Talleyrand, Not Napoleon

The following was the draft of my speech on my leadership style.

When it comes to much of modern literature on leadership styles, I am a sceptic.  I do not believe in servant leadership, for example: it is a modernist fad.  No real leader is always authoritarian: that is simply bullying.  Transformational leadership is another incarnation of personality cults.

True leadership has no set form. It is not broken up into labels.  It is like water in a container.  Whatever shape that container is, that water fills it.  If a leader has ossified into a certain style regardless of the realities of the situation, it is as if that water has frozen into ice, and the container breaks.  If a leader has no values, it is like that water has turned into vapour, and no longer fills the container.  Leadership always considers three things: the goal, the values and the resources.  It is whatever is required to fulfill the goal, to adhere to the values, and to maximise the resources, including human resource.

Consider Napoleone di Bonaparte.  He is thought by many to be an epitome of leadership, and to an extent he was.  A man born to lesser nobility, who rose from a minor artillery officer to Emperor of France.  And yet, I consider him a failure.  He is a man who won numerous battles, but lost the war.  He died in exile, in St. Helena.  He left France bankrupt, still surrounded by enemies; and with an entire generation of sons and fathers lost to the nation.  Carl von Clausewitz understood this.  He was a Prussian general who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, including the famous Battle of Borodino.  In his famous treatise on military campaigns, Vom Kriege, he wrote, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”

Napoleon understood only war, and had no clear goal.  And that is a mistake many leaders make.  They get involved in the process.  They get emotionally attached to the product, the vehicle, or the institution.  It is like a man who enjoys cycling so much that he forgot to pay attention to where he is going and finds himself lost.  I never set out on anything without having an idea of where it will be several moves later.  I play chess, on the board and in the real world.  We make a move by thinking seven turns ahead.

Napoleon Bonaparte said that a leader is a dealer in hope.  In insurance, we are merchants of hope.  But selling hope alone is fraud.  There has to be a basis for it, and there has to be a consideration of ethics, values and principles.  Leadership is not about merely espousing values, but living it.  That requires a certain sense of certainty and emotional strength.

Where Napoleon excelled, was in his utilisation of resources.  He famously said that an army marches on its stomache.  Since he began as an artillery officer, he understood it intimately.  He pioneered innovative tactics using field guns.  He paid a lot of attention to the logistics of running an army.  Most importantly, he understood his greatest resource: his people.

The contention here is that people are, by their very nature, emotive and emotional.  This cult of personality is a double-edged sword.  Whilst his men fought like lions for him, particularly his famed Vieille Garde, it also meant that the entire institution, the edifice of state collapsed and created a vacuum when he was defeated.  That is a failure in leadership because there was no viable succession plan.

A leader is only as good as the people around him.  That requires either building them up, or recruiting the best, or, a bit of both.  The consideration with having competent people is that they are also leaders.  This means that we are not just supposed to be leaders of men, but leaders of leaders.  This requires leading, not from the front, but from the rear.  A successful leader always has a great lieutenant, or several.

Coming back to our theme, for Napoleon, that man was Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord.  Talleyrand rose from Agent-Generale of the Catholic Church in France, to First Minister of France, Napoleon’s chief diplomat and spymaster.  He eventually turned on Napoleon, and survived him to have a long and rich career.  Unlike Napoleon, Talleyrand understood the winds of change, and rode them successfully.  Whilst the public remembers Napoleon, students of leadership, and the arts of war, remember Talleyrand.

This brings me to my conclusion.  Success is not synonymous with fame.  From the stories of the Bible to the Epic of Gilgamesh, to Beowulf, to modern television, many characters, many of our heroes and idols are famous because they tried, they succeeded and they failed.  Elvis Presley and Bruce Lee are immortalised more for their unfulfilled potential than their successes.  That romance of the tragedy, our collective yearning for what ifs.  That is not what leadership is to me.  Leadership is quiet efficiency in achieving goals, quiet belief in our principles, and quiet confidence in what we have, resources and people.