Knowledge is power, or so it is said, and an organisation that deals with both wholesale may offer a few cautionary tales for business people.
Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is as much the history of a start-up with an unusual role in government as it is a history of the domestic intelligence apparatus of the United States.
The book finds that building an institution depends greatly on the character of the people at its core.
This is especially true of J Edgar Hoover, who held the post of director for 48 years and whom Mr Weiner describes as maybe history's greatest bureaucrat.
Assigned to the "Radical Division" of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1919, Hoover started with a staff of 61 agents and 35 undercover informants and built the organisation into a sprawling surveillance network with a vast budget and a staff of thousands by his death in 1972.
That is despite frequent legal tussles to convince successive attorneys general that what the FBI did was legal. Mr Weiner's view is that at many times it was not.
The book charts how Hoover won support from key members of the US government as he assembled a spy network on the grounds of national security - winning the trust of presidents from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon.
And all the while, Hoover was building the mystique of the FBI through Hollywood and the news media, even as it bungled operations and repeatedly failed to live up to expectations.
In Mr Weiner's telling, the FBI is frequently a feckless organisation that routinely missed clues that could have foiled terrorist activities by groups such as the Weather Underground.
This also coincided with state secrets being sold right under the FBI's nose because of a lack of a counterespionage programme.
Mr Weiner's book, compiled as the result of a 26-year-old Freedom of Information Act request and also based on public records, is a remarkable insight into one of the organisations that single-handedly recast world history - seemingly in spite of itself.
