History Lessons

Jonathan Gifford

Sujets

• Gestion et management

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) PTE LTD
• Date de parution: 01 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814312165
• Langue: English

Extrait

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 An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International
PO Box 65829 London EC1P 1NY United Kingdom
and
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Marshall Cavendish is a trademark of Times Publishing Limited
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The right of Jonathan Gifford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved
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The author and publisher have used their best efforts in preparing this book and disclaim liability arising directly and indirectly from the use and application of this book. All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain necessary copyright permissions. Any omissions or errors are unintentional and will, if brought to the attention of the publisher, be corrected in future printings.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-9-814-31216-5
Project managed by Cambridge Publishing Management Ltd
Printed and bound in Singapore by Times Printers Pte Ltd
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. CHANGING THE MOOD
Bernard Montgomery
Elizabeth I of England
Nelson Mandela
2. BOLDNESS OF VISION
Abraham Lincoln
Pericles of Athens
Winston Churchill
3. DOING THE PLANNING
Napoleon Bonaparte
Lee Kuan Yew
Martin Luther King
4. LEADING FROM THE FRONT
Horatio Nelson
Mustafa Kemal Atat rk
Muhammad Ali
5. BRINGING PEOPLE WITH YOU
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand P rigord
George Washington
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough
6. MAKING THINGS HAPPEN
Oliver Cromwell
George S. Patton
Zhou Enlai
7. TAKING THE OFFENSIVE
Hannibal Barca
Saladin
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
8. CREATING OPPORTUNITIES
Genghis Khan
Chiang Kai Shek
Marco Polo
Notes
Selected bibliography and further reading
INTRODUCTION
H istory Lessons starts 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 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 Mood is 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, 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 Vision probably 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 Planning is 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 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 You is 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 Happen is 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