It is no coincidence that this blog takes a lot of its examples of good practice in leadership and strategy from military history. Modern management theory is a direct descendant of military strategy, and several early management theorists had a military background. They simply applied the principles they learned in the army to business:

“Maintain your objective but be flexible in the means you use to attain it;”

“Select your subordinates carefully but then trust them to do their jobs as they see fit without interfering with them;”

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy [or the marketplace];” and

“Keep your organisation intact but flexible.”

It might be a surprise to some to learn that the best known exponent of these, and many other maxims which are often quoted in board rooms, was a 19^th Century Prussian Field Marshal, Count von Moltke.

It is particularly interesting to note the emphasis von Moltke places on flexibility. After all, the stereotypical Prussian is supposed to be stiff and unbending, doing everything “by the book”, like the character played by the great Gert Frobe in the film Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines.

In fact nothing could be further from the truth than that stereotype. The German military tradition, more than any other, always emphasised flexibility, a constant refrain in the writings of the likes of von Manstein, Rommel, and Guderian. It is, for example, hard to imagine a British or American Lieutenant in the First World War being given the freedom of action enjoyed by the young Erwin Rommel when he held that rank. This led to phenomenal success against the odds. Although the German Army was hamstrung by incompetent political leadership in both World Wars, its accomplishments in the field are in many ways far more impressive than those of the eventual victors. Happily for humanity, Hitler, thinking he knew better than von Moltke, interfered constantly with his subordinates, undermined their flexibility and initiative – and lost.

As we have said before, while a good man is not necessarily a good leader, a bad man is almost invariably a bad manager.

George W Bush remains probably the most controversial figure in recent history. The quasi-medical term “Bush Derangement Syndrome” describes the condition in which perfectly rational people become irrational on the subject of the 43^rd President of the United States. The vilest abuse of him will get a cheer from some in the media. He also has his defenders: there is money to be made from merchandise bearing Mr Bush’s face and the slogan “Miss Me Yet?”

This blog tries hard to be as non-political, or at least as non-partisan, as possible, so it is not our place to comment on his policies or his Administration – suffice it is to say that, like any politician, he has entries on both sides of the ledger, and the final accounting may not be complete for some time.

However, it is worth noting, as yet another example of how poorly we are served by the mainstream media, that their cartoon image of Mr Bush’s personal character is grossly inaccurate. They persist in portraying him as a semi-literate playboy when the facts – should anyone be interested in them – are that Mr Bush came to the Presidency as a well-educated bookworm with a wide-ranging and, eventually, very successful career in private business to his credit.

It is also worth noting that, for a man who is supposed to be unintelligent, Mr Bush has written a singularly intelligent book, Decision Points – which we recommend very strongly to entrepreneurs, less for its political content than for the insights it gives into economics and leadership at the highest level.  

Anyone who is still determined to buy into the media caricature can, of course, retreat into conspiracy theories about “ghost writers”. There is simply no convincing them. Nevertheless, one of the most telling indicators of authenticity is that Mr Bush, a graduate of Harvard Business School’s notoriously tough MBA programme, gives a brilliantly concise one-sentence summary of what he learnt on the course:

“I came away with a better understanding of management, particularly the importance of setting clear goals for an organization, delegating tasks, and holding people to account.”

Whether Mr Bush’s own Administration lived up to those principles is for history to decide, but the principles themselves are sound. The current Administration – in which the lack of private business experience has already had a noticeable effect – would do well to adopt them. America needs clear goals, delegation to people who understand their business, and, above all, those people being held to account.

The markets are very nervous – and rightly so – about the debt crises in Europe and the United States.

Yet the frustrating thing about both crises is that they should be relatively easy to avert. They are not mega-tsunamis or planet-killing asteroid strikes that are beyond all human control. Nor are they mysterious: there is no need for a new Keynes to tell us what is happening, because anyone who can read a newspaper and do basic arithmetic knows exactly what the problems are. They are foreseeable and were foreseen, and indeed have both been rather unmissable for some years now.

Above all, they should be very easy to solve, given the political will. The solutions are not rocket-science. Everyone knows what needs to be done, and what will eventually have to be done.

In the United States, the government must stop spending as much as it does. The federal deficit is unsustainable. Sooner or later, there must be cuts, and there will be. Delaying the evil hour only makes it worse. Even the flawed Class of 2008 understood that there comes a time when unpleasant decisions cannot be put off.

In Europe, there is a limit to how much the more prudent nations can prop up the more feckless in order to maintain the pretence of a single currency. Does anyone, even the most sincere European federalist, really believe that Greece can and will remain a member of the eurozone indefinitely?

Everyone in the business world knows what has to happen. So – at least privately – do most politicians. So why delay? Everyone is agreed on the decisions that need to be made, so the sooner they are made the better.

Yet the political class seems paralysed with indecision. President Obama, obsessed with his re-election next year, has failed to take control of negotiations with Congressional leaders by advocating bold measures: once again, he has shown himself to be a reactive President, rather than one who seizes the initiative. Meanwhile, across the Pond, the European Establishment is terrified that suspension from the euro of Greece – and then probably Portugal and Spain, and maybe Italy and Ireland – will undermine the credibility of their whole cherished project of European integration.

It is tragic that in the whole pack, there is not one real leader with the guts to say, “We all know what we are going to have to do. Let’s just do it.”

For the real tragedy is that nothing magical is required here, only the courage and honesty to do what clearly needs to be done – in other words, leadership.

Field Marshal Lord Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief in the First World War is portrayed in the film Oh What A Lovely War and the television series Blackadder Goes Forth as an uncaring idiot.

His Diaries prove that image is unfair.

Haig was not a brilliant strategist like Napoleon, but he was a competent professional who cared about his men and understood a few basic truths about how to handle them. One of his virtues was respect for the chain of command.

For example, on 22 November, 1917, when he found a Cavalry Division in what he considered the wrong place, “I personally would very much have liked to have given him [the Divisional Commander] an order to return but restrained myself because it is impossible to be successful if more than one commander is giving orders, and Woollcombe Commanding IV Corps had the Cavalry Division under his orders”.

As Commander-in-Chief, Haig would have been well within his rights to give orders directly to the Divisional Commander, without reference to the intermediate Corps Commander, but he was right to be reluctant: the chain of command demands that everyone in the organisation receives orders from a single source and knows who that source is. Orders from two sources lead to confusion, uncertainty, and loss of direction.

Napoleon would not have hesitated to ignore the chain of command in such a situation. Confident of his military genius, he was always intervening personally and giving direct orders to subordinates of all ranks.

Yet there was a price to be paid for that appearance of decisiveness and leadership. Those in the intervening grades became used to the Emperor intervening directly, and so they never became confident in their own exercise of initiative. That lack of initiative among his principal subordinates was a crucial factor in Napoleon’s defeats in Spain, in Russia, and, finally, at Waterloo.

So the great Napoleon was defeated in the end and died in exile, while Haig, the unimaginative professional, won his war and died in his homeland, greatly honoured.

It is impossible not to be awed by the sense of duty of the Japanese workers who are fighting to secure and clear up the Fukushima nuclear power station after it was knocked out by a tsunami. Exposed to high levels of radiation, they expect to die, but still they work.

The numbers involved have varied: at one point, it was reported to be 300 – which immediately evoked the memory of the Three Hundred Spartans, a suicide battalion who marched against an unbeatable enemy fully aware that there was no hope of survival.

The workers have also evoked memories of an honourable tradition within Japan’s own culture – that of the Samurai, the warrior-servants for whom death was preferable to the disgrace of failing their lords.

Western managers look on with a little envy mixed with their admiration. Would Western workers behave as Samurai in a similar situation? Or would they be straight on the speed dial to their personal injury lawyers?

If, as we suspect, the latter is more likely, can anything be done to infuse our own employees with more of the Japanese work ethic? This is a question with which Western managers have long been obsessed. Some may remember that, from the 1960s until the end of the 1980s, there was a real vogue for all things Japanese in Western corporate circles.

Western executives bought katanas, took karate lessons, and read the likes of Miyamoto Musashi and Yamamoto Tsunetomo – usually missing their main points entirely – in the vain hope that all this would, somehow by osmosis, result in Japanese levels of productivity.

It never worked, and the fashion faded with the Japanese economy. The great secret of Japanese management is that it was always a product of a broader culture of mutual loyalty and obligation of employer and employee that extended beyond the workplace, and which did indeed go all the way back to the relationship between a Daimyo and his Samurai.

It is impossible to replicate that relationship without the associated broader culture, and the culture is itself the unique product of centuries of Japanese history. Indeed, many assumed it was dying out even in Japan – or at least they did until Fukushima.

According to the UK’s Chartered Management Institute, 44% of managers polled consider that they “excel at people management”.

Yet of those who took a diagnostic test only 14% excelled.

Neither of these figures is surprising. Few managers are actually good with people, and poor management in general has been a particular problem in some British companies for decades. At the same time, British managers can be among the most arrogant in the world – a psychological hangover from the days when middle class Britons effectively ran the world.

Indeed, some British managers are particularly bad because they are particularly arrogant.

The best leaders are humble.

This goes against the traditional image of “The Leader” as the self-confident alpha-male, striding around masterfully and shouting out orders without a moment’s hesitation or, apparently, a moment’s weakness or doubt.

Yet those loudmouths are usually the worst leaders in practice. Convinced of their infallibility, they see listening to others as indecision and they refuse to admit it when they are wrong – which, as a result, they frequently are. Since they lack all self-perception, they do not realise that their subordinates can see all this very clearly and hold them in contempt for it.

The good manager, by contrast, is always learning. He is always listening to others – both because others are more likely to co-operate with him if they feel he has listened to them and because he knows they might just be right. He is always open to the possibility that he might be wrong. He is engaged in a permanent quest to improve how things are done.

Above all, he is dissatisfied with himself. This is the key to all self-improvement. Where someone is perfectly content with himself and his situation, he has no incentive to change anything. Positive change can come only from unhappiness with the status quo – and the greater that unhappiness, the greater the openness to change and the motivation to improve.

The meek will indeed inherit the Earth – not least because they are more willing to adapt than the arrogant.

If ever a man deserved to hang it is Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering: his pudgy fingerprints are all over the letter that led to the horrifying Wannsee Conference.

As if that were not enough, many on his own side would also cheerfully have strangled him, albeit for very different reasons: his incompetent handling of the Luftwaffe, the mighty German Air Force, in World War Two was a major contributory factor in Germany’s defeat.

Yet the same Hermann Goering also deserves credit, if that is the word, for creating the Luftwaffe in the first place, and for building it from nothing into the most feared fighting service in the world in just six years.

It is an astonishing feat, but even more astonishing is that Goering accomplished it. Physically brave, personally charming, and politically cunning, he was not without natural gifts, but management skills were not among them.

This lazy incompetent achieved great success on his own terms by accepting that he was a lazy incompetent, and by hiring active and able subordinates to cover his weaknesses. More importantly, having hired them, he let them get on with their jobs with the minimum of interference – unlike his master, the paranoid meddler Adolf Hitler.

One of the most talented of Goering’s deputies, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, made a perceptive comment in his memoirs about his chief’s leadership style:

“Even if he was a past master at getting his subordinates to do his work, occasionally his very frequent hours of leisure were devoted to casual reflection which bore many fruitful suggestions.”

Many executives today would say the same of their own boss. While Goering should never be a role model for anyone, it is foolish to try to write him off as a fool. He was intelligent enough to know his limitations and to build an organisation around him that took them into account. It cannot be denied that his management system has been much imitated, and it can be very effective in turning weaknesses into strengths.

However, Kesselring made another perceptive comment, this one about Goering’s greatest opponent, the man who beat him, which every entrepreneur should memorise as a far more reliable formula for success...

“Every undertaking is a risk, and needs, besides planning, relentless execution and a certain optimism. Churchill fulfilled these conditions in the highest degree.”

Experience dictates that someone with the title “Equalities Minister” (sic) is not likely to be a friend of business.

We are therefore delighted to be able to write in praise of Lynne Featherstone, MP, for her excellent suggestion that Joan from Mad Men should be a role model for women.

Her point is that women should be proud of their natural body shape and that the fashion for women to look like stick insects is a marketing con. As we pointed out in a previous post – under some business pretext or other – this is a point on which both men and feminists are agreed.

Yet there is a broader point that Mrs Featherstone missed but which supports her case for Joan as a feminist role model.

Anyone who has seen the television series – highly recommended, by the way – will know that Joan is the best manager in the advertising agency for which she works. While the partners seem to spend most of their time drinking and committing adultery, Joan is the one who actually runs things.

Joan is loyal, intelligent, organised, socially perceptive, efficient, and a born leader. Think of her as a Company Sergeant Major with the curves of a D-Type Jaguar, or perhaps a sexy version of Margaret Thatcher.

The last season saw her sidelined, married to an unappreciative dolt. Things went downhill at the agency without her. The priapic partners had to sober up and set up a new agency in just 48 hours. Chaos ensues until one of them says he knows someone who might be able to help. Cue Joan’s dramatic return – the moment she walks through the door, everyone knows everything is going to be all right.

Yes, Mrs Featherstone is right on this one: we need a lot more Joans. Every businessman fantasises about having one – and not for the reason most people might think.