Most of the books out there on executive leadership are also variations on a common theme. You’ve read them all before, no doubt: the best management style is to work closely as a team with employees; to employ a hands-off approach; to display your authority; to develop your resources while fostering participation among management groups; to inspire your employees with personal style and rhetoric. All theories have their proponents.

“Apex Thinking: A Guide to Long-Term Leadership for the Rising CEO,” by Dr. Charles H. Polk, Ed.D with Dr. William M. White, Ed.D., forces readers to forget those latest trends in the business world, those “here today, gone tomorrow” paradigms that might work short-term but provide no lasting benefits. Instead, “Apex Thinking” focuses on unlocking secrets to effective and lasting management by understanding this fact: to get to the top of a company, and be an effective chief executive once you get there, one must not only understand that there is an unspoken, often-grueling “game” to be played, but one must play it and play it well.

Dr. Polk is president of Mountain State University, a  four-year school in southern West Virginia with an enrollment of around 8,500 students and offering associate, bachelor and graduate degrees. That in itself isn’t remarkable, unless you consider that when Polk took over as the school’s president in 1990, Mountain State University was a two-year school known as Beckley College, financially bankrupt and lightly regarded. In a few years—all under Polk’s leadership—Mountain State University has become the third largest graduate school in West Virginia. He’s considered an out-of-the-box thinker and a renegade business leader, and that helps explain MSU’s meteoric rise from small-town college to international university.

It also helps explain “Apex Thinking.” It is, at times, brutally candid (“It usually doesn’t take too long after entering the work force for most of us to see that the ‘good guys’ don’t always come out on top...”), skillfully honest (“Power is a game of control and not being controlled...”) and revealingly encouraging (“Only after we come to an understanding of what reality is can we hope to establish what we truly want to be.”)

Another thing the book does well: providing brief axioms—dubbed “Lessons For The Apex Thinker”—that offer brief snapshots into Polk’s distinctive, and blunt, leadership matrix. “Top leadership ability rarely rises through the ranks of an organization without occasionally using force,” Polk writes in the lesson prior to chapter one. “It is occasionally more important to talk about one’s success than to actually demonstrate it,” he writes in another.

Those brief lessons are interspersed throughout a book that takes nearly everything into account, with chapters on dealing with a board of directors, team building and public relations. And in each you get Poll’s unfiltered, uncensored, damn-the-torpedoes approach to leadership development.

Becoming a successful CEO, Polk writes, is not the answer of A+B, nor is it simply a matter of “trying hard and dreaming big.” No, it’s a little bit of both...with some Machiavellian machinations tossed in just to make things interesting.

Polk understands this, crafting a treatise on long-term leadership that’s a must-read for business leaders...and those who want to get there.