September 18th, 2006
Bleah ... have you ever noticed how heads of business—those running anything larger than a mom-n-pop bakery or bookstore (and sometimes even down to that size)—use military metaphors to compare their business "decisions" to some of the larger military figures' campaigns in history? (Though not all, I notice: They never seem to pick Charlemagne's campaigns, for example, though they were as great in his time as, er, say Ghengis Khan's conquests were in his.)
I guess that the folks who somehow end up having to helm a business ship sort of reach a view of themselves and how they relate to the rest of the world and decide that if they were in the military and at war they would be leading armies into battle. Perhaps they are right, probably not. If war teaches nothing else, it is that the middle managers ruin everything, including lives in the thousands.
Right, but from the viewpoint of some dude whose company has just grown from 3 employees to 30 or 300, the world has suddenly become his oyster. He has just metaphorically stormed through all of Europe, and tomorrow the world. See, he thinks that the expansion he has seen is indicative of the expansion he'll always see.
No height restriction. Pyramid scheme. Lets put another lungful of air into the balloon.
And as they perch on the giddying heights of their recent expansion, they start to consider themselves the Next Napoleon Bonaparts of Business. They think maybe their system is the right system, and nothing can stop them now. They are happy to ignore the fickle winds of business (I mean, war), and they instead think that their success is all about themselves. And, like all self-made men, they worship their creator.
Tear off that chiffon, Josephine. Daddy Napoleon just crushed the competition, and now he's got an itch to scratch.
But why is it that Napoleon is so often cited as the great war genius who should be emulated by corporate heads?
Hmmph, speaking personally, I wouldn't like having to work for someone who took a mostly-abandoned city (Moscow) at all costs, sat around while its inhabitants set it afire, and then retreated through scorched Earth constantly harassed by a swarm of pissed off soldiers from the opposing army. What does it say about a corporate leader that he wants to be just like the guy who lost 90% of his army to take a military objective that he couldn't hold onto for more than a month?
Sure, Napoleon had most of Europe for a little while ... but he couldn't hang on to any of it, and the loss of life from military and civilian ranks was unimaginable. And in the end he lost it all anyhow, after his neighbors got tired of his expansive blockading imperialist greed and self-glorification.
Business-wise, keep taking and growing, and people will only tolerate your expansion so long. Pretty soon they'll gang up on you in some sort of corporate Battle of Waterloo. It's inevitable; it's human nature. And you know that can't end well, no matter who wins, right?
Napoleon's army was literally decimated by the weather and the Russian population. Half a million of them marched East towards Moscow. Fifty thousand made it back to France, and you can just imagine how ineffective those few would have been by the time they got home. You won't recover from that soldier's life, ever.
Napoleon himself, of course, made it home sooner and in comfort and warmth because ... er ... he was the man running the slaughter. When you jockey into a position of power, you are allowed to eat and drink only the finest while you mismanage good honest people to horrific suffering and death. Only the psychotic live well, you know.
So the corporate heads that I have had the displeasure of listening to babble and rant at all-hands meetings, and the Napoleon wanna-bes that have wasted my hours and brain cells with explanations of policy that had nothing to do with reality should abandon their Napoleon complexes.
Instead, they should all aspire to emulate Stalin or Hitler. At least it would be more honest.
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