Just over a year ago, Sir Lawrence Freedman became the first of our community to offer readers of The Strategy Bridge his thoughts on mentors, books, and legacies, beginning what would become a series to which many of us would turn at the start of each week: the #MondayMusings. 

Each week since, through three simple questions, we've been privileged to engage in conversation with a staggering variety of strategic thinkers. We've heard from inspirational senior leaders in the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. and Australian Armies...and we've heard from the junior military thinkers inspired by them. We've heard from brilliant civilian scholars of strategy both established and promising. We've heard from bloggers and biographers, poets and podcasters, and teachers and students of strategy too numerous to name. And with each fresh perspective, each new twist on the mentors who made us and the legacies we want to leave, we learned something new.

A favorite part of this series, especially for booksellers everywhere, has been the staggering variety of books—and even board games—our community of musers found useful in illuminating strategy. Some refer us to the classics (Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Thucydides, etc.), and some emphasize that strategy requires a synthesis for which no single book suffices. Some suggest that following the rules is for tacticians while changing the rules is for strategists, throw caution to the wind, and provide title after title that influenced them, sometimes fiction and sometimes non-fiction. And every so often, a recommendation unexpected and serendipitous emerged—strategy written in the language of baseball or in the growth of a railroad or in the paradoxical and puzzling world of The Hitchhiker's Guide—and our sense of the world and what it means to be a strategist shifted under us. The resulting list, available in all its glory here, is enough reading for a lifetime...and a great life that would be!

It's been a wonderful ride, and we'd like to thank the authors and readers who made it possible for us to leave, in the #MondayMusings, a legacy we're proud of. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did...and just maybe there are a few more musings in store.

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