Leadership in a Turbulent World: What We Can Learn from Warfare
By Tully Moss
We sometimes hear executives say, “Business has gotten incredibly difficult. The competition is so tough. It’s like war out there.”
Such statements grossly understate the horrors of war. But they do have a point: the onslaught of disruptive technologies, and ever-sharper and more agile competitors have made the life of executives maddeningly complex and challenging.
If we take these executives at their word, that business is ever more like war, can we learn anything about warfare that would be helpful?
One place to go for answers is World War II. It was a truly global war, the competition was fierce, and the costs were extremely high: more lives were lost in that war than in any previous war.
Rather than asking why the Allies won, we might flip the question and ask why the Nazis lost. It was not foreordained that they would lose. The Nazis had the best technology, the best generals, the best fighting techniques, and tremendous forward momentum. As of 1940, they had very much won. Virtually every country on continental Europe had been conquered or subdued; or, in the case of Italy and the Soviet Union, was an ally of Germany’s. Austria had been annexed. Spain was supportive. Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and France had all been conquered. Switzerland had claimed neutrality, as had Sweden. Continental Europe was either part of a German empire, or allied with it, or at least neutral.
With so much going for them, why did the Nazis fail?
The answer to that question holds insights for business. Amazingly, the Nazis lost sight of the two most important things in both warfare and business: people and strategy. They allowed ideology, biases, and prejudices to warp their sense of strategy. They demeaned or killed millions of people who could have helped them win the war. They were far too dependent on one leader, whose distorted sense of strategy led them into one colossal failure after another. And their approaches to competitive intelligence and supply chain management were shockingly lacking.
Many people believe Adolph Hitler, Germany’s supreme leader during World War II, was an insane imbecile. Not so, says the historian Dr. Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War. According to Dr. Roberts, Hitler was thought to have had a high IQ — he was a mine of information on tank speeds and other details about the war — and he was not a madman, at least not until the end. Dr. Roberts believes that, “Hitler did not lose the war because he was an imbecile or a madman. He lost the war because he was an indefatigable, incorrigible Nazi.”
By that, Dr. Roberts means that Hitler allowed Nazi ideology to fatally distort his view of strategy. Hitler, whenever the interests of the Nazi Party differed from those of the Wehrmacht, the Germany military, always prioritized his fascism, his Nazism, over the best interests of the Third Reich. He also saw the war entirely in ideological terms rather than strategic terms. Take, for example, his biggest strategic blunder: the 22 June 1941 invasion of Russia. Dr. Roberts shows us that in the three central reasons for this invasion, you see ideology trump strategy. First, Hitler’s intent was to build lebensraum (living space) for the German ubermensch, superman. Untermensch (lower humans, the Slavs he was invading) were to be used to build the great Nazi empire. Racial ideology, not strategy, was a primary driver. Second, Hitler had a political (not strategic) objective, which was to win the final struggle against Bolsheviks, against whom Hitler had been fighting since the 1920s. Third, over half of Europe’s Jews lived in the USSR, and Hitler was fixated on destroying them. Not one of these three rationales for invading the Soviet Union was based on sound principles of strategy. They were driven by Nazi ideology.
And so it went throughout the war: Hitler ignoring the advice of his generals, and time after time making decisions based on Nazi ideology, not strategy.
Massively compounding his mistakes of strategy were his decisions about people. At the beginning of the war, Germany probably had the world’s finest group of generals and, in the decades prior to the war, had among the world’s greatest scientists. But Hitler would appoint generals based on loyalty to him and Nazism rather than their being top-class. He also killed off a large portion of his workforce and created conditions under which Germany hemorrhaged talent. Between 1939 and 1945, the number of people working in German war factories fell from 39 million to 29 million, in part because they were conscripted, but also because Hitler decided to kill six million of his brightest workers (the Jews). There was also a massive brain drain as a result of Nazi ideology. The atomic bomb the U.S. created, that ended World War II? That was designed in good measure by European physicists (mostly Jewish) who had fled Europe for the U.S. That damage has lasted for generations: from 1901 to 1932, only six Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry went to Americans, while Germans received 16. After the War, that was reversed: between 1950 and 2000, 67 Americans received the Nobel prize in physics or chemistry, while only seven Germans did.
Then there were the colossal failures in intelligence. After the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, Hitler and his advisers were dismissive of the American threat. Their assumption was that the U.S. would concentrate its war efforts against Japan first. Hitler also assumed that the U.S., in his mind ruled by blacks and Jews, would not be able to fight effectively. He put ideology before his own experience fighting the Americans in World War I.
None of the senior Nazi officers knew America. The only one who had come to the US was Ribbentrop, who had attempted, unsuccessfully, to sell champagne in New York. The other Nazi officers listened to Ribbentrop, whose take on America was that it was devoid of culture and devoid of soldiers. When, Ribbentrop asserted, has a Jewified nation like America ever become a nation of fighters? Hitler told Molotov in 1940 that the earliest the Americans would be able to put troops in the Western theater was 1970. But by 1942, there were 250,000 Americans in North Africa fighting the Nazis.
In contrast to Hitler’s ideologically-driven approach to war, General George C. Marshall, Secretary of War for the United States, was pragmatic and strategically focused. He made one of the most far-sighted strategic decisions of the 20th century, which was to fight Germany first. It was not Germany that had attacked the United States, but Japan. The emotional decision would have been to fight Japan first. But Marshall kept his cool and put the priority on Germany. Without that focus, the United Kingdom may have fallen to Germany, and that would have vastly compounded the challenge of taking back the Continent.
Marshall also made a critically important decision about people. At the beginning of the War, the U.S. military had the reverse problem of the Germans. The Nazis started with perhaps the world’s finest collection of generals, and then Hitler began undermining them. The Americans started with a comparatively weaker set of generals: competent, perhaps, but older and more cautious. The War was their opportunity to prove themselves, and they were eager to go. But Marshall fired 200 senior officers. Why? He knew this was going to be an extremely difficult war, and he needed younger, more aggressive generals.
Have we learned from the mistakes of the past, or are we repeating them?
Is the United States repeating the mistakes of Nazi Germany? The U.S. is currently led by a man with an authoritarian streak (Trump) who is biased against certain ethnic groups (Muslims) and who appoints cabinet members and other senior government officials based on their loyalty to him and his ideology. He routinely distorts facts and ignores findings of the U.S. intelligence community and makes his decisions based on his instincts.
Despite these foreboding signs, the United States is unlikely to go the way of Nazi Germany, in good measure because, for all the people who support Trump, there are equal numbers who are vehemently opposed to him. The more probable outcome, at least in the short term, is dysfunction. Both the left and the right in America are intensely ideologically-driven, and we have seen the perils of this approach. One of America’s strengths has been its pragmatism, and if this were to be lost in an ideological bloodbath, it would not bode well for the nation.
What about business? Are there lessons for business in the mistakes of the Nazis? We don’t tend to think of companies as being ideologically-driven, but plenty of them have stumbled because they rigidly adhered to a view of their business that was fundamentally distorted. If we substitute the word motivation for ideology, the picture becomes clearer. A classic case of warped motivation would be the behavior of Wall Street firms leading up to the Great Recession of 2008. Their motivation, their ideology, was unadulterated greed. This clouded their perceptions of reality, so they couldn’t see the toxicity of the products they were producing. A number of them, such as Lehman Brothers, failed.
More recently, the battlefields of American business have been littered with the carcasses of companies that held on to their “ideologies” — dying business models — and failed to adapt. This is happening now in America’s retail apocalypse. As the preference for online shopping has accelerated, malls are becoming ghost towns. The technology battlefield may be the bloodiest of them all: scores of companies — think Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Lotus, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, RIM (Blackberry), Sony, WordPerfect, etc. — have held on too long to models that worked in the past and have not been sufficiently proactive about developing new models for the future.
Beyond hanging on to outmoded ideologies or business models, companies chronically underestimate the importance of getting the right people to lead a transformation. Too often, those who are selected for transformation initiatives are people who are simply available or those who toady to the leader. Transformation is difficult and no less than a world-class A-team is required. Precious few companies show they understand what this means.
The third major failure of the Nazis was intelligence, and in a parallel to the business community, it is surprising how few companies rigorously assess their competitive position. Many people have considered Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, to have been the greatest CEO of the last century. He was intensely focused on understanding the competitive position of GE’s businesses, and he relentlessly drove his managers to identify ways they could leapfrog their competitors. Not many companies come close to having Jack Welch’s focus on competitive intelligence — and consequently, not many have been able to match Welch’s track record.
We are in an era of accelerated, disruptive change. Does it call for unique approaches? Yes, particularly as it relates to technology and adapting to geopolitical shifts. But the lessons of war lead us back to the basics. In our frenzy to transform our companies, we need to be clear-eyed about the fundamentals: strategy, people, competitive intelligence. Keeping our perspective based on reality and not on emotions and outmoded ideology is tough. But to manage in turbulent times, this is essential.
© Tully Moss, 2018
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About the author:
Tully is well-versed in Harvard’s approach to business education. He has led numerous executive education programs utilizing Harvard Business Publishing materials and has taught over one thousand Asian managers and executives. He has been trained at Harvard Business School, having completed Parts I and II of Harvard’s Art & Craft of Discussion Leadership course. His facilitation work has covered issues such as leadership, innovation, marketing, change management, corporate strategy, and digital disruption.
Tully has close ties to Harvard: he is a moderator for Harvard Business Publishing, and he co-authored a Harvard Business School case study on the Philippines, entitled, “The Republic of the Philippines: The Next Asian Tiger?”
Tully brings to his facilitation work a rich perspective developed from over thirty years of management consulting. He has consulted in a broad array of services and manufacturing industries on issues such as business unit strategy, marketing strategy, organizational effectiveness, and mergers and acquisitions. He is skilled at improving go-to-market effectiveness through fact-based assessments of market positions, segmentation opportunities, value propositions, and sales and distribution channel opportunities. He also has experience in developing process improvements and change management programs. He has authored thought pieces on high performance companies, market trends in Asia, and mergers and acquisitions.
In addition to leading case study discussions, Tully is an accomplished coach. He has been certified by the International Coach Federation, and, for 360-degree assessments, has been certified by both Zenger Folkman and The Leadership Circle.
He has extensive experience consulting in North America, Europe, and Asia. His clients have included Fortune Global 500 corporations as well as small and medium-sized enterprises.
Tully received his MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and his bachelors, with honors, from Williams College. After graduating from Williams, he taught at a college in Hong Kong under a YALI grant.
