Every other book on power teaches you the play. This is the only one that also hands you the Counter.
65 protocols the elite actually run on you. 65 counters. Nobody else gives you the second half.
You have been outmaneuvered before. You only understood it afterward. The project you built, renamed and handed to someone else as their win. The deal whose terms quietly changed on the way out the door. The meeting decided before you walked in.
That was not bad luck. It was a play, run on you by someone who understood power better than you did.
Ghost Protocols is the field manual you should have been handed on day one. You learn the move. Then you learn exactly how to shut it down when it is run on you.
The classic power tradition taught offense and stopped there. This is the 2026 evolution, built for a world where dark psychology and influence now run at algorithmic scale, through feeds, recommendation engines, and AI.
Nine systems of power, mapped
- Identity Architecture. How power identities are built, projected, and stripped. Whoever controls the frame controls the room.
- Information Control. What gets shared, what gets buried, and how to read people and the gap between their words and their intent.
- Alliance and Isolation. How coalitions form around interests, not loyalty, and collapse the same way.
- Leverage and Debt. The mechanics of obligation. How favors become chains, and how to exit without burning the bridge.
- Narrative Warfare. Whoever controls the story controls the outcome. How narratives are seeded, spread, and dismantled.
- Institutional Power. How organizations concentrate authority, and how to navigate it without being managed out sideways.
- Perception Engineering. The manufactured gap between what people see and what is real. Construction and detection.
- Psychological Compression. The pressure tactics used to force a yes. Time, isolation, authority, scarcity, gaslighting.
- Algorithmic Ghost Architecture. How these same protocols now run inside AI systems and digital influence pipelines.
Every protocol includes its Counter. Two readers walk in: the one who wants to use these tools, and the one who needs to recognize, in body language and behavior, when the tools are being run on them. Both leave with what they came for.
Who this is for
- Executives who get outmaneuvered and need to understand how.
- Negotiators whose agreed terms get rewritten on the way out.
- Founders facing boards, investors, and predatory partners.
- Anyone who has been on the losing end of an influence operation and did not see it until it was over.
Mark Farrell spent thirty years inside real power structures, not studying them from the outside. Corporate boards. Political rooms. High stakes negotiations decided before anyone sat down. What he documented became 65 protocols. What he learned about surviving them became 65 counters.
A field manual. Not a self help book. Not theory. Built for people who operate where information is currency and influence is the weapon most often aimed at them.
Learn the play. Learn the Counter. Stop being the one who understands it afterward.
