The Allies had no shortage of flamboyant military leaders in World War Two – MacArthur, Montgomery, Patton, Mountbatten, etc.

Yet when it comes to teaching leadership to professionals, the famous names are not mentioned as often as the relatively obscure Field Marshal Viscount Slim. The Leadership and Management course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, has been described as “Slim Studies”.

This is because the real proof of leadership is not winning but coping with adversity.

The big reputations always go to those who happen to be leading when objectives are achieved. Yet, as often as not, they are the people who are brought in after the moment of crisis has passed, and who benefit from increased resources which were not available to their predecessors. So the new guys are associated with nothing but success and their predecessors with nothing but failure – despite the fact that it is the latter who had the harder job and who may well have performed better. This is unfair, but it happens a lot in life.

Slim is an unusual case because he started by losing to the Japanese in Burma, but was able to turn things around, hence the title of his memoirs, Defeat Into Victory.

This book is itself unusual because, instead of the typical boasting and self-justification of those who like being great men, here is a leader actually admitting mistakes and worrying that he has been given credit which belongs to others. It also contains a number of reflections that entrepreneurs might find relevant.  

1   “It is easy to criticise the decision; it is not so easy to make such a decision”.

2   “Business, too, seemed at all grades in Burma to have been a better training ground than government service for initiative.”

3   “Luckily, there was no public relations department at my headquarters”.

4   “Remember only the lessons to be learnt from defeat – they are more than from victory”.

5   “One need not be an orator to be effective. Two things only are necessary: first to know what you are talking about, and second, and most important, to believe it yourself”.

6   “A new idea should have something to recommend it besides just breaking up normal organisation”.

7   “The fundamental fault of their generalship was a lack of moral, as distinct from physical, courage. They were not prepared to admit they had made a mistake.”

8   “It is not so much numbers and elaborate equipment that count in tough places but training and morale”.

9   “Largely because of this lack of material resources, we learned to use those we had in fresh ways to achieve more than would have been possible had we clung to conventional methods”.

10  “Commanders at all levels had to act more on their own; they were given greater latitude to work out their own plans to achieve what they knew was the Army Commander’s intention.”

The contributors to this blog would like to point out the above post was written before the 15 July 2010 broadcast of the BBC Radio 4 show The Bottom Line.