If there is an intellectual godfather to ''The 33 Strategies of War'', it's certainly, and by the author's own - if implicit - admittance, Machiavelli and his famous works on the mechanics of gaining and maintaining power. As Machiavelli extended the amoral approach concentrating on efficiency and self-interest benefiting results from the realm of war to the area of politics, so a few hundred years later Robert Greene proposes an extension from military and political conflict to any conflict that one might encounter in life.