Many contested decisions inside an organization are settled before anyone formally makes them. A budget is framed so that one option is the only responsible choice. A review is scheduled for the week the main objector is traveling. A pilot is declared a success before its numbers are in. People who would never call themselves political do these things every day, and many decisions are won that way.
A leader who is convinced their plan will leave the company worth more has a duty to win enough backing to carry it out. Declining the contest does not stop the decision from being made: whoever stayed in makes it, and their judgment may be worse for the company than the leader's would have been. In the first book of Plato's Republic, Socrates gives this as the reason a good person agrees to rule: the greatest penalty for refusing is to be ruled by someone worse. Winning a decision inside a company takes the same willingness, and knowledge of the moves: the ones worth making and the ones that will be made against you.
This catalog describes 783 of those moves. Alongside the tactics people use against each other, it holds the ordinary tools of a leader who means to win in the open: designing how a decision will be made, building a coalition one ally at a time, negotiating, and keeping a board informed. The tactics are grouped by what they work through, in twelve families, from Information and Narrative to Outsiders, Boards, and Deals. Inside each family, tactics that share a mechanism sit together in a cluster.
Three labels
The 163 tactics to use are legitimate and unremarkable: mapping who decides, doing favors before an ask, briefing people before the meeting, running a fair pilot, making a case with true information, and offering open incentives. Their pages teach the move as a colleague would.
The 289 borderline tactics work through pressure or hardball. They control the forum or the agenda, use formal authority bluntly, pick the moment when attention is elsewhere, press a true but selected case, or bargain hard before a deadline. A page cannot see the reader's situation or motives, and the same move can be the right call in one company and the wrong one in another. So these pages teach the move, what it costs, and the point at which it would cross into the acts described below, and they leave the judgment to the reader. Each one says so under its summary.
The 331 tactics to guard against cannot work without one of those acts: lying; fabricating or falsifying records; hiding material facts from people entitled to them; threats beyond legitimate authority; humiliating, harassing, or isolating people; sabotage; retaliation; setting someone up to fail; breaking the law; or harming customers and other third parties. Their pages describe what the tactic looks like from the receiving end and how to defend against it. No page, under any label, teaches any of those acts.
How each tactic works on a decision
A contested decision comes down to a comparison between the preferred position, the option someone wants chosen, and the adverse alternative, the option they want to defeat. A tactic changes that comparison in one or more of four ways: it increases the preferred position's benefits or decreases its costs, or it decreases the adverse alternative's benefits or increases its costs. About half work in three of the four at once, and increasing the adverse alternative's costs is the most common. A small grid shows which. Its left column is the preferred position and its right the adverse alternative; its top row is benefits and its bottom row costs. A green square with an up arrow is an increase, a red square with a down arrow is a decrease, and a white square is unchanged. Each tactic is also rated for how visible it is to the people it is used on: hard to spot, seen with attention, or easy to spot.
The thinking behind it
Every page carries a section called "The thinking behind it". For each thinker the tactic draws on, it states the idea, names the work it comes from, and says how that idea explains the move, or the defense against it. More than a hundred thinkers appear across the catalog. Among those cited most often are Robert Cialdini on reciprocity and influence, Erving Goffman on how people manage the impressions others form of them, and Jeffrey Pfeffer on power inside organizations and the dependence it rests on. George Akerlof on what happens when one side knows more than the other, Daniel Kahneman on loss aversion, and Thomas Schelling on commitment also appear often. The thinkers behind the tactics has a page of its own: each thinker's works and ideas, where a finding is contested, and every tactic that draws on them.
How to read the catalog
The index lists every tactic by family and cluster, each row giving the name, a one- or two-sentence summary, its label, its mark, and its visibility. It can be searched, and filtered by family, by label, by any of the four ways, by visibility, and by thinker. The address keeps the filters, so a view can be shared.
Each name opens the tactic's own page. Under the summary comes an example, an invented scene in an invented company, then why the tactic works on the decision, then the thinking behind it. A tactic to use, and a borderline one, continues with when it fits, how to use it well, what it costs and where it backfires, and what to do when it is used on you. A tactic to guard against continues with the warning signs, how to defend yourself, and how a leader shuts it down in their own organization. Beside the text sit its label, its mark in words, its visibility, its thinkers, and the other tactics in its cluster.