History Lessons: What business and management can learn from the great leaders of history

273 Pages·2010·3.952 MB·English

by  Jonathan Gifford

History Lessons
What business and management can
learn from the great leaders of history
Jonathan Gifford
Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Gifford
First published in 2010 by Marshall Cavendish Business
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CONTENTS
Introduction v
1. CHANGING THE MOOD 1
Bernard Montgomery 7
Elizabeth I ofEngland 14
Nelson Mandela 21
2. BOLDNESS OF VISION 29
Abraham Lincoln 34
Pericles ofAthens 43
Winston Churchill 51
3. DOING THE PLANNING 61
Napoleon Bonaparte 66
Lee Kuan Yew 76
Martin Luther King 84
4. LEADING FROM THE FRONT 93
Horatio Nelson 99
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 106
Muhammad Ali 116
5. BRINGING PEOPLE WITH YOU 125
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord 131
George Washington 138
John Churchill,Duke ofMarlborough 148
6. MAKING THINGS HAPPEN 159
Oliver Cromwell 164
George S.Patton 174
Zhou Enlai 182
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7. TAKING THE OFFENSIVE 191
Hannibal Barca 197
Saladin 207
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson 215
8. CREATING OPPORTUNITIES 225
Genghis Khan 231
Chiang Kai Shek 239
Marco Polo 250
Notes 259
Selected bibliography and further reading 263
iv
INTRODUCTION
History Lessonsstarts from the assumption that management, at
any level, has a lot to do with leadership. An effective manager
needs a whole array of talents, and now that we have begun to take on
board the concept that people should not be managed at all, rather
that managers should ideally lead their teams to the successful
fulfilment of their tasks, so leadership skills for managers have come
to the fore.
This book is based on the premise that there is no one kind of
perfect manager or leader and that a search for the set of
characteristics and skills that represent the ideal leader is doomed
(happily) to failure. Leaders, like the rest of us, come in all different
shapes and sizes: meticulous and visionary; outgoing and retiring;
impulsive and cautious; subtle and direct. This book sets out to look
at what the great leaders from history have actually done—to see how
they behaved; to learn what we can from their actions. History Lessons
attempts to give readers enough history to provide some sort of
insight into the real issues faced by each of the leaders, and the context
in which they made their decisions. There is also, I hope, enough detail
about these leaders’ lives to give some idea of the kind of people that
they were; of the personal background and historical context that
helped to shape their personalities and influence the decisions that
they took and the plans of action that they devised. Leadership and
management are intensely human activities—the leaders of the past
were essentially no different from the leaders and managers of today.
It is from their entirely recognisable human qualities that we can learn
the most useful lessons.
The book does not attempt to set out any particular historical
theory about individual leaders: the historical facts presented here are
those that are generally accepted to be true (historical truth being,
inevitably, an elusive thing). Equally, the book does not follow any
particular management theory. In fact, History Lessons sets out to be
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a theory-free zone—readers are invited to draw their own conclusions
and to find their own parallels between the decisions and actions of
these leaders from history and the issues that they face in their own
working lives. The one thing that every manager may take from these
accounts of the great leaders from the past and the more recent
present is, I hope, inspiration.
There are various things that leaders throughout the ages have all
done; various skills, abilities, and characteristics that they have all
demonstrated. The complete list of ‘things that great leaders do’ is no
doubt a long one. In History Lessons I have selected eight skills and
abilities that, in my opinion, represent many of the essential things that
any leader should be able to do and—ideally—should be very good at.
If you can glance down this list and say to yourself, “On reflection, I do
all of those things and, come to think of it, I do them rather well,” then
your future as a leader in your own field is secure. Many great leaders
in history have demonstrated only a few of these particular skills and
abilities, but this was still enough to secure their place in history.
The chosen list of things that leaders do and the characteristics that
they display is this:
•
Changing the Mood
•
Boldness of Vision
•
Doing the Planning
•
Leading from the Front
•
Bringing People with You
•
Making things Happen
•
Taking the Offensive
•
Creating Opportunities.
Changing the Moodis chosen to open the book, since this is one of the
hardest things that a new manager has to do, and also one of the most
subtle. There are no hard and fast rules for achieving this; no easy
method even for measuring the current mood and noting its
improvement. But when the mood is bad no organization can thrive,
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and is unlikely even to survive. When the mood is good, then things
really start to happen. The leader who manages the switch from the
former to the latter will have made a flying start. In some extreme
cases, managing such a change would represent a lifetime’s work
well spent.
Boldness of Visionprobably gets enough press already: “It’s the vision
thing.” We tend to assume that only leaders of nation states and Chief
Executive Officers need to worry about vision, but, in fact, every
manager, at every level, needs to have a vision. Another word for vision
is just ‘strategy’: it informs everything that you do. If you start to do
things that do not cohere with your overall strategy—your vision—then
you will begin to fail, or at least to waste a great deal of time.
Doing the Planningis often underrated. There is an inevitable sense
in which a great deal of planning is an entirely obvious and routine
part of any manager’s work—you plan to deliver result A by time B.
But it is the hidden planning that often reveals the leaders of true
genius: they have their vision of what they want to achieve and they
labor quietly but diligently to plan how they will bring it
about. These are the leaders who suddenly astonish with the
dramatic results of their actions. Their results are not, actually,
astonishing—they have been carefully planned.
Leading from the Front is another of those apparently dramatic
management skills that, in fact, everyone should aspire to. There are
many examples of leaders whose selfless and conspicuous bravery has
propelled them to fame and glory: men and women who have
inspired huge devotion amongst their followers and who have led
people to achievements of which they would not have imagined
themselves capable. Leading from the front is not necessarily as
glamorous as this; in fact there are many deeply unglamorous and
unpleasant tasks that have to be done in any organization. The
manager who steps in occasionally and does one of these arduous
things is leading from the front and demonstrating a core aspect of
great leadership—that you do not expect your team to do things that
you are not prepared to do yourself. There is another sense to the
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notion of leading from the front: people lead from the front when
they simply stick to their principles; when they insist on doing
what seems right to them in the face of all opposition. This is just as
brave (and sometimes just as foolhardy) as leading troops into
enemy fire.
Bringing People with Youis another potentially elusive ‘must have’
for managers. You can tell people what to do; indeed, you can scream
at them until you are blue in the face (I have seen this done on many
occasions, in many different and sometimes imaginative ways) and
they will not budge. And, indeed, why should they? What, as they
rightly say (or mutter), is in it for them? Great leaders are able both to
inspire and to create a substantial common interest: we are all in this
together; your success is my success. Great leaders also recognize the
rights and expectations of others; they are the great diplomats of the
world and the antitheses of the great dictators.
Making Things Happenis a less elusive skill. For many people, this
is the very essence of leadership—a leader can almost be defined by his
or her ability to make things happen: to get people to do things that
they would not have done without the leader’s inspiration and
guidance; to change the world around them. But making things
happen can be a bit one-dimensional. Some of the outstanding
movers and shakers of history have not been, in the broadest sense, the
truly greatest leaders. Their psychological make-up sometimes makes
them constitutionally unable not to make things happen—they see
the world as a series of errors crying out to be corrected; a collection
of other people’s messes begging to be tidied up. They tend to be a bit
too certain that everything would go to hell in a hand cart without
their personal intervention. Sometimes they are right, but the greatest
leaders combine this characteristic with several of the other, more
subtle leadership skills.
Taking the Offensive is one of those actions that can sort the men
from the boys and the women from the girls. It is arduous and potentially
dangerous and very often it would be much less painful simply to put up
with things as they are; to hunker down in our foxholes and try to cope
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with what the opposition is throwing at us. But no really great leader
will allow the opposition to keep him or her permanently on the
defensive, nor will they accept that things are simply as they are and can
never be changed. Taking the offensive is one of the many leadership
abilities that are most clearly demonstrated in the military world—in
the world of physical confrontation—but that is in fact needed in every
field of human endeavor. The manager who takes the offensive
against any apparently intractable problem in their organization is
demonstrating the same leadership skills as the battle commander who
takes the fight to an apparently invincible enemy and wins an audacious
victory against all odds. Some people also take the offensive not in
organizational but in personal terms. The individual who stands up for
change in the face of ingrained and established custom and practice is as
daring as the most glamorous cavalry commander.
Finally, Creating Opportunities is perhaps one of the most subtle
of the arts of management and leadership; a kind of making your own
luck. Funnily enough, the end result—the apparently surprising run
of good results; the optimism that begins to flow through the
organization; the dawning of a golden era in which everything seems
to go right for your team—stems precisely from your having
successfully demonstrated all (or most) of the key leadership
attributes set out in this particular list. If you have created the right
mood in your organization, set out your vision and done your
planning; if you are leading from the front and bringing your people
with you in other ways; if you are making things happen and are
taking the offensive, then, strange as it may seem, your luck will
improve. You will find that you have set up opportunities that your
team can now happily seize upon. You are now, thanks to all of your
diligent preparation, magically in the right place at the right time. The
end result will (by definition) be a team effort—your leadership skills
will have created the conditions and the environment in which success
can be achieved by everyone in the organization. Your team begin to
bring successes to your door; unexpected and unplanned-for
opportunities present themselves.
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