Leadership

Introduction

Let us put straight one common error; defensive action is not fragility. It can give the seeming impression of weakness, which could prove advantageous to catch your adversary off-guard, but such an impression is merely a ruse that misleads the enemy into rash aggression. Defensive warfare is calculated intelligence, a high-powered mode of execution. It consists in being ingenious and mindfully inexpensive, engaging only in the vital battles. Consequently, careful withdrawal is essential, you must know how to compel the enemy into misguided hostility, draining his force for a catastrophic counter-blow. As a substitute to undisguised antagonism, which is often disapproved of, defensive action allows you to let the enemy initiate battle, leveraging his errors by playing the waiting game. Through feigning weakness, you compel an unwise attack. Through feigning more powerful, you dissuade your enemy from striking. Defensive action, then, is transforming weakness (or seeming weakness) into control and conquest.

Reward and Sacrifice

When war is inescapable, fight on your conditions. Identify their shortcomings and leverage them wisely. Furthermore, battle on your conditions means that it will be more costly for them and more reasonable for you. You must know, then, how to entice them into your territory by appealing to their concerns. An attractive objective clouds judgement, diluting likely trouble and accentuating potential profit. Thus, if you could coerce your enemy into an alluring pitfall, you can exhaust him to the point of miscalculation. The lack of energy that comes with fatigue will generate error and unexpected drawbacks which are beneficial. It is important to discern, moreover, that the more desired the prize, the more recompense in investigating its sacrifice. Both the indefinable and clear costs must be examined beforehand. In this manner, you are essentially exercising foresight to consider all conceivable variables unclouded by the appeal of the prize. Often, the very allure of a reward will muddle your judgement of its complexity and misleads you into overlooking its cost. If you look back through history, you will find that it is pervaded with the remains of people who paid no attention to the expenses of potential winnings.

Assail their Weakness with Power

There is a general truth in warfare; attack their weak points with your strong points. A group is neither fully strong nor weak. All forces have vulnerable flaws, no matter how indestructible their external morale may seem. In the grand scheme of things, weakness will always have a fragment of concealed strength that could be expanded and compounded, even in the feeble forces. Conversely, a recognized strength, such as a large army, could prove a shortcoming in its conclusion. There is always an element of unpredictability that could potentially transfigure advantage and limitation. In the first place, you must know where you’re aiming at before you strike, evaluate where your enemy’s weaknesses lie; governmental issues, lack of confidence, conceit, egotism etc. During your appraisal, concealment of your shortcomings is important in the conservation of your long-term strength. Once you have identified the enemy’s vulnerable points, you must calculatedly and repeatedly attack them. If you want to dispirit your enemy’s force, exploit their vulnerability and devour it. Your aggression will lead to their depletion, which will uncover new vulnerabilities. The wise calibration of strong and weak points is indispensable to knowingly break down your enemy. To sum up, locate their vulnerabilities and leverage your power to capitalize on their weak points.

Creativity and Ingenuity

A warrior is ingenious, he employs his strengths innovatively and shifts his emphasis on what is in his power. He preserves equilibrium through deliberate restraint, regeneration and endurance. Warriors, possessing exceptional foresight, vigilantly orient themselves for the long term, planning ahead of time to ensure they avoid unpredicted exploitation and place themselves in the most favourable situation. Resources and riches are beneficial when put into good service but groups who apparently have a surplus of resources are disposed to grow indolent and foreseeable as a consequence. The abundance of materials and assets compels them to have a dependency on their benefits, setting aside understanding and the grand design. They deal with difficulty by accumulating more resources, neglecting the benefits they already have and never finding a use for it through their lack of ingenuity. Thus, a profusion of assets deprives you of necessity and dulls your creative faculty, the same faculty that stimulates resourcefulness.

Let us presume that your enemy is your equivalent, under such circumstance, resourcefulness is more important than acquiring more stock. Conversely, if your enemy is not your equivalent and you have more resources, operating inexpensively is not a choice but a prerequisite. There will be times where disregarding your virtues and maximising resourcefulness will prove most advantageous. People such as Picasso advocated the notion of acting deprived irrespective of how wealthy you are. You see, the impoverished can teach us that creativity stems from destitution and there is substantial value to be gained from having less.

Ends Justify the Means

A plan is only worthwhile so long as you have a means to justify it. If your plan is to make a million dollars in a decade but your means to obtain it does not align with your end-goal, this is simply wishful thinking. Flip the script and evaluate your resources before initiating a master plan to fulfil it. What resources do you have in your possession? Do they justify your end-goal? Hannibal’s operation continually started out with assessing his forces’ structure and means and that of the enemy’s, all the assorted elements and particular parts of the enemy’s force and environment. The appraisal would lay out the basis for his plan of action and more importantly, the desired ends for this course of action. As a synopsis, Hannibal repeatedly attuned his ends to the means through calculated judgement of both his force and his adversary’s.

Give yourself space to profoundly deliberate on what resources you have at your disposal, grounding yourself in reality rather than wishful thinking. Figure out where your benefits lie and how they can contribute effectively to your ends, understand thoroughly what your capabilities are as well as those of the group. If you’re leading a group of people, you must know their fundamental temperament and morale and consider how to ingeniously put them to good use. Once you have gathered the relevant intelligence, you simply attune your ends accordingly. The formula, then, is the accumulation of useful information related to your resources and the diligent planning and adjustment of the ends to the means.

---

Rigidity in War

War is not only about circumventing failure but also about defeating your adversary in a heroic fashion. In strategy, the element of structural organization is very consequential. There is nothing more immobilizing to a group than the appearance of disorganization. The sense of untidiness that comes with disarray is almost dispiriting to the members and the general morale of the group is inadvertently affected by the lack of structuring. The flowing, swift and versatile groups are the visionaries who are actually destined for triumph. If you have a propensity, as a leader, to overly restrain your group and attempt to interrelate every aspect of its development, you will simply bind yourself to what has been buried in history. That is to say, that forging a rigid structure that lacks adequate flexibility to adapt congruously to the conditions will only hold back the group. Rigidity in war is rather fleeting, its unbending nature will eventually collapse once it finds itself unable to bend any further. Furthermore, this characteristic generally lacks the balance and stability to preserve its composure amidst the conflict of war. Thus, the element of adaptability envelops more strength and command in the group.

Divide to Live, Combine to Fight

The principle: If you want to live; divide. If you want to fight; combine. The reality is that most people would, by preference, want to mimic a method than act unaccompanied. For it takes more nerve and self-government to take action without a safety net, discarding your fixation with recipes and mechanical reasoning. If you want to surpass the common people, understand that the quintessence of strategy is not a step-by-step system, it is deliberately being in a position where you have more choices to decide on than your adversary. Strategy is more about positioning and less about tying yourself to one favourable solution. Ideal positioning is having multiple alternatives at your disposal contingent upon how conditions unfold. Positioning connects well with having excellent foresight. If you lack the necessary prudence to think ahead of time in order to swiftly place yourself in the optimal position, you will either be late or you will fail to consider it. Foresight allows you to orient yourself carefully in advance, anticipating potential plots before they happen and being at the right time and place to hold the upper hand. In Sun Tzu’s Art of War, this position is termed ‘shih’.

It is of great importance for the superior leader and the developing warrior to acknowledge that recoursing to an inefficient stratagem is still more reasonable than negligence and passivity. Moreover, if the leaders await directives, an advantageous position will not be utilized under any circumstance. A real warrior knows when to set aside his assigned commands, this is the mark of sovereignty. For, the surest way to ravage self-control is by pampering your warriors and behaving under the assumption that they are indistinguishable. In doing so, you are too inviting and encouraging infighting. Triumph is the byproduct of control, instruction and superior quality. Shallow affability is simply inferior to success, forming vigorous relationships grounded in fortitude. The signification is simple: Rigidity makes you immovable, fluidity grants you diverse recourse and possibility.

Adaptability and Swiftness

To arrange your group for adaptability and swiftness, your structure must be pliable. Thus, you should partition your corps into distinct groups that are able to function and adjudicate independently. The morale of the crusade must be instilled in your group, making them impossible to stop or prevent. Identify and entrust the expedition and let the heroism of the group reveal itself. Napoleon had a strategy whereby he coerces his enemy to diverge his forces inadvertently. In doing so, he shatters their organization and forces them to split off. The difference lies in the structure, if your enemy’s body lacks versatility, segregation will be detrimental. You don’t want to find yourself in a condition where forced segregation is imposed on you by your adversary, you should structure your squad accordingly and avoid involuntary division.

Remember: Tell them what to carry out but not how to act. If you give people leeway, their creativity will confound you. It takes a certain audacity to moderately disengage and permit a degree of unpredictability. Nonetheless, through subdivision, reduced control will grant you movability, the apex accumulator. Your strategic aims, then, must be coherent to impart operations to multiple units within your group, letting them define the means to succeed. Make it entirely obvious to your group that counter-action to command is not insubordination. To sum up, inventiveness is of great importance, it must be inculcated and fostered in your men to make them more resilient towards the turn of events. Strength of character is resilience and independence, heroic properties of battle.

---

“Boldness governed by superior intellect is the mark of a hero.”

Carl von Clausewitz

Exceptional leaders influence people without making them feel controlled by an external authority, thus they are both shrewd and understated in favourable doses. If you hold an authoritative position, your orders should be stimulating and understandable, attentively focused on the group, not your vanity. Your method and course of command determine your triumph or downfall. Ill-defined direction is indiscernible and until it gets to the battleground, it will be long-overdue. Meagre leadership results in misguided action that’s based on people’s egotism. Vague direction causes people to act in accordance with their bigotry, stirring further disarray. Your mode of governance should be attuned to the deficiencies of the comrades in your group. Do not fail to spot your group’s flaws and count on instinct, it is not practical. Grand leaders are conscientious and aware, understanding the nuts and bolts of differing characters and arranging accordingly. Hence, if you fail to attune, your trail of command will almost surely collapse. Moreover, A leader with a flexible nature is of great benefit. Changeability is open to change in relation to the conditions and a commander with said trait has adept leverage that shapes the versatility of his group into a powerhouse. Remember: Insanity is an anomaly in human beings but a notable law in groups.

Leaders are permitting self-constraint by present-day politics, alluring them into a mode of conduct that clashes with one of the most momentous laws of war; directive union. In other words, the unification and harmony of ordered instruction. A productive means for catastrophe is segregated leadership. It has been the product of the most prominent conquests in former times. A sure way to destroy creativity is to engage in bargaining among an expansive range of individual characters. The group embodies an independent psyche; vigilant, unhurried, uninspired and in certain circumstances, purely groundless. Preservation of this union is absolutely critical, you have to remain in control of the threads, avoiding their abandonment. Simultaneously, you ought to know how to conceal your marks wisely, working behind closed doors and making your alliance feel concerned in your resolutions, to enforce this sense of fusion. Their guidance is profitable, so long as you know how to navigate through it efficiently, employing their productive proposals and courteously diverting from the unproductive ones. When you do this correctly, it will make them feel valuable and thoroughly connected with the advancement of the group.

Leadership is both understatedness and astuteness, the more arduously you try and coerce people, the more resistance you fire up and in turn, the less influence you have over them. The moral, therefore, is that a more substantial authority could result from detachment, although the frame of reference is consequential in this regard. An essential measure in a successful chain of command is a proficient alliance whose moral code aligns with yours. Thus, it is of utmost importance to pick well-suited people for the position. The appropriate character of a subordinate is a capacity to operate harmoniously under your command and with other members in your alliance and be endowed with a competency to take on the necessary duty as well as an adequate degree of mental self-government. The moment may not be on your side but never pick a man based solely on a written biography. Examine a man’s psychology apart from his expertise to form a more accurate judgement of his nature. Furthermore, reasonable reliance on your group is not destructive but avoid being held hostage or imposing excessive control. To be able to gather and endow useful details is a crucial duty for a successful course of order to allow you to attune swifter to conditions. The more concise and efficient your course of order, the more fluent your circulation of intelligence. People in your group would occupy distinct positions within the circle, endowing you with immediate intelligence from the battle lines, this will serve as an effective and regulated carrier for the amassing of data.

When people’s beliefs wholly resemble yours, they are likely attempting to cajole you with the appeal of alikeness. It is wise in said conditions to sustain a sceptical nature around them until you get to make out their temperament. Superficial charm is a ruse and an effective one at that, people employ it on their targets to lessen their sense of opposition but also to win their good favour and alleviate the potential threat. Do not make the assumption that a charming person is necessarily good-intentioned and benign, it is foolish to base your judgement on mere fabrication and appearance. There are people who are supremely competent in disguising their incentives, mainly the Machiavellian types and they make sure their genuine motives are by no means insinuated in their tongue. Undercover spies are doyens at this mode of conduct, ensuring no traces are exposed or left behind.

It is crucial, also, that your desires are understandable prior to giving out directives to your group, you must neither be unduly definite nor constricting, you should know how to entrust an adequate amount of emancipation in the people within your group to strategise independently when the condition necessitates it, rather than advocating mechanized deportment which makes them feel uninspired. Lastly, don’t be threatened by forces with divided leadership, you already have the edge which is sufficient. Forces with segregated leadership make for the opportune adversaries, you will not come to grief.