Reiko Noto
Professor Enoch
RW Winter
20 February 2015
Lessons in leadership of Alexander the Great
“Gordian knot” is one of the famous episodes of Alexander the Greats, which shows his wisdom and quick-witted tact. The legendary Gordian knot is following. At Gordium (the capital of ancient Phrygia) there was an ancient wagon and its yoke was lashed to a pole whose ends were hidden. According to legend it could only be loosened by the future conqueror of Asia. Alexander tried to untie it. When he failed, he pulled out his sword and cut it in two (Cawthorne 24). Thunder and lightning that night were interpreted as a sign of pleasure from the gods, helping spread the story around Europe, which remains an English cliché today “Cutting the Gordian knot” (Bose 125). J.M. O’Brien commented that “[t]here is no question that Alexander possessed extraordinary powers of concentration and responded to ‘impossible’ challenges with exceptional insight” (69).
Leadership is essential for various situations today and not limited to a country's monarchy. It is especially prominent in business, and many leaders lead their companies and expand their business such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. It seems there is a great difference between us and the king of the empire who lived more than two thousand years ago. We can learn, however, much about leadership from Alexander the Great and apply strategies to our way of solving various problems we faces.
The purpose of this paper is to try to apply Alexander’s leadership to our way of dealing problems, organizing our teams and creating image of a leader especially in business. It will first show history and background at him and his age where his leadership grew up. It will then reveal how Alexander exercised his leadership and try to apply his strategies to business scenes. This part will be separated three sections of the most important three strategies- solving problems he faced by thinking about it from different point of view, taking symbolic actions in order to create image in each section, integrating people who have different background.
Historical Background
Macedonia was the ancient kingdom that was established about the middle the seventh century B.C. (Errington 2) and once conquered 90 percent of the historically known areas at that time under the reign of Alexander (Kurke 4). Its land is well suited to pastoral and agricultural activities and mountains of it are appropriate for stock raising and can provide abundant supply of wood (Borza 51). Macedonia seemed blessed with a good environment for maintaining life. It was once, however, a mere marginal state on the northern edge of the Greek world and a target of continual attacks from its neighbors by the time of Philip II (359-336 B.C.) (Errington 1-2). He succeeded in conquering Greek and built the foundation of prosperity of Macedonia which was succeeded to his son, Alexander.
Alexander was born in July 356 B.C. as the eldest of Phillip’s sons. He was just under 20 years when he took the throne on the death of his father in 336. (Chesire v). After he was crowned, he soon planned to set about the work that Philip II was failed to accomplish-the conquest of Persian Empire. It was under the reign of Darius III, who ascended to the throne in the same year as Alexander coincidentally. He started invading into Asia Minor in 334 intending to subdue whole Asia (Cummings 123). The first victory over Persian was the Battle of the Granicus fought on the banks of the Granicus River (Bennett 132). In 333, he won against the Darius’s 70,000 troops with his 40,000 troops on the Gulf of Issus (Sacks and Oswyn 23). He proceeded to procession and ruled Syria. Then he moved to Egypt later in 332 and founded Alexandria in the next year. In 331, he defeated Darius’s troops again at Gaugamela (Cheshire 70), which determined the fall of Persian Empire. After he finally succeed to rule the former areas of Persian Empire, he launched Indian campaign. It is usually interpreted as Alexander’s desire to conquer the entire known world because the world is ended in India in Greek thought (Wikipedian 161 ) Finally, however, he gave up pushing on over the Indus River because his subordinates refused to follow him (Bradbury 76). Alexander the Great's empire was at its peak- 2 million square miles. It stretched from Greece all the way to India (Skelton and Dell 51).
Alexander the great three strategies
Alexander the Great used great strategies and exercised leadership in his procession and consequence of various areas as mentioned in the former section. This section will take three important points of his extraordinary leadership: solving the problems he is faced by thinking about them from different point of view, in order to creating image, and integrating people who have different background.
Finding a new point of view
One episode related to the first one is about the siege of Tyre. Alexander tried to attack Tyre during his campaign against Persia in 332 B.C. The new, island city of Tire lay about a half mile from the coast, surrounded by 2.75 circuit of wall whose height was 150 feet (Heckel 67).
Persia was a threat for Macedonia in the sea and Tyre itself had two harbors and horrible fleet. Though some of fleet was in Aegean with Persian’s ones, Tyre possessed more than eighty triremes (Kern 209). The Tyrian fleets were superior in the water and the island of Tyre could get supply and support from the sea easily. (Warry 43). In the difficult situation, what Alexander did is entirely unexpected for Tyrians. After Alexander rule mainland Tyre, he started siege against the island in January 332 (Tucker). Alexander launched the construction of a causeway between the mainland and the island in order to create a passage for his corps because the other way of landing the New Tyre seemed impossible (Clare 762). When the causeway was complete, he was able to lay siege to the fortified island as if it were a city on land. It fell quickly-in about two weeks. When he successfully completed the causeway, he could lay siege to the fort island as if it were a city on land. It took only two weeks for it to fall (Kurke 9). The reason for his success is that he saw the matter in its new perspective in order to overcome the difficulty. He changed his way of thinking and succeeded capturing the fortress island by creating a causeway and landing it with surface troops.
The way Alexander took to overcome difficulty seemed characteristics, but there is a company which used the same strategy. U.S. Steel provides us with a modern example of problem reframing. The company had an environmental problem. It had to restrain emit of the waste which is made in the process of steelmaking because it is highly polluted. The large amount money is needed for remediation, and it could still fail. Employees had considered the problem for several months. Finally, one of them came up with the idea of solving it. The employee recognized that the there was a small amount of the fuel for the furnaces and the company could utilize it. They turned the direction from “restraining industrial waste” to “utilizing it as fuel” (Kurke 26). Sometimes it seems difficult to some s complicated problems, but the difficulty could be overcome by seeing them from different point of view as Ancient king did.
Taking Symbolic Actions
There are some stories which show his great ability of taking symbolic actions. One of them started on the night before the battle of Issus where Macedonia beaten Persia. Before the battle, Alexander and his army heard that Darius, the king of Persia, captured and slaughtered one of his medical troops. The news made them furious, and worry spread around his army because it was inferior to Persian one in numbers of soldiers. On the previous night of battle, he was sound asleep even after day broke. This is the strategy to reassure his soldiers who were worrying about the battle. Soldiers found Alexander thought nothing of the Persian army, which successfully stilled their fear (Kurke 207-208). Almost the same thing happened at the time of the battle of Gaugamela. The morning of Gaugamela, he was sound asleep and woken up by Parmenion, one of his subordinates. Parmenion remarked that he wondered why Alexander could sleep undisturbedly the morning of such a significant battle. Alexander replied that they already won the battle and are just chasing Darius who will never stand and fight. (Beaudan 33-34) Beaudan commented that “[t]his could be considered boasting, but reflects the calm and confidence that Alexander felt and spread around his army.” Alexander knew the effective way of taking symbolic action to convey image that he was the man who would win and never lose.
Alexander succeeded to get rid of his army’s anxiety by showing them conviction that we would surely defeat Persian. His symbolic message was that they should consider the problem, but should not worry about it. Symbolic leadership works in the way where the leader does not directly influence followers. That means, leaders' actions themselves are symbols and interpreted freely by followers. The difficult point is that leadership has to be interpreted as they intend (Winkler 60-61). One leader of our age who often uses symbolic leader behavior is Tony Dungy, who is a former professional American football player and coach in the National Football League. Dungy has established the tradition of giving a vision document to players so that they are always thinking ahead. The essential message is continuing one's commitment to do "what ever it takes" to achieve their goal (Palestini 92). The symbolic actions work when leaders aim to affect followers emotionally as Alexander did.
Integrating People
Another episode is related to the strategy of integrating people who have different backgrounds. According to Curtius, who was a Roman historian of the first century, Alexander said he hoped to erase the line between conqueror and conquered so as to integrate ethnicity of his entire empire (Yanne). After he conquered Persia, he attempted to unite the Macedonian tradition and the Persian one by modeling his way of life after its customs. He thought that behavior based on goodwill would be established by mixed customs and common feeling, not by compulsory force (Cheshire 111). He decided that it is the best way to completely integrate his empire that Macedonian officers married the Persian aristocrats (Yanne). For his attempt to come true, he took another bold action- announcing he was going to release older and hurt soldiers from military and replacing with 30,000 Persian young men who had been learning the Greek language and Macedonian way of fighting. Contrary to his expectation, Macedonian soldiers resisted his announcement and declared if anyone was fired, they would all leave .Most of them still regarded the Persians as barbarians. Alexander, in response, made impressing speech. He reminded the soldiers of the great victories under him. He then asked them to think of themselves as citizens of a larger empire and declared he made no differentiation between Greeks and barbarians. Soldiers were moved deeply by his speech, and the threat of mutiny was successfully avoided (Skelton and Dell 63). This speech is called the oath of Alexander, which marks alexander’s great ability of integrating people.
The key point of the Alexander’s strategy is that he aimed to unite Macedonia and the other areas he ruled, not suppressed them by force so that he could maintain the empire for a long time. The way of mixing one and the other is also significant in mergers and acquisition of companies. Mark Benner, who is a chairman of Global Consulting Partnership, said "Two cultures must be brought together and blended to create a collaborative, high-performance new company." (Gerri 1). In one successful case of M&R, Carlos Ghosn, who is the president and CEO of Nissan signed Renault-Nissan alliance. In 2003, these two companies combined sales, which made the alliance the world’s top five automakers. In the interview, Ghosn said “The most fundamental challenge of any alliance or merger is cultural: if one does not believe anything can be learned from one’s new partners, the venture is doomed to fail. I have always believed that an alliance, merger, or acquisition—in fact, any corporate combination—is about partnership and trust rather than power and domination.” (Stahl 4). Mergers, acquisitions, and alliances involve mixing people of different corporate cultures and even various national cultures into one company (Stahl 5). It is essential to have respect to other’s cultures as Alexander did rather than just dominate them by might.
Conclusion
As the preceding sections showed, Alexander exercised his great leadership that much can be learned how that can be applied today. One is solving problems he faced by thinking about it from different point of view as seen in Siege of Tyre. The second is taking symbolic actions in order to create image as he exercised the night before the battle of Issus and Gaugamela. The third point is integrating people who have different background when he made great speech about integration policy, which is called the Oath of Alexander. Modern day examples were giving too of how these strategies were used by US Steel, Tony Dungy, Carlos Ghosn. Alexander’s effective strategies for leading people are used even in our age as seen in the each three section. Though empire finally was not inherited, his way of exercising leadership will be succeeded by many leaders and continue forever.
Regardless the age we live, his great strategies of leadership can be applied in various situations.
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