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The Last Absolutism: Why Companies Are the Final Refuge of Autocracy
Paperback
Series: Business and Professional Development
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN13: 9798180843180
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 9 2026
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 9 2026
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Somewhere in your city, right now, a grown adult is rearranging another adult's entire week with a single sentence, answerable to no one. Not a dictator. Not a monarch. A boss. We abolished absolute rulers from public life and then quietly reinstalled them behind the lobby doors of almost every company on earth.
The Last Absolutism argues that the privately owned firm is the final refuge of one-person rule, the one institution where the separation of powers never arrived. But the company turns out to be only the nearest example of a much older and stranger law: any system that listens only to itself slowly rots. The boss who hears only flatterers, the royal house that marries only its cousins, the mind sealed in its own echo, and the artificial intelligence trained on its own output all decay in precisely the same way, for precisely the same reason.
With wit, sharp examples, and not a single equation, Boris Kriger traces this hidden law from the boardroom to the Habsburg jaw to the collapse of self-feeding machines, and then do something rarer than diagnosis: they describe the cure. Open the closed loop. Bind it to the world. Mix unlike points of view. And let a new kind of intelligence carry the dull machinery of business in the background, while human beings return to the one job that cannot be delegated, which is to watch, to judge, and to decide what is worth doing at all.
A book for anyone who has ever had a boss, a family, or an opinion, and suspected that all three sometimes talk only to themselves.
Keywords: power, organizations, artificial intelligence, complexity, management, systems thinking, future of work
With wit, sharp examples, and not a single equation, Boris Kriger traces this hidden law from the boardroom to the Habsburg jaw to the collapse of self-feeding machines, and then do something rarer than diagnosis: they describe the cure. Open the closed loop. Bind it to the world. Mix unlike points of view. And let a new kind of intelligence carry the dull machinery of business in the background, while human beings return to the one job that cannot be delegated, which is to watch, to judge, and to decide what is worth doing at all.
A book for anyone who has ever had a boss, a family, or an opinion, and suspected that all three sometimes talk only to themselves.
Keywords: power, organizations, artificial intelligence, complexity, management, systems thinking, future of work
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