Historians on Leadership and Strategy: Case Studies From Antiquity to Modernity

This book examines the well-covered subject of leadership from a unique perspective: history's vast catalogue of leadership successes and failures. Through a collection of highly compelling case studies spanning two millennia, it looks beyond the classic leadership parable of men in military or political crises and shows that successful leadership cannot be reduced to simplistic formulae.
Written by experts in the field and based on rigorous research, each case provides a rich and compelling account that is accessible to a wide audience, from students to managers. Rather than serving as a vehicle for advancing a particular theory of leadership, each case invites readers to reflect, debate and extract their own insights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030260903

Book preview

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

M. Gutmann (ed.)Historians on Leadership and Strategyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26090-3_1

Introduction: The Value of the Historical Perspective for Leadership Studies

Martin Gutmann¹  

(1)

ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Martin Gutmann

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

In the introduction to Historians on Leadership and Strategy: Case Studies from Antiquity to Modernity, the editor argues that a historical perspective can enrich contemporary debates on leadership. The human past provides a deep and largely untapped reservoir of data and case studies for analysis from the perspective of leadership. Additionally, the use of history methodologies can lead to different answers to contemporary leadership studies questions.

Keywords

Leadership in historyNew leadershipLeadership studiesInfluenceInterdisciplinary studies

1 The Case for Historical Cases

1.1 A Tale of Two Generals

In early 1861, a long-seething political crisis escalated when seven southern states broke off from the United States to form the Confederate States of America. When hostilities broke out that April, few expected the Civil War to last long. President Abraham Lincoln, whose election the previous fall had sparked the southern secession, was determined to put an end to the rebellion swiftly and decisively. On 21 July 1861, he sent an army of some 30,000 Union troops south from Washington, DC, toward Confederate lines. His hopes for a speedy resolution to the conflict were quickly dashed. What would later be called the First Battle of Bull Run was a Union fiasco and set the stage for a new type of war. Masses of men armed with modern rifles and supported by powerful artillery could inflict damage on a new and dreadful scale. Lincoln realized that this type of war called for a new type of general, one who could combine technical expertise, organizational precision, and strategic vision. He knew just the man for the job. That night he sent a telegram ordering George McClellan to return from his posting out West to take command of the principal Union army, the Army of the Potomac (Goodwin 2005).

It would have been hard to find an individual with a more impressive resume. Every step in McClellan’s life before his appointment that summer night seems to have been engineered by destiny to prepare him for the task, from his enrollment at West Point at the age of 15 to his decorated career as a peacetime officer and subsequent success as a railway manager. The same week Lincoln sent the telegram ordering McClellan’s return to Washington, he signed a conscription order for a further 500,000 men. The Civil War would be fought by previously unthinkable numbers of men. Each of them had to be clothed, supplied, armed, trained, and deployed in a carefully coordinated dance. McClellan excelled in this role. In fact, he developed many of the structural conventions modern militaries are based on today.

By March of the following year, McClellan felt that his new army was ready to take the fight to the South. His plan was ambitious: to transport 120,000 soldiers across Chesapeake Bay and position them behind enemy lines, within striking distance of the South’s capital Richmond. McClellan orchestrated this daring plan flawlessly. All that was left for him to do was to brush the scattered and severely outnumbered Confederate soldiers out of the way, and the war would be over. What happened next seems at first entirely out of character with McClellan’s brilliance. In this simple task, of spurring his men on to push decisively against the enemy, he failed—utterly and completely. He hesitated, he second-guessed, and he worried that the enemy was superior in numbers and equipment, and, as a result, his army got bogged down (Sears 1992). For all his planning and organizational genius, McClellan could not get his soldiers to win in battle.

1.2 Understanding Leadership: In Theory and in Practice

Long before scientific inquiry into leadership came to dominate business school curricula and the talent management offices of global corporations, Lincoln articulated the inherent difficulty involved in finding and defining leadership. He said ironically of McClellan that he is a pleasant and scholarly gentleman [and] an admirable engineer, but he seems to have a special talent for a stationary engine (Catton 1998). With this, Lincoln singled out a real crux in understanding the leadership phenomenon. McClellan was, by all observable criteria, highly qualified to lead. He was tall, handsome, and well-spoken. He consistently enjoyed his men’s loyalty and respect. His resume was full of impeccable credentials and the requisite experience. Yet in the context of battle, when the symbolic engine had to be put in motion, none of this seemed to matter. Lincoln fired McLellan and tried out a series of other commanders until in Ulysses S. Grant, he found a man who got the job done with, in the President’s words, dogged pertinacity (Hay et al. 1997).

In 1990, more than a century after Lincoln fired McClellan, Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter published his classic article What Leaders Really Do. Kotter proposed that whereas management is about dealing with complexity, leadership is about dealing with change (2001). Put differently, management is the process of imposing structure, of planning, of writing budgets, of hiring, and of other tasks that give order to the complexity of organizational challenges. Leadership is about putting this into practice, about selling a vision, about dealing with unforeseen issues, about overcoming setbacks, and about motivating teams. The distinction between leadership and management can be difficult to spot in real life; most people have some competencies in both areas. McClellan represents that rare case that illustrates the difference. He was an extraordinary manager—one of the best the US military every produced. He was also a terrible leader.

The McClellan case, if recounted in its full details, could be unpacked further to reveal a host of relevant leadership insights. In this introduction, its purpose is more basic: to make the point that when looking for leadership insights, a real case is a good place to start. This is because leadership is a particularly tricky object of study. Physics and chemistry are governed by natural laws and can be described in their entirety in the abstract. Leadership, by its very nature, takes place in a social context involving at least two individuals. It is as such a highly complicated and subtle process that is easy to recognize—especially in its absence as the McLellan case demonstrates—yet difficult to quantify or describe in words. It is also highly context specific. Leadership is a necessary function not only in business, politics, and in the military, but also in the lowest ranks of companies, in informal groups of friends, in the classroom, and in the home. In each of these settings, leadership functions differently. Leadership is also personal and aspirational—we all want to be leaders, and yet we each bring a unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and background experiences to the table. For all of these reasons, leadership is a phenomenon that lends itself toward being studied in practice, a fact that explains why business schools and organizations privilege learning through case studies. In McClellan’s troubled command, the difference between leadership and management that Kotter labored to explain in theory comes vividly alive. We can all relate to a McClellan—or a Lincoln for that matter—and in reflecting on their experience, we gain a window onto our own leadership strengths and weaknesses.

1.3 The Rationale for a Historical Case Book

With an extensive pool of business leadership cases already available, why add more to the mix? This is a fair question and one to which McClellan again suggests an answer. In the corporate world of the past two decades, few buzzwords have enjoyed the staying power that leadership has. Finding, retaining, and training leaders are a corporate priority. McKinsey and Company warned at the end of the last century that global corporations were involved in a War for Talent because the knowledge economy required increasing numbers of highly competent individuals who could effectively mobilize their fellow workers in complex contexts. US companies alone spent $14 billion on leadership development in 2011 (Loew and O’Leonnard 2012). By 2017 some estimated the figure at $50 billion (Feser et al. 2017). However, all of this recent hype around leadership should not lead us to believe that leadership itself is a modern phenomenon. McClellan was fired over a century before Kotter wrote his article. And long before Lincoln wrestled with his underperforming general, individuals rallied others behind them in order to perform collective tasks, such as hunting mammoths or digging irrigation canals. Leadership is and always has been a human necessity. The world’s first work of fiction, the Epic of Gilgamesh, tells the tale of a warrior king who neglects his duties to his subjects. The great thinkers of the ancient world, from Plato to Sun Tzu, dwelled on the responsibilities of those in charge.

With this in mind, it is surprising that the large pool of leadership cases written in the past two decades with the aim of training a new generation of leaders is largely situated in the contemporary corporate world. Despite the great value that the dozens of cases about Jack Welch’s tenure at GE or the success story that is Starbucks undoubtedly deliver, they are not representative of the full spectrum of leadership challenges which humans have faced and will continue to face. Remedying this deficit by enriching the pool of available cases is one of the primary motivations of this book. The authors firmly believe that while cases on Silicon Valley start-ups are valuable tools in management education, truly transferable lessons can only be drawn by examining leadership in as broad a context as possible.

This is not to suggest that how leaders are chosen, what is expected of them, or how they lead has not changed—it has, dramatically so (Wilson 2016). In fact, these very changes invite us to think more critically about what leadership means today and the reasons for its evolution. Nor would we suggest that this book is the first to provide case studies of historical subjects. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership: In Turbulent Times is a great example of the power of stories from the past used to generate fresh insights (2018). Similarly, Nancy Kohn, a Harvard professor, has produced a steady stream of high-quality business cases focused on a variety of historical figures, such as the turn of the century African-American entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker (Koehn et al. 2011).

This book places a portfolio of 13 compelling historical leadership cases in the hands of management students, scholars, and professionals. The leadership cases in this book span two millennia and several of the globe’s major regions and vary greatly in scope and thematic focus (more on which below). Though concepts of leadership vary in scholarship, the broad definition offered by Peter Northouse guides the cases in this book: leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal (2013). As such, we do not see leadership as confined to the political and military elite. It is something humans of all walks of life practice and experience. Moreover, while leadership can be examined in a nonstrategic context—in the day-to-day interactions between a manager and subordinates, for example—many of the challenges presented in this book have a strategic dimension. Strategy is often defined in a business or military context. The founder of the Boston Consulting Group, Bruce Henderson, defined it as a, deliberate search for a plan of action that will develop a business’s competitive advantage and compound it (Henderson 1989). Liddell Hart, the famous British military historian, defined strategy as the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy (Hart 1967). Here too—as with leadership in general—the case can easily be made that strategy, seen more broadly as the planning and allocation of resources to achieve an organizational aim, is applicable beyond the boardroom and the battlefield. Like leadership, it takes place at all levels of society—a fact that is reflected in the cases in this book.

2 The Evolution of Leadership Studies

Modern management studies emerged in the wake of the industrial revolution. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, a book that has been singled out as one of the most influential of the twentieth century. Taylor, an American businessman turned consultant, systematically examined how changes in organization and process influenced productivity. Rather than improving machines, Taylor’s focus was on the work of the humans who operated them. Taylorism, as it became known, revolutionized manufacturing. In the 100 years since Taylor’s seminal book, management scholars have continued to quibble over the optimal form of organizing businesses, but the basic principle he set out remains: Managers have the power to increase efficiency and effectiveness by optimizing production processes. While Taylor and his many disciples emphasized the manager’s role in organizing the structures and processes of the business, other scholars set out to understand the subtleties of how these managers related to their workers. These early leadership studies functioned in the mold of what later came to be called the great man theory. Leadership, these scholars believed, was a quality some men were born with, and it was the leader’s duty, in the words of a group of experts writing in the 1920s, to induce obedience, respect, loyalty and cooperation (quoted in Northouse 2013). The challenge for early leadership scholars was thus less to describe and understand the leadership process than to perfect methods for identifying men predisposed to be leaders. Their job was to pick out the great man from the crowd and enable him to induce obedience more effectively.

Leadership studies have come a long way since then and has anchored itself securely in psychology departments and business schools around the world. It has become more inclusive and more nuanced. We now know that leadership can (to a degree) be learned (Avolio 2005). We also know that effectively mobilizing followers—inspiring, motivating, and influencing them—requires more subtle tactics than the threat of sanctions or an emphasis on inducing obedience (Northouse 2013). Beyond such points, the subject has diverged greatly, with scholars studying a variety of aspects of leaders and the leadership process. This introduction cannot fully outline the complexities and conclusions of the prodigious outpouring of scholarly work of the past few decades. Instead, it will suffice to make the point that as a field of study, leadership covers a lot of different ground. In fact, already by 1991, one group of scholars estimated that there were 65 discrete classification systems for defining and studying leadership (Fleischman et al. 1991).

In an effort to impose a basic taxonomy on the subject, Keith Grint proposed in his 2005 book Leadership: Limits and Possibilities that questions of leadership could be located in one of four clusters:

1.

Who leaders are and what makes them leaders

2.

What leaders achieve that makes them leaders

3.

Where leaders operate that makes them leaders

4.

How leaders get things done that makes them leaders (quoted in Jackson and Parry 2011)

Even within each of these four categories, however, the approach to the subject and the conclusions drawn vary. For example, on the subject of Who leaders are, an early emphasis among scholars was placed on the personality traits possessed by successful leaders. Exemplary of this was Ralph Stogdill’s 1949 survey of 140 studies on leadership traits from the beginning of the century through the end of the war, a process he repeated and expanded in 1974. His findings suggested that leadership correlates with ten personality traits, including drive, vigor, risk-taking, and self-confidence" (Stogdill 1974). Other scholars have resisted the emphasis on deep-seated personality traits and focused instead on the skill sets or behaviors of leaders (Mumford et al. 2000). The other three clusters of study outlined by Grint show a similarly complex landscape of sub-questions and conclusions.

The current book is not positioned within any one of Grint’s four clusters. It is case based, so readers with an inclination toward one particular line of questioning may find insight and inspiration in the same case as a reader of a different persuasion. Nonetheless, as a whole, the cases in this book resonate with two recent developments in the field. First, in response to what they perceive as an underlying persistence of outdated great man tendencies, a group of prominent leadership scholars has recently called for a New Psychology of Leadership. Recognizing leadership as a process between two actors—not something that resides in one of them—Alexander Haslam and his colleagues argue that leadership is above all about creating a shared identity and, by extension, that good leadership is always about how leaders and followers come to see each other as part of a common team or group. (2011). Second, scholars of a parallel movement in leadership studies, Authentic Leadership, have argued that there is no one definitive leadership trait, style, or behavior but that individuals need to develop as leaders in accordance with their own personalities, experiences, and professional contexts (Mayo 2018). Authentic Leadership unifies an intrapersonal perspective with an interpersonal one—that is, the questions of who the leader is and what he or she does with in the relational context of leader and followers (Northouse 2013). A historical perspective on leadership fits well with the impulses generated by New Psychology of Leadership and Authentic Leadership scholars and can promote the aspects they have identified as particularly promising for the further development of the subject.

3 Leveraging History

Academic disciplines are enablers. They have allowed modern universities to channel teaching and research into concentrated topical channels: the study of people in groups (sociology), the study of the human past (history), the study of the distribution of scarce resources (economics), and the study of value-adding organizations (management studies), for example. Leadership studies, while not a traditional academic discipline, has nonetheless found a predominant academic home: psychology. The use of common terminology and conventions, the exchanging of ideas at annual conferences, and the selection and compilation of state-of-the-field research in top journals have catalyzed inquiry in each of the just-mentioned disciplines. However, academic disciplines can also constrain. When everyone asks similar questions and draws from the same pool of concepts, out-of-the-box thinking can be stifled. Recognizing this limitation, numerous institutions have promoted interdisciplinary study and research programs in the past decade. Aligning incentives and overcoming disciplinary cultural barriers can be difficult, but where interdisciplinary research and teaching have worked—nanotechnology and the concept of postmodernity provide two good examples—the results have been groundbreaking (Jacobs 2009).

The case for bringing history and leadership studies closer together is compelling. This is not to suggest that leadership scholars never look to the past—some of them have (Bass 2008). At the same time, some historians and other scholars, such as sociologists and anthropologists, have begun to write more explicitly about leadership. However, the potential for more substantive exchange is there—a potential this book makes no claim to even remotely address in full. A view to history cannot solve all the open questions regarding leadership. However, it can provide scholars and practitioners with a new source of cases from which to reflect on and bring a fresh perspective to the leadership conundrum (Mukunda 2012; Gutmann 2018). Moreover, historians operate under different paradigms than psychologists and other classical leadership scholars and have pursued an independent line of inquiry that, while not directly commenting on leadership, has much to contribute to its study.

Historical scholarship is, quite obviously, framed along a time axis. Even inquiries into one discrete event, such as the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, will examine the immediate, mid, and long-term historical drivers that underlay that event. They will also very often trace the ripples of the event into later times. But, in addition to this obvious time focus, history scholarship’s traditional appreciation for three complexities—social dimensions, causality, and context—makes it particularly relevant to the study of leadership questions.

3.1 Social History: Or Seeing Leaders Everywhere

The great Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote of his craft in 1840 that the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here (1840). Many history enthusiasts today may agree with this sentiment and believe intuitively that if one is interested in why events of the past unfolded as they did, one need look no further than Alexander the Great, Chinggis Khan, Napoleon, or Winston Churchill. Professional historians, however, will disagree. Over one hundred years of historical research shows that this privileging of an exceptional few is a misrepresentation. As we will see below and later on in the cases in this book, many prominent leaders were not as in control as they and posterity like to believe; instead, various forces acted to constrain and direct their efforts. Thus, an appreciation for larger social structures and how they influence and constrain a leader’s room for maneuver is a direct contribution the field of history can make to questions of leadership. Historians have long recognized that the great events of history—the lesser ones too, for that matter—were often shaped by the decisions and efforts of many unknown actors.

This dimension is particularly pronounced in so-called social histories. The great American historian Howard Zinn, for example, chose to write a book on the history of the United States with the story of the discovery from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, […and] of the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem (1999). While other historians have taken issue with Zinn’s socialist leanings, no contemporary historian would refute his pronouncement that the New Deal was shaped by more individuals than just Franklin D. Roosevelt. The masses of people who lived through this period of American history were not mere extras; they played an active role in shaping the events they lived through. Moreover, Zinn and others have shown that episodes such as the Great Depression, which formed the backdrop to the New Deal, saw a host of unofficial and un-appointed leaders emerge in social movements, factories, and universities. This broader perspective makes historians natural companions of the leadership scholars who have worked to undo the great man theory of leadership. There are leaders at all levels of society and we are all, at different times in our lives, leaders and followers.

3.2 Causality

A recurring meta-question for historians is that of causality. Why did things happen the way they did? Another way to think about causality is in terms of influence: How can one actor influence an external environment, and how does that environment direct or constrain that actor? Thus, for example, while some psychologists have tried to understand Nazism and the Holocaust through a diagnosis of Adolf Hitler’s pathologies, historians have shown the complex layer of interplay between Hitler’s intentions and broader structures in German and European history (Kershaw 2000). It is now clear, for example, that the unfolding of the Holocaust was shaped by a multilayered and interlinked set of circumstances beyond any single human’s control. This does not reduce responsibility: Hitler and a series of high-ranking Nazi officials very much intended to murder millions of Jews and others they deemed undesirable, and thousands of Germans and other Europeans willingly helped implement the scheme. But it has become clear that one cannot explain the Holocaust and why it unfolded in the exact path that it did merely by looking into Hitler’s psychological makeup. Hitler’s actions were constrained by the outcome of battles, and his plans were enabled by a European-wide openness to an authoritarian reordering (Mazower 1999). At the same time, while Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust, he had no direct influence on the cynically inventive German technicians who adopted the use of the fumigation gas Cyclone B in enclosed shower rooms as a tool for mass murder.

The interplay between human influence and forces beyond human control is not unique to the Second World War. The terrible famine that struck India in the 1870s was the result both of an El Niño cycle—a phenomenon outside of human control—and of British decisions to produce opium, tea, and cotton on what had previously been subsistence-agricultural land. The environment and humans together created the famine that killed some 29 million people (Davis 2001). Historians refer to this interplay as agency versus structure. In other words, a key question for historians concerned with any given historical event is how much agency did an individual (or individuals) have, and how much of its unfolding was due to forces beyond their control? The implications of this perspective for questions of leadership are profound. Whether one looks at the traits, behavior, or skill set of a given leader, it seems equally important to ask how much that leader actually contributed to a successful—or unsuccessful—outcome and how much was out of their hands. Indeed, as one scholar has recently concluded, the impact of a leader on organizational outcomes is often less profound than we tend to assume (Mukunda 2012).

3.3 Context

A common refrain maintains that we should learn from the past, so as not to repeat history’s mistakes. When Saddam Hussein threatened the peace and stability of the Middle East in the 1990s, George Bush justified the US intervention with the lesson of Munich. Few historians, however, would approve of this nod to the 1938 conference at which Britain, France, and Italy sacrificed Czechoslovakia for an additional year of peace in Europe. The context of any individual event is too unique to allow a blanket one-to-one comparison with a later one. The eye for context among history-focused scholars can also contribute to studies of leadership. Leadership scholars have long acknowledged that different contexts call for different leadership qualities—a phenomenon referred to by leadership scholars as situational leadership (Hersey and Blanchard 1977). Despite this, the pool of cases used in leadership training has remained largely limited to contemporary business scenarios.

The course of human experience is vast and diverse. It is not nearly as linear as we like to think. In the contemporary observer’s mind, there is a subtle tendency to see the past as having led inevitably and directly to the present—to the nation state, to capitalism, and to a fossil-fuel economy—and to see events in history as mere tick marks in the path that led to today. This does not correspond to the actual unfolding of history. The Ming Dynasty in China lasted from 1368 to 1644—longer than the United States has existed as a country. That age in Chinese history has been called by historians one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history (quoted in Fan 2016). Supported by a professionally trained civil service, the Ming rulers oversaw a flowering of technological innovation—such as the development of iron smelting and gunpowder cannons—a pottery industry that was the envy of the world and a blossoming of arts and literature. Ming China is an age unto itself, an example of human endeavor and organization as deep and complex as any in our world today. Yet hardly anything is remembered of it except by specialist historians. While it would be absurd to draw a direct leadership lesson for today from the experience of a Ming ruler, it is equally absurd to derive universal leadership principles from a handful of contemporary business cases. To ferret out enduring lessons about leadership, we must probe as wide a context as possible. This context can be found in history.

The historian’s predilection for context has yet another application in leadership studies. We saw in the case of McClellan that his leadership traits were poor predictors of his leadership outcomes—a fact which leadership scholars concluded a century later (Katz 1974). The opposite can be true as well. McClellan’s eventual successor, Ulysses S. Grant, was to all outward appearances entirely lacking in leadership qualities. Grant, in contrast to McClellan, was awkward by nature. When he arrived in Washington for his appointment in 1863, the receptionist at his hotel tried to send him to sleep in the attic—seeing in his ragged appearance a vagabond rather than the country’s future supreme military commander. The following day, when asked by Lincoln to address a crowd of well-wishers gathered in the White House, Grant uttered a few incomprehensible mumblings before departing prematurely. He did not command his audience, as we would expect of a leader. In his business ventures before the war, he had failed; as president after the war, he struggled. Despite all these deficits, he excelled in war. And for this fact, Lincoln was willing to overlook all of his shortcomings. Leadership abilities, as Grant makes clear, cannot inherently and necessarily be transferred from one context to another.

4 The Cases

Neither Grant nor his unfortunate predecessor McClellan will feature in the pages to come. Instead the focus will fall on a different group of men and women, each of whom faced a particular challenge within a context that will be unfamiliar to most of us today. Beyond this, each case differs from the others across a number of dimensions. The scope and nature of the challenges are unique to each case. Some cases play out in days; others span decades. Some cases deal with life-and-death crises, others with less pronounced but no less complicated challenges. The cases vary in the type of leader they examine, with some following classical protagonists—officers at war and business managers in turbulent times—and others focusing on more obscure leaders, such as a school director under the Nazi regime or a group of IRA prisoners. Each case bears certain similarities to others in distant times and regions and, yet, when measured along other dimensions, aligns more closely with an entirely different set of cases. This fact is exactly what makes the collection such a powerful tool for studying leadership—time and culture inevitably impart a stamp on the leadership context but cannot obscure common threads across the ages.

In keeping with the tried and true style of case authorship, the studies in this book do not foreground the author’s own analysis. Instead, each case follows the same framework: (1) a description of the leadership challenge, (2) a rich retelling of the leadership story, followed by (3) the author’s own analysis. By first presenting the leadership challenge and then describing in rich detail the unfolding of the leader’s experience, each case invites the reader to reflect on and analyze it independently. The framework should not be mistaken for simplification. Researching and writing at the highest level of academic standards require much domain-specific expertise, and each case is written by a historian or historical writer with in-depth knowledge of the period in question and the events described, gained through exhaustive research and engagement with other scholars. In the third and final section, the author’s own analysis is meant to serve as one opinion on the matter, rather than the final word.

The cases are presented in reverse chronological order. While they could be ordered along any number of characteristics, doing so would artificially foreground one dimension of each case above the others. In chronology we find a neutral ordering. In moving backward, the reader can progress from a context they are more familiar with toward one in which they are not. Part I presents three cases from the post–Second World War period. Part II and its two cases take place in the context of the rise of fascist regimes in Europe and the Second World War. The four cases in Part III are situated in the period of the Industrial Revolution, the period of rapid transformation that began in the 1750s and saw the harnessing of new forms of energy in the service of mass production, along with parallel upheavals in political, social, and economic orderings. Finally, Part IV spans thousands of years, from the age of the ancient Greeks to the politics and culture of the Mongolian Empire and the English royal family. The lessons to be learned from each case are unique, and it is up to the reader to decide how transferable they are to his or her own leadership environment. Taken together, this collection makes up a unique leadership portfolio, one that invites readers to discover new perspectives on a subject they may feel they already know well.

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Part IThe Postwar Period

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

M. Gutmann (ed.)Historians on Leadership and Strategyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26090-3_2

Leadership in War and Genocide: Roméo Dallaire in Rwanda

Michael Geheran¹   and David Frey¹  

(1)

United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA

Michael Geheran (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

David Frey

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

Throughout history, the ethical application of violence, in tandem with an institutional culture that emphasizes obedience and authority, forces officers to confront moral dilemmas that are unique to the military profession, putting soldiers under stress which civilians may find difficult to imagine. Deployments to combat zones create unparalleled levels of fear, stress, and uncertainty, thrusting troops into sometimes daily confrontations with life-or-death situations. In such highly ambiguous environments, a leader’s character—who they are morally and ethically as a person—has a significant impact on their decision-making and the choices they make under duress. Supported by an extensive body of recently declassified source material from the UN Archives in New York, this study examines the actions of Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, force commander for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), during the Rwandan genocide. It argues that character is a central element in preparing leaders to lead under extreme conditions when they encounter the unforeseen.

Keywords

RwandaDallaireHutuTutsiGenocideCharacter

List of Abbreviations

DPKO

Department of Peacekeeping Operations (United Nations)

FAR

Forces Armées Rwandaises

FLQ

Front du liberation du Quebec

HPZ

Humanitarian Protection Zone

Lt Gen

Lieutenant General

MGen

Major General

MRND

Mouvement Revolutionnaire Nationale pour le Development

ROE

Rules of Engagement

RPF

Rwandan Patriotic Front

UN

United Nations

UNAMIR

United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda

UNCIVPOL

United Nations Civilian Police

1 The Leadership Challenge: Decision-Making in the Fog of Civil War and Genocide

At 2030 hours on 6 April 1994, the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was killed when his plane was shot down on its final approach to Kigali Airport, setting in motion the events that would culminate in the Rwandan genocide. Habyarimana’s assassination was the pretext for Hutu extremists to seize control of the Rwandan government and derail a fragile peace agreement with the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Within 24 hours, a grotesque killing spree of immense proportions engulfed the country, and the civil war, dormant since August 1993, resumed. Extremists began killing Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu in well-planned attacks across Rwanda. As violence erupted throughout the country, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), a 2500-man force commanded by Canadian Major General Roméo Dallaire, found itself isolated, outnumbered, and outgunned, and completely unprepared to mitigate the tragedy unfolding around it. The civil war had rendered UNAMIR’s mandate obsolete; its peacekeeping mission was officially over. Two weeks later, the UN Security Council, which included the Rwandan Ambassador who belonged to the Hutu extremist faction, ordered Dallaire to prepare for a complete withdrawal from Rwanda. Less