The book's fundamental purpose...is to explain Prof. [Bill] Rood's unique perspective on the practice of strategy to those who never had the pleasure of knowing him during his lifetime, and it does so outstandingly. . . .You Run the Show or the Show Runs You is an impressive success in every respect, and a fitting tribute to Prof. Rood's intellectual legacy. Those who knew him personally will read the book with particularly pleasure, given how delightfully it evokes the spirit of the man himself, but even those too young to have been his students will be enlightened as to why, for instance, arguments concerning British defense policy published in the Royal United Services Institute Journal in 1937 might shed light on the strategic problems facing democracies today and in the future.

Comparative Strategy

In this important new book, J. D. Crouch and Patrick Garrity have succeeded in capturing the essence of Bill Rood’s thought on strategy without losing its richness. They have embedded his ideas in controversial historical contexts, just as he believed necessary, and have advanced strategic thinking further. Whether you are interested in the man, his ideas, or testing your own analysis, this book will cause you to question received wisdom. This is what Bill Rood most liked to provoke. Rood was Socratic with an edge and a memory. Like Socrates, he had experienced war first hand. For Rood, strategy emerges from wrestling with the complexity and dynamism of real experiences such as those highlighted by Crouch and Garrity.

Ronald F. Lehman, Former Director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

Great minds are lost to history unless their followers sustain and enlarge their ideas. More than an ode to a beloved professor, this book is a tidy compendium of strategic thinking for our days.

John Hamre, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and former Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Professor Rood's students are a remarkable lot. Here, they pay tribute to a fine teacher whose insights were simple but powerful: “In a world that can promise neither peace nor safety to sovereign nations, it is the burden of statesmanship to look ahead to distant dangers that are today obscured by more immediate concerns, only visible, perhaps to the informed, thoughtful and far-sighted.” Would that more American policy makers operated according to that common sense principle.

Mackubin Thomas Owens, senior fellow of the Foreign Policy research Institute and of its journal, Orbis