Thursday, April 19, 2007

Julius Caesar on Leadership


Here is a great essay on leadership.

Much can be learned from history that can have practical use for us in our everyday lives. The usefulness of great men and great events in history is that they are so large. When they succeed, their success is easy to see and the reasons are (mostly) easy to find. When they fail, same thing.

Julius Caesar (102 BC – 44 BC) was a politician first, a soldier second, and a writer third. He was a person of his era. When he learned that a military career was necessary to success in politics, he became a general and conquered France. He wrote books about his successes as a way to promote himself. After his conquests, he returned to Rome to discover that he had to still fight a civil war to win power. He finally won, became absolute master of Rome but was killed just as he started to consolidate his power.

He is interesting to history because he moved from politics to the military and back again. He had to manage people in order to succeed. The article relates various events to modern management theory

0 comments: