Richard Nixon once said, "People respond to fear, not love. They don't teach you that in Sunday school, but it's true."
Yeah, I remember that interview, but Nixon was really only paraphrasing Niccolò Machiavelli.
If you haven't read "The Prince," you can learn a great deal from it. I'm not saying that I agree with the overall message (that the ends always justify the means), because I don't. But it's a pretty good insight into the minds of the countless rulers and businessmen who've used it as boilerplate.
There are literally dozens of translations available at your local Barnes and Noble or Borders, and they only average about 100 pages. You can knock it off in a few hours easily.
