of learning organizations seems more like a plea for an ideal corporate culture than a guarantee of effectiveness. As the examples of Julius Caesar and Napoleon vividly demonstrate, effective leadership may also involve strict adherence to the hierarchical authority model and concealed information that is typical of military, not corporate, contexts.
That does not necessarily mean that the military model of authoritarian societies of the ancient and 18th-century worlds is suited to corporate culture in democratic societies. It does mean that the leadership styles of Caesar and Napoleon may reveal something about why they were effective in their own contexts, and offer lessons that might be adapted to the more collegial context of modern organizations.
Caesar's career as a leader has been controversial from the time he was publishing accounts of his military expeditions of conquest in behalf of Rome, and his death marked the transition of republican Rome into Imperial Rome. The context for Caesar's assumption of leadership was the fact that, in the first century BC, Rome wavered between civil war, republic, and monarchy for decades before he successfully assumed the role of monarch. The big picture of Caesar's strategy was to form alliances with rival factions in Rome that would unite behind him, then lead a military expedition against barbarians in order to shore up his reputation as a protector of Rome, then return to Rome to claim the political fruits of military victory. Further, when he did return to Rome, he was careful to court the attention and favor of the common people. That explains his courtship of rivals Crassus and Pompey as mentors after he returned from Gaul; their factions despised each other. He reconciled them and got the endorsement of both, even marrying his daughter Julia to Pompey. It explains, too, his financing of lavish athletic/gladiator games upon his various returns to Rome (Parenti, 2004).
As Brenn...