Ph.D. in management studies. Dr. Lingelbach has studied oligarchs for more than a quarter century. His interest in them began in Russia, where he lived and worked for five years. He was Russia Country Director for Citizens Development Corps (1994-1995); President and CEO of CARESBAC-Saint Petersburg (1995-1996), one of Russia’s first venture capital funds; and CEO of Bank of America’s businesses in the former Soviet Union (1996-1999). In these roles, he met and worked with some of the oligarchs featured in The Oligarchs’ Grip, including Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Fridman. He has also researched oligarchs in Latin America and the Caribbean; North America; Europe and Central Asia; East Asia and the Pacific; the Middle East and North Africa; South Asia; and Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Lingelbach is the recipient of numerous research and teaching awards, including a 2018-19 Fulbright to Myanmar; a 2021 Fulbright Specialist to Colombia; and two nominations for an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

Valentina Rodríguez Guerra is the co-author of The Oligarchs’ Grip and lead co-author of The Oligarchs of the Americas: From the Conquistadores to Silicon Valley, to be published by De Gruyter in 2026. She is the founding executive director of The Center for the Study of Oligarchs. She has written about oligarchs for international media such as The Messenger and The Hill, has been interviewed by media outlets such as Financial Times and Talk TV, and has spoken about oligarchs at the European Council’s Venice Commission, the Bristol Festival of Economics, and the Symi Symposium. Valentina is a PhD candidate in the Faculdad de Administracion, Universidad de Los Andes, a candidate for a MBA, and holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration, the latter two from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL) in Bogotá, where she was a researcher in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Unit of the university’s Faculty of Economic Sciences. She has worked as an investigator for Colombia’s Contraloría General de la República (Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic) and Procuraduria de la Nación (Office of the Inspector General). She was a member of UNAL’s MIND (Mentes Ingeniando y Diseñando) team, which won one of the top awards at NASA’s 2022 HERC (Human Exploration Rover Challenge). Ms. Rodríguez was also a principal member of the team that designed and implemented the university’s groundbreaking 2021 Fulbright exchange.