Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy

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Napoleon Never Slept

NAPOLEON NEVER SLEPT How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy by Randall Collins and Maren McConnell cover design by Jeff Warrington

published as an E-book by MAREN INK, 2016 Copyright 2015 by Maren Ink

http://maren.ink All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of Maren Ink.

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Success is a Career of High Emotional Energy

PART I. HOW TO GROW WINNING NETWORKS BY EMOTIONAL ENERGY: STEVE JOBS AND YOU

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1. Emotional Energy in Yourself The EE (Emotional Energy) Thermometer Steve Jobs Affects Everyone's EE

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Careers: A Marathon Coach’s Advice about Not Sleeping Before the Race

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2. Emotional Energy in Groups: Collective Effervescence Warning: Collective Effervescence Has a Short Shelf-life

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3. High Attunement builds EE, Low Attunement lowers EE

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4. People and Situations that Bring You Down

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5. What About People Who Seem Energetic But Don't Get Things Done? The Fourth Dimension of EE: Rhythm/Sync

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6. EDOM: Emotional Domination

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Careers: Caesar Faces Down a Mutiny

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Did Steve Jobs ever Hesitate? 7. Energizing Networks of Allies Heavyweight and Lightweight Networks Six Degrees are Useless: What You Need is a Two-link Heavyweight Network What You Know Is Not Separate from Who You Know

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Careers: Not Just Any Mentor

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8. Dangerous Networks: Rivals and Opponents The Raid on Xerox Bill Gates as Turncoat Insider

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9. What Money is Good For: Freedom to Build Your Own Networks How did Steve Jobs Recover from Being Exiled?

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10. Inner and Outer Networks Inner Circle: Networks of EE Networks of EDOM: Allies, Deal-Making Networks, Rivals Outer Ring: Pseudo-networks of Reputation

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Time-Line: Steve Jobs' Career and Turning Points

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Careers: Insiders in Sports: Winners See It Differently

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PART II. NAPOLEON AS CEO

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1. A Career of Emotional Energy

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2. Starting Young in the Adult World

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Careers: Building Momentum against Easy Competition: Sam Walton in Arkansas

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3. Luck is Location at the Cusp of Change

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Careers: Networks at the Edge of Danger: Michael Collins Takes Over the Irish Revolution

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4. Networks That Made Napoleon

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Careers: Marrying (and sometimes divorcing) the Boss's Daughter

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5. Napoleon's Winning Style

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Always active, never passive Speed is organization-wide Morale over material Mobile firepower Careers: Caesar is Prepared to Have Trouble

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6. On a Roll

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Careers: The Reputation Multiplier: Caesar's famous Fortune

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7. Dilemmas

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Overextension Opponents catching up Careers: Ulysses S. Grant Deflates the Magic of Robert E. Lee

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The creep of formalities 8. Napoleon's Down Moments

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Careers: Re-launching on the Rebound: Building IKEA

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9. Endgame: Losing Emotional Energy

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10. Ability, What is It?

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Careers: Genius is How You Look at It

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PART III. WHAT MADE ALEXANDER GREAT?

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1. Launching from the most Advanced Platform

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Careers: If You Can't Inherit It, Join It

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2. Tiger Woods Training

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Careers: Avoiding the Bureaucratic Ladder, Side-stepping the Credential Queue

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3. The Ideal Target for Takeover

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Careers: Making a Killing: Piecing Together the World's Largest Insurance Company

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4. A Growing Resource Beats a Stagnant Resource

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5. The Difference-maker: Logistics-plus-Diplomacy

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6. Alexander's Victory Formula

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Cautious Timing, Explosive Action Observe Weakness and Attack It Careers: Superior Troops Have Empowered NCOs

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Emotional Domination is More Decisive than Trickery 7. Alexander's Dilemmas

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The Impetuous Leader A Drunken Killing and a Management Dilemma Careers: The Old and New Management Teams

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Two Mutinies 8. Partying to Death

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Why did Alexander Sleep Well, but Napoleon Never Slept? Careers: Carousers and Workaholics

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PART IV. ELEVEN PRINCIPLES OF WINNING BIG

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EE: emotional energy EDOM: emotional domination 1. Gain EE from successful encounters; avoid energy-draining encounters 2. Keep checking micro-social attunement and disattunement 3. Energizing the group energizes yourself 4. Details are never boring when they have trajectory; successful people are never bored 5. Start early in the adult world: skip the credential queue and the bureaucratic ladder 6. Build momentum where it’s easy-- but with a path to big leagues 7. The big battle, the big deal: monitor rivals, identify weakness and exert EDOM

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8. Build inner circle and alliance networks by EE, deal-making networks by EDOM, and outer reputational networks by collective effervescence 9. Heavyweight networks are dangerous: expect volatility 10. Luck is location at the cusp of change; launch from the most advanced platform 11. Ideological rigidness limits success; other people's rigidness is your opportunity Knowing What Arena You’re Playing In War Business empire-building Politics and social movements Scientific, intellectual and artistic worlds

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REFERENCES

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INTRODUCTION Success is a Career of High Emotional Energy

What all highly successful people throughout history have in common is they were extremely energetic. Napoleon slept only four hours a night, and that was during quiet times, when France was at peace. When he was with his army on campaign, he napped in snatches of 15 minutes here and there, and was up at all hours, ahead of everyone else, getting the next day's action ready to go. Winston Churchill, during the Second World War, would take a nap in the afternoon and stay up all night answering dispatches. Beethoven was so engrossed in composing that he didn’t even notice his meals-- his cook would find the untouched dishes outside the door next day while Ludwig was still crafting music inside. Steve Jobs would phone key people in the small hours of the morning, or stay up all night at their house making enthusiastic plans. Where does their energy come from? Eventually most people get tired. How do these historically successful people keep it up, day after day, night after night, year after year? Call it passion if you like, but putting a word on it doesn't really explain it. Why don't big winners in the game of success get burned out, like most other people? They didn't do it just by repeating slogans to oneself. Always try harder, never give up, believe in yourself. Words like these have been popular for thousands of years, from the time of the ancient Romans to the latest athletic coach. Millions of people have tried to pump themselves up this way, but only a few have been extremely successful. Both losers and winners in football games repeat the same slogans. Exhorting yourself is just a personalized form of advertising hype, if it isn't combined with the real techniques by which people produce success. There is no evidence that Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Steve Jobs spent any time repeating such mantras. So what did they do? The top leaders, the big winners energized other people around them, and got energy from them in return. They were experts at the art of social interaction.

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They generated emotional energy in their encounters, whether in full-scale meetings or brief conversations. What is emotional energy? (We'll abbreviate it EE.) High EE is feeling pumped up, bodily and mentally. High EE persons are confident and proactive. They are forward moving; they have a path to a goal and they convey it to other people. Emotional energy can vary from high to low. Some social interactions pump up people's EE. Other kinds of interactions bring them down. People with low EE are hesitant, passive, even depressed. They quickly lose enthusiasm and are easily tired. Great leaders make their social encounters generate high EE. And they avoid the kinds of encounters that bring EE down. What are the ingredients of encounters that are energy-gainers? We see this best by comparison with encounters that are energy-drainers. Charismatic leaders get people focused. They turn their attention onto the same thing. They set in motion positive feedback loops: people in the group build up a shared emotion; the stronger the emotion, the more they feel themselves in tune with each other, and the more tightly they focus together. And the more tightly they focus, the more their shared emotion pumps each other up. This can be done by making excited speeches to a crowd, but there are other ways to do it. Both Caesar and Napoleon were good at conveying calm confidence, keeping people from losing their head under stress. Steve Jobs often riveted the attention of his work groups by insulting them about the quality of their work, but this was just the initiating emotion that got everyone focused. His emotional assaults turned into attunement as they argued out the details heatedly and at length, until they were together on a new path. Whatever the emotion, the key is to make the group share it, then transform it into a feeling of shared strength and purposeful trajectory. And this is the secret of how Napoleon hardly ever slept, or Jobs could stay up all night. They got energy from the groups they energized. This is another key feedback loop. Not only is the whole group reverberating its energy when they get focused, but the leader of the group-- the one at the center of attention-- is getting the most energy of all. And since Napoleon, or Jobs, goes from one intense encounter to another, he is getting a steady series of positive jolts of emotional energy. They are getting high on their work, getting high on running a successful organization. They don't need to sleep, because they have so much energy; and they don't feel like sleeping because they are so hyped up by what they do when they are awake. Napoleon was on a high state of alert. Although he got very little sleep, he did not make the kind of mistakes

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that people do who have been sleep-deprived for too long. He made his worse mistake when he got too much sleep in Moscow. Virtually all leaders of big organizations are extremely busy, going from one meeting to another. Some of them get pumped up by their daily round, others become exhausted by it. What makes the difference is whether their micro-interactions are leveraging EE or losing it. Their energy level is also flowing through bigger networks. Encounters with other people are the ties that make up social networks. Several different kinds of networks are necessary for success. Pumping up a circle of followers, of course; that is the intimate network that constitutes one's team. But also there are dangerous networks, farther away from home base and its comfortable social trust, where deals and alliances are negotiated; dangerous because both sides are risking giving key information to the other that might be stolen or used against oneself. We will see how the most successful leaders handle dangerous networks, by the interactional technique of emotional domination (abbreviated EDOM). EE and EDOM are key features of really top success. EDOM is the crucial feature of winning a battle, as will come out in our military examples. Also it is the key to career-making (and career-breaking) business deals. The great success stories also have their down moments. We can learn from this because it shows how EE is lost, the flip-side of how it is gained. We will see the interactional techniques that Bill Gates used to come out on top of Steve Jobs-- despite Jobs' incredible force of emotional domination, Gates had a way of countering it with a different emotion that kept him from getting sucked in. We will see how great leaders recovered from failure-- for example, several times in Napoleon's life. These stories of failure should be encouraging to us, because they show that success is made, not born. Jobs, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, all had down periods. Jobs and Napoleon recovered from them, by methods we can appreciate. Alexander couldn't overcome the key weakness in the way that he led his organization, and ultimately it killed him. We learn from this too. The book is organized in three main parts. Each one dissects the life-story of a hugely successful career: Jobs, Napoleon, Alexander. They are interspersed with sidebars, labeled [Careers], that focus on key events in the lives of other historically successful persons. We will see how Caesar could put down a mutiny of his troops by speaking with just the right tone and timing; and how Caesar by careful observation of what happens in the first phase of a battle was able to create a second-phase strategy that made his army invincible. We will see that the great leaders are careful observers of the micro-details around them, that they cut through to the key details that make the difference between

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success and failure. That is another reason why great leaders are emotionally upbeat: for them nothing is boring, because even small details are energizing when they point a trajectory into the future. We will see Sam Walton building Wal-Mart in rural Arkansas, following a strategy like many other super-successful persons of creating a mini-empire against weak competition, before taking it to the big time. We will break inside the mystique about genius and talent, and see how persons get this kind of reputation by learning techniques that outsiders have no awareness of. We will see what is the secret of luck (it isn't just trying harder). We will see why many super-successful persons got started at a very early age, and why today's bureaucratic and credential-inflated world is an obstacle. We will see how different personality types can all be successful: Alexander the Great with his ferociously aggressive energy, but combined with his careful observation of the right timing to strike. Howard Hughes with his flamboyant partying but an obsessive focus on the cutting-edge of the aircraft industry. A quiet Frenchman who built up a minor insurance company through a series of takeovers to became the largest in the world. We will even zoom in on Jesus recruiting disciples, with his discerning eye for the unspoken details that reveal what people really want, and which people are a waste of time and an energy-drain. Great leaders worked with different emotions, but they all had the key qualities of keen observation of people and timing, social attunement, emotional energy, and when need be, emotional domination. By digging into the key features of how super-successful people interact, and how they built their networks, we will lay out what made them successful. Not slogans about how to behave, but what really worked. There will be more super-successful people in the future. These patterns apply to them too. Pay attention. You can be one of them.

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PART I. HOW TO GROW WINNING NETWORKS BY EMOTIONAL ENERGY: STEVE JOBS AND YOU

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“Your work is shit!” Steve Jobs yells at you. It is the first time Steve has walked into your workspace since you were hired at Apple. He picks up the component you’ve been working on. “Look at this. It’s as ugly as a toilet bowl.” It’s a circuit board nobody is going to see, you protest, it’s going to be inside the case. Steve explodes. “Let other people build shit. What do you think makes us better than them?” He turns to the rest of the work group. Everyone is staring. “You’re a bunch of dickless fucking assholes.” They’ve seen this before, but their jaws are still dropping. Fingers reach uneasily to cover a mouth, breathing is shallow. Steve walks deliberately to another workbench and turns the component around and around, gazing at every angle. “We’re way behind schedule, and you shitheads still haven’t got it right.” The team leader gets angry. “We’d be on schedule, Steve, if you didn’t keep changing the product.” Steve yells back. It becomes a shouting match, and it goes on for a long time. It’s like a bar-room insult contest except that nobody but an electronic engineer would understand the words they fling at each other. Welcome to the group, you tell yourself. You are standing just like everybody else, in a loose circle watching Steve and the team leader go at it. Everybody looks more relaxed. Someone shrugs a shoulder and catches your eye. You smile back. Steve abruptly breaks it off. He wheels around and draws on the whiteboard on the wall. “This is how we’re going to do it. And it’s got to be done by Monday.” Somebody says, “No sweat, Steve. We slept in here last weekend, too.” The team leader waves a hand at the whiteboard. “This is what I’ve been telling you for weeks, Steve.” Steve looks around the group very soberly. “You guys are really great. The next three nights, you’re going to make history.” [This prototype encounter is an amalgam of those described in Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Simon and Schuster, 2011.]

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1. Emotional Energy in Yourself

Steve Jobs epitomizes very high Emotional Energy. Is he just a freak, the kind of person who comes along every once in a while and changes history? Or can anyone do it? It can be done. The details show how.


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The EE Thermometer Emotional Energy or EE goes up and down like temperature on a thermometer. This thermometer can be viewed from three sides. Side 1: Body and Mind

The easiest way to read your EE is a feeling in your body. Do you feel strong and refreshed? Or are you tired out, feeling weak or just plain lazy? EE is bodily energy that is simultaneously mental, a process happening in your nervous system along with your muscular physiology. Feeling strong and tireless at your work can happen even when you are sitting down and using very little muscle power. An intense muscular activity like sports has a mental aspect that affects whether you breeze through the competition or feel like you're running in quicksand. Bodily and mental EE generally rise and fall together.

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Side 2: Trajectory

The same EE thermometer, viewed from another angle. Trajectory is having a goal, moving through the minutes of your day making things happen. At the highest level you are alert to your environment, picking up things that are new and promising as well as things that are obstacles. Not just charging ahead like a wild bull. At the opposite end, low EE persons are passive and unfocused. They seem dull to themselves and to others. Between high and low points on the EE thermometer is a spectrum of intermediate conditions. At an “average” point you may not notice your feeling at all. For many people much of the time, things just feel normal, neither high nor low. They go along with it.

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Side 3: Social Mood

The EE-scale is about your expectations for dealing with the people in your potential environment. Consciously or unconsciously, you have feelings about whether you will succeed with them on not. High-EE persons are confident. You feel that you can deal with the people in your path, that you will win them over, get them on your side, or prevail over them if they make an obstacle. Low-EE persons are the opposite. They doubt they can deal with the people they encounter. They worry and expect to lose. At the bottom end, they avoid dealing with anyone at all. The confidence of high-EE persons comes out as enthusiasm. You are up-beat, carrying around a positive mood that perks up yourself and others. On the opposite end, low-EE persons are depressed. They depress themselves, and it is depressing being around them. Low-EE persons are energy-drainers. High-EE persons are energy-gainers, for everyone who gets near them. The EE-thermometer will read pretty much the same level on all three sides. This is because encounters with people affect all sides of the EE-thermometer in the same way.

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Steve Jobs Affects Everyone's EE Put yourself in the place of the engineer in his first encounter with Steve Jobs. What happens to your EE thermometer? At first you’re rocked back on your heels. You feel frozen to the spot. You try to explain but he shuts you up, rolls right over you. Then you notice everybody else looks the same way. Then, just when it’s getting worse, it gets better. The shouting match between Steve and the team leader shifts the attention onto them. It’s like being in the audience at a heavyweight fight. You exchange glances, smile a little in surreptitious solidarity. It’s not just you; you’re part of the team. Steve’s insults roll off the team leader’s back, like a boxer slipping punches. They’ve done this before. They’re arguing furiously but they’re sticking to the point. What’s wrong with the engineering they’re doing? Solving one problem compromises another. How do we get out of this conundrum? The team leader lands a punch. It’s not a knockout but it’s a knock-down. Suddenly Steve looks triumphant. He’s not the one who’s been knocked down; it’s the problem that’s on the ropes. That we’ve knocked onto the ropes. Now let’s go finish it off! It’s been an emotional roller coaster ride. At the end you’re gasping a bit for breath, but feeling sky high. So that’s what it’s like to work with Steve Jobs! Steve Jobs displays every dimension of high EE. Steve is tireless. He’ll go on arguing as long as you can argue, until he gets the last word. He’s not a big man, but strong will doesn’t mean strong muscles. Steve is a high-energy body. When he sits down, he tucks up his legs, he slouches, he takes off his shoes and sticks out his feet. He jumps up and paces around. He strides to the whiteboard and gestures at what he’s written on it. Sometimes he will stop dead still, staring intently at the person who is talking. He can be silent when others are expecting an answer, drawing out the silence to the point where it’s uncomfortable. Most of the time he abandons himself to his energy rush, but he can control it too, when that gives him the upper hand. When Steve is involved in a prolonged negotiation or planning session, he likes to finish it off by taking a long walk with his most important counterpart. Something about the rhythm of a long, unforced walk turns a duel into a duo. What may have been a contentious shouting match hours earlier turns into a step-step-step, walking together talking, and more often than not arriving at an agreement to work together. Steve is a master of body rhythms-- everybody’s body rhythms.

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He heats up but he knows how to calm down: not down to low energy but down to a quiet, steady rhythm where personalities touch. He is the master of turning high drama into happy ending. Like Napoleon, Steve Jobs has little concern for sleep. He phones his work buddies at 11 p.m., at 2 a.m., at 5 a.m. when he has a new idea. He drops in for dinner unannounced and stays late into the night. He doesn’t stand on ceremony-- which means he doesn’t let his life be run by conventions of when people are supposed to work or supposed to be at leisure. People who live by conventions don’t accomplish anything new, he would probably say. Who needs sleep, if you have enough emotional energy.

________________________________________________________________________ Careers: A Marathon Coach’s Advice about Not Sleeping Before the Race If you’re running your first marathon, he said, you may have trouble sleeping the night before. Don’t worry about it. You think you’re going to be exhausted because you didn’t get enough sleep before the race. It’s really the other way around. The reason you can’t sleep is because you’re so full of energy. Just go with it. The same thing was expressed by Laffit Pincay, then the all-time winning jockey in horse racing. “I’m never sore,” he said. “I get up at 5 in the morning. I go days without sleep and it doesn’t bother me. I don’t know why they say you need a good night’s sleep. I don’t. I always feel good. I’m up all night reading and watching TV. When the time comes (to retire), my body will tell me. I’ll know.” One reason he was pumped up was that he rode 9,530 horses to victory, still second all time. Winning is better than sleep.

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2. Emotional Energy in Groups: Collective Effervescence Steve Jobs comes on stage at the Apple shareholders meeting. It is January 1984 and everybody has been buzzing about the TV spot that ran during the Super Bowl two days ago. Almost 3000 people pack the auditorium. The lights go down and Steve starts to attack their big corporate rival, IBM. George Orwell had predicted that by 1984 the world would be run by a dictator whose image appeared everywhere, a world where your TV screen spied on you. “IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple,” Steve intoned. “Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? Was George Orwell right?” (Isaacson 169) The room goes dark and the Super Bowl ad appears on a giant screen overlooking the podium. It was the most expensive commercial ever made at that time, a Blade Runner look of the future in depressing black-and-white, where zombie-like people shuffle under the eyes of the thought police and the image of Big Brother, the dictator on a giant screen. Then out of the crowd runs a fearless young woman in a runner’s singlet and shorts, and hurls a sledgehammer at the screen, shattering it into a blaze of pieces. The screen goes bright with the Apple logo, and the auditorium is standing and cheering. Steve then dramatically unveils his new computer, the Macintosh. Steve inserts a floppy disk and the audience gasps. Until this time, personal computers just showed text, usually a green phosphorus glow of letters on a dark background. Now the giant screen projecting the Mac scrolls graphics across it, colorful displays in motion, the repertoire of fonts to choose from, the program for drawing your own pictures and charts, everything we have used ever since but were totally new at the time. To wind up, Steve has the Mac introduce itself. “Hello. I’m Macintosh,” it says in an electronic voice. “It sure is great to get out of that bag.” The audience is on its feet again, laughing and shrieking. “Obviously, I can talk. So it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who’s been like a father to me, Steve Jobs.” (Isaacson 170) The audience is so excited that it can’t stand still, so full of energy they are jumping, pumping their fists, chanting over and over again, a prolonged rhythm that will not stop. It takes them almost ten minutes to quiet down. This is the simplest and most basic way that people generate emotional energy. In microsociology, it is referred to as the rhythmic-entrainment model. There are three main ingredients and one feedback loop: (1) A group of people are assembled in the same place, where they can see, hear and feel each other bodily.

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(2) They focus their attention on the same thing, and become aware of each other focusing their attention. (3) They share a common mood or emotion. Then, everything intensifies. If the emotion grows stronger, people transmit it to each other. We pay attention to each other’s bodies, sounds, motions, even their body heat. This makes us even more aware that everyone else is experiencing the same thing. Our minds are aligned because our attention is aligned. For the moment, we are all thinking the same thing, and we know it. It is these moments that make people feel like “we” and “us” and creates the power of public opinion. (4) Feedback flows in a circle. More shared emotion tightens our focus; more focus heightens our emotion. Sociologists call it collective effervescence. It is like bubbles percolating in a can of soda poured into a glass. Shake it up enough and the glass will foam over the rim. High collective effervescence means our bodies are in motion together. We may not be doing anything purposeful, it doesn’t feel like work. The audience listening to Steve Jobs can’t sit still. They are so pumped up with adrenaline that they have to do something. No doubt this is why applauding was invented. The more demonstrative they become, the more they pump each other up. The feedback circle is making everyone more energetic. We are pumping each other’s adrenaline. Our bodies are linked in a mutual feedback loop, quite literally driving each other’s physiology. It is the adrenaline feedback loop that makes us clap, shout, laugh, pump our fists and jump up and down together. Collective effervescence thrives on rhythm. Clapping, chanting, dancing, linking arms and swaying together are ways we get ourselves aligned with other people, and ways to signal our alignment. Feeling aligned with others makes each of us individually more energized. Rhythmic entrainment fine-tunes the feedback loop. You feel what other people are going to do, down to the fraction of a second, because you are in a rhythm. When you clap and chant, you know when the next beat is going to fall because you are in the beat, and you know when other people are going to clap because they are in the beat too. Getting into micro-rhythm erases any doubts as to what the group is going to do. You are in it, making it happen while it makes you happen. Being in a rhythmically entrained group is a peak life experience. It is for the sake of such moments that people like to attend sports events. It would be easier and cheaper to stay home and watch the game on TV, so why do people pay large sums to be there with the crowd? Because the crowd, linked through bodily feedback, can build collective ef-

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fervescence far more effectively. It doesn’t depend on whether your team wins or loses. Winning is important mainly because it gives an occasion for a big celebration ritual. But losing can still be a worthwhile trip to the stadium if you experience the early moments of anticipation and the rounds of cheering when the fans get into the dramatic moments of the game. It is the same with other popular entertainment. You can listen to music any time on your earphones, but if you do this during daily life when everyone else is doing something different, it just takes you apart rather than towards other people. Going to concerts remains popular even though they are technologically redundant and outdated, because what they are selling is not the music-- it is the collective experience of the music, the getting high on the music together. The music, the costumes, the show are just devices for the audience to generate emotional energy among themselves. The process of generating collective effervescence is found all over social life. Sociologists first discovered it by analyzing religious gatherings. Politics, too, generates greatest enthusiasm and commitment through speeches and rallies. It is no exaggeration to say that most things that people feel intensely about are generated by moments of strong rhythmic entrainment.

Warning: Collective Effervescence has a short shelf-life At the time when people are feeling it, collective effervescence is so overwhelming that you feel nothing can stop us. But the adrenaline fades out in half an hour or less, and the psychological afterglow fades over a period of days or at most weeks. That is why high enthusiasm for something depends on repeating the experience. It is why religions invented regular church ceremonies-- once a week appears to be a good approximation to the time-dosage needed to keep up a continuing commitment. This would be an average commitment. Really high commitment-- on the level like Steve Jobs-- are kept going by much more frequent jolts of collective effervescence, repeatedly during the day, every day.

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3. High Attunement builds EE, Low Attunement lowers EE The same mechanism operates in any social encounter. It works in every size group, from the smallest up through the largest. Two people coming together always have the possibility of becoming mutually focused, and building a shared emotion to a high level of rhythmic entrainment. This is what people mean when they say they “click” with someone, or not. Crucial point: People with high EE go through more successful, energy-building encounters, and fewer EE-draining encounters. How do they manage this? The difference is in the details. The stronger the ingredients for successful EE-building encounters, the stronger the EE outcome. Mutual focus of attention: Pay attention to the signals the other person is giving off. That means not only what they say, but how they say it, the emotions on their face and their body movements. It means reading where they are coming from and what they are driving at. For a successful encounter, this is a two-way street. Not only do you pay attention to the other person, but make sure that they are paying attention to you. A really successful interaction has yet another layer: the other person knows you are paying close attention to him or her, and vice versa. It is a two-way street where everyone not only drives on it but looks down at the traffic from an overpass. Steve Jobs was famous for his steady, unblinking stare. When someone was talking, he stared them right in the face. This is a bit unnerving, since we commonly make eye contact but periodically look away, giving the other person a break from too intense contact. Jobs could be especially unnerving when talking to Apple employees, since he didn’t accompany his stare with the usual tie-signs such as nodding or smiling. Nevertheless, Steve was very good at getting EE out of such encounters. His stare was not necessarily friendly, but it fulfilled the mutual focus ingredient to a high degree. You had his full attention, and he took in everything you gave out. The way to succeed with Steve Jobs was to reciprocate, to focus just as intently as possible in the other direction. If that held, the encounter was on its way to a potential high-EE jolt for both sides.

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Shared emotion: Get on the same page emotionally. If you are feeling angry and the other person is feeling afraid, this is a bad combination for any outcome other than that one person will probably get their butt kicked emotionally. The emotions might not be so dramatic but if they are divergent the encounter is unlikely to build EE. It doesn’t matter whether the emotions are overtly expressed or not; people hiding or repressing their emotions still create a blockage so that the encounter fails in attunement. Often the pathway towards a successful encounter is to start with a strong emotion that is easily shared. It need not be a positive emotion. Very strong negative emotions, like grief, can produce successful attunement. That is what so often makes a funeral a moving experience-- even for tough guys who don’t usually cry, or maybe especially for tough guys like soldiers, cops, or Hells Angels, for whom death is their strongest focus of attention. Other strong emotions like fear can bring people together (as they typically do in a disaster or threatening situation). Anger can do it, especially if our group is angry together at someone else-- one of the most common emotions evoked in politics. Steve Jobs’ technique was typically to evoke anger or fear. That is what his crude insults did: they got everyone’s attention right away and started the encounter off with a jolt. In fact, Steve tended to insult people that he liked or worked closely with, people on his own team. With outsiders, people he had to bargain with, he tended to take the opposite approach and to play humble until he found out what he wanted to know. This kind of technique worked because focused encounters have their own dynamic over a period of time, the few minutes or more that they last. Steve could start out with an insult, but if the mutual focus could be kept up, the emotion would be transformed into something else. The feedback cycle: building rhythmic entrainment. Once the encounter is launched, build up shared rhythm. Feel your own rhythm; anticipate other people’s rhythm. Let them blend together. If this can be achieved, initial emotions get transformed. The initial emotion can be fear of an enemy or worry about a problem. It can be anger. And of course, it could be happiness. The key process, however, is to take the initiating emotion and transform it into collective effervescence: sheer bouncing off of each other into a chorus of shared emotion. And that generates emotions on another level: solidarity-- the feeling of the bond of the group; and Emotional Energy, that makes individuals feel strong. Steve was such an expert at generating EE because he was so persistent. He didn’t insult people, turn on his heel, and walk away. He insulted them, stared in their face and listened to what they had to say. He gave people an opportunity to get on the same page-- he demanded that they get on the same page with himself. Anger was just one technique, especially for getting things going. He put his energy into getting people emotionally

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aroused, mentally focused, and then clicking in a shared rhythm. Strong emotions were just an ingredient for the emotion-transformer that turned them into EE.


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4. People and Situations that Bring You Down Low attunement drains emotional energy. Not all encounters succeed. A lot of them are mediocre, neither bringing you down nor pumping you up, just getting along with people, keeping up the routine. Nothing wrong with that; it is how most personal relationships are maintained, and how most organizations operate on a daily basis. But it is not how great organizations work, nor how top careers are made. Steve Jobs hated this kind of routine. Some encounters are worse than this. They poison personal relationships and send an organization on a downward slope. The causes are in the ingredients. No mutual focus. People don’t focus on the same thing when they are together. They don’t pay attention to each other. It’s easy to spot. Someone comes into your office, but tunes out what you are saying and looks impatient to head for the door. An audience that checks their email while someone is speaking. A party where the person you are talking to keeps looking around. Research on speed-dating has found that asking a lot of questions is a sign that people aren’t clicking. Good conversations may start with asking a question (what kind of work do you do?) but it quickly leads to a series of back-andforths because you are focused on something that interests you both. There are several different reasons why people don’t focus on each other. Among other things, they may not want to. Whatever the reason, if they can’t focus together, the encounter won’t get to the point where it generates any EE for them. The longer it goes on at a low level of focus, the more it becomes a downer. No shared emotion. Sometimes people are really out of mood with each other. The guy who wants to be casual and jokey, the woman who wants to gush, are not going to get along with someone concentrating on something serious. People with really different political positions generally have emotions about public events that strongly clash, and will likely have trouble talking with each other unless they avoid such topics. These kinds of mismatched encounters don’t do you any good, but they may not cause much EE loss because they are so brief. They are only really a drag if you are stuck with this person, like the wrong kind of companions sitting next to you at a dinner party. The kinds of encounters that are really draining are ones where the forms are maintained but the substance is flat. You are stuck making polite conversation in which no topic is very interesting but you keep at it anyway. Sociologists call these forced rituals. It could

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be the company picnic, or sitting through a school graduation. They are supposed to be gatherings that celebrate meaningful events or generate group solidarity; but instead they fall flat. And falling flat is worse than no ritual at all, because it lowers people’s energy, confidence and enthusiasm. Even worse than forced rituals are phony rituals. These are where you make a real effort to be up-beat; you talk enthusiastically, laugh at people’s jokes, try and get in the swing of things. It’s hard work when nothing ever turns into a spontaneous rhythm. After a day of such encounters, you end up with what is called “interaction fatigue.” This is fairly common in going through a series of job interviews. The organizational pep talk is a loser if all it does is bore the audience. Is there an antidote to encounters that bring you down? Steve Jobs had a technique. He was an expert at spotting phony performances. He could tell when engineers were argumentative because they were defending their turf and didn’t want to try something different. If he sensed they really knew what they were talking about, he would respect what they said and try to work something out. Jobs was no engineer and had only a superficial knowledge of the field, but he read their tone and demeanor for clues as to what was really important in what they said. The people he worked with were generally more expert than himself, but he could tell when they were hiding their own lack of confidence, and when they were telling him things couldn’t be done just because they were waffling about not knowing how to do it. His micro-observational skills enabled him to get away with a brutally honest, no-bullshit approach. And this had the effect of keeping up Steve’s own EE. He never let himself be bogged down in fruitless defensive maneuvering or keeping up appearances. If he could tell that the other person wasn’t seriously engaging with him, he just cut it off. In his own words, he didn’t like having “bozos” around. This had less to do with the intelligence and expertise of the person he was dealing with, than their style of interacting. He didn’t want to be around people who were energy drainers.

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5. What About People Who Seem Energetic But Don't Get Things Done? Some people put out a lot of body movement, a lot of noise, maybe a lot of muscular exertion. But it ends up being waste motion. In a way they resemble high-EE persons, but it is energy that is tangled-up, making obstacles out of itself. The difference from successful high-EE persons is in a fourth dimension: whether their energy has rhythm and synchronization or not.

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The Fourth Dimension of EE: Rhythm/Sync

High-EE persons are in rhythm. Your action feels smooth, flowing, easy. You are in rhythm with yourself, like a musician who loves the tune. If you can impart that rhythm to others, you can lead them. Out on the tangent, energy expended goes up, but in a disjointed way. At the extreme, a furious person is completely out of control, flailing around. He or she has lost focus on the target and is burning off adrenaline, no matter what it destroys. Down towards the bottom of the our-of-rhythm tangent, it is merely uncontrollable waste motion. Restlessness is a sign that your energies are stirred up but you can't get yourself in sync to do anything with them. At the lowest level, boredom differs from mere passivity and depression because your mind/body system wants to do something but feels stuck. When you are on the out-of-rhythm tangent, you are out of sync with other people. Outof-sync persons are more disruptive to a group than depressed persons; they don't just bring other people down, but entangle everyone's energy in a useless spiral.


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6. EDOM: Emotional Domination Steve Jobs is trying to buy the Pixar computer animation unit from George Lucas. The Star Wars director needs the money because he’s going through a messy divorce. But Lucasfilm’s Chief Financial Officer thinks Jobs is low-balling the sale price, and the Pixar unit leader wants to stay as independent of Jobs as possible. So they arrange a strategy: the CFO will come late to the meeting, making everyone else wait for him. That will let everyone know who is in charge. But Steve arrives on time with the Pixar brass and just starts the meeting himself. When the CFO finally arrives no one even looks at him, because Steve has everyone’s attention. The deal goes through and the CFO hardly gets a word in edgewise. This is an example of emotional domination, or EDOM. Here is another: January 1997. Steve Jobs has just agreed to come back to Apple, in some kind of vague position to help get the company back on its feet. Four thousand people pack the San Francisco hotel ballroom for the Macworld exposition. Apple CEO Gil Amelio comes onstage and tries to deliver a pep talk, but he bores everyone and rambles on for over two hours. His speech has no rhythm at all, he fumbles for words and forgets what he wanted to say. Obviously he is uncomfortable with the situation. Finally he does what everyone has been waiting for, and introduces Steve Jobs, along with the other founding icon, Steve Wozniak. The crowd gives them a standing ovation. Jobs gives a brief speech, and then Amelio comes back and tries to assert himself, with another speech that rambles on for another hour. Finally, Amelio calls back Jobs and Wozniak, for a victory pose where he will raise both their arms in the air. The crowd is enthusiastic but Jobs hangs back at the edge of the stage, hands in his pockets, while Amelio embraces Wozniak. The body language announces what is going to happen. Steve is back, and he’s not going to play second string. Flash forward six months: The Board of Directors has just replaced Amelio with Jobs. Within a week, Jobs calls a telephone meeting of the Board. Apple is losing its best employees because of its dire financial condition, and Jobs wants to hold them by repricing their stock options. The Board says it will take about two months to study the legal and financial consequences. “‘Are you nuts?!’ Jobs exploded. He paused a long moment of silence, then continued: ‘Guys, if you don’t want to do this, I’m not coming back Monday. Because I’ve got hun-

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dreds of key decisions that are far more difficult than this, and if you can’t throw your support behind this kind of detail, I will fail. So if you can’t do this, I’m out of here.’” The next day the Chairman calls to tells him the Board has approved. Having won a showdown on a minor issue, Jobs has the momentum, and he seizes it immediately. He demands that the entire Board resign. “This company is in shambles, and I don’t have time to wet-nurse the board. So I need all of you to resign, or else I’m going to resign and not come back on Monday.” (Isaacson 318-19) He aims for total EDOM, and he gets it. There is a bit of strategy in this, since he tells the Chairman he is the one exception whom he wants to stay on, getting the most central person in the network on his side. He knows what kind of people are on the board, and he knows that probably they are tired of the hassles of running a company that is going downhill. Most of all, he knows how to seize the moment. Did Steve Jobs plan in advance to do this? Probably not; charismatic persons read the situation and jump on it.

How do you get EDOM? It starts with the basic ingredients for Emotional Energy, and concentrates them on yourself. (1) Generating a mutual focus of attention, and placing oneself in the focus, the person everyone is looking at. (2) Building a shared emotional mood, while making oneself the person who sets the mood. (3) Building up rhythmic entrainment and getting the group in sync, while making oneself the leader of the band, the conductor who sets the beat. We see this clearly in the way that Jobs times his showdown conversation with the Board: They speak corporate talk, in measured tones. He explodes at them: “Are you nuts!?” Then he pauses for a long moment of silence.... that none of the Directors feels motivated to break. It would have been an opportune time for someone else to seize the floor and move the conversation in another direction, but no one has the nerve to do it-- has the EE to do it. Jobs has set the pace. He wants them to move fast, not to dally over decisions. Next day, having won the skirmish, he declares war: he demands their resignation, not even giving them a chance to catch their emotional breath. He has set a fast rhythm, and he is going to keep it. Not all fights over EDOM go so one-sidedly. Sometimes there is a fight over EDOM:

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At Pixar, a well-integrated work group that pre-existed Steve Jobs, his domination was never so absolute. One of the Pixar co-founders, Alvy Ray Smith, another hippie-rebel style computer engineer, got into an argument with Jobs about circuit boards. It turned into a shouting match, and Jobs mocked him by imitating the slow drawl of Smith’s rural Texas accent. Smith retaliated by attacking Jobs’ favorite turf in the meeting room. He pushed past Jobs and started writing on the whiteboard-- where Jobs always liked to command the center of attention, summing up the official message of the meeting. “ ‘You can’t do that!' Jobs shouted. ‘What?’ responded Smith. ‘I can’t write on your whiteboard? Bullshit.’ At that point, Jobs walked out.” It ended in a draw. Smith had too much EE of his own, a reservoir of past successes in his own networks, to back down. But he couldn’t prevail over Jobs, so he resigned to found his own company. (Isaacson 245) Jobs doesn’t assert emotional domination by pulling rank. He doesn’t remind people that he’s the owner or the boss. He argues things out with them. Whether he is conscious of it or not, Steve comes down hard, not just on the technical issue they are arguing about, but by controlling the focus, rhythm, and emotional tone. In fact, Jobs generally doesn’t recognize official ranks anywhere, because he doesn't need to. At Apple, technically the Board of Directors are his superiors since they can fire him, but he gets EDOM over them anyway. Among his own employees at Apple, Steve was famous for what they jokingly called his reality distortion field. The idea was like a sci-fi fantasy force field that enables all sorts of impossible things in outer space of the future. The way Apple insiders described it, Steve had the power to alter real facts and the laws of science. Apple engineers and programmers would argue that something Steve wanted them to do wasn’t physically possible, but he would convince them that it was. Sometimes Steve had to give in, but more often than not, he motivated the work group to try something they thought was impossible and end up finding a completely different way to solve the problem. In effect, this was extreme EDOM, emotional domination so intense that it takes over one’s sense of reality. In micro-sociology, this is not so surprising. Intensely committed groups and charismatic leaders affect people’s views of what is real and unreal, possible and impossible, although usually what they convince people of is in the realm of politics or religion. Steve Jobs did it by focusing the emotions and rhythms of the group so strongly that they altered their views of scientific and technological reality. One colleague explained, “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around.” Another said, “Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it.” (Isaacson 11718) Nothing prevails over the intensely focused emotions of a group in sync. Steve’s reality distortion field was basically emotional, but emotions focused onto the smallest details of the technical projects his teams were working on. One person who was immune to Steve’s emotional dominance was Bill Gates. In the early part of their careers,

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Jobs was far more famous and successful than Gates, and Microsoft created much of their early software for Apple. They interacted closely and Gates often attended Apple meetings and retreats. The secret of Gates’ power to resist was his own distinctive emotional, or rather anti-emotional style. When other people got more emotional, Gates deliberately made himself calmer and colder, tuning out and avoiding eye contact. Steve would go into one of his high-pressure emotional performances, but Bill would detach himself from it, watching it like an distant observer. Apple engineers said that Gates was not a good listener; when they explained their inventions, Gates jumped ahead, preferring to figure out for himself how it worked. Bill’s style was not at all charismatic, but he knew how to negotiate what he wanted, and how not to let anyone else lead him around. His own micro-interactional style-- don’t get caught up in anyone else’s emotions; don’t fall into their vocal rhythm; don’t let them set the speed of the interaction-- gave him maximal independence, especially against someone like Steve Jobs. Bill Gates had his own way of getting EE, his own circle of intimates and his own organization. His EE storage battery was charged up on his home turf, but via encounters that had an entirely different pace and tone than the ones Steve Jobs specialized in. Steve had an almost religious way of running things. This came out most strongly in his way of recruiting people who he thought were good into his work teams. One of his recruits when the Mac was first being developed was sitting at his desk, working on the older computer, the Apple II. Steve leaned into his cubicle and told him he was on the Mac team now. “The engineer replied that he needed a couple more days to finish the Apple II product he was in the middle of. ‘What’s more important than working on the Macintosh?’ Jobs demanded. ‘You’re wasting your time on that. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you’re going to start on it now!’ With that, Jobs yanked out the power cord of his Apple II, causing the code he was working on to vanish.” (Isaacson 114) Without being blasphemous, notice how similarly Jesus acted when he recruited disciples: He made fishermen drop their nets and walk away from their boats. A man said to him: “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” Jesus replied: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.” It is an astounding things to say. In a ritually pious society, there is nothing more important that burying your father. Jesus demanded a complete break with existing forms. Those who follow them are dead in spirit. No divided loyalties here: it is all or nothing. Extreme EDOM is typical of charismatic leaders. In fact, it is virtually their defining characteristic. It includes being absolutely decisive. Nothing is allowed to break the rhythm, no hesitating, nothing but single-minded focus on the goal.

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Careers: Caesar Faces Down a Mutiny The details of emotional domination look the same, wherever we find them in history. Here is an example from 47 BC. There were riots in Rome when Julius Caesar was away in Asia fighting the Civil War. Mark Anthony summoned him to hurry back. The army was in mutiny, demanding to be paid, refusing orders and threatening to kill their commander. When Caesar arrived in Rome, he found the whole city frightened of what the army would do. Caesar went out to the army camp, and without warning suddenly appeared on the speaker’s platform. The soldiers came onto the field in great commotion, unarmed, and shouting. Some greeted him as “Commander.” State your demands, Caesar said. Ashamed to mention to his face the bounties they had been promised, they called out, we want to be discharged, we’ve been fighting this civil war for 3 years, we want to go home. Without hesitation, Caesar said: “I discharge you.” Dead silence. After waiting for it to take effect, Caesar added, “I will give you the rewards I promised, when I triumph with other troops.” The soldiers began to shuffle and murmur among themselves, hoping Caesar would make them another offer. He kept silent and started to leave the platform. The soldiers crowded around him, pleading for him to stay, pleading they were loyal, it was only a few mutineers who were at fault, offering to punish the mutineers themselves, pleading to be taken back into the army. Caesar lingered a few minutes, as if he didn’t know what to do. Finally he remounted the platform and said: “I won’t punish any of you.” The soldiers clapped and cheered, as he told them that after they finished off their enemies they would all receive a bonus of land and money from Caesar’s own property. Caesar cut them off. “But I am pained that the Tenth Legion-- the legion I honored most in all my campaigns-- has joined this agitation. They alone I discharge from the army.” They pleaded with him but Caesar was adamant. The Tenth Legion was so hurt that they offered to draw lots and execute every tenth man, if Caesar would take them back. At length he relented. No one was punished. Instead, the army was ordered to prepare immediately to depart on another campaign. Caesar is sudden and surprising. He immediately takes the initiative away from the mutineers, and once he has it, he keeps them off balance. His timing is masterful: sudden appearance, unhesitating decision, dramatic silence to let it sink in, a show of vacillating to prolong the tension. Finally he forgives them generously, but accompanied by another harsh insult narrowed down to only part of the crowd. Relief for the majority goes along with a spectacle of shaming and hurt feelings for a once-honored elite.

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Caesar gets emotional domination and then makes sure everybody feels it so badly they will give anything to end the confrontation. He rubs it in, playing the drama twice, first for everybody, then making them watch as one group is singled out for humiliation. At last he relents, having extracted heart-felt offers of loyalty. And it ends, not just with tearful reconciliation, but throwing their new-found solidarity into action: they march.

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Did Steve Jobs Ever Hesitate? Was he ever vacillating and indecisive, unable to make up his mind? At times, yes. Emotional Energy and Emotional Domination are not permanent qualities of the personality. EE is created by a chain of successful encounters. When the micro-ingredients are off -- no mutual focus, no shared emotion, no rhythmic entrainment-- the situation flounders. So of course EDOM can fluctuate. Steve has his moments of vacillation. Notice when they happen. March 1985. The Mac was launched the year before, but its sales are only 10 percent of projected. Bill Gates has deserted to IBM with his software, and IBM has charged into a 75% share of the PC market. The Apple board of directors are exasperated with Jobs, and they are riding the mild-mannered CEO John Sculley to crack down on the way Jobs is behaving. Steve is stalking the halls, cursing out anyone and everyone. Mid-level managers begin to talk behind his back. The company is full of conspiracies, plans to replace Jobs as head of the Mac division, plans to exile Jobs to a skunkworks where he can lead a little team inventing something new and not messing up the whole organization. Top managers, Steve’s old hires and Sculley’s new ones, can’t make up their minds; they join in plotting against Jobs, against Sculley, switch back again. Everyone is angry, fearful, hesitating. Indecisiveness is spreading like an uncontrolled disease. Steve’s mood swings widely. The idea of being the inventor-genius, off with his buddies, appeals to him. One day he is agreeing with the board. The next day he is lashing out at Sculley, telling everyone he is a bozo. His old partner, Steve Wozniak quits. “Sculley finally worked up the nerve to tell Jobs to give up running the Mac Division. Jobs looked stunned... and began to cry. Sculley sat there biting his fingernails.” Sculley tells him he is going to bring it up to the board, and begs him to concentrate on new products. “Jobs jumped from his seat, and turned his intense stare on Sculley. ‘I don’t believe you’re going to do that,” he said. ‘If you do that, you’re going to destroy the company.’” (Isaacson 197-98) Steve has flashes of energy but it is badly out of sync; he has lost the power of EDOM. His counterparts are the same way, feeding each other. No one in the company can get focused.

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The board unanimously backs Sculley and Jobs acquiesces. A month goes by and Steve still has not made the transition. At the quarterly research presentation, Jobs brings his Mac team, and asks for “one last chance to prove he can run a division.” Sculley refuses. Steve retreats with his team of loyalists, and at dinner they pump him up, urging him to fight. They cook up a plot to oust Sculley while he is away on a scheduled visit to China. Carelessly (or self-centeredly), Steve mentions the plot to the very manager who is slated to replace Jobs as head of the Mac Division. The manager in turn goes to dinner with Sculley and tells him, “If you leave tomorrow for China, you could be ousted.” (Isaacson 199) Sculley cancels his trip, and next morning they all meet at the Friday executive meeting. “Jobs sat at the far end, looking energized. Sculley looked pale. Jobs attacked, coldly and slowly, fixing Sculley with his unblinking stare. As the rest of the room sat frozen, Sculley finally lost his temper,” but he is so rattled that his voice stutters. Nevertheless he plunges ahead. Sculley can’t control his own demeanor, but he has the votes. He polls the room: who can run the comparny better? “The frozen onlookers began to squirm. In hesitant voices, they supported Sculley. Jobs looked shattered... and bolted out of room. No one followed.” (Isaacson 201-02) Even Steve’s team of loyalists can’t restore his EDOM. They huddle in his office, where Steve starts to cry. The showdown has backfired, escalating the situation. He can’t even stay on running a skunkworks on the side; he’d have to leave Apple. But even now, Steve vacillates. Over the weekend, the loyalists meet at Steve’s home to plot, but most of his old allies refuse to join. Sculley is angry, kills the skunkworks deal, and tells Jobs he can stay on as figurehead Chairman of the Board, nothing more. In the auditorium where the new organization plan is presented, Jobs sits in the back row, staring angrily at Sculley, who never looks in his direction. “There was a smattering of awkward applause.” The organization is dispirited and de-energized. Jobs recalled, “I felt like I’d been punched, the air knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe.” (Isaacson 207-8) Steve has not only lost EDOM, he has lost his own sense of direction. He is so passive that he acquiesces in the ceremonial role as Chairman, and goes off to speak at events in Europe representing Apple. This man of outrageous honesty and blunt talk falls into a script dictated by others. Not until several months, as he gets a new trajectory, does he build up enough EE to make the final break with Apple. Time now to overview Jobs’ entire career, and to analyze how his networks came together, and how they fell apart, and then got put back together again, stronger than ever.

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7. Energizing Networks of Allies First there was Steve Wozniak. Jobs knew about him because of his reputation as a high school tech geek who played outrageous jokes such a manipulating other people’s TV sets and phones without their knowing it. Woz was brilliant with circuit boards and had the rudiments of a build-it-yourself personal computer. But not at all an emotionally dominant person-- quite the opposite, Woz was too shy to speak in public, even to a club of fellow electronic hobbyists. Wozniak does provide a network link, taking Jobs to the Homebrew Computer Club meetings, where Jobs figures out two things. First, how superior Wozniak’s design is to everyone else’s. Second, that an audience exists, even a market, who will be enthusiastic about it, and buy it. Jobs literally becomes Wozniak’s spokesperson. At the same time, he energizes Woz, getting him to work at building a complete PC. Wozniak doesn’t want to quit his safe job at Hewlett-Packard, but Jobs pulls him along by creating an alternative and much more energetic environment. Jobs talks him into forming a partnership, surrounding him with a group of enthusiastic friends: putting him where the action is. Within five months, they have a full-scale computer, the Apple I. Even with this burst of success, Wozniak is still too shy to attend the first computer show. Woz stays in his hotel room in Atlantic City, while Jobs shows off the Apple I and roams the display floor checking out the competition. The computer-building network is a movement, halfway between pop fans and camera faddists. Their gatherings are fun and identity-building. Jobs is the most focused and energized of the group. He expands the network, heightens the enthusiasm, and gives it a trajectory, all the things that Wozniak couldn’t do. Jobs doesn’t energize just Wozniak, he recruits people with EE. There is a saying about the marriage market: Don’t marry for money, go where the money is and marry for love. This is what Jobs does with high tech expertise. He starts out already situated in Silicon Valley, in the midst of science labs and think tanks spun off by the burgeoning business of micro-processor chips. Out of these ingredients, combinations are already happening, like Atari manufacturing a table top electronic ping-pong game that people play in cocktail lounges. Jobs gets a job at Atari, mainly to learn what’s up and who’s who. Someone tells him about a brilliant electrical engineer. Jobs goes and recruits him.

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Jobs approaches a Xerox programmer, even though he already has another high-paying offer. “I have a lot of stuff to show you,” Steve tells him. “Wow," the guy said later, "I don’t see that kind of passion everyday. So I signed up.” Steve is not just infusing his network of recruits with his own EE, he also recruits them by whether their emotional trajectories click. “If their eyes light up, if they went right for the mouse and started pointing and clicking, Steve would smile and hire them.” (Isaacson 114-5) A good observer of micro-details, Jobs relied more on seeing people in action than listening to what they said.

Heavyweight and Lightweight Networks Everyone now knows you need networking for success. But not all networks are equally worthwhile. Some are a waste of time, and some are an actual danger. Jobs put it bluntly: some people are bozos, and he didn’t want them around. Others are A-list, and those are the ones to recruit. There are two main things that make a network tie worthwhile. First, heavyweight ties are to people with EE. They have energy and trajectory; they get things done; they put their talent to work making big things happen. Second, heavyweight ties are expandable. They lead somewhere that you want to go-- they connect to other heavyweights. Lightweight ties are the opposite. Either the person you connect with has little skill and ability to get things done; or they don’t know anybody worth knowing. When Apple hired John Sculley as CEO in 1983, Jobs believed they were getting a marketing genius, who would bring Pepsi-Cola’s big league respectability with him. But Jobs soon decided that the people Sculley was bringing in were bozos-- people who lacked world-changing EE. Sculley might be a heavyweight himself but his network was lightweight. In Jobs’ estimation, Sculley dropped to being at best a light heavyweight, and in the end, just another lightweight lightweight. These are dead-end networks. Worse yet, since networks tend to propagate through similar people, they gradually dilute the whole organization. In Jobs’ view, they poison it.

Six Degrees are Useless: What You Need is a Two-link Heavyweight Network It has become popular wisdom that pretty much everyone is connected to everyone else within six degrees of separation. If you want a personal introduction to someone at the other end of the country, you should be able to find somebody that you know (link 1) who knows somebody (link 2) who knows... (links 3, 4, and 5) who personally knows the person at link 6. There was a game in the 1990s about who has acted in a film with someone, who acted with someone else, etc., until everyone is connected within 6 degrees to--

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Kevin Bacon? This doesn’t exactly make it the formula for becoming a top Hollywood star. Practically speaking, so what? If you want someone to do you a favor, your friend (link 1) might be able to get one of their friends (link 2) to do it for you. But people don’t feel much obligation once you get to the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend level, not to mention 4, 5, or 6 degrees out. Six degrees is just too remote to carry any weight. Any information that comes from more than 2 links away is likely to backfire on you. Consider the parents’ nightmare scenario. Mom and Dad go off on a vacation, letting son or daughter to take care of the house. Junior invites his friends over for a party. Junior’s friends tell their friends, who tell their friends. A bunch of people show up who don’t even know link 2-- Junior-- much less know or care anything about the owner of the house. All they know is here’s a wide-open house and an exciting scene because so many people are coming from all over having a wild party. The result is the house is wrecked, as the parents find when they get home. This doesn’t mean you can’t expand your networks sequentially when building a business. But to build a heavyweight network, you need to turn each link into a personal link- a one-step link. A positive example, and a negative example: After Jobs was fired at Apple, he was having trouble getting the investment community to buy shares in his new enterprise, NeXT. Even venture capitalists shied away from him. NeXT had no product anywhere near ready to ship, it was running out of cash, and Jobs’ reputation was in the tank. Hearing about his situation, Ross Perot called him up and left a message: “If you ever need an investor, call me.” Perot was another maverick, a former IBM salesman who broke away to build his own mainframe system servicing corporations and government agencies. In 1984, just a year before Jobs was ousted at Apple, Perot had sold his company to General Motors for an unprecedented price of $2.4 billion. Jobs delayed a week before answering Perot’s call; his financial situation was desperate but Jobs was not going to appear over-eager. When they connected, Jobs offered an even bigger slice of NeXT to Perot, and pumped the enthusiasm by investing another chunk of his own money. The two of them clicked. “Steve’s like me. We’re weird in the same way. We’re soul mates,” Perot said. (Isaacson 227-28) From then on, Perot made a point of showing off his new friend, introducing Steve to people like Gordon Getty, inheritor of the then richest fortune in the world. Steve now had entrée into the social and celebrity upper class. The East Coast business establishment might not like him, but his new contacts outflanked them. The initial contact with Perot happened through a remote network of hearsay, but the two of them turned it into a direct connection.

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A negative example: Back in 1983, when turmoil was building up inside Apple over Steve’s management style, he was finally persuaded to hire a new President. Following his usual penchant for hiring the best among his rivals, Jobs offered the job to the IBM division head that invented the PC; but was turned down because he did not want to go over to the enemy. The link was close enough-- probably a two-step link-- but the tone was too negative to click. Finally Jobs decides to hire a headhunting firm, and to go outside the high-tech industry. He is deliberately going to remote networks-- two steps to the head-hunter, another two steps or more to the man they finally hire, John Sculley from Pepsi Co. It is a deliberate effort to get someone who has favorable network connections with the top of the advertising business (Sculley had run the successful campaign to challenge Coca Cola, an analogy to Jobs’ struggle with IBM); and favorable connections with the Wall Street elite. It turns out to be too much of a stretch. Jobs turns on the charm with Sculley and convinces him, for a while, that they are soul mates, but Jobs soon finds that the people Sculley hires are “bozos.” They build up a strong one-link connection but within months it is undermined by its network baggage. Not only do the distant parts of their respective networks not click with each other, but they are pulling in opposite directions. Sculley’s “bozo” protégés are antithetical to Jobs’ inner circle, and the infighting accelerates. In the network world, the attempted hybrid was a bridge too far.

What You Know Is Not Separate from Who You Know Contrary to the cliché, it is almost impossible to know a person without knowing something. Who you know, at a minimum, means having a network connection with them, and that means being able to carry on a conversation with them. This requires cultural capital- something to talk about that both sides regard as worthwhile. It may be just polite pleasantries about where you travel on vacation, or sports teams you are fans of. But you have to know something in common, or the conversation turns into the boring and embarrassing pauses that happen at cocktail parties when you meet someone from a too-different part of the social universe. Watch how Steve Jobs builds his network connections. First of all, he has a store of gossip-- he knows what people are saying about other people inside the tech community. On the whole, gossip has a bad name when it consists in backstage sniping by circulating critical stories among people who know each other. But Steve wants to hear who is good at something, who is doing something cutting edge in the tech world. And that doesn’t mean the kind of gushing that people do in the polite upper-middle class social scene, isn’t so-and-so wonderful, such a lovely person, a real trooper, always there for you when you need them. Steve wants to know specifically what people are good at; and he wants

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to know it about people who are in the technical networks close to his own. He’s not talking just for the sake of a momentary conversational glow. When he is being pushed out of Apple in the summer of 1985, he goes to visit scientists at Stanford. They talk about biochemistry. Steve knows little about the field of gene splicing, but he knows enough to ask what their computer needs are. Steve suggests doing experiments by computer. That sounds feasible, but a work station with enough computing power is too expensive for most university labs to afford. Steve gets excited: here is a new product niche to fill. It becomes the direction in which he takes NeXT. Steve knows enough going in to get involved in a mutually engrossing conversation with lab scientists; and he leverages what he finds out, so that the conversations become better and better. Networks made out of sufficiently engrossing links generate more knowledge; and that knowledge generates still more network links. That is, if you focus the conversation on ideas that have trajectory. Another example. Early on, Jobs realizes that the start-up personal computer industry is full of clunky-looking products. It’s a bunch of engineering nerds showing off their tech skills. All they care about is making it work, not what it looks like. Jobs goes into department stores and walks the aisles looking at kitchen products. He likes the way Cuisinart appliances look. He buys one and takes it to his work group; this is how an Apple computer should look. So far, he is dealing remotely with someone else’s product network-- with the thing, not with the people who made it. He gets better at making closer network contact. He sees an advertisement for Intel in a magazine; it’s a high-tech firm in his neighborhood, and he likes how they present themselves, not as techy but as cool. He calls up Intel and asks who created the ad. They tell him: Regis McKenna. Jobs is so ignorant of the advertising world that he thinks it is an organization, but he isn’t shy with questions. Regis McKenna turns out to be the premiere advertising publicist in Silicon valley, and Jobs pesters their office until they send an associate who visits their garage. Jobs’ hippie demeanor puts them off a bit, but his forward-moving energy shines through. Steve finally manages to get to McKenna himself. They clash enough to make it exciting, mainly because Wozniak comes with him, and gets touchy about McKenna criticizing his technical write-up: “I don’t want any PR man touching my copy.” (Isaacson 79) They get kicked out of the office, but Jobs comes back without Wozniak-- he knows already how to dissociate incompatible parts of his network. Jobs and McKenna have enough background in common to get along. McKenna is another college drop-out, who worked in the semi-conductor industry and went into business for himself making hip rather than dull products, in this case ads. Jobs touches the common chord and he now has a top level team in a part of the business world that would always be his strength: avant-garde advertising.

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It might seem ironic that Jobs, who did so much to promote electronic communications and rode to the top making products to leverage the Internet, preferred face-to-face meetings. But there is nothing ironic about this as micro-sociology. Steve Jobs was a master of who-you-know-is-what-you-know. To know somebody well, to be able to make a powerful link with them, a heavyweight link, you need to know what to talk to them about. The link becomes heavyweight to the extent that you can fill it up with cutting-edge ideas, ideas loaded with emotional energy. And conversely. What-you-know depends on who-you-know. And that means, really knowing them in their best professional mode. Knowing what ideas they get energized about. Knowing when they are stonewalling or bullshitting you. Knowing when they are past their limits, and when their talk has a trajectory, into the future and outwards into more heavyweight networks connections to be made. The easiest and most effective way to size this up is in face-to-face conversations. The Internet, the telephone, these are devices to hide behind, machines that enable you to present a front and hide the backstage manipulation. Face-to-face, that is harder to do. A really penetrating micro-observer reads all the cues in a conversation, its rhythms and hitches, body postures, everything that is in sync or out of sync. Heavyweight information comes wrapped in heavyweight observational skills. It is the key micro-ingredient in what is called charisma.

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_______________________________________________________________________ Careers: Not Just Any Mentor Mentors have become popular organizational practice. Does it work? It is based on a sound sociological principle: people make careers through networks. Having the right network contacts early on is the way to get a good job and a way to get ahead in it. What hasn’t been proven is whether mentoring programs, now that they have become so widespread, actually deliver on their promise. Some business corporations assign a mentor to new hires. Universities assign mentors to new Assistant Professors. Minority students get mentors who volunteer to come back and help the next generation get through. How much better they do by having mentors is another question. If we look at persons who had extremely successful careers, many of them had a mentor at a crucial point early in their lives. Michel Villette, a French sociologist who studied how people made big fortunes in business in Europe and the United States, concluded that most of them had a mentor who helped launch their career. What kind of mentor? Someone who provided network connections and-- hold your breath, volunteer mentors-- money to invest in reaching the next level. In other words, they didn’t just provide advice and emotional support. They weren’t cheerleaders, they were facilitators. When Sam Walton was starting out building Wal-Mart in small-town Arkansas, his father-in-law acted as his mentor. The older man was a successful businessman who introduced Sam to bankers, guaranteed his credit, and even bought him his first franchise. The early road was rocky and there were a lot of failures. The mentor was crucial in getting Sam back on his feet. He also made introductions to people in the business world, franchise executives, suppliers, potential employees. In short, the mentor who started Sam Walton on his way to a large fortune got him the connections he needed, vouched for his reputation by backing up deals, and helped him with financing. Sam Walton’s father-in-law provided a wide-ranging, heavyweight network, not to mention money. Similarly with Steve Jobs. When he and Wozniak were making computers in his garage, he started looking for money to finance a better product. He found a venture capitalist who realized they had something. But he told them they weren't going anywhere by taking their computers around to local stores, and said he wouldn't invest unless they brought in someone who knew marketing. Jobs asked him for three names to contact. One of them was Mike Markkula, who had worked for the chip manufacturer Intel and made a fortune when it went public. Markkula had lived through previous waves of Silicon Valley takeoffs, and he sensed another one coming on. Markkula and Jobs immediately liked each other. Steve started going over to his house, and they would talk all night: about what a personal computer should look like; about how to market it to ordinary people instead of just hobbyists so that everyone could use it in their homes. They got high on enthusiasm envisioning how big their company was going to be, and not just for the sake of money. Markkula agreed to invest a quarter of a million dollars, five times as much as the first venture capitalist Jobs negotiated with, and to join him as a partner. Jobs got far more out of Markkula, because they clicked more strongly. They generated emotional energy together. They

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already had some of the same vision-- or more likely, the vision of what Apple would be grew out of their all-night talk-fests. For the next few years, Markkula would be the business side of the newly formed Apple Computer Co., making the leap to the adult world. Not just any mentor will do. It has to be a mentor who is willing to put a lot of oneself into facilitating their protégé’s career. And has to be someone who is dominant in that field, someone who has the heavyweight connections and knows how to use them. The more successful the mentor, the better the chances of the protégé. The downside of this pattern is that a mentor who is only modestly successful will not be able to launch their protégé to the level of becoming a big winner. This is the fallacy of an organization that assigns mentors to junior people as a matter of bureaucratic policy. Such mentors aren’t necessarily bad; they may provide a bit of comfort and some informal advice about the way things are done. But if such mentors don’t have heavyweight networks themselves, they won’t be able to introduce you, the newby, into heavyweight networks. If they’re not really financially savvy themselves, they can’t do much to jump-start your financial connections, assuming they would want to. The kind of mentor you want, then, is someone who not only has a heavyweight network, but is willing to put a lot of his or her own reputation and even their finances into your career. How do you get such a mentor? Two steps. You can go looking them. This is much better than waiting for them to come to you, or just accepting whatever the organization assigns you. Steve Jobs from the very beginning was intensely interested in scouting out the players in his field. He learned early where his deficiencies were. He asked his contacts in the established high-tech firms to recommend names, then talked to the people on the list until he found someone who was willing to take on the role of fullfledged mentor. Step two: you have to not only locate the mentor, you have to convince them to take you on. And that means you have to meet them half way. Being young and clueless is not enough. Mentors don’t do it out of pity, and if they are doing it just because they were assigned to do it, they probably won’t throw a lot of themself into it. There has to be a mutual attraction: older and younger click when they feel attuned to each other. The less clueless you are, the better your chances for establishing a bond with an experienced mentor. The protégé who already has some skills and vision in that particular kind of career is going to be better at generating attunement with someone who is highly skilled. Here again, who you get to know is not separate from what you know, or at any rate how quickly you learn it. What we see over and over in the early business careers of persons who make a fortune, is that they find a mentor who really likes them. Often this is described as a father-son relationship, the older generation who feels like he is cloning himself. A better way to put it would be: the older person has the emotional energy and the skills at emotional domination to be a business success. This style of operating is at the core of his personality. The protégé has to match, as much as possible at a young age, that trajectory of EE, those skills at EDOM. When they first meet, they can’t be rivals; the older puts aside trying to manipulate the younger, the younger puts aside trying to challenge the older. They have to click around their similarity, each seeing a part of oneself in the other. In the world of competitive careers, this kind of resonance is the nearest thing to love. Usually it is a honeymoon phase of life. Once the younger has found how to work the networks on their own, the mentor is left behind.

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[Note: Relationships with mentors are somewhat different in scientific, intellectual and artistic careers. See Part IV, Knowing What Field You're Playing In.]

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8. Dangerous Networks: Rivals and Opponents Columbia University sociologist Harrison White said that markets are mirrors in which producers see each other. He meant that the producer can’t see the consumer very well, especially the consumer of the future. It doesn’t help to ask people what they want, because they don’t know that they want a new product until they try it. It’s the producers who have a much better idea of what can be done, because they are working on the possibilities of new technologies and putting things together in new combinations. When a producer looks at the market, they see who is doing well, or badly, with what kind of products. Your rivals’ market share tells you what consumers like. You can then use this information to position yourself. Especially in introducing a new product, you want to know how well something like this has done. But you don’t want to duplicate exactly what your competitors are offering, unless you are willing to get into a head-to-head competition; in that case, you are entering a long grind of mutual price-cutting, a race to the bottom that is hard on your profits unless you can do a huge volume and end up with dominant market share. The markets-as-mirrors idea explains how to find a market niche-- similar enough to what someone else has sold so that you know it can be done; different enough so that you are not directly competing with them. The greatest of all economists, Joseph Schumpeter, said this is what entrepreneurs do; innovation creates a temporary monopoly because no one else is offering that product. Of course these monopolies don’t last, in a free market, because other people are monitoring you in the market mirror just like you are monitoring them. That is why you have to keep on creating new combinations that other producers don’t have yet. Markets-as-mirrors allows some producers to sell products that are more expensive than others. They don’t compete over who has the lowest price. Instead they compete over quality. That means quality as the consumers see it. No one was better than Steve Jobs at seeing this point. It’s not just that a product has to be good; it has to look good. It has to convince consumers that it really enhances their lifestyle. It has to engage their emotions;

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it has to make them fall in love with it. When Jobs monitored his competitors, he looked for whose were dull, whose were clunky, and whose were good-looking, attractive, cool. The market-as-mirror is a mirror for emotions. Now comes the dangerous part. Competitors are monitoring each other. They are not only looking at each other’s products, they meet each other, talk to each other, make deals with each other. You learn what they are doing, what products they have in the pipeline, how they are positioning themselves. In an active market, there are plenty of rivals who are aiming at the same market niche. When Steve Jobs walked the aisles at the early computer shows in Atlantic City and San Francisco, he was not only sizing up the competition, he was also letting them size him up. There is always an ambiguous period when allies and competitors are the same people. Jobs wants to find out as much as he can about the high-tech industries in Silicon valley, among other reasons because he wants to hire their best talent away from them. And he is looking for the best technologies and best designs-- remember, Steve Jobs is not an engineer or a designer, he just is the sharpest observer of who has an edge and where the next high-quality niche is going to be. But someone else could do the same thing to him. When Jobs and Wozniak were starting out-- back in 1976, more or less Year One of the computer-building movement-- they were not the only ones. The Homebrew Computer Club had a membership that was growing from 30 to 100 and more. Surely out of that number there must have been other people who saw there was a market opening for a personal computer? Of course there were, dozens of start-ups in the first few years. And they were all monitoring each other-- the purpose of the club in the first place was to show off what they were doing, sharing ideas and techniques. And generating emotion. This was the collective effervescence of the group, the isn’tthis-fun, we’re- really-making-things-happen atmosphere that pumped people up. It also created a group identity, a feeling of sharing that goes contrary to the feeling of market competition. Wozniak was full of this feeling of sharing, so much so that Jobs had to entice him into forming a business partnership, mainly by showing they could provide even more fun-and-energy than the Homebrew Club. So how did Jobs come out of top of all the potential competitors in Homebrew? For one thing, a lot of them were like Wozniak, who didn’t want to take that route; it was fun, and they weren’t unhappy if Jobs took their best ideas and ran with them. But there were other commercial spin-offs, real rivals to Jobs. The existence of Silicon valley around them guaranteed that this would happen. It was a place of start-ups that had made good, electronics innovators who grew and then split off. Since the 1950s, former co-workers and employees had been creating micro-chip giants like Intel out of the market-share struggles of previous giants like Fairchild Semiconductor, started by engineers who rose in

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revolt against their boss, William Shockley, who had invented the transistor at Bell Telephone Laboratories and then went into business for himself. People had been taking insider information for decades and starting new businesses to compete with the previous generation. The best way to look at it is to zoom out to a high-angle view, de-centered from the story of Steve Jobs. Silicon valley networks created the Homebrew Computer Club, and Homebrew created the networks that launched the personal computer market. Someone in that network was going to concentrate more energy, more intense networks, and better monitoring of the environment than anyone else. And that turned out to be Steve Jobs. Better yet: it created Steve Jobs.

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The Raid on Xerox The crucial turning point happens in Year Four, 1979. Apple has a successful personal computer on the market. So do (or soon will have) Altair, Commodore, Kaypro, a dozen others. Alert to the professional gossip, as usual, Jobs hears that the Xerox research center in Palo Alto has a great new technology for computer screens. But its researchers are secretive. How to get inside? While soliciting investments to expand Apple production, Jobs negotiates with Xerox headquarters back on the East Coast. He offers them Apple shares at a good price, ahead of its upcoming IPO. Part of the deal is access to Xerox’s trade secrets. Jobs then visits the Palo Alto Research Center. Their scientists meet them with a rather standard presentation for visiting dignitaries. Privately, one of them said, “It was incredibly stupid, completely nuts, and I fought to prevent giving Jobs much of anything.” Jobs persists; the scientists stonewall him. He mobilizes his allies. Jobs brings with him his best experts in the area, along with a former programmer he had hired away from Xerox PARC. The other side offers some more superficial information, already published stuff. “Let’s stop the bullshit!” Steve keeps shouting. He repeatedly phones Xerox headquarters in far-away Connecticut, where the investment officers have little idea of the potentials of this new area of technology. Finally the Palo Alto scientists give him the full details. “Jobs bounced around and waved his arms excitedly... ‘You’re sitting on a gold mine,’ he shouted. ‘I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.’” (Isaacson 96-97) What was the secret discovery? Known as Graphical User Interface (GUI), it was a revolution in how the computer user input commands and got results on the screen. Up to now, a personal computer user typed in letters and numbers from a standard typewriter keyboard, and these would appear on the screen. The only thing different from a regular typewriter, except for the lack of paper, was that the messages usually were in green phosphorus and the screen was black. It was not only klutzy and unattractive, but dull and technical-looking. (And this in itself was a big leap forward from the computers of 10 years earlier, when you had to punch holes in a stack of cards about the shape of today’s airline boarding pass, in a code that had no intuitive meaning at all.) GUI looked completely different: screen with pictures on it, icons such as the trash box, rectangular boxes with names of files and folders. You navigated the screen with a mouse, pointing at what you wanted to open, dragging things around to put them in another file, clicking to open and close. All this is so standard today that it takes a leap of historical imagination to go back to the days when this had to be invented, and to appreciate how big a leap it was at the time. Some of the Xerox scientists saw the possibilities, but no one saw them more energetically than Steve Jobs. The reason we are all used to the colorful icon-filled screen today is because he showed the market what could be done with it.

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The main technical problem was that GUI required much more computational power than the previous system. Every pixel on the screen had to be mapped to specific bits. But computer chips were trending faster and smaller. Looking ahead, Jobs envisioned computer screens that were user-friendly (a new term at the time), brightly colored, whimsical and playful. Jobs looked at the market and the technology, and saw the consumer of the future-- a consumer that his new product was going to create. Once the screen was bitmapped, it opened the way to touch-screen controls that proliferated into all sorts of hand-held devices 20 years later. Home at Apple with his stolen intellectual property, Jobs turned his back on the old-style Apple II and its offshoots, and devoted all his attention to perfecting the user-friendly, screen graphics computer that would revolutionize the industry, the Macintosh. Jobs becoming ever more perfectionist, it would take three more years before Macintosh was ready to launch. In the meantime, Xerox marketed their own GUI computer. To the relief of Jobs and his team, it was a commercial flop. Its graphics were slow, it was very expensive, and aimed at the office network market. It was a tense waiting game, now that competition in the industry had woken up. But Apple had the advantage, if they could afford to wait, that computer chips were constantly becoming faster and cheaper. After someone else tested the market with an inferior version, Apple could blast open the market niche with something really spectacular. It was a strategy of market monitoring and timing that Apple would play to perfection in their run of big hits in the iPod era onwards. Some of the Xerox PARC scientists knew the value of what they had. But they had insufficient allies in their own company. Apple, with much better focus on the new market niche (Xerox was mainly selling office copying machines), was a much more energized place for the graphical screen oriented towards a burgeoning market of consumers. Jobs had little trouble hiring away Xerox PARC’s best scientists, including the very ones who had most strongly opposed him from getting their secret.

Bill Gates as Turncoat Insider Bill Gates and Microsoft are famous as Steve Jobs’ big rivals. By the 1990s, the Microsoft OS had buried Apple, and almost driven it out of business. Nevertheless, as so often happens, the biggest rivals were once very close to each other in the cutting-edge networks. In the early 1980s, Gates was designing programming language for the Apple II, just as he had done earlier for smaller computer start-ups in the Silicon valley scene. Jobs didn’t mind hiring people who worked for rivals, as long as they were the best. At this point Apple dwarfed Microsoft, with annual sales of over $1 billion against $30 million. But the Mac was going to be the real revolution. Jobs flew to Seattle to try to sweep up Gates into his tsunami of enthusiasm for the new graphical interface. Gates went with the flow

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and agreed to write Mac versions of his inventions, Word and the Excel spreadsheet. During 1982 and 1983, Bill became an insider, regularly attending demos of the Mac OS, and motivational events like Apple sales conferences and work-team retreats. Gates acted in skits and clowned around on cue for the cheering troops. “I was part of the crew,” he said later. Bill and Steve became buddies. Steve loved Bill’s software, and they had a shared secret: the graphical interface that would be like going from silent black-and-white films to Technicolor musicals. At industry conferences, “nobody knew about the graphical interface Apple was developing. Everybody was acting like the IBM PC was everything,” Gates said, “but Steve and I were kind of smiling that, hey, we’ve got something.” (Isaacson 174-5) But the Mac was a year behind schedule and IBM was charging hard. The Mac team began to worry that Gates, with his probing questions, was ferreting out the technical details of their GUI system, with an aim to take it for himself. They were right. Jobs and Gates had a secret agreement that Microsoft would produce their GUI-oriented software exclusively for Apple, but the agreement was due to run out in 1984, when the Mac finally launched a year late. In November 1983, just a month after he was happily touting the Apple-Microsoft marriage, Gates publicly announced the new Windows operating system that would bring all the graphical interface magic to the IBM PC. To make things worse, Gates shamelessly imitated Steve’s marketing specialty, a glittery extravaganza of a product launch. Jobs angrily summoned Gates to Apple headquarters. “He called me down to get pissed off at me,” Gates said. Perhaps surprisingly, Gates came, walking into the lion’s den by himself while Jobs, surrounded by his loyalists, shouted at him. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!” Gates let him rant, and then got off his famous reply: “Well, Steve, I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” Even more surprisingly, this kind of thing didn’t keep them for talking for two days. Why didn’t Gates just leave? Why didn’t Jobs kick him out? Gates demonstrated Windows to Jobs, like teen-age hobbyists showing off. Gates was worried Jobs would threaten a law suit. But Steve’s style was much more personal. “Oh, it’s actually really a piece of shit,” Gates remembered him saying. Gates tuned out the emotions, happy to see Jobs taking this line. Next thing Steve was almost crying, pleading with Bill to let him launch the Mac successfully: “Okay, okay, but don’t make it too much like what we’re doing.” (Isaacson 177-8) Acquiescing to a force as immovable as himself, Gates’ market strategy. By now it was obvious they were deadly rivals, but neither side broke off the relationship. Jobs kept trying to get Gates to design things for NeXT, but Bill was unimpressed. They would meet and insult each other, but kept on meeting. Probably they both knew that in this business you had to learn from your enemies, or at least watch them as closely as possible. Windows at first was clumsy and unattractive, but Microsoft kept on improving it, until finally in the early 90s Windows and the IBM industry standard almost blew

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Apple out of the water, driving their market share down to 4%. Gates had learned how to trade insults with Jobs, although he did it more in the press than personally. Even their occasional shouting matches at conferences didn’t stop them from visiting each other. Markets are mirrors, and you see the future by looking at your rivals and gauging where the unoccupied niches are. The better your rival is at doing that, the more closely you want to observe him. “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” is an ambiguous proverb from the treacherous world of Mafia politics. It applies even better to the world of high-tech business. It fits best for heavyweight networks, where there is the most potential advantage, and the most potential danger. Here, holding a grudge and seeking revenge are bad strategies. The competitive landscape shifts, and it might become an advantage to deal with former enemies sometime in the future. Or at least, to stay close enough to them to steal their trade secrets. There is no way out of the dilemma. Some kinds of networks are inherently dangerous-networks where innovators need allies, but these same allies are in the best position to turn against them. A technical product thrives in the market when there is an upstream that supplies components, and a downstream of further applications that will make your product popular. That means secrecy can’t be absolute, since too much secrecy means cutting yourself off from the networks. Steve Jobs’ volatile style was actually well-adapted to this ambiguous situation. A shouting match didn’t disrupt a long-term negotiation. Steve would hurl insults one minute, but change his tune to crying, cajoling, schmoozing. He never apologized and never looked back, just picked up again with a new line. He would walk out, and then call back. Bill Gates had another way of doing it, detaching himself emotionally, becoming cooler as the other side heated up. The two styles were perfect complements of each other, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. What made them work was not getting hung up on any particular moment. They were both resolutely goal-oriented. Trajectory is all.

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9. What Money is Good For: Freedom to Build Your Own Networks Why do rich people keep on trying to make more money? Once you are up in the realm of billions of dollars, you can’t possibly spend it on anything-- not on any real products that you can consume or enjoy. The most you can do with your money is invest it, buy up more companies, or give it away. Are they just greedy, or have they spent their lives obsessing about money, so they can’t stop no matter how old and rich they are? Michel Villette, the French expert on how people make fortunes, has another take on it. In the world of business deals, money is freedom. If you have enough of it, you can pick and choose. You can wait out the bad times and take advantage of opportunities when someone else really needs to raise money. If you don’t have enough money, you have to borrow it at conditions set by other people; the less you have, the worse the conditions. It takes money to leverage other money. Money gives you access to networks. Generally the more heavyweight the networks, the more money you need to stay with them. Having a lot of money gives you a lot of momentum. Going backwards from more money to less puts you at a disadvantage, and the heavyweights know how to act when they hear about your problems. This explains why mega-rich people keep on trying to go forward on the money train. Not having enough money for the kinds of deals you want to make costs you your freedom. Instead of expanding networks through your own EE, and controlling dangerous networks through EDOM, they control you. As Steve Jobs might put it, networks of bozos are forced on you and get in your way. Money isn’t the only thing in play. Money enables the kinds of networks you can grow. And even more important than money is having high EE. But without money you can get yourself into a bind, and then you lose EE. The best way to see this is to examine the down phase of Steve Jobs’ career.

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How Did Steve Jobs Recover from Being Exiled? When Jobs was thrown out of Apple in disgrace, he had two main things to fall back on. He had $100 million worth of Apple stock, which he converted to ready cash. And he had close network ties to everyone of importance in the high-technology world, and the reputational visibility to get access to those he didn’t know. Being in disgrace, they might not listen to him but they would take his call. In the world of big business, $100 million is not a lot of money. Steve probably could have amassed more, but he had a peculiar attitude about money: he wasn’t really interested in money, except for what he could do with it. He spent very little on himself. He didn’t go to charity balls and such events that he regarded as society fluff, so he never got caught up in the reputational whirl of giving money to charities. (Jobs sardonically said that the charity world was a good place for Bill Gates, since he didn’t have anything really creative to do with his time.) He wanted Apple to make money, being very well aware of the constraints of not having enough money for his top-quality products, and having to deal with bozos to get funding. But he recruited top talent, not just by getting them excited with the sheer energy and vision of the enterprise, but because he paid them well: he distributed Apple shares widely among those he valued and kept relatively little for himself. So there he is in 1985, out on the sidewalk with $100 million. What to do next? His inner group of loyalists from the Mac team come with him, and he puts some of his millions into funding NeXT, a avant-garde computer company that tries to find a niche in the workstation market. But it is quirky as ever, its hardware is delayed for years and a flop when it comes out. Mostly NeXT is a steady financial drain on Jobs’ personal funds. The main thing that NeXT has going for it is that it has the best graphics user interface, and Steve keeps together the talent to go on improving it. This is something of a twoedged sword, since Bill Gates is still hanging around (Jobs is still wooing him to work with NeXT, never cutting a heavyweight tie when it keeps him connected to the action). And Gates is steadily catching up, imitating bit by bit, until Windows sweeps the OS market. Apple’s downfall is Jobs’ resurrection. By 1996 Microsoft’s domination pushes Apple to the verge of bankruptcy. In a last grasp for a lifesaver, Apple buys NeXT for its advanced graphics interface. That brings Jobs back into Apple, with all his EE and EDOM, and a much better sense of how to run a business. NeXT was a money-loser throughout Jobs’ 12-year exile, but it kept him in the game until an opportunity came along to buy his way into something even more distressed. What made this a perfect opportunity was that it was a chance for history to repeat itself: the

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very company whose biggest asset is its once-famous brand reputation, reunited with the man with the halo (of light or brimstone being a matter of opinion). Jobs had just enough money to play in these games when he needed to. When he got back into Apple there was very little left, but he bet the bank on perhaps the most innovative advertising campaign of all time, and it worked. At the moment Apple had no new product but a big chance for attention. Jobs wastes no time in launching a lavish-- and expensive-- advertising campaign, touting no products, just Apple’s logo attached to images of the world’s most famous creative people, from Einstein to Picasso to Martin Luther King. Leveraging the brand, he then generates market capitalization, which enables him to launch a series of new directions with the iPod, Apples Stores, and the iPhone. It was spending money to make money. Better said: spending money to leverage emotional energy, in the form of public enthusiasm and investors’ enthusiasm; and then turning that money into successive rounds of excitement-generating products which are so cool they can sell at higher prices and make more profit than their competitors. Throughout their up phase, Apple hoards cash. Having once been cash-starved (as such things go), Jobs never wants to be beholden to anyone again. To get the full picture, we need to backtrack to the down times, when Jobs is hanging on by two threads: one is NeXT, and the other is Pixar. The time is 1986. Jobs still has most of his $100 million. He also has his celebrity contacts in California, through which he hears that George Lucas wants to spin off his computer animation unit, being in a cash-flow problem during a divorce. Jobs gets it, for a relatively low investment of $10 million. Why does Lucas sell it to him, considering that there are other buyers with deeper pockets? Of all the possible suitors, Jobs is the one deepest into the avant-garde computer business. And he impresses the artist-technician types who do the computer animation that he is on their side, wants to move them ahead to doing the greatest animation ever seen. This is right up Steve’s alley. He keeps the Pixar group together with his emotional blitz (though a few do leave to create their own companies), and he clicks with Lucas on the level of mutual empathy-- the film-maker can be assured that his beloved special-effects unit will be in good hands. EE-resonance in this network of specialized heavyweights who speak the same language turns into cash savings for Jobs, and he can afford to buy Pixar. Can he afford to keep it going? In fact Pixar is another money-drainer for years. Steve has to devote more of his attention to finances, becoming the all-around business executive that he had not been at Apple where his obsession had been cutting-edge products at no matter the cost. His skills at EDOM come in handy here too, and the Pixar animators, who know more about what they are doing than Steve does, come to appreciate him as

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their protector. In 1989, their fourth year of business, Pixar wins a minor Academy Award for a short computer animation film. It doesn’t make any money, and the other Pixar divisions selling hardware and software are doing badly. At this point, one could say, all Pixar is doing for Jobs is keeping him with a hand in the game, even though his money is dwindling away. Two more years, 1991, sixth year of a losing business: Jobs negotiates a film production deal with Disney. There had been connections before. After all, Disney was the great historic production company for animated cartoons, and some of the Pixar animators had worked there. And there is an opportunity for a bit of a rescue operation, on both sides. Disney is an old company now, under management far removed from its originators, not doing particularly well either in animation or in conventional films. Its chief, Jeffrey Katzenberg thinks that Pixar with its Academy Award, and Steve Jobs with his edgy reputation, might do something to perk them up. But Katzenberg, one of the most feared people in Hollywood, as a negotiator is Jobs’ equal. And he has better cards in his hand: a much bigger company, better reputation, and more cash. Steve is back to playing from a weak position, and the deal he negotiates is no more than a financial lifeline. They will co-produce a full-length animated film at Disney’s expense, with Disney holding the option on 2 more films, at the same cut: 12% of ticket revenues to Pixar, while Disney owns the picture and all its spin-offs, including the characters. It is a bad deal but Pixar is almost bankrupt. Jobs had sunk $50 million into it, and together with the drain of NeXT, there isn’t much left. He takes the deal. Their work relationship is rocky, and one point Jobs even halts production over Katzenberg’s interfering with the artistic content. But by late 1995, Toy Story opens with great box office, recouping its costs in the first weekend, and goes on to become the highest grossing film of the following year. Soon after its opening, Pixar has an IPO of $1.2 billion. Jobs immediately demands that Disney renegotiate their deal. He wants 50-50 equality, Pixar/Disney co-branding, half the profits. After some displays of EDOM on both sides (Katzenberg having broken with Disney in the meantime), Jobs gets what he wants. Pixar has the money now to make films at the highest standard, and goes on to a string of 3-D computer animated hits, top grossing every year they appear through 2003. They do so much better than Disney’s other films that in 2005 Disney buys Pixar, but on terms that put the Pixar executives in the driver’s seat. It is the money he made at Pixar when it finally breaks through in 1995, that puts Steve in his own driver’s seat. He suddenly has money and business success, while Apple is going the other way. Always one to seize momentum when he has it, he turns the Pixar breakthrough into a huge IPO, and rides that bundle of money and prestige not only into a lucrative deal at Disney but into a comeback at Apple. His networks of business allies are ready to expand again, taking over markets for music, telephones and everything else where portable mini-computers can go in everyday life.

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Money and EE are an unbeatable combination, especially at the moments when their trajectory is accelerating upwards.

10. Inner and Outer Networks What then is successful networking? Winning big happens by building three layers of networks.

Inner Circle: Networks of EE If you are going to accomplish something big, build an organization that has as much EE as yourself. Realistically, that is never going to be the case; the charismatic leader is always going to have more EE than anyone else. But a winning organization is as close to the ideal as possible. EE means physical and mental energy, putting out a lot of effort, and putting in long hours when needed. Napoleon’s troops moved faster than anyone else because they had high EE. Steve Jobs’ work teams could blitz through week-ends and all-nighters to meet deadlines when they were coming up on big product launches. This kind of effort doesn’t come from money, nor from fear. You can force people into long hours, but whether they perform badly when fatigued, or magnificently, depends on EE. High EE means being confident, proactive, taking the initiative. It has a direction. If there is an inner circle who are pumped up with the same EE as their leader, the leader doesn’t have to be around all the time. Realistically, he or she can’t be. A great organization has a core of people who are energized on the same trajectory. They take initiative to do what needs to be done, wherever things come up. This kind of energized inner circle is a one-link network. The charismatic leader knows everyone in it personally. These words are too pallid. The leader doesn’t just inquire about everyone’s family-- Steve Jobs avoided this kind of small talk. They click into a rhythm while focusing on the tasks to be done and the direction they are going. Napoleon’s armies, with their long string of victories, made successful careers for many officers, most of them even younger than himself. They rocketed upwards, sometimes from the enlisted ranks, because Napoleon was on the lookout for active leaders at every level. He paid attention to the many details to be arranged before a battle, one reason why

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Napoleon almost never slept. It wasn’t just attention to detail; it was attention to his officers, and the ones who picked up his high-focus, high-energy style were rapidly promoted. The same with Napoleon’s peace-time activities. He was always reforming and modernizing; so his day was filled meeting with teams of reformers in charge of projects that they all bought into. Napoleon had the advantage of living in an era when there were passionate movements for reforms, so he didn’t have to start from scratch. There was a willing team, and young Napoleon himself came up in it. His contribution was to stop the infighting and get them focused on the practical steps to be carried out. He amazed his followers in these daily meetings with how much he was on top of problems. They were all renewing their EE but Napoleon had a more constant stream of such encounters, which is why he was even more energized than anyone else. Sam Walton, building his chain of warehouse stores in rural Arkansas that eventually became Walmart, wasn’t just schmoozing as he flew around from store to store. His presence was upbeat and encouraging, but he was also looking for who shared his kind of initiative and direction. His store managers worked as hard as he did because he chose the ones who resonated with him. These super-successful organization builders prioritized face-to-face meetings. Obviously, in Napoleon’s era, there was little else you could do, although there was also a lot of sending written messages. Are face-to-face meetings still relevant in the era of the Internet and the social media? Steve Jobs thought so. They are particularly important for the inner circle, the team held together by EE. The best meetings are not so much about information but about shared rhythm and emotion. That is a reason why the social media are most popular among youths, people without much career trajectory, down nearer the bottom of the success ladder than the organization-builders at the top. In the middle levels, social media for professionals may have some use, but they don’t build much emotion. The strongest emotional attunement and the power of high EE comes from heavyweight encounters among heavyweights. Those who can meet personally-- especially in the midst of serious action-- have an advantage over those who can’t. Bottom line: build inner circles by shared EE in highly focused encounters.

Networks of EDOM: Allies, Deal-Making, Rivals Now we come to networks that are further away. They are more fluid, have less constant focus, in fact consisting of many people going in many different directions. There is potential EE out there but not all of it is going to end up in your team. In this realm the key micro-interaction is EDOM-- emotional domination.

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These are networks of outsiders. If you are building a business, these are the other businesses that already exist or are starting up. Some of them are potential sources for recruits; others might be links in your supply chain, or potential customers; some are sources of investment capital, or targets for your own investment or expansion. This is the double-edged realm of mutual positioning and deal-making. Steve Jobs at the very outset was already doing what an energetic entrepreneur would do through one’s career: checking out his business environment, getting to know them, collecting information. Above all, sizing people up for their energy and the quality of the products they made. Such networks are dangerous because the best people on the other side are doing the same with you. Jobs’ tactic was to display more EE than anyone, attracting people to his vision. This pulled them into the realm of allies working together, or even recruiting them into his own team. As he got a few years older and his organization built up momentum, he became more aggressive, developing his techniques of emotional domination. Networks of collaborators who work on the forefront of technological innovation are especially dangerous, since sharing information or even just allowing close observation makes it possible someone might steal the other’s intellectual property. This is what Jobs and his crew did to Xerox, and what Bill Gates did to Apple. The Gates/Jobs interaction is classic because it shows all the micro-tools of emotional domination (especially on Jobs’ side) and Gates’ anti-emotional tactics to resist them while ferreting out the technical secrets/ information he was looking for. EDOM is blatantly out in the open in deal-making negotiations between firms. The biggest leaps in fortune happen suddenly, when one side makes a killing, getting something that turns out very valuable for very little at the time. One way to make a killing is a strategy of patience, persistently monitoring your rivals, waiting for the moment when they are in a financial bind (quite possibly because of the market pressure you have put them under) and you can offer a friendly merger, a cheap way to strip their assets. People who help you can also take you over. The process is similar to war, except in business hostile domination works best when there is a silver lining of friendly rescue. Caesar worked this tactic repeatedly in his conquest of Gaul. He always started by scouting the details of enemy politics. In each campaign, he defeated the leading tribe in the enemy coalition, punished them by seizing their property, but offered to take the enemy’s allies into his own coalition. It was an offer not to be refused, since an ally of Rome had to send troops to support them in their next war. Caesar was famous for his clemency to defeated enemies, which not only encouraged surrendering but was also an effective recruiting device. He did the same thing in the Roman

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civil wars. When he defeated a rival’s legions, he welcomed their survivors to join his own army. War was about emotional domination, which led to physical domination; but then back to a friendly mode of emotional domination, when you now had the opportunity to become a friend of Caesar and of Rome. Side-switching after the battle was the key to building an empire. Alexander did the same in his conquest of Persia, ending up with an army that had more Persians in it than Greeks. Napoleon’s campaigns also hinged on emotional domination. He demoralized enemy armies by repeatedly outmaneuvering them, concentrating superior fire-power with his mobile artillery. He counted on a dramatic victory to force a negotiation with the losers, which always involved stripping them of territorial assets, and making them enter his coalition. He underlined both his domination and his irresistible magnificence by swiftly marching into the enemy’s capital city. Moscow was a turning point because the Russians saw through the game. They simply evacuated, leaving Napoleon, for once in his life, waiting on someone else, literally sitting around bored waiting for the peace ambassadors to show up. He lost not only the initiative but the feeling of inevitable EDOM. In the end he lost most of his huge army in the retreat, where the Russians refused to fight any more pitched battles but relied on harassing tactics and attrition. Guerrilla warfare as a grand strategy dates from this period. Guerrillas don’t aim to win battles; their attacks are designed to harass but above all to show that they cannot be defeated emotionally. It becomes a war of attrition, and not just in casualties of boots on the ground and the mounting expense of high-tech bombardment. It drains away the emotional energy of the superior army and the political will to keep on fighting. EE means confidence about future outcomes; when that is gone, the occupying army is ready to give up and go home. In war and in business, EDOM works best when it dramatically swings momentum. As soon as Steve Jobs returns to Apple and gets rid of the previous CEO, he takes on the Board of Directors who agreed in the firing. He tussles with them over a minor issue of policy, and as soon as he wins, he demands that the entire Board resign. He has the momentum; a token victory immediately provides the opportunity for a clean sweep. Another characteristic of big winners: when they have the momentum, they press on the accelerator.

Outer Ring: Pseudo-networks of Reputation Still further out in the networks from their center of loyalists, out beyond the zone of ambiguous allies and rivals, is the peripheral zone of people that you don’t actually know. Sometimes you see their faces: the audience of followers and fans or just plain curiosityseekers who come to speeches, shareholder meetings and product launches. If they are excited to be around you, you may shake hands with dozens or hundreds of them, but it is

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a one-off situation, not at all like a heavyweight tie. Even further away are an unknown number of people who have heard of you. They are a pseudo-network, where talk about you circulates without you actually being connected to them. It is the region of the most volatile swings. The most powerful effects in the realm of reputational networks happen through collective effervescence. This is the bubbling mutual enthusiasm that percolates through a crowd which has gotten itself focused on something, and then goes on getting high on the sheer buzz of itself. This is the effect that great speech-makers and entertainers and preachers aim at. It can also happen without a leader on a platform, where fans line up around the block for tickets, or customers queue up outside an Apple Store for a product release. It is a marketer’s ideal. Customers and consumers turn into fans; and being around other fans gets them high and feeds their enthusiasm for the product. It is the ideal market niche because it generates the highest profits. Fans are willing to pay high prices for goods because they are surrounded by an emotional halo, and much of that glow is the reflection of the enthusiasm of excited crowds. Collective effervescence generates feelings of identity and group membership, so fans are loyal and won’t look at what rival producers are offering. Fans are immune to price wars. Another way to say it is that customers and consumers turn into a social movement-- let us call it a consuming-movement. A social movement mobilizes to support a cause (gay marriage or anti-slavery or anti-taxes or whatever). Outside its core of organizers and speech-makers is a fluctuating population of followers. This population is bigger or smaller, depending on how enthusiastically it recruits their personal networks of friends to come to rallies, or just to talk up the issue, give money, or get out and vote. A consuming-movement is the epitome of brand loyalty. Better than that: it is brand enthusiasm, getting high on buying the next new thing that the brand puts out. A problem beyond your control is this. A producer can try to enthuse their consumers, but creating a consuming-movement is something people do for themselves. Public relations firms and political campaign managers try to manipulate such things, but fake emotion is never a good substitute for the real thing. Collective effervescence has a short shelf-life. Even when enthusiasm is carried along by a social movement, it has its own time-dynamics. The basic problem is charisma is unstable. It is an irresistible force when it exists, but it needs to keep up a steady stream of successes. Charisma needs to be repeated at regular time-intervals, and it can’t disappoint.

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This is the problem for a general on a victory streak. When Napoleon is on a roll, his opponents expect him to win, and this makes their armies more willing to surrender and their leaders more willing bite the bullet after a big defeat and negotiate. The dilemma of big success is that once you are super-famous, any small setback is magnified because it is discussed by such a big audience. Charisma needs to be unbroken, and repeatedly displayed. Once a big winner acquires that charismatic reputation, he can’t even take a break for more than a few months. That is why Napoleon, after a series of battle victories in Italy, refused to settle down and bring his army back to France. He decided to take it to Egypt-- not because there was much strategic value in it, and in fact he ended up losing considerable forces to the English navy. But for him it was worthwhile. Napoleon's name was on everyone’s tongue when he got back to France with his archeological relics from the pyramids. The popular buzz helped get him appointed First Consul, a stepping stone to becoming Emperor. Similarly with Steve Jobs. When he was in disgrace from Apple, he not only lost his alliance network of investors but his reputational network of consumers. And he was out of the public eye for over ten years. When he finally turned things around, he made sure to keep up the momentum. He leveraged his success at Pixar and Disney into a return to power at Apple, and then went into a succession of one big product launch after another. His advertising campaigns were all about the buzz of belonging to a consuming-movement. Apple Stores were designed to be a happening place. And each product had to be bigger than the last: iTunes, iPods, iPhones... This sort of thing sets a hard standard to keep up all the time. The reputational sphere is volatile. After all, it is only a pseudo-network, not something that can be controlled from the center. It is not a dictatorship, and big winners eventually get replaced. After each run, there is room for another big winner.

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TIME-LINE: STEVE JOBS’ CAREER AND TURNING POINTS [bold = rivals and down phases]

Year Zero. 1975

Steve Jobs is age 20, Wozniak 25

FIVE YEARS RISE: Year 1. 1976 April: Jobs partnership with Wozniak Sept: Apple I computer Year 2. 1977 Jan: Apple Computer Co. founded with $250,000 investment Year 3. 1978 Apple II 2,500 sold Year 4. 1979 develops Apple III, Lisa, & Mac computers Wozniak concentrates on Apple II summer: Xerox invests in Apple Dec: Jobs pirates Xerox graphical user interface Year 5. 1980 May: Apple III on sale, flops Jobs takes over Mac team Dec: IPO raises $1.8 billion FIVE YEARS STRUGGLING: Year 6. 1981 Apple II sales 210,000; main income Aug: IBM introduces PC Year 7. 1982 Apple II sales 280,000 IBM and clones sales 240,000 Year 8. 1983 Apple II sales 420,000 IBM and clones sales 1,300,000 Pepsi marketer Sculley hired as CEO Year 9. 1984 Jan: Super Bowl Ad sensation dramatic Mac launch event with graphical user interface Year 10.1985 March-May: turmoil in Apple; financial losses Jobs reduced to figurehead Chairman IBM & compatible PCs 75% market share Sept. Jobs founds NeXT fired as Apple Chairman lawsuit; settled in Jan. 1987

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10 YEARS STAYING IN THE GAME: Year 11. 1986 Jobs buys Pixar computer animation Year 13. 1988 NeXT delayed launch event Year 14. 1989 NeXT computer sales only 4% of projected loses workstation market to Sun Microsystems poor sales of Pixar computer animation hardware & software Pixar wins Academy Award for computer animation short Year 15. 1990 NeXT and Pixar continue to lose money Year 16. 1991 Pixar film production deal with Disney Year 18. 1993 Pixar hassles with Disney over artistic content; production stops Year 19. 1994 Pixar production resumes; hassle with Disney over finances Year 20. 1995 Pixar film Toy Story premieres; top grossing film for 1996 Nov: Pixar IPO; Jobs makes $1.2 billion, & equal deal with Disney DECLINE OF APPLE COMPUTER CO: 1990 1993 1995 1996

Microsoft imitates Mac graphical user interface Apple falls to 16% of PC market in late 1980s New Apple CEO Microsoft Windows OS dominates market Apple falls to 4% market share Feb: New Apple CEO; financial crisis

FIFTEEN YEARS COMEBACK: Year 21. 1996 Dec: Apple buys NeXT Year 22. 1997 Jan: Jobs returns to Apple as advisor July: Jobs forces CEO and board to resign Sept: Jobs interim CEO; layoffs, product cuts launches brand-awareness ad campaign Year 23. 1998 May: launches iMac, color design; Apple returns to profitability; stock rises Year 24. 1999 iBook flat screen laptop Year 25. 2000 G4 cube sales fail Apple stock crashes Year 26. 2001 May: Apple Stores open

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Year 28. Year 31. Year 32. Year 35.

Oct: iPod launch, Mac as hub; innovative iPod ad campaign 2003 Apple iTunes Store (grows to 75% market share) 2006 Apple Stores world’s biggest retail gross iPod brings in 50% of Apple revenue 2007 iPhone launch 2010 iPhone sales 90 million; 50% of world cell phone profits Apple stock world’s most valuable company

PIXAR SUCCESS: 1996: Toy Story top grossing film of year 1998: Bug’s Life top grossing film 1999: Toy Story 2 top grossing film 2002: Monsters, Inc. top grossing film 2003: Finding Nemo all-time top grossing animated film 2005: Disney buys Pixar, but Pixar executives dominate (reverse acquisition)

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________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Insiders in Sports: Winners See It Differently What is the difference between winners and losers-- in sports or anything else? Sociologist Dan Chambliss studied championship swimmers, including the U.S. Olympic team. For comparison, he took swimmers who were also-rans. They came in second and third; they got to the finals or semi-finals but couldn’t beat the top competitors. What was different about them? Do winners just have more muscle or better body shapes? No-- they all look great when you see them outside the pool. Do winners happen to have been born with quicker-firing synapses so they can move their limbs faster than anyone else? No, again; watching the careers of young swimmers, Chambliss noticed that the best ones make sudden jumps in quality, as if they suddenly figured out the key to performing at a higher level. Of course if you line up all the athletes from the top to the bottom levels of competition, some of them are bigger, stronger and quicker than others. But we’re not comparing the Olympic champion to the bottom of a high school team. Chambliss’s losers are very fine athletes; physically there is no difference between them and the winners. Raphael Nadal said that the top hundred tennis players all look the same in practice. It's what they do at crucial moments during the match that separates them. OK, mind over matter. Winners try harder. They are more determined to succeed. But this is not what Chambliss saw in his swimmers. If anything, the also-rans seemed a little more determined than the perennial winners. The winners looked calmer and more matter-of-fact. Of course they are all harnessing a great deal of effort. They all have a high level of Emotional Energy, except that the winners are more smooth and easy while the high-level-losers are more grimly determined. Is it confidence? Yes, the winners are confident, but how do they get that? Do their coaches give them more moving pep-talks? Top-level coaches expect their athletes to perform at the highest standard, but they don’t generally convey this in emotional locker-room speeches, at least not in the sophisticated world of the 21st century. Being really good is not a momentary high on the day of the game. Winning coaches say you can see it in practice better than in the minutes before the action starts. Practicing Better, not Harder A different approach: winners practice longer and harder than their competitors. But no, not really. High-level losers tend to practice very long hours. Their determination comes out in how hard they practice, how many hours they put in on the practice field or in the training room. This is a matter of degree, of course. Everybody at a high level practices hard. But Chambliss noted that championship swimmers do not necessarily spend more time in the pool than anyone else. What is different about the winners is how they practice. -- Winners practice specific details. They want to keep their fingers at just a certain angle as they stroke through the water. They want to touch the wall when they turn in just the right way. A dozen such details occupy their attention. They aren’t just practicing to make oneself stronger.

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They are extremely technical about what they are trying to do. They are being thoroughly professional. -- Winners enjoy practicing. This may be the biggest distinction between the top and the rest. The winners are not grinding their way to higher performance. They like what they are doing. That is why they can spend long hours doing things that other people would find tedious. It doesn’t wear them down; it gets them high. It feeds their emotional energy. How do they keep it from being boring? All this technical detail: minute differences in finger angle, for instance, for the swimmer (think of minute differences in arm movement for a baseball pitcher or a batter). It would be boring to an outsider; but they are insiders. These aren’t just details; they are details that in their minds are the difference between success and failure. The outsider sees details as meaningless, or doesn’t see the details at all. That is what makes most of us outsiders. The insider focuses on the details--- focuses on the details of the details, actually. The winner is constantly watching the details, trying to tweak them into an even better way of getting results. You are not just accommodating yourself to the details, plodding through them like a punishment imposed from outside. You are actively mastering the details, projecting them forward towards the goal, towards success. Details are not Boring when They Have Trajectory For that reason, even though practice is sometimes described as training muscle memory, that is not exactly what winners are doing. Training soldiers and police to fire guns in a combat situation is often referred to as getting the practice so ingrained that you don’t have to think about it; in a stressful situation, “your training takes over.” But the top performers are even better than that. They don’t have to rely on automatic muscle memory. They are acutely conscious of what they are doing, mind and body integrated so that everything flows towards success. -- Winners are experts. This is their self-image: a self-image not just in one’s mind but deeply engrained in one’s body. Their confidence is not just in telling onself-- “I am a winner.” Their confidence is not put in so many words, but if it were, it would come out as: “I know how to do this.” Better yet: “I feel how to do this.” This is what their practice achieves for them. It is why they enjoy practice. It gives them a feeling of being supremely good at what they do. Outsiders See Winning as Magical; Insiders See it as Mundane This applies to everything, not just to sports. Many strivers can’t get to the success level because they create a psychological barrier between themselves and their goal. Chambliss found perennial also-rans were baffled by the winners. They couldn’t understand why someone no more capable and determined than oneself always beat them. It must be some kind of mysterious quality that real champions have-- greatness, talent, the gift. The fact that winners seemed like ordinary people up close makes it even more mysterious. It must be magic or a gift from the gods-- whatever words you fall back on to describe it. And this was the biggest barrier of all. It undermined the striver’s emotional energy, and focused them on the wrong thing.

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It kept them from seeing that the secret of winning is that there is no one big secret. Winners are completely mundane and objective. They have dozens of little techniques to concentrate on, and that is what fills their attention. For a winner, success means doing one mundane thing after another, and doing each of them supremely well. As the saying goes, the star performer is in a zone-- but the zone is calm, clear, as ordinary as it can be in the midst of what other people find tense, exciting, or suspenseful. In a manner of speaking, the insider to success does have a secret formula. But it is the opposite of magical. The secret is to keep yourself, in the midst of action, at the calmest and most focused level, while your opponents are fogged up by the emotions of the confrontation. If your opponents are really good, they will have their expert techniques too. That means the contest is to push them out of their zone, while staying in it yourself. Winning is about techniques, and about emotional domination. You need EDOM to have enough calm to use your techniques. So both are important, but EDOM ultimately pulls the causal chain.

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PART II. NAPOLEON AS CEO

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1. A Career of emotional energy Napoleon Bonaparte was a person of extraordinary energy. At the height of his power, he worked 12 or 14 hours at a stretch, every day, from 7 a.m. until evening. He read reports, sent orders, met with one department after another; he could rapidly sum up each topic, amazing his staff with his memory and grasp of issues, and then shift gears to a new delegation and topic. He spent no more than 15 minutes at meals, wolfing down his food, drinking little; but found time to keep up on backstage gossip with the servants. In the evening he spent several hours in the formalities of court and fashionable entertainment-- the one part of the day he found rather boring-- then went to bed for a few hours of sleep; got up again in the middle of the night for another couple of hours of work, back to bed again, and up at 7 for next day’s round. His tone, except sometimes during evening formalities, was generally upbeat; if he was a workaholic, it energized rather than exhausted him. When he was commanding an army in the field, he slept even less: 15 minute snatches here and there. When he was younger, he took naps among his artillery pieces. Before battle, he was up all night, preparing battle plans and orders at 1 a.m. while the troops rested to move before dawn. Napoleon’s attention was everywhere, dispositions, artillery, logistics, coordinating far-flung troop movements. He made sure to praise or sanction officers’ performance and to encourage ordinary soldiers. He never got battle fatigue or made bad decisions from tiredness; his soldiers got enough sleep to keep them fresh but Napoleon thrived on his own rhythm. His armies were famous for being faster than anyone else, his own energy transmitted outward in a network where he held all the threads. How did he do it? To call it genius or talent is just a word, not an explanation. Napoleon had an extremely high level of emotional energy, EE. How did he get it? The answer is in the details of his daily life. The incessant round of meetings do not wear him out, because they are micro-interactional successes: energy gainers, not energy drainers. His life is almost wall-to-wall highenergy moments. At its height, it is a perfect mesh of network and individual. Times of big enterprises, big battles, big reforms-- when they are coordinated by teams working in the same direction-pull networks together into meetings for concerted action. When these meetings are intense, and when they stay focused and get things done, they pump everyone up.

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Someone like Napoleon becomes an energy star. He is the core of feedback loops that repeat many times a day. He comes in, energized from what has gone before, and gives each new meeting trajectory and focus. He is a good listener, hearing bad news attentively, taking good suggestions forward. He coordinates everyone's efforts, summing up key points and problems and what to do next. He keeps people in rhythm. The meeting is a success, both practically and emotionally; they move their project forward, and leave the place pumped up with renewed energy. The leader of a well-focused team is the most energized of all, because the energy star is the center of all the circuits. In Napoleon’s career, we can trace the rise and fall of EE. Napoleon when young was confident and hard-working, but we don’t hear of feats of working 20 hours a day or over-awing his companions. Even when his military and political career took shape, there were periods when he was down, shy and unconfident. Towards the latter part of his career, some of the extraordinary EE slipped, and we find him at times exasperated, bored and passive. At the very end, in exile from the center of action, he fell into a deep lethargy, and died at an early age. Napoleon’s was a career of emotional energy, and its ups and downs provide the comparisons we need to understand the ingredients of extraordinary success, and the limits of living on sheer EE.

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2. Starting Young in the Adult World Napoleon was sent away to military schools in France when he was 9 years old. He didn’t return home to Corsica until he was a newly commissioned 16-year old Lieutenant in the French army. It would be anachronistic to regard this as a deprived childhood; in the 1700s people started working much earlier than in our credential-inflated times, and there was little sentimentality about children. Young Napoleon came under the usual pressures of a closed-in boarding school. He was small, and spoke French with an Italian accent, hence was the butt of other boys who ragged him about his strange name. Napoleon avoided the others, concentrating on his studies and reading about the great generals of the past. The bully boys found his hideout on the school grounds and tried to attack it. Napoleon faced them down without coming to blows. How did he do it? Details are lacking, but today’s micro-sociological research suggests a scenario like this: Napoleon stands with an alcove behind him, perhaps a deserted chapel where he has been reading. He stands facing his attackers from the top of a little flight of steps, still not very tall but looking bigger than he is. He does not make the mistake of trying to hide or even to turn his back. He says nothing, but his face speaks: stern as bronze, people later would describe him, eyes hard, a little menacing. The attackers, three or four of them, are just below him on the steps, the biggest in the front, the others flanking behind, the youngest of the bully-gang in the rear. Their jeering insults echo in the stone building like the harsh calls of birds, like the barking of dogs. Napoleon says nothing, makes a little gesture of menace with his chin towards the boys peering around their head-bully’s shoulders. The youngest bully shrinks back, the flankers waver. Head-bully glances around angrily at them, but they hang back. Head-bully returns to his stare-down with Napoleon, but the edge is gone. He tosses his head and gestures angrily for his bully-cohorts to advance, but they are turning away down the steps, the fun already gone. With a last growled insult, head-bully too turns and withdraws in defiant slow motion. “Attends!” Napoleon snaps at them, in military tones. “Wait!” They stop, frozen, looking over their shoulders, the head-bully mustering bully-pride to turn and face him. “Your names?” He stares at each in turn, starting with the subalterns, extracts their identities, head-bully last and sullenly. “Dismissed!” Napoleon says. “For the moment. That is all.” In fact this is the most effective way to deal with a violent threat: not to cower or turn one’s back, but to maintain a strong and determined presence, quite literally using one’s eyes and voice as one’s strongest weapons. Napoleon learned early that emotional dominance precedes physical violence and determines who will be its victim. Soon Napoleon’s

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schoolmates were making snow forts and engaging in snowball battles under his command. He was already finding that confronting opponents was a situation where he gained emotional energy. Things were different when he reached the elite military academy in Paris. Sons of France’s wealthy aristocracy looked down on someone from a minor provincial Italian lineage; their snubs could not be so directly overcome. Napoleon concentrated on military lessons, impressed his instructors, and graduated a year early. For years thereafter Napoleon would be awkward in high society. The experience made him a ready advocate of the anti-feudal and egalitarian French Revolution, which broke out when he was a lowranking officer at provincial garrisons. In the meantime, his father died. His older brother was training as a priest, so Napoleon as second son became de facto head of his large family. He took long periods on leave in Corsica. Through his father’s politics, he was closely connected with the nationalist movement seeking Corsican independence from France. But he also had a network connection to the other main faction, since his father had won favor by supporting the French administration, and in fact Napoleon received his elite schooling as patronage for his father’s political switch. Corsica was an arena where his family was already at the center of political networks-- and in the ideal position of having connections on both sides. Here was a place where young Napoleon, with the prestige both of his family and a French officer's uniform, could jump into a leading role. It was a school for practical politics. Which goal was more important, local independence, or carrying through the Revolution to replace hereditary aristocracy with democracy? The ideals of the French Revolution could go either way. Napoleon cast in his loyalty with France as the spearhead of modern reform, also because he preferred to belong to a big important country rather than a tiny provincial one. This put him in conflict with the independence movement. Taking the other side, Napoleon organized a local patriotic militia, made a show of force, and won some small engagements. Politically, he successfully petitioned the National Assembly to make Corsicans free and equal French citizens. In early 1793, the nationalists took power in Corsica and Napoleon had to flee with his family to Marseille. It was a political defeat, but young Napoleon gained experience organizing troops on his own; and quickly learned the winding stairs of political fortunes and the dangers of ideological fanatics. Henceforward he would be a political realist, using ideologies to muster support but not allowing them to sway his personal judgment. In Marseille, Napoleon was temporarily in one of his down periods. He had acquired the interactional skills of how to generate EE, but he was out of his favorable side-show. He was 23 years old, and already had 7 years as an army officer, 2 of them commanding his

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own troops and leading a political movement. He was ready to re-start his upward trajectory on a bigger stage. ________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Building Momentum against Weak Competition: Sam Walton in Arkansas Napoleon starting out in Corsica is typical of how big winners launch their careers. Wal-Mart was the biggest trend-setting success in mass consumer marketing. Developed by Sam Walton in the 1950s and 60s, its business model was big and cheap, all the way around. The cheapest possible locations, a department store that looks like it is selling right out of the warehouse, self-service with virtually no sales staff; prices that present a bargain to the customer and drive competitors out of business. By 1985, Sam Walton was the richest person in the USA, before the dot-com fortunes of the 1990s. How did he do it? The franchise department store chain was not new when Sam Walton started out, and price-cutting discount stores like K-Mart were showing it could be done. But these stores operated almost entirely in cities. Instead of going up against this kind of competition, Walton built his business where competition was weakest. He created his empire in the poorest and leastdeveloped parts of the United States, in Arkansas and Oklahoma after the Great Depression. WalMart went into small towns, where the only competitors were Mom-and-Pop stores, run by local families who everybody knew, with regular customers and suppliers who paid pretty much the same prices all around. There were a few chain stories of the "Five-and-Ten-Cent" type, but they divided up the territory so as not to drive each other out of business. Prices were high and quality was low; everyone was used to it and nobody knew better. Sam Walton discovered he could sell styles that had gone out of fashion in New York or Chicago, buying up left-over consignments. And when there were new products to introduce to the countryside-nylon stockings, ice-making machines, beauty creams-- Sam would stir up attention with a big noisy store celebration. Above all, Sam Walton set his sights on volume and expansion. He learned the business young by working in one of the franchised department stores, picking up the new techniques of loss leaders and reducing profit margins. Then he got his father-in-law, a wealthy businessman, to finance his own franchise. Not satisfied to remain anyone else's subordinate, Sam began to break franchise regulations that required him to buy 80% of his goods from suppliers authorized by the corporation. It would be the hallmark of Walton's business methods: constantly seeking new suppliers, and getting them to compete against each other so that he could buy at the lowest price. He upset traditional supply chains with restless energy. While he was still operating franchise stores, he opened a Wal-Mart store of his own, testing the waters. The franchise ordered him not to open another. Walton talked up everybody affably and let the situation die down for a couple of years, then opened another. He was on a roll. Walton didn't just outdo his own franchisers. He watched his competitors constantly, and hired away their best and most ambitious managers to run his own stories. He turned them on with his own enthusiasm, spelling out his plan of expansion, offering them their own pathway to fortune by becoming limited partners. Walton always paid careful attention to personal style, hiring new managers only after inviting them to a home dinner where they were checked out for church attendance and proper morals. Sam Walton fit the old-fashioned religious ethos of the small town South, but he was no dour Puritan. Full of good humor and enthusiasm, he passed his emotional

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energy along to his trusted assistants. And he was a frequent if intermittent presence; traveling from store to store by small plane, he constantly checked on how stores were doing, exhorting his managers to expand volume and profits. It was an active, high-energy network; and it was, in fact, constantly expanding, and Sam made sure everyone was aware of it. Always in motion, Walton used the profits from each store to finance expansion into yet another small town. He kept expanding even through setbacks; losing a lease, dropping money in a realestate venture, having his biggest store destroyed by a hurricane. The sheer rate of expansion was all that counted. Profits made him respectable but he always needed more, so he turned to the local banks for cash. Friendly, affable, church-going Sam Walton was a good prospect for a loan; his success was visible and bankers gave him easy terms. Walton's advantage was more secretive: he borrowed from many different banks, sometimes borrowing from one to repay what he owed another. The banks were small, local, and spread out; Walton alone was cosmopolitan, flying around in his plane, knowing everyone. He owned 1 store in 1950, 15 by 1960, 30 stores by 1970, each one set up as an independent company, with different minority shareholders. The Walton family was always the majority owner and only Sam's wife, a trained book-keeper, knew who actually owned and owed what. Local investors might be conservative but Walton kept them in the dark, or rather in the pleasant glow of his personality and his energetic success, while he manipulated the overall situation so that his empire could expand. In 1970, his bankers grew a little wiser and ordered him to restructure his debt. Arkansas connections pressing down on him, Walton decided to cut them out of the loop and turned to the national stage. Using a personal, down-home tie to another Arkansas man in a New York investment bank, Walton consolidated all his stores into Wal-Mart Corporation and put 20% of its shares on the stock market, retaining control of the rest through family members. It was an opportune moment, the stock market starting on a series of upward surges that would take the Dow-Jones Average from 630 to 10,700 by the end of the century. Not only was financialization taking off-- the spread of easy investing to a large proportion of the population-- but Wal-Mart was just the kind of expanding new business model that was making real profits around the country. Within ten years, Wal-Mart share value grew from $30 million to $500 million, with still further leaps during the decades of inflationary growth of the market. In the big competitive arena, where all the smart players operate-- the New York Stock Exchange- Sam Walton from Arkansas became the richest man in America. It was not a fluke. He built his advantage by seeking out the weakest competition. He was riding a wave of success, already spilling beyond his home base, when he went national. Start against easy competition, build momentum, then make the move to the big leagues.

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3. Luck is Location at the Cusp of Change Napoleon was lucky to be born when he was. He was a 20-year-old lieutenant in 1789 when the Revolution broke out, too low-ranking to take any significant part in the rapidly escalating years of attacking the king, the fear of émigré aristocrats, the paranoia of internal enemies and the resulting murderous purges. He wasn’t high enough in the aristocracy to have privileges to lose and wasn’t tempted to emigrate. And since two-thirds of the officers did emigrate, there were plenty of vacancies for young officers, especially after the army began to expand in 1793. Artillery was an unfashionable and low-ranking branch, but it was becoming the determining force on the battlefield, just the right location to make one’s reputation. But an officer had to get a command in order to make his reputation, and in the situation of revolutionary upheaval, that took politics and network connections. Napoleon got the jump on other officers his age, because he could go back to Corsica and play the big fish in a small pond. The local big names led the independence movement, so Napoleon found he made a bigger splash by leading the pro-French reformers. This brought him favorable notice from the central government as an energetic and reliable local follower. The danger was that 1793-4 was the period when paranoia and political killings were at their height. The King was executed January 1793; the radical Marat was assassinated in July; Queen Marie Antoinette had her head cut off in October. Top contenders for power were killing each other. Successive factions of revolutionary Republicans were guillotined by Robespierre, before he was guillotined himself. Public mood shifted to weariness with the violent struggles of revolutionary factions. There was a window of opportunity to play the restorer of order; and it was in this role that Napoleon was initially welcomed. A general theory of political luck: What appears fortuitous from the point of view of a particular person, is predictable when seen in terms of structural locations and structural change. It is a matter of reversing the gestalt. Leading political actors in a period of violent struggle are going to knock each other off. In France, once the royalists were gone, the radicals turned against the moderates; and when they were gone, turned against each other. Eventually when most people are exhausted, there is room for an outsider detached from the ideologically polarized factions to act as peace-maker, establishing a more stable regime. The restorer of order will have support in public opinion, during the time-period when most people are tired of seemingly endless ideological disputes and violent strife. Such a detached outsider cannot be entirely without network connections, but he must be distant and flexible enough not to be

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brought down by old factional struggles. In other words, the situation will select someone like Napoleon: someone new, with a successful track record in distant arena, but with enough connections at the center to be noticed. And luck is location in time: the timing of major change in political structures affects what persons are selected for the dynamics of each period. After the leaders of inconclusive struggle, comes the demand for a stabilizer. Big structural changes, and times of dramatic struggle, generate charismatic leaders: an energy center, someone who pulls all the strings in his or her hands. To tie everything together demands very hard work, great energy, going from one meeting to another getting people energized and attuned to a collective project. Situations of major structural change, where the advantage is to centralization and coordination, select persons who are high-energy coordinators. But finding such persons is not a sheer lucky accident. Their daily routine fills the person in that slot with emotional energy. Extraordinary changes generate extraordinary EE. Consider the many things that are attributed to Napoleon: the legal code that replaced feudalism with egalitarian and rationalized procedures for litigation, property, criminal punishment and civil procedure; administrative centralization and uniformity of government; modern methods of government finance; public provision of education and patronage of science. Of course Napoleon did not do this all by himself. The shift from patrimonial-feudal structures towards centralized bureaucracy had been going on in France, as well in Prussia and elsewhere, for a century or more. But contending structures were in gridlock, and the French Revolution, precisely because of violent conflicts, destroyed many structures, opening the way for a more consistent system of organization. As Tocqueville recognized, the Revolution extended the trend towards bureaucracy that had been going on surreptitiously for a long time. Some of it was done by administrators of the Republic; but the period of stability in which it was carried through was Napoleon’s regime. In hero-centric or person-centered historical narratives, too much credit-- too much causal force-- is attributed to one person. Nevertheless, when big structural momentum is swinging but is held up by crisscrossing and counter-balancing struggles, an opening is available for a regime to deliberately carry through a clean break. When this happens, the leader of the team who does the reorganizing gets a great reputation, not only among contemporaries but in historical downstream. The days when this is going on are times of intensely coordinated action. The logjam is broken. The networks are excited. We are action together, and things for once are moving and have a direction. These are the conditions where someone can play the role Napoleon played. Every hour there is so much to do that is consequential and important; everything involves setting in motion many networks of people. When these networks

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intersect at a center, the person who connects them all becomes immensely energized, speaking their vision and their common goal. It is this feeling that makes the person at the point of focus into a charismatic leader. The glory days of the 1930s New Deal had the same quality. To attribute it to the heroleader is inaccurate. Franklin D. Roosevelt and a dedicated team organized the action. They generated structural changes regarded as long overdue, and simultaneously generated their own emotional energy. FDR acquired the charisma of the individual at the center who gets the most attention. Great times make Great Men, and vice versa. Given favorable conditions in the future, they will create Great Women, too. The leader's charismatic energy is generated by being located at the point when major changes are accelerating past a turning point. After that exciting time is passed, there is no longer a demand for that kind of person. It is no longer important that some one should hold all the networks together, thereby becoming a super-energized leader of a team on a mission. The mission is institutionalized, organizations are routinized. The day of the charismatic leader is over.

________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Networks on the Edge of danger: Michael Collins Takes Over the Irish Revolution Like Napoleon escaping the guillotine, the right timing launched Michael Collins into leadership of the Irish Revolution. In 1916, at the time of the Dublin Easter uprising, Collins was 25 years old, active as a middle-ranking organizer, but not old and prominent enough to be among the leaders executed by the British when the uprising failed. He was imprisoned but released after 8 months. Most of the older leaders were dead, the rest still in prison. Collins stepped into the vacuum. He became the center of what remained of the network of revolutionists. Funds from sympathizers in America and Ireland were coming in to support the families of dead or imprisoned rebels. Collins became secretary of the charity organization collecting the funds, and he personally went out to distribute the money. Soon he knew everyone who had a relative in the struggle for independence, and better yet, everyone who was a fighter knew Mick. As more got out of prison, and revolutionary cells began to form again all over Ireland, the Big Fellow became the logistics hub of the movement. Mick had his fingers on the money, and it was no longer just for charity: revolutionists might know hardly anyone outside their own village hide-out, but everyone knew who they needed to contact when they wanted to buy guns. Collins knew everyone in the underground, who you could trust and who you couldn't. And since British agents were on the lookout, he was the one trustworthy connection that held everyone together. Michael Collins was not yet a speech-maker, not a political leader. Such persons were more visible, but Collins worked in anonymity, making sure never to be photographed and changing where he slept every night. Being the center of the underground network gave him big advantages: he

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knew more revolutionists and had more information than anyone else; he was more trusted than anyone; and he had resources that fighters needed, especially guns. Every organization, even a revolutionary one, needs an administrator; and when the organization has to operate in secrecy, a trusted insider becomes more powerful than when leaders can compete in the open. Holding the network together by personal contact takes constant hard work; but for someone with the right touch, it also generates emotional energy. His days and nights are crowded with fateful encounters, excitement, revolutionary ideals and practical realities; he is the center of every little meeting, pumped up by the people he is enabling. Collins became the ultra-energetic, perpetually busy leader that Napoleon became in his years of success, simultaneously more at the center of things than anyone else, more sociable and popular, and more highly regarded for getting things done. Although he was just an administrator, Collins gravitated into the center of leadership too. The decision to revive the independence struggle as a full-scale guerrilla was not taken by a vote in political meetings, nor by the political speech-makers. The showdown with the British erupted because Collins decided to protect his own operation. When information reached him that British undercover agents were infiltrating his underground network, he decided to counter-attack. Collins did not wait for approval. He recruited his own armed force to assassinate the British agents. The result was a sharp escalation on both sides. British agents were tracked down and shot. The British retaliated, blindly and brutally since they scarcely knew who was responsible. The Irish revolution was suddenly popular among the mass of the people who had hesitated about taking up arms. And although Michael Collins was initially neither a political nor a military leader, he turned into both. He became de facto head of the revolutionary army in the guerrilla war against British occupying forces. It was a grinding effort to wear down British will to persist, and eventually it succeeded. The ending is a classic tragedy of too many political forces for even the Big Fellow's energy and popularity to reconcile. The British were willing to negotiate, but only to give partial independence, not the full sovereignty of Ireland the militant revolutionaries wanted. Collins was the only one the militants trusted, so the political leadership prevailed on him to lead the peace negotiations in London. The British knew the Irish movement was split and that most people were ready accept a compromise. In the end, Collins signed the agreement, declaring he was signing his own death warrant. He knew what he was talking about. Having thrown his energy into it, Collins became the orator who carried the vote back home; became first head of the Irish Free State, then head of the army that put down the civil war, his old gun-toting comrades now on the other side. The organizer of assassinations himself was assassinated at age 31. Is it surprising that Michael Collins' death started to bring the Irish together? He was the center of its network, its energy and its ideal. When the network broke apart into the typical factions of diehards and compromisers, the man at its center tried to hold it together as long as he could, until it broke him. In 1998, he was voted the most influential person in Irish history.

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4. Networks that Made Napoleon If we flip the gestalt from situation to person, we see Napoleon thrown upward by lucky connections. Political defeat in Corsica was a down moment, but exile to Marseille brought orders to rejoin his regiment in Nice. Having tasted revolutionary politics, Napoleon tries his hand at writing a political pamphlet. It was rather clichéd compared to his incisive utterances when he had made it to the top; he is not yet sure of himself, his pathway gives him little more to think with than the rhetoric of the day. But Napoleon's pamphlet draws the attention of his political connections, the Jacobins then moving towards dictatorial power in the Committee of Public Safety, and their influential local agent, who happened to be Robespierre's younger brother. Autumn 1793 is a time of military crisis. There are enemy armies on several fronts, and the English fleet has taken the French naval base on the Mediterranean, at Toulon. There are royalist revolts in Marseille, Lyon, and Toulon. More luck: the commander of the French artillery besieging Toulon is wounded, and Napoleon is appointed to replace him. He is already the secretary to the council of war at Toulon, and he makes up a plan for the assault, training artillery on the weak point between the inner and outer harbors, to drive out the enemy fleet. The plan is approved by officials in Paris; the higher officers know Napoleon through previous connections in the army and give him a free hand. Napoleon places the guns himself and leads the assault. The fort is taken and the English are driven out. It is a rare and welcome victory for the Jacobin regime. Napoleon is celebrated and promoted to Brigadier General at age 24, and made planner for the Army of Italy. Flipping the gestalt: networks appoint an officer on a crucial front, who is favorably known to army superiors and politically connected with the civilian authorities on the spot. They are sophisticated enough to recognize it is a problem for an artillery officer. The wounding of the previous artillery commander is sheer chance, more of less equivalent to how professional athletes get their chance in the lineup when the previous starter is injured. This is a mechanism by which individuals get selected for action that will change their careers if they succeed. The system is selecting for someone like Napoleon. If not him, would it have created an equivalent? Although victory over the English is welcome news in Paris, it is far from being the center of attention in this time when the Reign of Terror is raging. Robespierre purges his rivals in spring 1794, then himself is overthrown in July; both Robespierre brothers are

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guillotined. Now Napoleon’s connections count against him; he is arrested. Does history holds its breath? Napoleon is released in a few weeks. More luck: he is too far from Paris to be quickly guillotined; his local political connections from Corsica and in the army give him support; his skills as an artillery officer are scarce and valued; above all, he is not important enough to be a serious target. The following 12 months are a downer in Napoleon's political career. He is assigned an unfavorable post-- away from his Mediterranean network, sent to an infantry command against the peasant rebellion in the Vendée out in the rural northwest, military dirty work with no possible glory. He lingers in Paris, seeking other appointments. He makes himself better known to the top rulers. Napoleon stays clear of political maneuvers, but gets a choice military appointment. One of the five Directors, Barras, had seen him in action at Toulon, and since Barras headed the Army of the Interior (i.e. the security forces, which he had used to overthrow Robespierre), he made Napoleon his second-in-command. In October 1795, there is a royalist uprising. Like so many successful demonstrations before it, a crowd descends upon the seat of government at the Tuileries, aiming to overawe the assembly. Napoleon had seen an attack in this very place, in August 1792, when a mob invaded the Tuileries and carried off the king and royal family to prison. Tourists in Paris today walk through this very spot on their way to the art galleries of the Louvre. Napoleon recalled thinking that a failure of nerve led to the fall of the monarchy, while a resolute defense would have saved it. This time he was ready to save the Republic with artillery. He recalled the occasion: “I made the troops fire ball at first because to a mob who are ignorant of firearms, it is the worst possible policy to start out by firing blanks. For the populace, hearing a great noise, are a little frightened after the first discharge but, looking around them and seeing nobody killed or wounded, they pluck up their spirits, begin immediately to despise you, and rush on fearlessly, and it becomes necessary to kill ten times the number that would have been killed if ball had been used in the first place.” Napoleon was a cool-headed observer of people’s behavior, above all in moments of violent threat. He did not try to defend the government building merely with infantry lines, who so often waver when civilian crowds press up close to them, that they are unable to fire. Artillery is a more distant and therefore psychologically easier weapon to operate; Napoleon coolly dispersed the attacking crowd, killing 100. Republicans publicized the event as the failure of royalist enemies of the revolution, and Napoleon was promoted to Major General. Barras wanted to keep him as commander of the Army of the Interior, but Napoleon wanted something more than head of the palace guard. In January 1796, he got the Army of Italy. So far, it was largely his political connections that got him his military posts. Now it would be the other way around.

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________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Marrying (and sometimes divorcing) the Boss's Daughter 


"I always said he fell in love as much with my family as with me," Sam Walton's wife, Helen said. Young Sam had no money but he was a handsome, charming and supremely energetic fellow, just learning the retail business in small-town Arkansas. One can just imagine Helen's father and mother sitting in the evening on their white-pillared veranda talking: "That Sam, he'll go far." His father-in-law staked young Sam to his own franchise department store at age 27, advising him through his first ventures, and picking him up again after his early business disasters. His in-laws believed in him, putting their credit on the line for him with local bankers and making the business contacts he needed to get started: "That Sam, he'll go far." It is an old cliché that the handsome young man marries into a rich family, which makes his career for him. The story usually goes that he is just a young fop, playing golf and sitting around in a fake Vice President's office waiting to inherit the business that other people are running. This may sometimes happen (and not just in movies) but it is not the way that people like Sam Walton (or Napoleon) get to the top. Getting to the top means going far beyond one's original network. Getting into the right network when you're young is a way of getting a leg up, which is absolutely necessary if you're not born near the top. But what we're talking about here is energy and motion, not merely standing on rungs of a ladder. Marrying the bosses daughter-- which is one way to get the money and connections to be launched into a business career-- has a real effect when it acts more like a catapult, an energy-multiplier. The young person supplies the EE, the trajectory and drive; what he needs is the resources. The connection launches him in an arena where he can have a real effect. Not just the daughter but the wealthy businessman and his wife fell in love with Sam Walton. How did that happen? We don't know the details but there are glimpses. At the University of Missouri he played football and won swimming championships, and was elected class president. He had energy in all directions, organizing fellow students to sell newspapers-- a business income he needed since his parents were struggling. He had a rich girlfriend (not the one he married later), which shows that his energy and charm more than compensated for the mismatch in family backgrounds. Later on, one can imagine him turning on not just Helen but her parents with that same bundle of contagious enthusiasm. Making the marriage connection, the family connection which turned out to be the first key business connection, was not just a matter of blind luck. It happened because Sam Walton's particular kind of EE-- tireless deal-seeking, schmoozing, enthusing-- meshed with what the future in-laws loved to hear. Marrying the Boss's Mistress Napoleon's career took off through a sophisticated Parisian variant on elite family sponsorship-marrying his boss's ex-mistress. It was Napoleon's first shot at the big time in Paris. His boss, Barras, is head of the Army of the Interior, and one of the five Directors who jointly rule France. Napoleon gains some reputation by putting down a Royalist attempt to overthrow the government. But he is still a general without an army. What made things pay off was a woman, Josephine Beauharnais, an aristocratic charmer at the center of Paris social life. Since she was

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formerly Barras' mistress, her salon was the place to be, the place where all the high-level gossip took place, rumors circulated, appointments were vetted. Not too surprisingly, when Napoleon grew close to Josephine, he got the independent command he wanted: the Army of Italy. He married Josephine just before heading off to Italy and the first of his famous string of victories. What did Josephine see in him, this serious young man at her salon? What did Napoleon see in her, a society lady of fading beauty 6 years older than himself? No doubt many personal qualities on both sides; but all wrapped in who they were, what each had been through, where they were heading. Napoleon married the network around his boss; in fact, he took over the network's support while it was slipping away from him. Barras probably thought his discarded mistress was a suitably second-class gift to his young protégé. It was more than a gift; it was a launching pad. Marrying, Divorcing, and Still Ending up with the Property Francois Pinault had become the third richest person in France in 2001. His father owned an oldfashioned sawmill in Brittany, the rural northwest corner where France juts out into the Atlantic. Francois was hired by his father's friend and business partner into his lumber business, and married the boss's daughter in 1960. Two years later, at age 25, Francois took over the business in his own name. The older man probably wanted to retire, and he obviously liked Francois' ideas for expanding the business, since the father-in-law advanced him the purchase money and guaranteed his bank loans. Francois Pinault was always relentlessly on the lookout for a good deal, among regional lumber merchants jealous of their markets and famous for cheating. Pinault stole a march on the rest in the early 1970s, bypassing the local importer they all relied on, and dealing directly with suppliers in Sweden and Canada. Pinault thereby secured agreements with large customers, while he set up a subsidiary in Sweden to buy lumber directly from foresters at the moments when prices were lowest. Back home, Pinault was busy buying up rival lumber companies, beginning with his neighbors in western France. Keeping a sharp eye, he stepped in when a company was in a cash flow crisis, especially when he himself is the cause of their troubles. His standard procedure was to offer friendly aid by taking the company into his group, but delaying the final step until it went bankrupt. Under French law, severance payments and back pay for employees were discharged by a government agency, while Pinault took over the lumber stock and customer accounts. To cap it off, he would renegotiate bank debts while appealing for local government subsidies in the name of job protection. Pinault's marriage to the boss's daughter did not last long. They separated within five years, and divorced a few years later after Pinault made enough money to repay his father-in-law's loans. Was the cunning old merchant disappointed, or was it what he might have expected? Fifteen years down the road Pinault had far outstripped the tough little bramble-patch of rural lumber merchants, and consolidated the entire lumber business of France under his control. He was shifting into another gear. He sold massive shares in his own company to a foreign investment group, then manipulated his own lumber purchases to put the company under stain; threatened his Swedish suppliers with bankruptcy; frightened his shareholders, and re-bought his expanded company for a fraction of what he had sold it for. The lumber merchant was now a financier to be courted and feared. When he finally took his company public in the late 1980s, the IPO gave him so much cash that he could buy Printemps, France's biggest department store chain. Like the boss's daughter, everything was a stepping stone along the way.

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5. Napoleon’s winning style When he arrived, French forces were bogged down in the northwest corner of Italy. French troops lacked supplies and were behind in their pay. Within weeks Napoleon put them on the offensive. In front of you is the richest part of the world, he told them; conquer it and we will have everything we want! Style trait number one: always active, never passive. To make an organization active (in this case 40,000 men) this meant galvanizing everybody, pulling the organizational threads together. The soldiers immediately liked him; officers quickly respected him, and soon it was clear that many other young officers-- and rankers too-- would win promotions. There were two enemy armies, one from the Italian kingdom of Piedmont, the other an Austrian force sent to aid them. Together they outnumbered the French, but the enemy armies were spaced apart. It was just the configuration Napoleon liked to face. Style trait number two: speed, organization-wide. Napoleon's armies moved faster than anyone else. This meant a high degree of energetic cooperation and hands-on leadership, since the whole organization had to move at the same speed. Napoleon first cut off the Piedmontese, winning a series of rapid-fire battles over a period of two weeks and forced them out of the war, taking their capital Milan as his new seat of operations. Then he turned on the Austrians. They sent a succession of armies to drive him back; Napoleon marched rapidly to hit each one separately. This was already French military doctrine; since large armies clogged roads and ate up local provisions (especially fodder for horses), they had to move in separate columns. The key was to converge rapidly when they met the enemy. The doctrine was standard; Napoleon was just better than anyone else at executing it rapidly. Since the Austrians did not easily give up, this part of the war took longer. In all, he won 8 major battles in 10 months. His troops were exhilarated by the victory string. One regiment created, as a standing joke, the story that Napoleon was a little corporal who got a promotion after each battle. Style trait number three: morale outweighs material. In fact it outweighs it by a factor of three to one, Napoleon said, and he knew how to generate morale. Wellington later said that Napoleon’s presence on the battlefield was worth 40,000 men. Building morale was a conscious effort. Napoleon started two newspapers during this period; one to spread the news of his victories back home; the other for the soldiers. This was a new kind of army,

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not just discipline and obeying orders; the soldiers were to be informed and motivated by the same ideals as the highest officers. Style point number four: mobile fire-power. Concentrating the artillery was already French doctrine, but Napoleon pushed it hard. He favored light, rapidly moveable field artillery over heavier guns; the effort was not so much massive shelling of fortresses (the older style of using artillery), but substituting cannon fire for infantry firing. Napoleon stressed what came to be known as combined arms, the artillery moving around the battlefield in close connection with infantry movements. His favorite size of gun became known, in armies throughout the world, as the Napoleon 12-pounder. There is a deeper point here in theory of violent conflict. As the French officer Charles Ardent du Picq would later document in the Crimean War, infantry have a tendency to misfire, or fail to fire entirely, in the stress of closely confronting an enemy. Since most muskets were inaccurate except within 40 yards ("wait ‘til you see the whites of their eyes"), a battle charge was a war of nerves; if the defenders could not get off their volley at the right time and with sufficient coordination, the oncoming attackers with their bayonets would usually panic the defenders into a retreat. Napoleon, who was an excellent observer of such things, recognized that artillery was more accurate and easier to keep under emotional control than infantry. This finding was later elaborated by a military sociologist, S.L.A. Marshall, after World War II, showing that only a minority of front-line infantry fired their guns steadily at the enemy; and that crew-operated weapons had a better performance, because there was more social support. This tactic meant artillery officers had to be out there on the front line, placing the guns, in tune with local conditions. Napoleon and his counterpart officers became visible heroes to their troops. Activeness; speed; morale; dispersed movement and rapid concentration to achieve local superiority; mobile artillery in infantry battles: these were a package, each one reinforcing the other. The whole army got on a positive spiral; they believed they were invincible. Eventually they were.

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________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Caesar is Prepared to Have Trouble “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” Julius Caesar begins the story of his victorious conquest. He goes on to tell us about the politics of the local tribes, who is the enemy of whom, who are the famous leaders and who are their jealous rivals. He isn’t just setting the scene. This stuff is the key to his entire campaign. Gallic politics is full of treachery, alliances being made and falling apart. Caesar is going to intervene, making more and more tribes into allies of Rome, keeping the others from combining and eventually destroying all opposition. Gauls may be volatile and treacherous, but the Romans’ alliances are going to be permanent. How does Caesar know so much about Gallic politics? It is a high priority for him. He interviews messengers and traveling merchants, interrogates enemy soldiers and meets leading Gauls face to face. He compares what they say, listens to them boast, catches them in inconsistencies, and puts together a realistic picture of what he is up against and where are the weak links he can exploit. Caesar, like most charismatic leaders, is an acute observer of persons. And he realizes that success depends on good political intelligence-gathering. He knows more about the Gauls than they know about themselves. Gallic tribes frequently switched sides. Sometimes they did this in the middle of a battle, a treacherous deal arranged in advance that was usually more decisive than the actual fighting. Caesar was not too worried about this kind of treachery among his own allies; he always kept the auxiliary troops in lesser roles and relied on the strength of his legions to handle whatever came up in battle. More importantly, he counted on the Gauls being volatile. They worked themselves up to a ferocious pitch at the outset, but they could just as easily become demoralized when Roman discipline didn’t break. Caesar’s strongest tactic as a general was to keep some troops in reserve instead of sending them all into battle. This has become standard military doctrine, so we forget that Caesar was among the first to use it. Most ancient battles were shoving contests between two massed front lines. Caesar observed that in the first phase of battle, both sides tended to get disorganized. Even the side that was winning usually lost its formation, got tangled up in a mass of bodies living and dead, and became incapable of further maneuvering. Caesar’s innovation was to hold back intact legions, and then when he observed that the first phase of battle had come to a crisis, to throw his reserves into the key place. His reserves would win the battle because organized troops can easily beat disorganized ones. In short: he anticipated that things would go wrong, and had a plan for dealing with it. Most previous generals just lined up their troops and started the battle. From that moment on, they had no control over what happened. Some of them, like Alexander the Great, simply led the charge from the front. Caesar was the first famous general who had a follow-up plan, and the clear-headed observation of when to launch the second phase. Caesar expected to have trouble with his allies, too, and he had a back-up plan to deal with that when it happened. He usually built alliances by offering friendly tribes the spoils of victory: when the enemy tribes were defeated, the allies would get their land, cattle, and captives. But once a Roman ally, always a Roman ally. Allies could not back out of the next war, because Caesar demanded that they show up with their troops to fight on his side. In the 9 years Caesar was in Gaul,

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most of the time was spent beating tribes who had previously been his allies but now went into opposition, when they recognized that the Romans were not going away. Caesar anticipated this would happen. (He was not like American planners who assumed that once we had won in Iraq and Afghanistan, our allies there would keep on being our allies.) Tribes who betrayed Caesar once were treated mildly. Their leaders would be severely punished and their property confiscated, but their lesser followers were pardoned and allowed to keep their possessions. But if they betrayed him twice, they got the full brunt of punishment, amounting to extermination. Human morals were much harsher in ancient times than today. Caesar became famous for what his contemporaries called his clemency, his mildness: he could be harsh to his strongest opponents, but he gave most defeated armies a chance to join him. This not only gave him a good reputation, but was an excellent way to recruit forces. During the Civil War, when Roman legions fought each other, Caesar won out by recruiting the defeated troops into his victorious army, which meant that his army was always growing. Caesar had that other quality of great generals, speed. But since an army is a big organization, speed is not just a matter of how fast soldiers move their feet or how much their leaders yell at them. Roman armies could move faster than the Gauls, especially over long distances, because of two advantages: superior engineering and better discipline. The Romans were not stopped by natural obstacles, because their engineers could quickly improvise a bridge across a river. The Gauls were taken by surprise because they regarded high mountain passes as impassable during winter, but Caesar’s soldiers, who were more like construction workers than soldiers, worked in teams to clear away deep snow. Gauls liked fighting but they thought the dirty work of building roads and fortifications was beneath their dignity as warriors. Romans did everything they were asked because their troops were highly disciplined. Roman soldiers knew that the faster they did these routine tasks, the more surely they would win, even against armies much bigger than themselves. We might be tempted to think that an organization that stresses discipline would be plodding and sluggish. On the contrary, a disciplined army is a well-practiced team, that moves fast because everyone knows their part. And they know what to do when they run into trouble, because they’ve practiced for that too. The same goes for any organization. If you want a large group to do things fast, the key is not to have everybody running around in a state of high excitement. Speed requires smooth coordination, tight group morale, and anticipating troubles in advance.

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6. On a Roll Napoleon fought 9 military campaigns over the period of 20 years from 1796 to 1815: 2 in Italy, 1 in Egypt, 1 in Spain, 3 in Germany and Austria, 1 in Russia; plus 1 defensive campaign during the comeback of the Hundred Days, the only campaign Napoleon fought on French territory. Of his first 6 campaigns he forced the enemy to yield a favorable peace treaty in 5 of them, resulting in a huge aggrandizement of French hegemony. The list of capital cities he triumphantly marched into includes Milan, Rome, Cairo, Vienna (twice), Berlin, Madrid, and Moscow. At one point, he had won 22 major battles in a row without a defeat; he was reputed so unbeatable that it created a stir when two battles against Austria and Prussia merely ended in draws. Through 1809, when he was 40 years old, he was like the greatest baseball pitcher of all time, a record of 22-0 in 24 starts. This was a better record than Julius Caesar. The only comparable generals are Alexander the Great, who never lost a battle although some campaigns failed, as in India; and Stonewall Jackson, 7-1 when personally in command, and overall 14-1 including subordinate (but generally independent) roles. Altogether, Napoleon said he fought 60 battles, including minor ones, and he won almost all of them. The French army was superior, for reasons Napoleon had not invented. The Revolution brought mass conscription combined with patriotic and ideological appeal, generating bigger armies than most enemy states, and better-motivated ones. French officers had developed better tactics, command structures in larger divisions, more use of massed artillery and especially mobile artillery, more systematic organization of recruitment, training, and logistics. Napoleon was a well-trained French officer of the new model. But other French generals were only intermittently successful, a backdrop against which Napoleon stood out as a marvel. How explain his success, against the times when things didn’t go so well? Compare the last three campaigns: Russia and the retreat from Moscow; the holding-on war that followed as Germany went into revolt; and the Hundred Days. Even then Napoleon continued to win most of the battles; there were some costly retreats where rearguards and garrisons became cut off. In the total sum of battles, there was only 1 real defeat, Waterloo. Why Napoleon started to lose, campaigns if not head-on battles, is counterpart to the question of what made him win. Later on, opponents got better by adopting French methods: organizing armies into divisions, using mobile artillery, and recruiting and motivating mass armies by patriotic appeal (mainly in Germany). By the time they had been fighting for 15 years, English troops could recognize French tactics and withstand them by strongly disciplined and carefully timed infantry volleys. In other words, opponents

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learn from each other, and the losers catch up if they haven’t been beaten so badly that they disappeared. Parceling out the element that Napoleon personally added, we still have the fact that during the time when French armies were superior, he did far better with the instrument that other generals; and during the catching-up period, when his armies further suffered the logistical consequences of being overstretched, Napoleon still almost always dominated on the battlefield.

________________________________________________________________________ Careers: The Reputation Multiplier: Caesar’s Famous Fortune After the Civil War broke out, Caesar quickly crossed the sea with a small army to attack his rival Pompey’s army in Greece. But the enemy forces were high-quality Roman legions, not Gallic tribes, and Caesar concluded that he needed a bigger army before taking them on. Reinforcements from Italy were lagging, so Caesar decided to go back in person to hurry things up. Since the enemy fleet controlled the sea, he decided to make the crossing in disguise in a small boat rowed by 12 sailors. The sea was so stormy that the boat could not get out of the harbor. The captain was about to turn back, when Caesar threw off his disguise and said to him, “Go ahead, don’t be afraid. You carry Caesar and his famous Fortune.” This meant more to ancient peoples than it means to us. Fortune was a goddess who ruled human affairs, and was believed to favor certain people. In effect she was the goddess of luck. So was Caesar just a gambler who believed luck was always on his side? Presumably the law of averages would catch up with such a person. Was Caesar superstitious? All the evidence is against it. The famous story about the end of his life is that he mocked the soothsayer who told him to beware the Ides of March. Caesar never made military or political decisions by auguries, even though that was official Roman protocol. Although Caesar’s first official position early in his life was to be elected chief priest in charge of such ceremonies, it is clear that Caesar used religion purely for political purposes, as a career stepping stone. He associated with the circle of Epicurean philosophers who held that the world consists of atoms moving in space and that the gods never interfere. When Caesar told his followers Fortune would protect them, he was encouraging them to be as confident as himself. He was happy to manipulate other people’s superstitions, if that’s what it took. Having a reputation that Fortune is on your side is part of being on a roll. His supporters expect to win; his opponents expect to lose. At first they may only expect this in the back of their minds, but as Caesar goes on to win more and more, it become a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is a nice reputation to have. How do you get it? Consistent good luck is the secret possession of winning techniques. Outsiders don’t know it, and there is an advantage in keeping them secret so that everyone else thinks they’re not competing with you but with a supernatural power they can’t possibly beat.

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We have already seen some of Caesar’s winning techniques: gathering political information before making a move; keeping forces in reserve to deal with expectable breakdowns; anticipating that allies will be treacherous; a policy of clemency to encourage enemies to switch sides. Another thing that contributed to Caesar’s winning streak was his own personal EE. Today it is often said that persons make their own luck, by trying harder and never giving up. This isn’t quite it. Caesar had all the qualities of high emotional energy, not only confidence and initiative, but also he was an extremely energetic person. He wasn’t loud and peremptory; in fact he was physically rather slight and was known for being mild-mannered. His strength was never to waste time. How did he find time to write his famous book on the Gallic Wars, that masterfully told his side of the story and heightened his reputation in Rome? He dictated it while traveling to and from military outposts and the cities he governed. Roads were poor and often non-existent, but nevertheless in his bumpy chariot or carried by footservants on a litter, he was always accompanied by a couple of secretaries to take dictation. He didn’t waste time stopping to sleep, since he slept in his chariot, one reason why he could make trips faster than anyone. In a time when an army was considered fast-moving if it could cover 100 miles in a week, Caesar could move several times faster. No wonder people thought he was super-human. Like Napoleon and other charismatic leaders, Caesar kept up his EE by a positive feedback loop. Every encounter with other people resonated with enthusiasm. While pumping up other people, he was pumped up himself even more. Everything he did had purpose, a trajectory towards success that made all the details meaningful, and kept him constantly alert. Caesar’s emotional domination of the situation comes out in an incident in his youth. Escaping from political enemies in Italy, he was captured by sea pirates, who demanded a ransom of twenty talents. (This was a huge amount of money, on the order of millions of dollars.) Caesar burst out laughing and retorted that he was worth fifty talents. Another feature of charisma: he crossed up others' expectations, surprising them and gaining the emotional initiative. While his followers were away gathering the ransom money, Caesar acted more like the leader of the pirates than their captive, joining in their military exercises and even telling them to be quiet when he wanted to sleep. He laughingly told them that after he was ransomed he would come back and have them all killed. The pirates laughed too, but that was exactly what Caesar did. As soon as he was ransomed, he immediately gathered a force, stormed their hideout, and kept his word. There is another clue in this early story about Caesar’s attitude towards money. He came from a network of politically elite families, and Roman politics gave opportunities for making money. But Caesar was not at all greedy. For him, money was something to be spent, as lavishly as possible, to gain popular support. He led the trend towards giving spectacular shows, gladiators, feasts, handouts to the public to make a reputation and win electoral campaigns. Generosity was his tactic. This meant that he had to be constantly raising more money, which was one reason why he embarked on the conquest of Gaul. But money was a means to an end, not the end itself. As we have seen with Steve Jobs, money facilitated career because it was a means to expand one’s networks. Throughout his life, Caesar was on a roll. True, he started in the elite, but it was a dangerous competition for power all the way. His famous Fortune was a snowball gathering size rolling downhill. But Caesar was pushing the snowball all the time. His winning career consisted in perfecting techniques for pushing the snowball.

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7. Dilemmas Napoleon got himself into three major binds.

Overextension He tied up hundreds of thousands of troops in Spain, in a war that lasted five years and eventually was lost. Spanish guerrillas were largely ineffectual but they were dispersed all over the peninsula, tying up multiple French armies and disuniting military command. On the whole, the French were winning but an English force, supplied by sea, landed in Portugal and kept making forays into Spain, intermittently and then increasingly successful under Wellington’s command. In Spain, Napoleon was not present most of the time, but when he was there he beat the English troops (the most dangerous opponent) and almost annihilated them. When Napoleon commanded personally, his armies won; the trouble was he was also fighting in Germany and then Russia. In his absence the French generals often lost battles or got bogged down, and the commanders dispersed around the country fighting guerrillas were jealous and quarreled among themselves. Napoleon had the energy and prestige to coordinate his subordinates when he was present; in his absence, other French commanders weren’t as good. Why not? This is a structural weakness of relying on a charismatic leader who centralizes everything by having much more energy than everyone else. Napoleon’s success in controlling things fed his energy but diminished the emotional energy of the next level of commanders when he wasn’t there. But this leads to a question: When does charismatic centralization work, and when does it backfire? Earlier in his career, when he came to power as First Consul in 1799 and for the next few years as Emperor, Napoleon energized his subordinates. These were the years of busy reforms, reorganizing everything in all directions. It was later, after the new patterns were set, that the leader stopped energizing the team. This is a general pattern in the life-history of organizations. When it first gets on a roll around a charismatic leader, all the networks are expanding, succeeding and feeding on each other's success. This is the honeymoon period. Once the organization has solved its initial problems, it pushes outward to bigger opportunities, and bigger opposition. Its enemies and rivals have learned something too. In this phase, relying on the charismatic leader starts becoming a weakness.

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Opponents Catching Up A second mistake or bind was the strategy to beat England by economic warfare, an embargo on trade with the European continent. It was a reasonable policy in the abstract, since France could not beat England’s naval superiority nor transport an army to the island; and for a while the English were hurt economically. (This was the same policy England used against Germany in World War I, responsible for the naval escalation that brought the US into the war; in the end, the policy worked.) But in practice embargo meant closing every port to English goods; this provoked local resistance, and required sending in French troops or coercing allies into agreeing to enforce the embargo on their coasts. This was a slippery slope. Napoleon did not start the policy, having inherited it from the revolutionary regime. But as his military successes grew, he was tempted to annex more territories to enforce control directly (eventually including Belgium, Holland, northern coastal Germany, and parts of Italy). Once greeted as liberator and revolutionary modernizer, the French became regarded as old-fashioned empire-builders. Even his Russian campaign-- the glaring mistake recognized by everyone after his invading army was destroyed not by defeat in battle but by overextension and attrition-- was motivated in the first place by Napoleon’s attempt to force the Russians into joining the embargo. Why didn’t Napoleon recognize it as a losing policy and change course? He did just that when he decided the Revolution’s anti-clericalism prolonged social strife in France; he successfully resolved the situation by making a Concordat with the Pope bringing Catholicism back into France, under terms favoring government control and without giving back confiscated church property. On religion, Napoleon was a typical radical secularist, but the issue didn’t matter that much to him, and political peace was more important. But the embargo had become too tied up with Napoleon's military successes. Most enemy diplomatic coalitions against him had been provoked by the embargo policy; but each time, Napoleon won more battles and extended the reach of French power. It was the issue that had made him master of Europe. Even if he saw its strategic down-side, it had been a winning trajectory overall. And since the thing that Napoleon was better at than everyone was battlefield command, the policy was bringing him indirectly a series of just the kinds of situations that most pumped up his emotional energy. His grand strategy became a EE trap, where the external realities eventually were going to overstretch French capabilities. But while it lasted, Napoleon was on a roll.

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________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Ulysses S. Grant Deflates the Magic of Robert E. Lee In 1864, Ulysses S. Grant had just taken over the Union army in northern Virginia, where so many generals before him had been defeated by Robert E. Lee. As usual, the Federal army was twice as big but Lee’s tactics were brilliant and his Confederate troops were pumped. They met in a tangled forest called the Wilderness; and as usual, everything went wrong for the Federals. When a subordinate officer ran up with a warning, Grant erupted in anger. “I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do. Some of you seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.” It was a futile outburst. The battle was lost, with tremendous casualties. After two days Grant had to break it off. Now came the turning point. At the very spot where previous Union commanders-Burnside, Hooker-- had turned tail and retreated north to lick their wounds and regroup, Grant turned south. He ordered the army to side-step around Lee, aiming for a series of bridges on the road to Richmond. Lee, with his usual promptness, caught the move and responded by looping his own forces southward by alternative roads, before Grant could make it. Again, advantage Lee. Nevertheless, defeated Federal troops, on the ten-mile night march through woods still burning from the battle, caught an unexpected sight: General Grant with his staff, passing in their midst on horseback, heading south. Words buzzed through the sleepy lines; men lined the road, pressing forward to touch their chief, clapping, shouting, speaking to him familiarly as one of themselves. They lit pine-knots to light up the scene, creating such excitement that Grant’s horse almost bucked him off. No more turning back; they were heading for Richmond. Heading for victory.

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The Creep of Formalities Napoleon's third mistake-- dilemma or slippery slope as it may be-- was gradually doing away with the forms of Revolutionary equality and democracy and substituting the aristocratic ranks and protocol of the old regime. At first, Napoleon’s personal rule was popular because he ended the bloody faction-fighting that roiled France from 1789 to 1799. Too much democracy was unstable, when factionalism was so intense and ideologically aggressive; and Napoleon was successful in getting France to calm down, by a mixture of repression and concessions. He put through policy changes that the divisive national assembly would have killed each other about: placating the Catholics and their peasant uprisings; reconciling émigré aristocrats and luring many back to France, sometimes giving them positions in government where they were rewarded for efficiency, putting bygones in the past by working alongside their former enemies. Napoleon regarded his policy as the career open to achievement, like himself making his way up through the French artillery to the top. He endorsed the Revolution abolishing hereditary aristocracy, and now Napoleon saw himself setting up a new elite that everyone could aspire to by proving themselves effective military officers or civilian administrators. Since his regime was heavily involved in war, reorganizing conquered territories, and changing the legal and governmental structure of France and elsewhere, there was a lot to be done and clear criteria of success and failure. Napoleon wanted to reward that success. He was a skilful organizer, and recognized the importance of having a good team, especially in the middle ranks. Because it seemed the easiest thing to do abroad, he created new Kings, Grand Dukes and other titled entities, using them to reward his best generals and political allies. The same system expanded at home, after Napoleon made himself Emperor and surrounded himself with a court made up of aristocratic ranks, again rewarding his allies. Personally, Napoleon did not enjoy the stiff protocol he had introduced (or re-introduced), which shows it was a matter of deliberate policy. He wanted to calm down domestic politics, even to stifle it under rigid forms. Formality was designed to eliminate court intrigues, and succeeded by enforcing boredom in his immediate entourage. The Emperor’s court contrasted sharply with Napoleon’s way of acting in other circumstances-- when he wanted to negotiate with foreign leaders, he could be charming, lively, humorous. In his informal mode, people liked Napoleon; his soldiers loved him. He even liked to sneak out at night and walk through the streets of Paris incognito, with only a single companion. But Napoleon at the height of his power had decided to rule through formalities, and the forms he found were traditional ones. He rewarded his special favorites with hereditary titles, estates, even foreign countries, contradicting the other strand of his policy, the abolition of hereditary privilege so that all careers were open to talent. Political struggles bring compromises; but as time went along Napoleon’s compromises choked off emotional energy, both his own and in the people around him.

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8. Napoleon’s Down Moments Spring and summer, 1795. Napoleon had been stricken off the rolls of army generals for failing to take up his command in northwest France, which he viewed as rural exile. A lady recalled what he looked like while living in his parents’ house is Marseille: “He entered with awkward, uncertain steps, with a shabby round hat pulled down deep over his face, his disorderly hair falling on the collar of his gray coat; without gloves, which he regarded as a superfluous expense; in badly made, badly heeled boots-- In short, when I call up in memory his whole miserable appearance and compare it with his later picture, I can hardly recognize him.” Taking allowance for the fact that Napoleon was one of the first to take up the new fashion of wearing his hair natural instead of the old style of wearing a wig, it is the picture of a man down on his luck as well as down on his finances. He took himself to Paris to work on his political connections. The city seemed to him in a mad dream, pursuing luxury and pleasure, an atmosphere that made him uncomfortable. The danger of a royalist plot perked things up. Napoleon got himself taken on by a leading politician, and by October he was placing the artillery to defend the government against an overthrow. A whiff of grapeshot was what Napoleon, the action-seeker, needed too. Soon he was frequenting the most influential salon, and getting ready to marry an accomplished society lady who knew everyone of importance. Networks were flowing his way again.

18th Brumaire, Year Eight of the Revolutionary calendar (November 9-10, 1799). Napoleon has hurried back from Egypt, having gotten wind of another government crisis. Besides a crisis of government revenues due to weak central control over regional authorities, armies were not being paid, debt and inflation mounted. Another purge was being contemplated on the Directory and the Councils, between the ex-Jacobins who wanted to return to the dictatorship and reign of terror of 1793 to crush the danger of traitorous émigrés, and the moderates who wanted to strengthen central authority by purging the radicals. Napoleon was enlisted by Sieyès, the anti-Jacobin leader, to provide the force to coerce the Council. Napoleon held a strong hand; he was greeted enthusiastically by

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crowds on his return from Egypt. Both sides made feelers to him; the Jacobins suggested a military dictatorship to get him on their side, but Napoleon had no desire to represent an unpopular faction. Napoleon made a deal with other side: the new constitution must take the form of a triumvirate of Consuls, and he would be one of them. Distrusting the politicians on all sides, but assured of military support and the people of Paris, Napoleon became impatient while the two Councils debated receiving the resignation of the Directors and the new arrangement of Consuls. He finally barged into the Council of Elders, and made a long and badly delivered speech. Opponents interrupted him-- an unaccustomed event for a military officer, amid politicians whose favorite tactic was shouting each other down. He turned to his aides and loudly called for protection if he were declared “hors de loi”-- outlawed, the cry that had brought down Robespierre. His companions pulled him out of the room to the hoots of the politicians. In the Council of Five Hundred, Napoleon was surrounded by angry deputies who beat him with their fists, and had to be rescued by his soldiers. Napoleon was overwhelmed by a different kind of crowd he could not face down. For once in his life, he lost emotional domination. His brother Lucian, who was President of the Council of Five Hundred, took charge of the situation. On a legal maneuver, he kept the councilors from take a vote on hors de loi, and went with Napoleon to address the Council guards-- the military force sworn to protect the politicians. Lucien dramatically reported the Councils were being infiltrated by agents of the English, armed with daggers, an appeal in the paranoid language of the time. Napoleon echoed his brother, and showed blood on his face. The rumour spread there had been an attempt in the Council to assassinate Napoleon. The mood turned; there was no resistance from the guards as Napoleon’s soldiers dispersed the Council with bayonets, some politicians even climbing out the windows. Napoleon had made it through, preserving the semblance of legal proceeding, although personally he was badly shaken. Henceforward, he would face no further divisive assemblies. His nerve was specific to the battlefield; it did not work in this alien environment.

The Emperor’s court assembly, January 1809. Napoleon has just made a hurried return from Spain, where he had beaten an English expedition and propped up his brother on the throne. The source of his haste: a rumour that Talleyrand, his Foreign Minister, and Fouché, the Chief of Police, had made a secret agreement to name a successor in case something happened to Napoleon in Spain. “Thief! You are nothing but a thief!” Napoleon shouted at Talleyrand. “You would sell your own father. You are nothing but shit in a silk stocking.” Talleyrand, the imperturbable diplomat, waited until the fit of rage was over. After the Emperor left the room, he remarked: “Too bad, that such a great man is so badly brought up.” He had judged it correctly; Napoleon’s threat was too overwrought to be serious.

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Napoleon was showing signs of weakness. Why? The Spanish situation was an irritant; his own family as puppet kings were not doing well. There was a continuing rumble of plots and assassination threats at home. And he didn’t like these formal levées anyway; for several years, when he got bored, he was known to make cutting remarks at the expense of the ladies present. Fortunately for Napoleon’s equilibrium, another enemy coalition gave him a challenge he could handle. By April he was off campaigning against Austria, on his way to his most grandiose battle victory at Wagram.

Moscow, September-October 1812. It had been the most difficult of all Napoleon’s campaigns, but he had reached the goal. The enemy’s capital city was taken. Of the invading army of 600,000 only 100,000 remained, most of them having fallen off along the way, another 30,000 lost at the battle of Borodino where the Russian army was smashed. He had pushed forward the offensive in August, after two months on the march: “In a month we’ll be in Moscow; in six weeks we’ll have peace.” The city was deserted, every door and window shut, the streets deserted-- not the welcoming or at least curious crowds Napoleon was used to. Two days after the French arrived, fires burned most of the city, set by the Russians themselves. Napoleon occupied the Kremlin and awaited the Czar’s messengers to discuss terms of a peace treaty. It was early September, weather was still good; to avoid spending the winter in Moscow, this would be the time to leave. Napoleon was uncharacteristically indecisive. For five weeks he waited for the ambassadors who never came. His meals, usually so short, grew longer. He seemed stunned, lolling about in deadly boredom with a novel in his hand. He had never appeared so low in emotional energy. Finally, in mid-October, he gave the order to retreat. The French troops had lost their discipline and spent their time looting the city; now they were weighed down with spoils. The oncoming winter, lack of food along the route, lack of horses, harassing attacks by the Russians took their toll. The dramatic story Napoleon would later tell blamed it all on the weather; in fact most of the losses of the invading army had happened on the way to Moscow, not the way back, but that was what impressed people. His image as the unbeatable conqueror was gone. The Russian army, when it had finally harried the French out of their land, was down to no bigger numbers than Napoleon’s remaining troops, and in no position to make an offensive. French troop losses were not really so bad, since most of the losses were in non-French contingents raised from his unwilling allies. But the Germans and Austrians were suddenly emboldened to throw off their enforced treaties with France; the initiative had swung. This was an emotional energy shift, a tidal wave of emotions on the macro-level, spreading among popular militias in Prussia and elsewhere, sweeping the German rulers along however hesitant they had been to unleash

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the kind of enthusiasm they associated with Jacobin class upheavals. For Napoleon, it was a geopolitical disaster, above all because it affected his international power prestige. In the minds of his enemies, he was no longer on a roll. Nevertheless, on the march, Napoleon was more upbeat than he had been in Moscow. In the coldest weather, he made a point of marching along with his Imperial Guards, on foot and in a fur coat, for several hours a day. In early December he decided to hurry back to Paris; one of the domestic generals had attempted a coup, acting on the rumour that Napoleon was dead; it was imperative to show himself and rebuild another army. They were finally out of Russia, but had to cross now-hostile Prussian territory. Napoleon traveled by coach with his ambassador Caulaincourt, disguised as his secretary. On the way he ragged this dignified gentleman about what would happen if they were captured: the Prussians would turn them over to his arch-enemy, the English. “Can you picture to yourself, Caulaincourt, the figure you would cut in an iron cage, in the main square of London?” The ambassador recalled: "And there he was for a quarter of an hour, laughing at this foolish notion... Never had I seen the Emperor laugh so heartily, and his gaiety was so infectious that it was some time before we could speak a word without finding some new source of amusement." He handled defeat well, when it came. During defensive campaigns of 1813-1814, he kept parrying the oncoming Prussian, Austrian and Russian armies advancing on France, but could do little about Wellington crossing the Pyrenees from the south. A French marshal who went over to the Russians advised: “Expect a defeat whenever the Emperor attacks in person. Attack and fight his lieutenants whenever you can." He could not be everywhere at once. When an enemy column took Paris, Napoleon still had an army in the field; but his other generals saw the situation was hopeless, and made a truce that forced Napoleon to abdicate.

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________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Re-launching on the Rebound: Building IKEA IKEA made its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, the 17th richest person in the world by 2001. His Swedish company revolutionized the way furniture is sold everywhere. But almost every innovation came on the rebound-- a strategy he adopted to recover from each career-threatening setback. Ingvar Kamprad grew up in a family in the timber business, and by his teens he had started his own business importing office equipment and selling mail-order furniture. But there was a lot of competition in the mail-order business (it was the era of giants like Sears and Roebuck in the USA, for instance) and at first IKEA could only afford to ship very low quality furniture. In 1953 IKEA began to sell furniture in do-it-yourself kits, and shipped all the parts in compact flat boxes. This saved space and reduced shipping costs, as well as, of course, skilled labor. The mail-order business failed but the flat box remained. To make the furniture more attractive, Kamprad set up showrooms on cheap property outside of cities, where customers could see what they were buying. The show-rooms drew attention. IKEA made it into a sort of outing with a restaurant and play area for children. Next door was a warehouse where the customer could pick up their own furniture in a flat box, take it home and assemble it oneself. It was prompt and modern, instead of stuffy old-fashioned furniture stores with their heavy styles, hovering salesmen, and waiting for delivery. And IKEA's stripped-down models fit the new Scandinavian-modern look. IKEA rode the upward wave of post-war economic boom in Sweden, helped by social-democratic reforms that built public housing, made women independent, and created a demand by young people to furnish their new homes. IKEA furniture fit their lifestyle and their budget. For Kamprad, shipping costs were now down to zero. The older Swedish furniture dealers were none too happy about IKEA's methods. The trade association barred Kamprad from displaying at furniture fairs, and complained to government regulators about violations. On top of this, they threatened Swedish suppliers with reprisals if they didn't cut off dealing with IKEA. The Swedish government, protective of its industries and favoring a policy of social harmony, sided with the furniture association against IKEA. It was as if Sam Walton, just as he was beginning to take over the retail business of rural Arkansas, were faced by a coalition of old-fashioned store owners who had the ear of the state government, determined to destroy this threatening new way of doing business. Kamprad's response was to side-step the Swedish blockade by going international. He made a deal with communist Poland, to build furniture components for IKEA designs. Since the communists were not oriented towards market profits, and Polish workers had their needs supplied by the state, Kamprad got an exclusive long-term deal that lowered his labor cost to 25% of what they were in Sweden. It was the height of the Cold War in 1961, but Sweden was neutral, and Kamprad had no respect for ideologies, nor fear of them. Business is business, even with a communist. And the canny businessman ended up with the profit. With even lower costs, IKEA was able to keep prices down while raising its design quality enough so that it matched up favorably with more professionally-made furniture in the modern minimalist style. As Kamprad grew richer and more of a presence, opposition to him in Sweden diminished. IKEA became something of a Swedish icon.

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Nevertheless, taxes on wealth were high under the Social Democratic government, and the threat prompted Kamprad to make his next big move. To reduce his taxes, he ploughed back more profits into the business, setting up subsidiaries in Denmark, Norway, and northern Europe. This enabled him to export capital from high-tax Sweden to countries with lower taxes, and paved the way for establishing tax residence abroad. The more Sweden pressed him for taxes, the more he built outside their reach. In the 1970s he transferred ownership of IKEA to the Netherlands, while he himself settled in tax-friendly Switzerland. IKEA's model of do-it-yourself furniture, with customer pickup at bare-bones warehouses, spread around the world. Not just because it was cheap, but even more because moving was how Ingvar Kamprad answered the threat of state taxation. Everything that knocked him down, also knocked him into a new course where profit was greater. Adversity pushed him out of whatever ruts he might have sunk in.

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9. Endgame: Losing Emotional Energy Napoleon salvaged a tiny principality, the island of Elba near his Corsican home, and retired there to await the turn of events. The Bourbon monarchy, recalled to power in France, quickly proved unpopular. The victorious powers fell out at the conference to redistribute territories. Ten months later, Napoleon landed in France, roused his army veterans, and fought the showdown again, the famous Hundred Days. As in 1814, he was outnumbered by enemy armies. He attempted to beat them separately by fast maneuver before they combined, but failed at Waterloo. He ordered a fast frigate to take him to his friends in America, but the British blocked the Atlantic port. Napoleon decided to take asylum in England, perhaps a romantic memory of other Continental exiles who had gone there is the past. Though their nations had been bitter enemies, on board ship he got along extremely well. It helped that he was treated like royalty, the English Admiral even taking off his hat to him. In England crowds came out to see the celebrity. Napoleon bowed and men generally took off their hats. It was a bitter blow when the English government, putting aside their personal sympathies and as a matter of policy, sent him into the furthest possible exile, at St. Helena in the south Atlantic. For a moment Napoleon’s valet was afraid he would commit suicide. He soon recovered; on the voyage he chatted and played cards with the Admiral. When his entourage (a full complement of servants and companions) arrived at St. Helena, he was lionized by the British settlers. Everyone wanted to meet him, and he was the life of the party, on occasion putting aside personal dignity to banter with children and adults alike. Eventually the situation began to wear on him. The novelty of his adventure among the English was gone. Everyday life consisted of quarrels with the martinet British governor, and fading hopes of being recalled to Europe. Napoleon grew fat and lethargic. This man of supreme energy, deposed at age 45 with nothing to do, grew idle, sickened, and died. He was 51.

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10. Ability, What is it? Napoleon was a man of highest ability, if we want to use that term. He was a better general than anyone; an administrator who got things done and left permanent effects. He chose his officers and civilian officials for their abilities. What does it mean? A tautology; ability, capability, such words all imply a subjunctive mode, it could well happen, we have every reason to expect that this person will make it happen-- but only because of what they have done in the past. Capability is a false noun; it exists only in action. On the whole, the action we call ability is emotional energy, compounded with good judgment, realistic observation, and the techniques of human interaction that bring other people to join in a collective project and thus make big things happen. To say that someone has ability but doesn’t use it, means they sometimes show what they can do, but most of the time they don’t. Why not? It is the obverse case of Napoleon. Having traced his ups and downs, we can see even someone who reaches the supreme level is riding in and out of networks and situations where they can generate EE. It is rare that someone can be at the center of networks of networks, hold the connections together, and make big things happen that have been hanging on the cusp of previous developments. Such positions in historical time and social space are rare, and so supremely energized persons are rare. Their moments come, raise them up, as they focus and raise up the people around them, and who in turn ripple the focused energy outwards among thousands or millions of people. The networks stutter and hitch; the actor at the center loses grip, regains it, goes on again. The network configuration changes, the moment is past. The circle of rippling focus narrows. The energy dims. The Great Man dies... or rather, the circuits no longer flow, the lights go out.

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________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Genius is How You Look At It We call someone a genius when we don't understand how they did something really impressive. The same goes for words like "talent" or having "a gift". Nothing we can do about it. A few people have it, most of us don't. This is an illusion. Looked at up close, genius is always a technique for how to do things. It isn't mysterious; we just didn't see it. If you feel tempted to skip this part because you don't like math, try to put that feeling aside for the next 3 minutes. Not liking something is an emotion, and how you handle your emotions is the biggest difference between winners and losers. You are about to read the secret of how to get around this. Karl Friedrich Gauss, considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, first showed his talent-- to use that word -- when he was a schoolboy. It was a little village school in Germany. The teacher, in order to keep the children busy, gave them a busy-work task: add up all the number from 1 to 100. In less than a minute, Gauss walked up to the teacher's desk with the answer written on a piece of paper. The teacher, who knew enough mathematics to be impressed, recognized his pupil as something special, and arranged for him to get a government scholarship at a better school. The boy from a peasant village was launched on his career that would include discoveries in the fundamentals of electricity. How did Gauss do it? Most of us would plod through the arithmetic by adding 1 plus 2 is 3; 3 plus 3 is 6; 6 plus 4 is 10, and so on until, 10 minutes or so later, we get to 100.

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Gauss saw it a different way. He saw the entire array of numbers from 1 to 100 laid out in his head, and the pattern: 1 plus 99 is 100; 2 plus 98 is 100; 3 plus 97 is 100... Splitting it in half and fitting together the top and the bottom, the answer is a certain number of pairs times 100. How many pairs? Obviously the top and bottom come together at 49 plus 51 is 100.

So the answer is 49 times 100 [i.e. 4900] plus what is left over, namely 50 and 100. The answer is 5050, and that was on the note Gauss delivered to the teacher's desk. You can do it in your head, without even writing it down. This is supposed to be a sign of genius, or at least being very smart, for people who don't see how it is done. Later Gauss shared his secret with everyone. Once he learned algebra, he wrote out a formula for adding up any sequence of numbers. If you don't like mathematics or are put off by its symbols, it looks alien, but it is just a matter of getting used to the language. [-- OK, you can skip the formula if you want.] n! = n ( (n-1) / 2 ) + n Which is to say: n! [the sum of all the numbers from 1 to n] is equal to n [i.e. 100 in Gauss's school problem] times 1 less than n [i.e. 99] divided by 2 [i.e. 49.5 times 100 = 4950] plus n [the 100 that is left over after all the number combinations 1 plus 99, 2 plus 98, etc. have been used up] giving a grand total of 5050. Try it: it will work with any number you can think of (1 to 3; or 1 to 48; or anything else).

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[-- Math-phobics, you can start reading again.] The point isn't to learn how to do arithmetic in your head. The point is that you, or anybody else, can be a genius. You just have to learn the technique. The so-called genius invents techniques. How? 1. Turn the problem around and look it from another angle. The usual technique would be to add 1 and 2, then add 3, and so on until you get to 100. Gauss saw the whole thing as a gestalt, top and bottom halves 1-49 and 51-99 fitting together like pieces of a puzzle. 2. Don't get locked into the usual procedure. That means seeing that it is a technique, instead of just taking it as a habit, and finding a different way to do it. 3. And that means looking at the details. Most of us would say, it's too boring to think about how to add up a string of numbers. But it's even more boring to do it the conventional way, plodding through adding 1 plus 2, then plus 3 etc. Look at the details carefully enough until you see a different way of doing them; then the whole thing flashes in a new light. Details are exciting if you can do something important with them. 4. And so: genius consists of people who energize themselves by rearranging details in a new and useful way. That means there are two obstacles to being a genius: first, because it seems mysterious, not something you could possibly do. Second, because once you get into it, it seems boring since it focuses on details. Wrong: this is how a championship baseball batter corrects his swing. People who are good at something-- now we can get rid of that stupid word "genius" -get high on details that they master better than anyone else. This same thing works for "genius" in music, or anything else that humans can do. The key is that their best technique is usually invisible to outsiders, who don't even know there is a technique. An outstanding micro-sociologist, who invented some great research techniques and made important discoveries about emotions, told one of the authors that he believes Mozart was a genius. I [rc] asked him if he knew anything about making music. He said no, he can't play an instrument or even read sheet music. He just knows what he likes to listen to, and Mozart sounds like a genius. But Mozart learned a technique. His father was a professional musician who taught him to play keyboards when he was only 3 years old, and to compose his own music. I have seen one of Mozart's compositions from when he was 6 years old; it is easy enough so that a mediocre piano player like myself can play it. In a way, it is amazing that a 6-year-old could do it; but on the other hand it is a pretty simple piece of music, nothing memorable about it. Mozart's music that is now considered to be in his distinctive style started when he was about 18 years old. That means it took 15 years of practicing until he learned how to compose in a way that was truly novel. And he kept on improving; his greatest operas and other pieces were done when he was in his late 20s and 30s. Considering how early he started, he had been at it for 25 years when he developed his most beautiful ways of putting together sounds, rhythms and harmonies. His beautiful techniques of composing were not intuitive, since it took him a long time to learn them. Like other creative people, he was a very careful observer of how things had been done up until now-- he composed hundreds of pieces imitating other composers' styles-- and he saw how the details could be rearranged to get even better effects. To call someone a genius is putting yourself in the position of an outsider. To accomplish something too, you have to make yourself an insider.

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Creative insiders question the details, and think of new ways to put them together. This is what Steve Jobs did; what Napoleon did in a very different sphere. It is interacting creatively on the micro-level with the world around you.

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PART III. WHAT MADE ALEXANDER GREAT?

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Among the big names of history, Alexander is up there with Caesar and Napoleon. Taking an insider view, what can we learn about their secrets of success? What does winning on battlefields tell us about winning in business, and other arenas of modern life? Napoleon was an all-time winning CEO because of how he led organizations in a time of society-wide structural transition, and how networks intersected for a moment in time to pump up a central individual with huge emotional energy. Alexander the Great parallels Napoleon, with an even better record of military victories. He too is located at the cusp of a structural transition. Going back to the times of Alexander, the 300s B.C., we are in a time-machine to a different moral universe. Relationships are much more violent, more out-front, and from our point of view, often extremely harsh. Nevertheless, some patterns of success hold through.

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1. Launching From the Most Advanced Platform What made Alexander great? First of all, his father’s army. Alexander is famous for having conquered the Persian Empire. It was the world's greatest empire at that time, covering 3000 miles from west to east, 1500 miles north to south. The expedition was planned and prepared by his father, Philip II of Macedon, and was ready to go when Philip was assassinated at the farewell party. The 20-year-old son took command, waited two more years to make sure the Macedonians and the Greeks were behind him, and then carried out the epic campaign of conquest in 10 years. Instead of kicking the can of causality down the road, we need to ask: how did Philip come to build this invincible army? The answer is in the organization and the opposition. The Macedonian army was an improvement on the Greek hoplite army. The Greeks had developed the practice of fighting in solid ranks, forming a compact block of shields, armor, and spears. The whole aim of battle was to keep one’s troops together in a rectangular mass. With their heavy armor, they could not be hurt by arrows, stones or javelins; a Roman version was called a Tortoise because it was impervious to anything. The Greek phalanx, developed in the 600s and 500s BC, was a huge shift from the traditional mode of fighting depicted in the Iliad (around 750 BC). The traditional form could be called the hero-berserker style. An army consisted of noisy crowds of soldiers clustered behind their leaders, who didn’t really give orders but led by example. Heroes like Achilles, Hector, and Ajax would work themselves into a frenzy, roaring out onto the battlefield between the armies, sometimes fighting a hero from the other side, but more often going on a rampage through the lesser troops, cowing them into a losing posture and mowing them down with sheer momentum, i.e. emotional domination, EDOM. This berserker style remained the way “barbarian” armies fought-- that is to say, armies that did not have disciplined phalanxes. The hero-berserker could never beat a Greek or Roman phalanx that stood its ground; the Greeks were always victorious over the barbarians north and east of them, and so were the Romans over their hinterlands. On the other hand, when one Greek phalanx met another, the result was a shoving match. Unless one side broke ranks and ran away, few soldiers were killed. Most battles were stalemates, and city-states could avoid combat if they wished, sheltering behind their

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walls. Phalanxes only fought by arrangement, when both sides assembled on chosen ground for a set-piece battle. The main weakness of the hoplite phalanx was that it was slow-moving. Hoplites were heavy troops, quite literally from the weight of armor they carried. An enemy that hit and ran away could harass a Greek phalanx, but they would be beaten if they stayed to fight head-to-head. This was brought home to the Greeks when Xenophon returned from a campaign in Persia during 401-399 BC, writing it up in his famous Expedition of the Ten Thousand. A contender for the Persian throne had hired them as mercenaries. But once they reached the Mesopotamian heartland, their Persian employer was killed in battle, and the Ten Thousand had to fight their way back, first against the Persian army and then against primitive hill tribes on their path to the Black Sea. The Persians troops were somewhere between the berserker style and the disciplined Greeks. They relied on large masses to impress their enemy into submission; typically these were grouped by ethnicity, each with their own type of weapons. Among these weapons of terror were rows of chariots with scythes attached to their axles; sometimes there were war-elephants. Troops recruited from tribal regions were used on the flanks, as mobs of stone-slingers, archers, and javelin-throwers; these were light troops, without armor since they fought from a distance. The Persian armies that Alexander fought had the same shape. None of these troops could beat a disciplined phalanx that held its ground. Chariots could get close only if they ran onto the phalanx’s spears, which horses are unwilling to do. Elephants, too, are hard to control and shy away from spears. The Greeks soon recognized they could beat armies of almost any size if they stuck together. One problem was that a phalanx could repel enemy light troops attacking with arrows and slings, but hoplites were too heavy to chase them down and keep them from repeating the attack. The solution was to add specialized units around the phalanx; hiring their own barbarian archers and slingers, and adding cavalry, mainly for finishing off the enemy when they are running away. Philip’s Macedonian army incorporated all the most advanced improvements. First and most importantly, he added heavy armored cavalry, operating on both flanks with the phalanx in the center. Philip’s cavalry were not just for chasing-down after the enemy broke ranks, but for breaking the enemy formation itself. Philip was one of the first to perfect a combined-arms battle tactic: the phalanx would engage and stymie the enemy’s massed formation, whereupon the cavalry would break it open on the flanks or rear.

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Since the Macedonians had only recently transitioned from tribal pastoralists to settled agriculture, it could combine military styles. The best-of-the-barbarians was added to the best-of-the-Greeks. Philip’s phalanx was recruited from the peasant farmers, his cavalry from the aristocracy, used to spending their time riding and hunting. Philip’s-- and thus Alexander’s-- cavalry were called the Companions. They were the elite, the carousing drinking-buddies of their leader. This arrangement of drinking-buddies at the core of the army, as we shall see, eventually caused Alexander a lot of grief. Second, Philip also borrowed from the most scientifically advanced Greeks, for techniques of attacking fortresses. These included catapults and engines, underground mining (to undermine walls), siege ladders and protected roofing to cover the de-construction engineers as they worked on the fortress. The third of Philip’s innovations was to travel light. Greek city-state armies, if they went very far from home, traveled with huge baggage trains: servants carrying armor and supplies, personal slaves, women, camp followers, often doubling the size of the mass. Philip made every soldier carry his own equipment; he prohibited carts, since they are slow moving and clog the primitive roads; he kept pack animals to a minimum, since they add to the number of attendants. When an army has to engage in long-distance expeditions, overcoming the logistics problem becomes the number-one issue. Alexander followed his father's solution.

________________________________________________________________________ Careers: If You Can't Inherit It, Join It Obviously we can't all inherit the world's most advanced organization, as Alexander did when he took over his father's army. Sometimes sons took over their father's business and made it worldclass. In the 1920s, at the age of 19, Howard Hughes inherited his father's industrial tool manufacturing company, just when the airline passenger industry was taking off. He threw himself into aircraft racing and set several records with his innovative planes, while living a playboy lifestyle in Hollywood film-making. In the late 1930s, he took over a domestic airline, and expanded it very profitably during WWII in flying overseas military supplies. After the war, he used its momentum to become one of the first international airlines, Trans World Airlines. Although superseded in the merger waves and bankruptcies after 1978 deregulation, for a time TWA was the world leader and Howard Hughes one of the most famous of the flamboyant innovators. This doesn't happen very often. Once a company has become dominant in a mature industry, it is rare for the younger generations who inherit it to take it to the next level. It is more typical for history's biggest winners to begin by entering a field from outside on the cusp of transformation. We see this with Napoleon, going into the artillery branch of the French army; and with mass marketing successes like Sam Walton with Wal-Mart and Ingvar Kamprad with IKEA. We see it with Steve Jobs and the entire Silicon Valley lineage going back to David Packard and William Shockley.

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The trick is to figure out where it will happen next. Today you can learn professional prognostications in business school. A better way is to find out from your own experience on the spot where it is happening. Some places we can generally rule out. Big corporations and bureaucratic hierarchies are usually not where an individual is going to make an historic splash. Of course, someone is always going to reach the top ranks in such organizations, where they will make a substantial amount of money and exert some influence for better or worse. But this kind of career is not in the same league with the names who get attached to historic transformations. It is difficult for a long-established organization to launch the next big change. Still, some part of the organization may be at the cutting edge. An individual can exploit the possibilities by locating the right part of the bureaucracy to work in, learning its techniques and its secrets, then splitting off on their own. Ross Perot joined IBM in 1957 and spent 5 years as a sales representative selling mainframe computers to business corporations. Since Perot had previously been a U.S. Navy officer, he sensed an unfilled market: computer services to government agencies. In 1962 he founded Electronic Data Services, which sold data processing services rather than the machines themselves. His biggest clients included the Federal government, such as a contract to computerize records for newly established Medicare; the Texas state school board, huge medical insurance companies, and foreign governments. Although a business-oriented Republican, Perot crossed ideological lines and led the trend to outsourcing government services. He repeatedly sold off his companies at great profit and started new ones. When he ran for President in 1992 it was on a third party ticket, as usual going his own way. Similarly with William Shockley in the early days of Silicon Valley. He began working for the monopoly known as "Ma Bell," officially American Telephone and Telegraph. In a time before the phone system was broken up and opened to competition, AT&T was as big and bureaucratic as they come. It was not the future of telephones. But AT&T was one of the first corporations to create a scientific research laboratory, devoted to exploring innovative projects. Shockley worked at Bell Laboratories for 14 years. He was associated in the 1940s with a small group that developed the transistor-- the first step towards miniaturization of electronics, replacing old-fashioned slow-working vacuum tubes. Shockley was the most aggressive and flamboyant of the research group, and they quarreled over credit for the discovery. Blocked from promotion in Bell Labs, he broke off in 1956 to found his own company. Getting as far away as possible from the East Coast atmosphere, he moved his operation from New Jersey to the San Francisco suburbs. Further spinoffs from Shockley's overly secretive company, and spinoffs from the spinoffs, created the silicon chips and their myriad uses that gave the region its name. The message: if the advanced platform at the moment is part of a bureaucracy, join it long enough to learn the technique and its potential, but don't get dragged down by the organization. Give it five or ten years (times may vary), and start your own organization.

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2. Tiger Woods Training Alexander was born in 356 BC, when his father was reforming the Macedonian army and beginning his conquests. Obviously Philip was away from home a lot and would not have taken a small child with him to the wars. But he trained Alexander by informal apprenticeship from an early age, having him around when he could. A famous incident happened when Alexander was 10 years old, and his father was buying warhorses. One magnificent horse was too shy and unruly to be ridden, and Philip was going to send it back until Alexander begged to have a try at taming it. The story goes on to say he had noticed the horse was frightened by its moving shadow, so he turned the horse’s face into the sun, soothed it by stroking, and finally jumped on its back and galloped off. Leaving aside the usual hero-forecasting that went along with the story, we see that Alexander was already a careful observer who figured out how to manage things around him; that he was both calculating and impetuous, biding his time for the moment to act. This was not just a colorful story of a boy and his horse; it shows a remarkably mature 10-year-old; and the qualities Alexander shows are much the same as his father’s. Although father and son butted heads and engaged in mutual jealousy, Philip regarded Alexander from an early age as the kind of officer he wanted to take over for him. At age 16, when Philip was away on campaign, he left Alexander as regent, and he jumped right in, leading the army in person and putting down revolts. Thereafter, Alexander accompanied his father on campaigns, commanding the key unit in battle, the Companion cavalry. Philip had other sons he could have groomed for this role. Alexander’s mother was Philip’s fourth wife out of an eventual total of eight, and Alexander had a number of stepbrothers. We can infer Alexander showed his aptitude early; which is to say, he picked up his father’s military art quickly and was given further opportunities, in a self-reinforcing virtuous circle. He was already distancing himself from rivals. The atmosphere of the Macedonian court was full of rivalries. Political marriages created rivals for the family succession, and the losers could well end up dead. Alexander's first elimination tournament was not just how he commanded in the field, but how he dealt with his ranking at court. When Alexander was 18, his father took a new wife, and at the wedding party the girl’s uncle-- one of Philip’s generals--- gave a toast to a new heir. Alexander threw his drinking cup at the man’s head and shouted: “What do you take me for, a bastard?” Philip drew his sword to cut down his son, but failed because he was too drunk to stand up. Alexander and his mother had to go into exile, but eventually he was recalled. Not long

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after, Philip was assassinated by another intimate with a dagger, Alexander’s mother had the new wife and her baby killed, and Alexander became the new King. He had been through a lot already by the age of 18. What did Alexander learn during his apprenticeship? Obviously, Philip’s tactics for leading an army in battle; also how to recruit and train it, since during Alexander’s 10-year expedition against Persia he replenished his army several times over. He must have learned how to travel with a light baggage train, since this is what Alexander did on his Persian campaign. Perhaps this was the province of his father’s generals, notably Parmenio, an older man of his father’s generation, who probably acted as Alexander's mentor. Parmenio was delegated ticklish problems like commanding non-Macedonian troops, arranging logistics and baggage trains; and in the early part of Alexander’s campaign, officers like Parmenio took care of the essential grunt-work. We catch glimpses of Alexander throwing off his mentor. After his big victory at Issue in the second year of the campaign, where the Persian king was defeated but not captured, Parmenio recommended accepting the peace settlement. “If I were Alexander, I would accept the offer...” to divide the Persian empire with the defeated Persian King. “So would I,” Alexander retorted, “if I were Parmenio.” Once Alexander had conquered the heartland of the Persian Empire in the fourth year, he left Parmenio behind while he embarked on his long campaign to its eastern edges. The mentorship was over. Later, when dissention grew among his officers, Alexander had Parmenio's son executed for complicity in a plot; and for good measure, sent back a message to assassinate the father.

________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Avoiding the Bureaucratic Ladder, Side-stepping the Credential Queue Many of the biggest winners started early. Alexander had his own army command at age 16, and led the great conquest at 22. His father Philip, too, started early, taking over as king at age 24 in a coup and building his world-class army. Napoleon was an officer at 16, a undefeatable general at 26. Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer Co. when he was 22, and was famously successful at 25. Not all successful people accomplish it young. The ones that do prove that it can be done: that young people can have the skills for the highest level of success. Above all, these are the interactional skills to generate a flow of EE that builds winning networks; the sense of how to focus on crucial details; and how to generate EDOM when necessary.

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How is it that some people can succeed young? Or rather, why don't most people do it? What distinguishes the ones who make meteoric early success, from the others whose lives are a slower plodding up the ranks? There are two major obstacles: a world full of bureaucratic hierarchies; and the educational credential system. Both of these are peculiarly modern obstacles to success. Both bureaucracies and educational credentials slow individuals down. How did the success-stars avoid this? The key is to start early in the adult world. In order to make a great success in your 20s, you need to have learned a great deal-- not so much sheer information, as how to behave. It means starting 10 years or more earlier. It requires becoming a player in an adult arena, learning the way things are done and who gets ahead in it. Obviously a 10-year-old is not going to be very good at this, but such examples show what kind of skills can be built from around that age. Napoleon was not the only young leader of a state in his time. William Pitt (the Younger) was Prime Minister of England during most of the years between 1784 and 1805, and thus was France’s, and Napoleon’s, chief opponent. He became PM at age 25, and held onto it for most of 20 years-- an extraordinary record in a Parliamentary democracy. How did he manage it so young? His father was a former PM, who did not send the boy to school but reared him to be an orator and politician. The younger Pitt was intensely serious, a workaholic who had no interests except politics, avoided society, and never married. By 22 he was not only in Parliament, but dominating everyone with his skill at swaying political factions. Great crises are opportunities for making great leaders. Pitt entered Parliament when the ministry in power was disgraced by defeat in the American Revolution; and the opposition party was split between factions, one of which Pitt’s father had led. Pitt joined none of them, but began by fighting loudly for parliamentary reform, refusing office until the King gave him carte blanche. Pitt could impose his will, just as Napoleon could, because he had a strong course of action when his quarreling compatriots could accomplish nothing. Pitt broke the logjam of reforms, raising the House of Commons above the House of Lords, making the head of the Treasury supreme in government, and reducing electoral corruption; revenue was rationalized and finances were put in order, enabling the huge military effort against France. Pitt paralleled what the French Revolution and Napoleon accomplished. The historic leader emerges when large structural changes, long-proposed, are finally brought about by a super-energetic individual. Like Napoleon, Pitt died soon after he left office, his energy deflated, aged 47; almost exactly the age Napoleon was overthrown. Crisis and deadlock in the old organization sets an opportunity for the young. We see this with Napoleon's generals, many of whom got their first command even younger than Napoleon. Many of them came up through the ranks; it was not just a saying that every private carried a marshal's baton in his pack. Of course, having a lot of fighting gave them opportunities; and there was a strong coat-tail effect of fast-rising leaders like Napoleon who promoted energetic people. The whole situation contrasts sharply with 20th and 21st century military careers-- in America and elsewhere-- where most officers reach high command only in their 50s or 60s. Ironically, our age of meritocracy is more of a gerontocracy than the pre-bureaucratic era. Coming now to meteoric business successes: their big obstacle is the school system. Yes, our school system is formally meritocratic. Favoritism and family background are supposed to be irrelevant; what grades you get and how far you go depends on how you perform on tests.

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But the school system slows individuals down because school itself is a bureaucracy. That means it is divided into specialized units, arranged in a planned sequence. Each year is a separate grade and there are separate classes teaching various topics. Above all, a bureaucracy controls everything by rules and by keeping records. Your entire progress through the school system consists of your record-- the classes you took, the grades you received, test scores, teachers' reports, letters of recommendation. Getting a degree like a high school diploma or a B.A., an M.D. or M.B.A. is just one more entry in your record. In a highly credentialized system like the modern U.S. (and virtually every other country), you need lower credentials to get admitted to further schooling where you can get higher credentials. Eventually you go out into the job market where employers in other bureaucracies will look at your credentials in deciding whether to hire you and how much you will be paid. Everything goes by standardized procedures that are planned to take a standard amount of time. You are legally required to be in school for a certain number of years starting at age 6; you are normally supposed to move through one grade per year. It is true that exceptions are permissible, skipping grades by demonstrating very high performance. Before WWII children who performed badly were held back to repeat a grade, but this has disappeared as bureaucratic routine has gotten stronger. But even though very studious children may skip grades, this is discouraged informally by everyone, parents and children themselves. Peer pressure is built into the system. American schools in particular are centered around socializing and athletics, so that younger children ahead of their grade are ostracized and looked down upon. If the secret of early success is to start early in the adult world, schools do exactly the opposite. They make sure that young people will be as similar as possible to other people their age, that they will be members of the youth culture rather than acting like adults. This is because school systems have become a series of bureaucracies feeding each other, a lengthening sequence stretching not only through the teen years but into their 20s or longer. There was no such thing as a "teenager" until the 1950s, when American educators put on a push to enroll everyone in high school. Before that time, youths who left school simply entered the labor force, where they had to act like adults. It is only with compulsory high school that the stereotypes of being a teenager made their appearance: alienated, faddish, obsessed with popularity, athletics and partying, thrill-seeking and action. Of course many teen-age persons are not like this, but they are submerged in the status ranking that kids enforce among themselves. So how is it possible to launch one's career early? Most entrepreneurs who made big successes went through the school system to a certain extent, but simultaneously got started young in their own business. Sam Walton hired his college classmates to distribute newspapers. Warren Buffett was making investments when he was 12 years old. Sociologist Michel Villette found that a large proportion of persons who made big fortunes in the 20th century came from families of entrepreneurs. Their father or another close relative ran an independent business; they did not grow up in families who worked in bureaucracies. The young future entrepreneur saw how to do it from an early age, how to sell products, make deals, raise and invest money, look out for business opportunities. In effect they went through a real-life apprenticeship, an insider's view of how to make money on your own. It is the opposite of the sheltered, keep-in-step-with-everyone-else ethos of the bureaucratic school system. An exception is for scientific careers, where you need to go through the school system to reach the point where one can get an apprenticeship in the laboratory of a top scientist. But even here, top scientists make a lot of money only when they combine their educational networks with an entrepreneurial ethos picked up from somewhere else. Even in the era of an inflated credential system, where a large proportion of the population stays in school well into their 20s, successful entrepreneurs are those who know when to launch out on

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their own. Jobs, Wozniak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, and the following generation in the high-tech computer world, dropped out of college when the opportunity arose. Howard Hughes left college at age 19, and learned the burgeoning aircraft industry from inside. They weren't pursuing a degree, which is to say another bureaucratic credential. For the successful ones, new technology was an arena where you can take action on your own, building an invention, building a market, building an organization simultaneously. Rapidly expanding networks like these are where winning EE is created.

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3. The Ideal Target for Takeover Alexander’s success depended on the fact that the Persian Empire was there for the taking. Let us unpack this. The Empire had already been organized, and hence there was something to take over. The great Persian kings had created a unified administrative structure out of what previously had been several major kingdoms (Media, Babylon, Egypt), plus a vast area that had never been a state. Before the time of the conqueror Cyrus in the 500s BC, the two great fertile river valleys of the Middle-East, Mesopotamia and Egypt, had already winnowed down to a few strong states based on big populations held together by water transport. But Iran and the adjacent uplands and plains were inhabited only by sparse populations. Some were shifting tribal coalitions of herdsmen. Others lived in pockets where agriculture could support a mid-size population and therefore petty kingdoms with medium-sized armies. The main problem was they weren't developed enough economically to be any larger. They lacked the logistics to supply an army big enough to conquer anyone else, by carrying enough food and water to cross the infertile areas between them. What Cyrus did was essentially what Alexander did later: starting from the major pockets of population and agriculture, he would win a few impressive victories, then use his prestige to overawe the outlying areas, with their lower level of production, to enlist as allies. It was a system of tribute, rather than direct control. The Great King, as Cyrus and his successors were known, was more than just an ordinary king, but overlord of lords-- Lord of Lords, a term used in the Bible. He did not change much locally; the same chiefs and petty kings remained in place, but they had to pay tribute. Above all, they had to provide goods in kind, especially animals and foodstuff so that royal armies could pass that way. For most places, it was a thin administrative system. Towards the core, a tributary empire turned into a thicker, more intrusive system. Cyrus and his stronger successors put their own administrators in place: high-level satraps, intermediate level governors, local garrisons. In richer places, older city-kingdoms like Babylon, taxes were collected in money for the royal treasury. Paved roads were built, facilitating the faster movement of armies to keep things under control; messengers connected administrators and sent orders throughout the Empire. Regional power was divided among a civilian head of government, counterbalanced by a chief treasury officer, and a military commander. Checking up on them were roving inspectors called “Eyes and Ears of the King.” Sheer military force can't take over a territory before it has developed to an economic level at which the conquering forces can be sustained. At the cusp of civilization, large

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armies couldn’t even traverse such places if economic organization isn’t advanced enough. No Greek general, Alexander or anyone else, could have conquered an empire spreading into the Iranian plateau and beyond into Central Asia, in the 500s BC when those places were still isolated agricultural oases amidst tribes and pastoralists. It required the intermediate step Cyrus took, to build the logistics networks. An overly hero-centered way of saying this would be: no Cyrus, no Alexander. To repeat: Alexander’s success depended on the fact that the Persian Empire was there for the taking. Now for the second part. That it was for the taking was a common observation in Greece from the 390s B.C. onwards. The success of the Ten Thousand mercenaries in fighting their way back from the heart of the Persian Empire convinced them that Greek forces could always beat Asian troops. From that time down to Philip and Alexander, Greek politicians and opinionmakers speculated about which of their generals and heroes could take over the Persian Empire for the Greeks. When Alexander came to the fore, the Greeks were willing to invest in his expedition. Why an easy target? The Greeks could see clearly enough that their military forces were tactically better than the Persians. Moreover, Persia had long since stopped expanding. Most striking of all must have been the way the Empire was periodically roiled whenever a King died. The satraps would revolt, and several years went into getting them back under control. And Persian succession crises was filled with betrayals and assassinations, decimating the royal families several times over. It had just happened in 338 BC, and had not yet settled down when Philip was ready to launch his invasion two years later. As expected, Alexander was able easily to pick apart the Persian Empire in Asia Minor (now Turkey). Beating one Persian army at Granicus soon after he landed, and besieging one holdout city was enough to make the rest of local lords come over to his side. The logistics system that supplied the movement of Persian armies now switched over to supplying Alexander's army. It wasn’t until next year that the newly installed Great King could muster troops to meet Alexander in Syria, already in reach of the Mesopotamian heartland. Darius III was a survivor, not a particularly vigorous ruler, who got the crown mainly because he was almost the last of the lineage still alive. Alexander spent 10 years on the takeover, not because it was difficult, but because the Empire was so large. Logistically, he needed that much time to make a grand tour of his Iranian and Eastern possessions after, in the 4th year, he had occupied the major cities, defeated Darius, and assumed his crown.

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Alexander made no changes to the Persian administration. His methods of conquest were the same as those of Cyrus: he accepted surrenders, then usually reconfirmed the former official in office-- sometimes even after they had opposed him in battle. It was the easiest thing to do, much easier than trying to create an administration of his own. In the heartland regions he installed his own officials as satraps, and reinstituted the three-officials system (administrator, treasurer, military commander) where it had fallen into disuse. The end result was to put the organization of the Persian Empire back in working order. In effect, Alexander carried out a hostile takeover of a big, famous company, once successful but now badly run, replacing its quarrelling officials with a vigorous new management.

________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Making a Killing: Piecing Together the World's Largest Insurance Company Once upon a time in 1975, there was a small, old-fashioned insurance company in a small French city. It was ranked 24th largest in France. By 1999, eight major acquisitions and mergers had made it the largest in the world. How does a small, backward company take over giants many times its size and far more advanced in computer technology, and in everything else more modern than itself? The answer: an entrepreneurial manager who saw vulnerable targets at just the right time; who understood why they were temporarily in trouble and temporarily under-valued; and who knew what value could be made out of them after they were put back on their feet. The man whose career we are going to follow, Claude Bébéar, is far from famous. He worked quietly, behind the scenes. He always arrived to offer friendly assistance. He was truly what is called in the acquisitions world, a White Knight. He was not threatening; no one was ever afraid of him. But neither was he sentimental, and he knew when he had strength, and when to use it. "What I was able to do was to recognize the weakness of other companies and exploit that weakness. When opportunities came up I dared to do what others didn't, but without taking considerable risks," he said. "This was simply because facing me were timorous people, bureaucrats, notables." (Interview quoted in Villette and Vuillermot, 188) Timid people running big companies. What does this mean? He meant they were people who enjoy their own importance in a well-known organization, who like things to run smoothly, who are happy with routine. In France, they were typically graduates of the elite Paris engineering school, the Ecole Polytechnique, who had been running government agencies since the time of Napoleon. They liked technical details and were scientifically up-to-date, but had no sense of business competition. In the world of politics, party leaders come and go, and even revolutionists; but the bureaucrats carry on from one regime to another. Some of these technocrats had left the government for the private sector because they had not risen as high as they expected, but in the private sector they duplicated the same bureaucratic mentality. This was especially true in French insur-

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ance companies, where the tradition was dignity, patience, and formality. The one thing they could not deal with were business crises, and these made them frightened for their jobs. "... timorous people, bureaucrats, notables." That last of these refers to an old European tradition of distinguished families, living in beautiful country estates and elegant townhouses. The sociologist Michel Villette (186) refers to them as "charming old gentlemen playing golf." These were the people that Claude Bébéar knew how to cultivate, how to set them at ease, quietly demonstrating he was the true professional who would take care of everything if they just put it in his hands. Perhaps something of the style of an old-fashioned butler who bows to everyone and makes himself indispensible. Let us follow the important moments in Claude's life. He graduates, like everyone else, from the Ecole Polytechnique, and is offered a job by the father of one of his classmates. The trustworthy professional style must have been there from the beginning, since his boss is a distinguished old aristocrat looking for a successor, and apparently he thinks Claude will be better at it than his own son. But it is a small and very old insurance company that he heads, in the historic city of Rouen, organized in archaic fashion as a mutual society of insurers. The whole thing is rather a remnant of the Middle Ages, but it did have peculiar kinds of advantages under French business law, and Claude would turn these legal immunities to good use in dealing with more modern companies. Claude first comes to prominence when the old man dies. But he does not immediately become the general manager, because the old man, yielding to sentimentality, had selected as temporary successor an old friend who had been with the company a long time. Claude politely says nothing, although the new manager is inadequate to the job, and gets everyone angry at him during a prolonged strike. When all the other managers are fed up, Claude suggests that the manager needs to be replaced, and he is delegated the delicate task of delivering the message to him personally. He does this so tactfully that Claude is now acclaimed at the new general manager. Peace is restored in the little company that will eventually become the giant known as AXA. In 1981, there is a crisis for French business: a coalition of socialists and communists wins the national election. The socialist Mitterand becomes Prime Minister and announces plans to nationalize the biggest French businesses to the benefit of the workers. The big insurance companies, among others, are in a panic. Most panicked of all is Drouot, a huge insurance company, who has further troubles of its own: it has been losing more money a year (200 million francs) than then entire revenue of Claude's company. David now saves Goliath. Claude quietly approaches the Drouot board with an offer: the company can be saved by taking it into AXA. It will be protected from nationalization because it will now be part of a mutual association of insurers-- itself a legal form that has a somewhat socialist ring to it. Such mutual associations, a hundred years before, were considered to be people-to-people organizations like co-ops; and since France had a history of quasi-socialist regimes, Claude was telling the truth when he promised the big company would be safe under his mutual association umbrella. But why does Claude want to take over a company that is hemorrhaging money? He buys it for 250 million francs; four years later is it is worth 5 billion francs. Claude knows the French insurance business thoroughly, and he knows that Druout's main insurance operation is sound. The gaping hole is the ship is financial, due to some foolish investments it had made in real estate, outside of its main line of expertise. Claude cuts away the losses, and makes the insurance operation profitable again by raising premiums and other professional adjustments. Other financiers who looked at Druout had decided it could not be saved, since its cash-flow trajectory was so bad. That is why the board, in desperation, accepted such a low offer. But Claude is an inside professional, who understands where the organization, with a proper tune-up, can be made profitable again.

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Claude's next big deal is in the USA. The insurance giant Equitable is in trouble. Wall Street financiers see it as a perennial money-loser. The business press predicts immanent bankruptcy. Investors treat it like the plague. Claude is invited to take a look. He goes to New York and quietly spends five months talking to Equitable managers, investigating every aspect of its operation. Equitable's president tells him, "Claude, now you know more about the company than I do." (182) What Claude wants to figure out is: how big is the financial hole? and how big is the underlying value of the business, strictly as an insurance company? He decides to make an offer. How much will this affable Frenchman offer to save the great American company? Let the stock market decide its value at the moment of sale, Claude proposes. A clever evasion: no one's ego is ruffled, no one's expectations dashed. It is out of our hands. Claude makes another killing. In his own mind, he is taking no risk. He knows much more about the company's business than the financial analysts and the investors who follow only the gross numbers. He knows that the company is severely under-valued by the market-- and that means he will make a huge profit on the deal, which would not be possible if the market had valued the company accurately. It is this kind of mismatch that creates the great business opportunity, the ideal target for takeover. In his first big deal, in Paris, Claude makes a killing because of timid people. In his big American deal, it is the market that is timid. Claude comes across as courageous, the White Knight riding the rescue. But from his own professional point of view, all he is doing is being realistic, calmly looking at the situation, assessing his own strengths and others' weaknesses, and making his move. This is a particular quality of the emotional energy of the business conqueror, parallel to a general like Napoleon or Ulysses S. Grant: staying calm while others around you are swayed by emotions into making bad moves. For a year after the Equitable deal, the stock market value of the company dropped. Claude got it at a low price, and watched the price go even lower while he cut its losing ventures and built its profits. Since AXA had taken on so much size, the value of its own shares declined by half. But Claude was safe for hostile takeovers behind the bastion of French law and the complexity of the mutual association. In a year, the stock rebounded, then soared. Through this formula, AXA took over one declining, undervalued insurance company after another, until it was the largest in the world. Claude Bébéar was no mere corporate raider. He did not buy companies to strip their assets or plunder their cash; he did not buy companies just to sell them off again. Compared to the military conquerors of world history, he was not one of the Genghiz Khans who left ruined cities and piles of skulls in their wake. He was more like the Roman generals in the style of Julius Caesar, who fought, made peace, and built settlements in Gaul and wherever the Roman territory extended. Claude himself recognized there was more to building a giant than winning the battles for control. Beforehand came the careful investigation, looking for a target worth taking over; afterwards, the task was to turn the acquisition around, plug its holes, build on its strengths. AXA was willing to acquire little companies as well, not as a growth strategy but just because Claude wanted to learn specialized branches of the insurance business, or ventures into new parts of the world to become familiar with how things were done in a new political and legal environment. This is the careful professional, paying attention to details; keeping oneself alert for what might be of use in the future. Above all, looking for weakness, waiting for the moment to act.

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4. A Growing Resource Beats a Stagnant Resource We are used to thinking of the Greeks as a small heroic people who saved democracy by fighting off invading Persian forces who vastly outnumbered them. This David-and-Goliath story was not strictly true at the time of the two Persian invasions, in 490 B.C. and again in 480-79 B.C. By the time Alexander launched his invasion in the opposite direction 150 years later, Greek forces were more than a match for the Persians. One key resource was that the Greeks were in the middle of a extraordinary population explosion. Between 600 B.C. and 400 B.C., Greek population grew from about half a million to around 4 million-- so many that the Greeks were sending out colonies all around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. When the Persians invaded around 480 B.C., their population throughout the entire Empire was around 12 to 14 million. Obviously the Persians could raise the bigger army. But that wasn't necessarily an advantage in invading a far-away territory like Greece, since the biggest problem was the logistics of supplying such a huge army on the march. The invasions failed, above all because the Persians could not sustain their army across the sea. If it could be supplied at all, it had to be by water, but the Greek navies were as big as the Persians'. The naval situation turned into a stalemate, which meant victory to the defenders. The Persians persisted for 15 years, a steady drain on their resources (not unlike U.S. involvement in a 13-year war in Afghanistan), before pulling out in 465 B.C. By the late 400s B.C., the Greeks were becoming used to the idea that the Persians were no long much of a threat. The Greeks went back to fighting among themselves, and some factions even allied with Persia in the unstable kaleidoscope of coalitions and countercoalitions. The Greeks were in gridlock, and the Persians were part of it. Eventually the Macedonians, expanding on the northern barbarian fringe of Greece, became the biggest power with the most advanced army. Greek statesmen were eager to see Alexander off against the Persians to get the Macedonians out of their hair. Looking at the situation from a larger perspective, what we see is one side with a growing resource, beating the other side with a stagnating resource. The population of Greece, including the Macedonians, was rapidly expanding during these years: an indicator of growing economic resources. At the same time, the population of the Persian Empire was stagnating. Moreover, the Greek population was better organized. In the army, this was the more compact hoplite phalanx, coordinating its forces for much greater effect. The phalanx army was smaller and required less logistics for support. The population of the Persian

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Empire was big enough to support a huge army, but it was sheer numbers, loosely organized, not particularly effective in battle. Above all, it was expensive to maintain. The growing resource beats the stagnant resource. In sheer numbers, it still looks like David-and-Goliath. In reality, it is more like a fast, tough light-heavyweight beating a slow and bloated super-heavyweight. All the more so because campaigns of empire-building were wars of logistics.

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5. The Difference-maker: Logistics-plus-Diplomacy A winning general like Alexander had to master the crucial combination of logistics and diplomacy. Even as fiery a personality as Alexander had to have an insider's appreciation of how to get his army in place to fight, and how to extricate them afterwards without starving to death. Why do logistics and diplomacy go together? We have already discussed the problem of baggage trains slowing down an army’s movement. On long-distance expeditions, the question is whether an army can get there at all. The basic problem is that the people and animals that carry food and water use them up as they go along. The more mouths in the supply train, the less gets through to the army. This must have been understood by professional soldiers like Alexander, but ancient historians ignored it. They also exaggerated enormously the size of enemy armies, claiming impossible numbers like 1.7 million Persians invading Greece in 480 B.C; and 1 million on the battlefield at Gaugamela in 331 B.C. These numbers are impossible because such troops would need huge empty spaces just to stand on. Stretched out marching on narrow roads they would have covered 300 miles, making it impossible to feed them. Using animals to do the carrying doesn’t solve anything. A horse can carry three times as much as a man, but it consumes three times the weight in food and water; camels can go four days without water, but then they have to drink four times as much. Solution: live off the land. But there are two problems. One, it only works in good agricultural land. But ancient agriculture was mostly around the cities-- to put it the other way around, ancient cities had to be adjacent to agricultural land or to water transport, or they would starve. Inland, cities and good agriculture were like oases, with poor land in between supporting at best a sparse population. So traveling across poor land, or worse yet, deserts like those in Iran or Egypt, posed a life-or-death problem for an army. The bigger the army, the more deadly it was to itself. The second problem is that a big army would have to keep moving, because even in fertile places, food and fodder become exhausted in a steadily widening circle. Agriculture gets exhausted as the army passes through. The bigger the army, the more it creates a path of no return, since if it comes back that way, it will find nothing to eat.

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How did Alexander’s army solve this problem? Essentially, by diplomacy. It would send scouts or messengers ahead, seeking out availability of food and water. Local chieftans or government officials presented themselves at the camp as word got around about an approaching army. Typically they would surrender to the conqueror, whereupon he would usually confirm them in their positions, enlisting them as allies. This meant they were obligated to help his army pass through their territory. Diplomacy on the whole meant generosity and persuasion. Alexander didn’t have to conquer everybody; leveling one resisting city and selling the population into slavery would be enough to bring the others around. In places where there was distrust, the invaders would leave a garrison, or demand hostages. It was a superficial form of conquest, which left everything locally as it had been. The essential thing was that new allies or friendly natives were obligated to provide stores of food and fodder along the route; pack animals to replace those lost by malnourishment, or to marshal their own local pack trains. For Alexander’s army, the method worked well. It also explains why it took 10 years to conquer the empire. Conquering the eastern part meant more marches through deserts and mountains, careful planning of when harvests were available, and more advance diplomacy. Alexander fought relatively few battles. After each one, he would stay in a well-provided location, receive visits of capitulation, and arrange logistics for the way ahead. His father, building a mini-empire in the barbarian fringes of Greece, was ruthless when he needed to be, but on the whole Philip expanded by diplomacy. It all meshed together: his fastmoving army, his combined-arms victories, and his diplomatic agreements that solved problems of logistics. His son operated the same way.

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6. Alexander’s Victory Formula Besides diplomacy and advance logistics, how did he actually conduct a battle? Not quite what you’d think: not just a headlong attack, but a mixture of caution and impulsiveness.

Cautious Timing, Explosive Action A better word would be patience. Alexander took risks once battle began, but his strategy of when and where to give battle was the opposite of risk-taking. Alexander recognized that a big Persian army could not stay in one place very long. The bigger it is, the less it can live off the land, while bringing in supplies generates the vanishing-point mathematics of pack animals and humans eating up the supplies they are carrying, not to mention clogging the available roads. Facing huge armies, Alexander delayed accepting battle. Before Issus, Darius assembled several hundred thousands on a plain near the Syrian Gates, where the Macedonians would be expected to come out of the mountains of Asia Minor. The gave unrestricted maneuverability for a large army, and there had been time to stockpile ample supplies. Alexander, crossing them up, went on a 7-day campaign westward among the mountain tribes. Then he returned to a city where he was well supplied by sea, made elaborate sacrifices to the gods; held a review of the army; athletic and literary contests; even a relay race with torches. Finally Darius had to move, and went looking for Alexander in the narrow region of mountains and swamps, throwing away his advantage of open ground. After two weeks inland, no doubt hurting for supplies, Darius finally met Alexander at the Issus River, where the Persian army-- now down to about 150,000-- was packed in and unable to use superior numbers to flank or surround him.

Observe Weakness and Attack It At Gaugamela two years later, Darius had an even bigger army, on a wide plain supplied by the main roads of Mesopotamia (today, northern Iraq). They even cleared away bushes so that their scythe-bearing chariot wheels had room to roll. Alexander brought his army, now grown to 45,000, to a hill overlooking the plain, where at night the torches seemed to go on forever. Since the Persians were not going to move, Alexander gave his army four days rest. Alexander was also playing psychological warfare, not letting the Persians fight in their first flush of enthusiasm (the adrenalin rush, we would say). Their suspense

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grew even worse, since they began to expect a night attack, so Alexander chose to attack in the daylight. Alexander always started the battle himself. His formula was to seize the initiative, establish emotional domination as quickly as possible. His open-field battles were all walkovers. Once the Companion cavalry broke the Persian line, their advantage in numbers was turned against them. At Issus, the Persians had large numbers of troops, realistically perhaps four times the size of Alexander’s, lined up along a river bank. But most of those tens or hundreds of thousands could never engage the Macedonians, because they couldn’t get close to them. Once their line crumbled, it threw the Persian army into a stampede; particularly disabling when so many men trample each other in a traffic jam. In every major battle, the Persians lost 50 percent or more, the Macedonians a few hundred or less (a fraction of 1 percent). The disparity in casualties seems unbelievable, but it is commensurate with complete organizational breakdown of one side, making them helpless victims. For violence on all size-scales, emotional domination precedes most physical damage. At Granicus, his first battle, Alexander positioned himself opposite where the Persian commander was surrounded by bodyguards. He waited for the moment when he saw a wavering in the Persian line, and charged his cavalry at that point. Alexander led 2000 cavalry splashing through the water and up a steep bank. This might seem a risky thing to do. But psychologically, relying on favorable geography for defense is a weakness; once the advantage of terrain turns out to be ineffective, the defending side has set itself up to be emotionally dominated. In every respect, Alexander aimed at the point of emotional weakness-- a point in time and space, visible to a good observer. Alexander did not have to fight the entire Persian army; he picked a unit about his own size, and counted on the superior quality of his troops-- the superiority they created by generating emotional domination. All three of Alexander’s fateful victories-- Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela-- ended the same way, with the enemy commander (in the last two, the King himself) running away in his chariot, setting off a general panic retreat. At Gaugamela, the Persian forces were so large and spread out that Parmenio, commanding on the left, had a stiff fight with Greek mercenaries and other Persian forces who did not know the rest of their army was routed. It took longer but Parmenio, too-- the other cavalry commander-- emerged victorious without Alexander’s help. This shows that the Macedonian style was not personal to Alexander alone. There is another respect in which Alexander attacked the weakness of the Persian army. It was an army of an empire, a polyglot of 50 different ethnic groups, with their own languages, each fighting in their own formation. We can surmise that central control of the

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army, once battle began, was minimal. We can also infer that morale and loyalty of each ethnic unit was shaky; they had been recruited by going over to the victor, and they were aware of the possibility of going over to the other side if things did not go well. There are numerous reasons why ethnic troops and their lower officers would not fight vigorously for their Persian commanders, if the battle started going against them. There was also the rigid hierarchy of the Persian army-- something all the Greeks commented on. Generals who failed risked being executed; but generals who succeeded were potential rebels, and many of them got executed or assassinated in a few years anyway, in the distrustful politics of the Empire. For Alexander, a few big battles were enough to make Persian loyalty crumble, setting in motion the massive side-switching and the diplomatic offensive at which Alexander was adept.

________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Superior Troops Have Empowered NCOs Why this would make a difference is illuminated by observations by Western troops serving in today’s Middle-Eastern wars. American and British forces in Afghanistan, for instance, have commented (both in print and to the author) that local troops can be ferocious in combat, and like the action of getting into a fight. Their main weakness is in their officers, especially their noncommissioned officers. American NCOs are trained to take the initiative, especially when they are cut off from higher command during the fog of battle. But Middle-Eastern officers are wary of doing anything they might be criticized for. Success as an officer is not necessarily a good thing. Outstanding success could be interpreted as showing up one’s superiors; big victories make one a political threat. Either way, a distrustful political atmosphere undermines an army's performance. In this respect, the ancient Roman army was more like the contemporary American one. Centurians-- leaders of a company of 100-- were widely regarded as the backbone of the army, and were singled out for praise by successful generals like Caesar. Similarly in the revolutionary French army at the time of Napoleon, energetic low-ranking officers were prized, and had good opportunities for promotion. In recent years, American soldiers have trained hundreds of thousands of troops for local armies in Africa and the Middle-East. We have successfully taught them how to use modern weapons, but it has been harder to transfer the ethos of modern officers: taking initiative against the enemy when the situation arises, but confidently relying on the chain of command for help and supply, and staying out of politics. As a result, U.S.-trained armies in Nigeria, Iraq, and elsewhere have collapsed in the face of guerrillas and small forces of determined ideological enemies. This is what it must have felt like in one of Darius' huge Persian armies, thrown together against Alexander's tightly-bonded team.

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Emotional Domination is More Decisive than Trickery It is worth underlining that big victories like Alexander's came from disintegrating the enemy's organization, and that comes from out-front emotional domination, EDOM, not from trickery. Yes, there are the stories about Alexander’s clever strategems where his advance was blocked by an extremely strong position, like a fort in a mountain pass. As always in such stories, someone discovers a little-used pathway over the dangerous mountainside, leading around to the rear of the enemy. Alexander leads a body of intrepid troops on this action-adventure, and takes the enemy by surprise. We don’t need to doubt the truth of these stories; but they are commonplaces about generals throughout history. There are similar stories in early Greek history, and they persist all the way down to today's Hollywood thrillers For Alexander, most of these clever-trickery battles were minor; none of them broke the back of the enemy organization.

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7. Alexander's Dilemmas The Impetuous Leader The only route from the royal city of Persepolis in southern Iran to the old Median capital in the northwest mountains, led over a 8000 foot pass, often blocked from winter until April. But in March 330 BC, Alexander was eager to get through. An ancient historian describes it with a touch of melodrama: “They had come to a pass blocked with perpetual snows, bound in ice by the violence of the cold. The desolation of the landscape and the pathless solitudes terrified the exhausted soldiers, who believed they were at the end of the world, and demanded to return before even daylight and sky should fail them.” Alexander reacted by leaping from his horse, seizing a mattock from a soldier and furiously attacking the ice, chopping a path through. It was the same way he led the cavalry charge in combat, pulling his troops behind him. In summer they are marching through a desert, suffering from heat and lack of water. One day, an advance party found a gulley stream, and were bringing water up on pack animals as Alexander marched by on foot with his soldiers, sharing their misery. A soldier filled a helmet with water and held it out to Alexander. As he was raising it to drink, he saw his cavalry soldiers looking at him thirstily. Alexander shook his head and dashed the water to the ground-- his cavalry shouted they could all go another day without water and they galloped off together. One wasted helmet of water, Plutarch comments, invigorated the whole army. Flash forward four years. Alexander’s army is preparing to leave Bactria, in far-off Central Asia. The campaign has been successful; they are laden with booty, rugs, silks, luxuries, a throng of camp followers. Alexander looks at the loaded supply train, just the kind of thing that would drag them down. Burn it all! And he starts in with his own wagons and pack animals, tearing off the bundles and throwing them into a fire. There is a shocked moment: then his soldiers join in, one after another; soon they are yelling in contagious joy, throwing things into the fire. It is a combination potlatch and display of military dedication, waking up from the soporific dreams of peace. Why does he act so much better on campaign than he does in court or in camp? He is an action junkie; the soft life repels him. But it is part of being a great King, and that has been his life’s goal. As long as there is another battle to fight, another danger to brave, he is in tune with his men, his buddies, his Companions.

A Drunken Killing, and a Management Dilemma

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While they are waiting, though, problems arise more difficult to solve by sheer energy. In the seventh year of his campaign, his army was in Samarkand, far away in what is now Uzbekistan. At one of their frequent drinking-parties, Alexander got into a dispute with one of the Companions of the elite cavalry. It was his oldest friend, Cleitus-- his fosterbrother, since Cleitus’ mother had nursed and brought up the two of them together. Both were drinking heavily. Cleitus began badgering Alexander about introducing Persian customs, especially making everyone who approached him prostrate themselves on the ground, treating him as a god on earth. Cleitus said it was offensive to his old friends, that an army wins as a group but he was taking all the credit for himself, that he is forgetting who-- Cleitus-- saved Alexander’s life at the battle of Granicus. Alexander grew angrier and angrier. Cleitus’ friends tried to pull him out of the room, but he barged back in through another entrance, shouting another insult. Today this is still the typical way that a bar-room quarrel escalates; it is usually when one of the participants in a face contest has been ejected and makes a return, that somebody gets killed. What happens next is revealing in the way Alexander was treated by his personal companions and servants. Alexander called on his guards to sound the alarm-- the signal that would have roused the entire camp to arms. None of the guards obeyed the order; they must have been used to such quarrels, and defied their god-playing King to keep the situation from getting out of hand. Since no one obeyed him, Alexander grabbed a spear and threw at Cleitus, killing him. Immediately he calmed down. He tried to kill himself with the same spear but his guards prevented it. He retired to his room, and stayed there berating himself for days. Finally his advisors prevailed on him to put the incident behind him. He resumed acting like a Persian king-god, at least in public. About this time began a series of plots, rumoured assassinations and real executions. Two of his favorite Companions had drawn swords on each other; Alexander settled the matter by telling them he would execute them both if they quarreled again. He also delegated them separate tasks, one to convey orders to the Greek-speakers, the other to the Persians and foreigners in his army. Heavy drinking, brawls, plots and assassinations were common at the Macedonian court. Alexander killing Cleitus was almost a replay of Philip trying to kill Alexander years earlier, when Alexander was 18. Philip was a tough, brawling fighter, years of violence having left him with one eye, a crippled hand, and numerous wounds. Alexander was wrecking his own body the same way. Both drank heavily with the aristocratic heart of their army. Both relied on the same battle tactics, leading the charge, inspiring the cavalry attack. There was no way Alexander could avoid keeping up these drinking bouts; he continued them until he died from one of them Drinking was the ritual of bonding among the group that won his victories.

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Alexander’s carousing seems to contradict his patience in arranging logistics and awaiting the proper moment for marching or battle. But these were parts of the same thing: having to wait around so much gave occasion for carousing, a way of keeping up morale during dead time. Now Alexander is in a structural bind. As Persian King, and in constant diplomacy playing King of Kings to the chieftans around him, he is caught in the ceremonial that exalts him. As leader of the world’s best military, he needs to keep up the solidarity of his Companions. The ambiguity of that name-- more apparent to us than it would have been at the time-- displays the two dimensions that were gradually coming apart: his companion buddies, a fraternity of fellow-carousers, fighters who have each other’s back; and the upper ranks of a hierarchic organization, whose job is to make sure orders are carried out. At the time, Alexander and his soldiers perceived it as an ethnic distinction. With the Persians, it was all hierarchy and deference. With the Greeks, it was almost the opposite. It is striking how much freedom from deference, how much equality existed in Alexander’s drinking parties. It is astounding that his guards refused to obey his orders, and even laid hands on him forcefully to prevent his suicide. They too were part of the team. Alexander’s daily life fluctuated among different kinds of situations. Times when he played the hard-drinking fraternity boy, and when he played the diplomat; increasingly as he took over Persian organization, he took on the role of arrogant ruler, paranoid about plots. For a while, he held all these things together. With every success, it got harder.

________________________________________________________________________ Careers: The Old and New Management Teams Alexander had an organizational problem, an early version of the perennial problem that comes with growth and success. Alexander's army originally consisted of Macedonians and Greeks. But the more victories he won, the more territory he conquered, the more his army became made up of Persians and other local ethnic troops. The further inland they marched into Asia, the further its composition swung. By year 4 of the campaign, Alexander was Great King of the Persian Empire. He left most of its administration in place as he marched onward. After year 5, his army was too far from the Mediterranean to receive reinforcements from Greece. Alexander's original army of 40,000 became swollen with local recruits, a fluctuating mass that reached 150,000 or more. It wasn't just an ethnic distinction, but two different ways of running an organization. The Greeks and Macedonians came for the prestige of being a ruling elite. They saw themselves as more civilized, and above all more democratic, than the Asians they conquered. But Alexander relied on enrolling defeated troops into his army, and over-awing neutral tribes into joining him. Hence the split between his diminishing group of Macedonian drinking buddies, and the new officer corps

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that Alexander had to promote to keep control of his Asian troops. His original Companions became split between the Greek faction and the Persianizers. The factions turned to fighting, murder, and an atmosphere of plots and bloody crackdowns. The issue plagued Alexander to the end of his career. He became increasingly the tyrannical Persian overlord, suspicious of plots and disloyalty. But there was an aspect in which he played the liberal reformer, trying to assimilate Greeks and Persians into a post-ethnic elite in the top ranks of management. His old team didn't see it that way. For Alexander the problem was intractable. Eventually it cost him his life. Napoleon also had troubles integrating old and new management teams. His loyal cadres had come up with him in his victorious army, along with the administrators who rationalized the Revolutionary regime. But Napoleon also brought back conservative aristocrats who had emigrated from France. It was part of his policy of reconciliation, of healing the splits that had torn France in years of internal war. Napoleon aimed to run a regime where individuals were rewarded for merit, not for ideologies and political loyalty. But the glory days of reform were coming to an end. Napoleon's court took on a stifling formality. His best generals carved out little empires for themselves in the conquered states. When the final showdown came, Napoleon's original cadres stuck with him, while the other generals went over to the enemy. Steve Jobs' career is a two-act play. Act One is his rise and fall in Apple Computer Co. The company splits along just these lines, the old management team that built their revolutionary computer designs with him, against the new management team brought in to provide business and marketing experience from the established corporate world. Jobs makes efforts at first to romance the leaders of the new management team. But mainly he regards them as bozos, and blames Apple's economic problems on them. Where Alexander and Napoleon made continuous efforts to reconcile the two teams, Jobs soon opted for his old loyalists, and ended up being thrown out of the company he founded. In Act Two, Jobs changes his approach. During his years in exile, he buys Pixar computer animation, which already has a well-functioning team. By and large, Jobs leaves them intact and lets them do their own thing. When he comes back to Apple for round two, he rapidly gets rid of the most alien part of its management team, and brings on board some personally compatible new hires like his design chief Jony Ive. The operation settles down to a series of technological and marketing triumphs. If management splits still exist, we don't hear of them. Steve Jobs was neither an engineer nor a professional designer. In both phases of his career, his forte was sizing up people and possibilities, and pushing for the most ambitious vision of the future. In this respect, Jobs' style was constant throughout. The difference between Apple Act One and Apple Act Two was above all in the conflict between old and new management teams in the first, and the absence of such conflict in the second. Is old vs. new management an inevitable dilemma? Look back at the methods of Claude Bébéar, the insider whom we followed in the sidebar Making a Killing: Piecing Together the World's Largest Insurance Company. Above all, Claude knew how to establish calm and reassurance for a company just passing out of crisis. "People don't like uncertainty," he told an interviewer. "They don't work, they fight among themselves, they argue." (Villette 183) Leaving the old management hanging in limbo is as bad as ruthlessly firing everyone. His method was to quickly appoint a new management team, combining current managers with outsiders from the acquiring company. "Even if your line is not the best," Claude said, "it avoids losing time." Time to reestablish company morale. Of course, he had already spent a great deal of time scouting out the company to be taken over, so he knew perhaps more about them than they knew about themselves. Claude's secret was smooth, careful professionalism in a

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world that is not calm and smooth; moving decisively when the target is ready for takeover, making it smooth again as soon as possible. In Apple Act Two, Jobs followed Claude's pattern. Above all, Jobs moved fast and decisively during the transition. He got rid of almost the entire Board, and pruned off stagnant divisions, starting upwards again with a well-integrated team. The option of changing teams fast and decisively was not available to Alexander. The conflict between his Greek companions and the Persianizers was never resolved. It eventually destroyed Alexander. After his death, the organization he took over, his mighty empire, immediately broke apart.

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Two Mutinies Eastward into India, crossing one tentacle of the upper Indus River after another, Alexander's army penetrates the exotic tropics. They win a great battle against a huge host, armed with elephants; Alexander receives the Indian King’s surrender, then returns his kingdom to him with an exchange of royal compliments. The war-plus-diplomacy formula is still working. Then: his troops refuse to go on. Not just the men; his officers come to explain what the soldiers are saying, they agree with it too. Alexander is devastated. He retires into his tent, refuses to talk with anyone. He announces the rest can go back; he will go on with whoever will accompany him. No one offers. It is like the days after he had murdered Cleitus. But Alexander is harder now, older too; he gets over it, reluctantly agrees to lead his army down the river to the sea, starting their return to the West. But his mood has changed. Already, since the murders and suspicions and executions in Central Asia, Alexander had grown more violent. He personally shot with an arrow a barbarian chief brought to him for rebelling. Later, reprimanding his administrators for corruption in his absence, he killed one with his own hand by the stroke of a javelin. Thus we should not be surprised at the following incident: Beginning the march home in the Indus valley, Alexander fought every tribe that would not submit. In one city, the citadel held out. Growing impatient with the siege, Alexander himself mounted one of the ladders, fending off a shower of missiles from above with his shield. He reached the top of the wall with three others when the ladders broke. His friends called Alexander to jump down; instead he jumped into the fortress. His tiny group fought ferociously, but were almost overwhelmed in the midst of the enemy by the time the Macedonians had frantically driven pegs into the earthen wall to make the ascent. One companion was dead; Alexander had been pierced by an arrow in the chest and fainted from loss of blood. His infuriated troops killed everyone in the place down to the women and children.

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Alexander was always heedless of himself in battle, but now one wonders if he cared whether he lived or died. His soldiers had betrayed him; if they wouldn’t follow him now, they would see! There must have been some satisfaction as his litter passed by boat along the camp shore, the army shouting as he raised a hand to show he was still alive. After a long and devastating march, the following year they were back in Mesopotamia. The big obstacle was the southern desert, the driest part of Iran. Alexander could have come back the way he had gone out, looping across the northern, more fertile edge of the Iranian plateau. But Alexander sent a subordinate with part of his troops that way-- he wanted to try something new, maybe something especially dangerous. Usually careful of logistics, he planned for his admiral to sail parallel to his route along the coast of the Indian ocean, to supply him with food and water. It was a rare miscalculation: they did not know the monsoon winds blew the wrong direction that time of year, and the fleet was stuck in port while Alexander’s 150,000 were marching west. Three-quarters of them died in the desert. It was the worst loss of Alexander’s career, more than all his battles put together. He was still undefeated in combat. But it was an emotional turning point, like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Once the remnant of his army reached safety, came the second mutiny. Alexander called an assembly of his Macedonian veterans, by now a fraction of his troops. He formally discharged those who were too old or wounded for further action, sending them home with ample rewards. The army’s mood was sullen. The cry went up: Discharge us all! And some yelled taunting insults about the Asian gods in whose name he would fight his further conquests. Alexander leaped down from the platform and pointed out the ringleaders to his guards, to seize them and put them to death. In the silence that followed, Alexander remounted the platform and bitterly discharged the whole army. From now on Persian nobles would fill the high posts; names of Macedonian regiments would be transferred to the new army. For three days the Macedonian soldiers lingered, uncertain what to do. Finally they laid down their weapons and begged to be admitted into Alexander’s presence. What followed was a tearful reconciliation. The quarrel was patched up, in the usual ritual, by massive drunken feasting.

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8. Partying to Death The triumphant return to the center of the Empire was one carousing celebration after another. There was a drinking contest with a prize; the winner drank 12 quarts of wine and died in three days. Another 40 guests died because they were too drunk to cover themselves in a sudden storm of cold weather. At another great feast, featuring 3000 entertainers imported from Greece, Alexander’s closest friend Hephaestion fell ill after swallowing an entire flagon. When he died, Alexander went into a veritable potlatch of grief; he had the battlements of nearby cities pulled down, and massacred the entire population of a nearby tribe who had been causing trouble; the physician who failed to cure his friend was crucified. Hephaestion was more than a friend; he was his fellow Persianizer, the one who like himself wore Persian robes, the one who had fought the leader of the pro-Greek faction after the murder of Cleitus. Now Alexander was alone, the Persian King of Kings, without a friend. Someone stepped forward, one of the original Macedonian Companions, inviting him on an all-night drinking binge. They did it again the next night. Alexander woke up with a fever, steadily worsened, and died. It was alcohol poisoning, of course-- literally drinking himself to death, like his old friends. We catch a glimpse of Alexander's state of mind at the end from a statue regarded as a good likeness. Are we surprised at how he looks? The statue made by his favorite sculptor is certainly not of a youth; probably it is from the last years of his life when he was back from campaigning. He stood out from his bearded contemporaries because he kept himself clean-shaven. Alexander was short but stocky, with something twisted looking in his face and neck. He was thirty-two years old when he died. Is this dying young? Think of him as an aging athlete, engaged in the roughest action for 16 years; about the time professional athletes retire, beat up from injuries. Alexander had been wounded in almost every battle, sometimes severely; wounded in the leg, bludgeoned in the head and neck, arrows that shattered bones and had to be painfully removed from shoulder, thigh and chest. It accumulates; and there were no steroids to prolong an athletic career.

Why did Alexander Sleep Well, but Napoleon Never Slept? Napoleon was so energized that he worked 20 hours a day, and on campaign never slept for more than 15 minutes at a time. Alexander was not at all like this. Alexander bragged that he never slept better than the night before a battle; that Parmenio had to shake him

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three times to wake him up before they went out to fight their greatest battle at Gaugamela. This is entirely plausible. Alexander was much more physical than Napoleon, a muscle man who tired himself out with vigorous exercise. Who was the better general? If we imagine Napoleon going up against Alexander on an ancient battlefield, Napoleon would have been too small to be a leading warrior. On a modern battlefield, Alexander would have been one of the wild barbarians whose cavalry charge got mowed down by Napoleon’s artillery. Maybe he was, in the form of one of the native armies Napoleon annihilated in Egypt or Syria. Both had high EE, pumped up with confidence and pumping up others in turn. But they did it by different means. Napoleon got his energy in center-of-the-network rounds of meetings, taking care of all the many branches of administration and moving around the pieces that had to assemble for battle. Things were simpler in Alexander’s day; administration was a thin ceremonial hierarchy; battle preparations were simple, and he did not so much direct his forces as launch the attack and create a bolt of energy that would stream behind him into the heart of the enemy army. Bottom line: Heroic leaders get that name because they are energy stars. They are persons in the center of gatherings, where they recycle emotions into group action. It can be done in different ways. Napoleon did it by energizing as many levels of the organization as possible, and getting the whole army to hit top speed at the same time. Alexander did it by spreading a reputation mixed of domineering, sudden anger, and magnanimous generosity. No one could act like Alexander today, except the leader of a guerrilla force or a street gang. Napoleon shows us the more modern style, on the path to contemporary organization-builders like Steve Jobs.

________________________________________________________________________ Careers: Carousers and Workaholics Most of our big winners were workaholics. Napoleon, Caesar, and Steve Jobs would fit in that category. So would Sam Walton, Michael Collins, and many others. Alexander is in the minority as a carouser. Napoleon disliked wasting time on eating. On campaign, he ate the simplest army food. In peacetime, he wolfed down his meals. When he became Emperor he presided over formal dinners but found them boring. It is ironic that there is a brandy named after him, as well as pastry "Napoleons," but these names were created commercially long after his death. He was not a puritan, however, and drank a little wine with others to keep up ceremony. His frugal eating and minimal drinking is one reason why he needed so little sleep. On the other hand, Alexander slept long because he did so much drinking.

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Julius Caesar rarely wasted a moment. He was always doing something, pulling together the strings of politics, the army, diplomacy, raising money, building his reputation. He slept in chariots on rough roads and dictated to his secretaries while awake. Not surprisingly, he ate the simplest diet. He would mock fellow officers who complained about the food. He drank very little. Caesar stood out from most others of his time. His lieutenant, Mark Anthony, was much more like Alexander. Anthony too was the leader of cavalry troops, and he was known to ride off with them into battle during the civil wars when news of the enemy reached them in the midst of a drinking party. Caesar and Anthony both visited Cleopatra in Egypt, at the height of their power. She was a beautiful, seductive and politically intelligent Queen. For Caesar she was just another political alliance. For Anthony, Cleopatra was far more than politics. He partied with her while his enemies mobilized. In the end, it was his downfall. Caesar's nephew Octavian, who defeated Anthony and became Augustus Caesar when he built the Roman Empire, was like his uncle, an ascetic workaholic. One respect in which Alexander was very self-controlled was in not being very interested in sex. He joshed his friends for their love affairs, but seems to have been a virgin until age 23, when Parmenio gave him a captive Persian woman. Plutarch records that the captured wife and daughters of the King and women of the court were “tall and beautiful”, but Alexander would say sardonically “What eyesores these Persian women are!” Nor does it appear that he was homosexual- although that would have been normal in Greece-- since he forcefully rejected a present of two beautiful boys. Alexander was a monomaniac about the army and dangerous physical action-- he preferred hunting lions. Very likely he regarded women as dangerous entanglements, sources of strife and assassination. He would have learned this from observing his father. When Alexander married, it was purely a political arrangement. Steve Jobs was rather puritanical. He was a vegetarian and did not drink. He was the epitome of the workaholic in his intense preoccupation with product details, and he demanded the same from his team. But for Jobs it would be misleading to equate workaholic with anxiously compulsive, since his emotional tone was so upbeat. Fun for him consisted in talking enthusiastically all night with his soul mates about their ideas for the future. He wasn't putting it on-- they really did have ideas to be enthusiastic about. Like other good leaders, he made no efforts to impose his abstemiousness about food and drink on others. He would take his inner team on outings like all-night loud music at a beach resort. Outings were a break from work routine, although the collective effervescence was mixed with focusing on the future. It appears that when Jobs led outings for his team, they were successful parties. The company party or company picnic has become so much of an institution that it is worth bearing in mind that parties can fail as well as succeed. A party may be intended to be a morale-booster, but many parties are flat or mediocre. It is easy to see the difference-- you feel it within a few minutes. Unsuccessful social gatherings don't produce solidarity, they just make it look artificial. They aren't energy boosters, but energy-drainers. Whether it takes place at work or at special celebrations, real mutual focus, real attunement in a shared rhythm produces emotional energy. It isn't the intention of having a party that makes the difference. It is whether the group actually become entrained in common trajectory that gets them enthusiastic. The difference is not really a matter of alcohol or some other mood-altering substance. Alcohol may be there, but that in itself doesn't determine whether or not the drinking will produce solidarity.

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Jesus, one of the most charismatic persons of all time, was famous for enthusiastic parties. It was a matter of controversy at the time. “John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon,’" Jesus responded. "The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘He is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.'” (Luke 7: 18-35) It was part of Jesus' recruitment technique. He built his movement, not among the rich and self-righteous, but among ordinary people, even outcasts. Near the beginning of his mission, Jesus attends a wedding party so crowded with guests that the wine bottles are empty. He orders them to be filled with water, whereupon the crowd becomes even more intoxicated. The author of the Gospel knows something about drinking, commenting that unlike most feasts, the best wine was saved for last (John 2: 1-11). Possibly the dregs of wine still in the casks gave some flavor, and the enthusiasm of the crowd did the rest. Perceptive partygoers will know it is better to be drunk with the spirit of the occasion than sodden with too much alcohol. Carousers and workaholics are different leadership styles, in different niches. Alexander and Jesus are a strange combination to mention in one sentence, but they both relied on a tightly bonded team willing to sacrifice everything for each other. Their organizations were quite simple, and the leader lived closely with their most important followers. Leaders of complex organizations, on the other hand, have to be in many places, holding together many networks. They get energy from the sheer pace of events, if their encounters have the micro-resonance that makes them successful. Drinking and heavy eating would just slow them down. The most successful of such leaders are workaholics, but contagiously enthusiastic ones. Advice: don't drink with people you don't like. Carry a glass of sparkling water as a gesture to the spirit of the occasion. If the gathering is disattuned, out of sync, alcohol can superficially cover it up, but not for long. Get high on EE.

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PART IV. ELEVEN PRINCIPLES OF WINNING BIG

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EE: Emotional Energy EDOM: Emotional Domination

1. Gain Emotional Energy from successful encounters; avoid energy-draining encounters EE is physical and mental energy. High EE is confidence, enthusiasm, and initiative. Low EE is the opposite: hesitating, depressed, passive, lethargic. Every social encounter with other people does something to your EE, raising or lowering it. High-EE people are riding on a string of successful encounters. Napoleon hardly ever slept, because he was so full of EE. His daily encounters pumped him up. High-energy people don't just happen. They build EE by techniques of successful social interaction. They don't just repeat morale-building slogans; they work at building EE in their daily lives. Cut your EE-losses. Either turn EE-draining encounters into EE-gainers, or cut them out of your life as much as possible. Don't waste time on situations that bring you down. But first try to see if you can turn them into EE-gainers.

2. Keep checking micro-social attunement and disattunement The first ingredient of a successful encounter is getting people focused on the same thing. Charismatic leaders are quick to get people focused. They don’t waste time with people whose attention is wavering or turned away. They cut right to the point, and see through people who are blustering, hedging, or putting on a front. The second ingredient is building up a shared emotion. It doesn’t matter what emotion you start with as long as it reverberates and gets everyone's attention. A charismatic leader often starts off with a jolt. Steve Jobs would do it by insulting the work his team has been doing, but he didn’t leave the emotion there. Getting the team to argue back angrily was the next step, since this built up intensity and got everyone involved. Jobs was good at transmuting angry situations into ones that ended with mutual resonance.

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A strong initial emotion is useful in getting everyone focused, but then it has to be channeled into a shared trajectory of action. By the end of the meeting, people should be resonating strength from their feeling of shared momentum. Napoleon conveyed confidence in the face of opponents, and the upbeat rhythm at which he worked. His confidence was no mere slogan; his army really was technically better, and he made sure that his soldiers knew what it took to win. Caesar conveyed being calm under stress. His unflappable attitude came from expecting something would go wrong in a battle, while he watched and waited, ready to fill the gap with reserves, and if need be to appear himself in the danger spot. There are different ways to lead a group emotionally; but they all get the group focused on the path to their goal, and energized by each other. Charismatic persons are good micro-observers. They recognize whether people are attuned and in rhythm with each other, or not. They know how to get them attuned; and don't waste time and EE by letting people get them down. Although religious leaders are beyond the scope of this book, Jesus was especially impressive in the way he got people committed to a goal, the way he saw through their motivations, and his willingness to abruptly cut off people who weren't serious with him. [see “Jesus in Interaction.”] http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2014_04_01_archive.html

3. Energize yourself by energizing the group Successful persons energize the people they interact with, and then get their own EE pumped up from the group. If your daily life is filled with this kind of positive feedback-from self to others, and back into yourself-- you will have the energy, and trajectory, to succeed.

4. Details are never boring when they have trajectory; successful people are never bored Napoleon was a good listener. He didn’t thunder at messengers who brought him bad news or good on the battlefield; he weighed what they had to say. The daily round of officials and scientists reporting on projects under way was an upbeat time for everyone. His questions hit the key points and moved projects forward. Napoleon amazed followers with his memory of details. These technical meetings were full of shared emotion; and ideas marked with emotion are the easiest to remember.

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Julius Caesar made a point of personally interviewing scouts, spies, captives and deserters from the enemy. It was his way of collecting information, which he judged by paying attention to detail: did their stories line up, waver or contradict? Did the speaker sound attuned or strike a wrong note? Every detail meant something to him, because he was constructing a gestalt of the military and political situation. Caesar could move so swiftly and decisively because he knew where he was going, while his opponents usually blundered around in a murk of unfocused excitement. Steve Jobs was obsessed with details of Apple products, both the technology and the design. His insults, disputes and arguments were always about details. He wanted everyone on his team to work at the forefront, in a world of micro-electronics where small differences magnified into big advantages, and new arrangements paid off in quantum leaps. The same went with his obsession for how the consumer would see the product, whether it looked klutzy or cool, too heavy, too flimsy, or something to fall in love with. For most people, details are boring. That’s what makes them outsiders. Insiders know what details make the difference. For them, details are where the big challenge lies, where the secrets of success are found. Like the championship swimmer who enjoys practicing because these fine-grained movements give them a feeling of coming victory, the inspiring team leader goes to the heart of the details and shows why they matter. It is the ultimate insider experience, when details are not just routine but carry a shared emotion that resonates throughout the team: these are details loaded with EE. They are our group’s trajectory into the future. Successful people are never bored.

5. Start early in the adult world: skip the credential queue and the bureaucratic ladder Most big winners start out young. Some hit their success young, where big openings happen close by. Others-- Julius Caesar, Sam Walton, IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad-- spent years making their way to the top. But they all started out early in the adult world. That means taking the initiative in adult political or business ventures, becoming entrepreneurs on their own at an early age, or at least learning the ropes. Imagine what people would say today if Alexander or Napoleon led troops into combat at age 16. They lived in times when there were no child labor laws. Today they would be called teenagers and we would do our utmost to make them conform to others their age, putting them under adult supervision at the bottom of bureaucratic ladders they are encouraged to climb, one step at a time. No wonder teenagers act irresponsibly, since we don’t allow them to do anything responsible on their own.

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It is not inevitable that everyone has to conform to our system of graded school years, with its sequence of diplomas and credentials leading to the next round of tests and diplomas, and out into a job in a hierarchic bureaucracy. Most of the people who made spectacular fortunes in the IT world of the last 40 years did it by dropping out of college as soon as they saw a business opportunity where they could take the lead. There are so many pressures to go on in the school credential sequence that now a majority of young people at least start college. Nothing wrong with it, you might enjoy it especially if someone else is footing the bills. And it may pay off in a mid-level bureaucratic career. If you want to be a big winner, that is not the path. Better advice: when you see a big opportunity opening up (see #10 for what this looks like), jump on it.

6. Build momentum where it’s easy-- but with a path to the big leagues None of history’s big winners started right out taking on the biggest opponents. Building momentum comes from a string of victories, and that is easiest to do when you start in the minor leagues. Sam Walton built up Wal-Mart, not by taking on the big chain stores in the big city markets, but in rural Arkansas where his competition was mom-and-pop stores selling a limited variety of goods at high prices. It was a good opportunity to get a discount chain going because no one else thought there was enough business out there; it helped that things were taking off during the baby boom. Starting out in the boonies is also good because early mistakes and setbacks don’t hurt your reputation. Napoleon got his first military and political experience by going home to Corsica, where his family position got him a military command in the pro-French faction. He won a few skirmishes but had to flee to France. He was lucky to be out of the country while heads were rolling from the guillotine. Instead of getting caught up in political battles that were too heavyweight for him at that that stage in his career, Napoleon became one of the survivors at the time when there was a big demand for military skills. Same with Alexander: although he inherited his father’s army, the best in the world and ready for its conquest of Persia, the first thing he did as 20-year-old commander-in-chief was to campaign against the northern barbarians, a trial run that made for some easy victories and the beginning of his unstoppable reputation. IKEA launching in Sweden before going world-wide; Steve Jobs starting out by raising the level of professionalism against the Homebrew Computer Club: some big winners built up faster, some slower, but they all started their string where competition was local.

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The converse is if you start out in a big, dominant company, it will take a long while to work your way to the top. What you will learn is a kind of organizational performance and bureaucratic politics that is useful in that arena. But the biggest winners of fortune and fame go a different route, where they learn to be in charge of their own fate at an early age.

7. The big battle, the big deal: monitor rivals, identify weakness, exert EDOM Julius Caesar’s famous line-- Veni, vidi, vici -- is under-appreciated. I came: of course. I saw: the first thing he always did was to look around, question people, get information about the enemy, the alliances, the politics. Having identified the weak spot, the rest was swift: I conquered. Alexander’s skill at this was chiefly on the battlefield. He made a reputation smashing bigger armies than his own. He rode at the front of his heavy cavalry, looking for a spot in the enemy line where he could break through and turn the rest of their army into a traffic jam of confusion. He positioned himself across from the enemy king, and waited until he saw a wavering in the line: that was where to attack. Let them defend themselves by a steep riverbank, it just showed their weakness by hiding behind a physical obstacle. Once he smashed through their confidence, it was all battlefield emotional domination; fleeing troops were easy pickings. An organization turns weak when its members no longer have confidence that the rest will back them up. This is the opposite of high EE. In a battle, one side’s EDOM drives the other side’s EE collapse. The big deal that makes a business career has a similar pattern. The loser takes tremendous losses; the winner has few costs and ends up with big gains. The set-up takes a lot of careful watching of one’s competitors, waiting for the moment when they are frightened by economic or political conditions, or when they are in a financial bind. The crucial negotiations are an exertion of emotional superiority, an irresistible flow of confidence and energy against a target that has lost their sense of direction. Sometimes it is smooth and subtle; sometimes it is a dramatic showdown. Either way, EDOM is the key to victory. In war or in business, emotional domination precedes the physical, material, economic gain.

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8. Build inner circle and alliance networks by EE, deal-making networks by EDOM, and reputational networks by collective effervescence Networking is trickier than just going to a lot of gatherings and meeting people. To be really successful, you need to build three kinds of networks. Build inner circle and alliance networks by EE. This is an application of principles #1 through #4. You need to have high-intensity, successful encounters with people who will work closely with you. That takes careful observation of micro-details, always looking for attunement, cutting your ties with people where there is disattunement. It means combining who you know with what you know, building your skills and knowledge by getting emotionally turned on to ideas and techniques. It means building networks that have trajectory. Build deal-making networks by EDOM. This is the application of principle #7. Aim towards the big deal, the big battle, the point where everything comes on the line, and you are emotionally prepared to win. Unlike the nicer network-building styles of shared EE, here things hinge on tougher techniques of EDOM. If you can’t or don’t want to do that, at least learn about other people’s EDOM techniques so you know how to resist them. (See Bill Gates in #9.) Build outer reputational networks by collective effervescence. This comes later, once you get a reputation for success. Caveats here: this is the hardest kind of network to control. If you do well on the two other kinds of networks, you should come out okay.

9. Heavyweight networks are dangerous: expect volatility Heavyweight ties are to another person who has high EE, skills and knowledge, and has further ties to more heavyweights. When two heavyweight networks meet, there is potential for big things to happen, both good and bad. Because of #7, to be a big winner you need to monitor your rivals closely, whether to build alliances, exploit their weakness, or imitate their strengths. Bill Gates was perhaps the only one who could out-maneuver Steve Jobs head-to-head. He understood Jobs’ tactics of emotional domination-- the insults, the sudden changes in moods, the schmoozing, the long walks when everything had calmed down. Gates’ tactic

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was becoming even more emotionally detached as the emotions got stronger. He played along, all the time with his eye on the technical secrets he wanted to learn. Or steal, however you want to put it. The big reversals of fortune in the IT business happened through these kind of heavyweight encounters. The same is often true for high-level politics.

10. Luck is location at the cusp of change; launch from the most advanced platform There’s always some luck involved in success. Getting a big break. Getting a bad break. Being in the wrong place or the wrong time. Turn the gestalt around and look at the larger picture instead of your own good or bad luck. Big careers are made when big social changes are on the cusp of happening. Whoever can build a high-EE network at the center of such changes becomes a big success. Napoleon after the French Revolution has gone through its phase of bloody infighting, and is ready to modernize armies and governments everywhere. IKEA in the housing boom after WWII where there is a new market for cheap ways of shopping for furniture. Steve Jobs in you-know-what. Practical advice: Locate where a big social change has started to happen, and is just about to explode. If you’re located there already, fine, like Steve Jobs growing up in Silicon valley. If you’re not there, move to it. Alexander inherited the most advanced platform, his father’s army. Jobs assembled the most advanced high-tech organization by recruiting the best pieces. Sam Walton was out in the boonies but that turned out to be an advantage, because of principle #6.

11. Ideological rigidness limits success; other people's rigidness is your opportunity The best generals know when it is time to cut their losses and negotiate peace. Eisenhower, who kept the Allied coalition together during World War II, could see when the Korean war had become a costly stalemate and ended it. The Vietnam War was a prolonged horror show, but 30 years after it ended world markets and shared prosperity perked up there too, because ideologies change. Being ideologically rigid means taking abstract principles and emotional slogans as more important than the real world of human beings. Being too righteous, too fearful, or too

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full of revenge all come out in a bad place. Big winners do not get where they are by being unrealistic. They owe their success to being more sensitive observers than anyone else. Napoleon came up in a revolution that uprooted the abuses of the church and the aristocracy. But he could see that the French Republic’s hostility to the church was one of the reasons why French politics was so bitter and factionalized. He made a deal with the Pope to bring back Catholicism, although with less privileges, because it was a pragmatic move towards social peace. Napoleon turned into an ambiguous figure: was he a revolutionary or a conservative? The answer was, a combination of both. It was a winning combination. Julius Caesar, like Alexander, didn’t keep grudges. Defeated warriors, as long as they fought well, were invited to come over to his side. It grew the winning coalition. Not that there couldn’t be problems. Alexander’s army became divided between Persianizers and Greek-only loyalists, and their rivalry eventually killed him. But the historic winners are all on the side of growing the coalitions, not on limiting them. Grudges are bad policy in business, where so much depends on dealing with your rivals. Hard-ball dealing and even treachery are part of the path to big success. Winners have to put bygones behind them to keep moving ahead. The biggest winners see this faster than anyone. The fact that many people are rigid, especially about who their enemies are, is not necessarily a bad thing from the point of view of someone who wants to be a big winner. Other people's rigidness is your opportunity.

KNOWING WHAT ARENA YOU’RE PLAYING IN The principles of winning big apply somewhat differently to different arenas. You have to know where you are playing to know how to adapt.

War The eleven principles obviously apply to historic victories. Do they still apply today? The main modification is in #5. Alexander and Napoleon could get started young, when armies were much less bureaucratic than they are today. Schools, tests, and educational credentials are all part of the increasing bureaucratization of modern life. Napoleon could start learning to be an army officer at age 9, and by 16 he was commanding troops in the

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field, and had his own army at age 26. Today, hardly anyone becomes a general before age 50. If you want big success young, the military is not the place to look for it. At least this is so for Western armies, especially in the United States. One reason guerrilla armies are so attractive to young men around the world is that they offer a chance to be somebody important without having to wait.

Business empire-building This is the classic place for the eleven principles, and it still is.

Politics and social movements This is a world of conflict, more than any other arena. Everybody is jockeying for position, so your allies are your rivals. This is evident in any primary election campaign. The major principle here is #9, and the part of #8 about reputational networks: expect volatility. With some success in politics or social movements, it is easy for you to get pumped up by excited crowds. The danger here is an inflated view of yourself. This is another reason why successful politicians and movement leaders so often get caught in scandals; they start feeling they are too big for such a thing to happen to them. Politics and social movements require showing oneself as selfless, dedicating yourself to a cause, to a principle, solely for the benefit of other people. It’s only when you are little that you are allowed to say, you want to grow up to be President. When you are in the political game, you have to say you only want an office for the opportunity to serve. At the same time, politicians’ routine daily reality is jockeying for support, for campaign funds, and above all getting oneself in the public eye. This inevitably makes political leaders somewhat two-faced. The best solution is a version of #2. Try to limit your professional phoniness. Don’t pretend to be someone that you aren’t. It may seem like a good idea to pick up votes of conservative gun-owners by getting yourself photographed duck-hunting just before election day, but this sort of thing backfires. Voters know immediately when it doesn’t feel right. What you want is maximal attunement with voters. It is a rare politician who can get this genuinely rather than by manipulation.

Scientific, intellectual and artistic worlds

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These careers are different from military and business success. Principles #5 and 6 don’t apply. You can’t skip the credential queue, at least in the world of scientific researchers, or for that matter philosophers, or sociologists. You can’t start out in the minor leagues, because the key to high-level success is to be the student of someone who is a famous leader in the previous generation of researchers. This has been the network pattern also for famous painters and musicians (at least classical musicians; there are networks of popular musicians, but they are looser and don’t go through the credentialing process of schools.) So although #5 says skip the educational credential queue when you get an opportunity to pursue a real business opportunity, that doesn’t apply if you want to be a scientist or an academic-based intellectual. In fact, that is the most valid reason to be in a university.

Bottom line: If there is one principle more important than all the others, try this: look for the places that give you energy.

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REFERENCES

Part I. How to Grow Winning Networks by Emotional Energy 1. Emotional Energy in Yourself Randall Collins, 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton University Press. Walter Isaacson, 2011. Steve Jobs. Simon and Schuster. Laffit Pincay: San Diego Union-Tribune, August 20, 2002. 2. Emotional Energy in Groups: Meredith Rossner, 2013. Just Emotions: Rituals of Restorative Justice. Oxford University Press. “IBM wants it all..." “Obviously, I can talk..." Isaacson 169-70. 6. EDOM: Emotional Domination “‘Are you nuts?!’..." "So I need all of you to resign..." Isaacson 318-19. “ ‘You can’t do that!'..." Isaacson 245. “In his presence, reality is malleable...” Isaacson 117-118. “The engineer replied that he needed a couple more days..." Isaacson 114. "Let the dead bury their dead." Luke 9: 57-62; Mark 8: 19-22; Randall Collins, "Jesus in Interaction: the Micro-sociology of Charisma." http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2014_04_01_archive.html Caesar Faces Down a Mutiny: Appian, The Civil Wars. II. 92-94. “Sculley finally worked up the nerve..." “one last chance..." Isaacson 197-99. “Jobs sat at the far end..." Isaacson 201-202. “I felt like I’d been punched...” Isaacson 207-8. 7. Energizing Networks of Allies Ronald S. Burt, 1994. Structural Holes. Harvard University Press; Duncan Watts, 2004. Six Degrees: the Science of a Connected Age. W.W. Norton; Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro. 2005. “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem.” American Journal of Sociology 111: 447-504; Randall Collins and Mauro Guillèn, 2012. "Mutual Halo Effects in Cultural Production Networks: the Case of Modernist Architects." Theory and Society 41: 527-556. “I have a lot of stuff to show you..." Isaacson 114-15. “We’re weird in the same way...” Isaacson 227-28. “I don’t want any PR man touching my copy.” Isaacson 79.

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8. Dangerous Networks: markets are mirrors: Harrison C. White, 1981. "Where Do Markets Come From?" American Journal of Sociology 87: 517-47; Harrison C. White, 2002. Markets from Networks. Princeton University Press. “It was incredibly stupid..." "‘You’re sitting on a gold mine...’" Isaacson 96-97 “I was part of the crew...” “but Steve and I were kind of smiling...” Isaacson 174-75 “He called me down to get pissed off at me...” “Okay, but don’t make it too much like what we’re doing...” Isaacson 177-78. 9. What Money is Good For: Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot, From Predators to Icons; Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero. Cornell University Press, 2009. 10. Inner and Outer Networks: Sam Walton: Villette and Vuillermot. Networks of Emotional Domination: Randall Collins, 2008. "Violence as Dominance in Emotional Attention Space." Chapter 11 in Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Princeton University Press. Caesar's methods: Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars; Appian, The Civil Wars. Insiders in Sports: Winners See It Differently Daniel F. Chambliss, 1989. "The Mundanity of Excellence." Sociological Theory 7: 70-86; Loic Wacquant, 2004. Body and Soul: Notes of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford University Press.

Part II. Napoleon as CEO Volker Ullrich. 2004. Napoleon. Rowohlt Verlag. Felix Markham. 1963. Napoleon. New American Library. 2. Napoleon faces down bullies: Collins, Violence. Sam Walton in Arkansas: Villette and Vuillermot. 3. Michael Collins Takes Over the Irish Revolution: Peter Hart, 2005. Mick: The Real Michael Collins. Penguin. 4. Marrying the Boss's Daughter: Villette and Vuillermot. "he fell in love as much with my family..." Villette 31. 5. Napoleon's Winning Style: Charles Ardent du Picq, 1903. Battle Studies. Caesar is Prepared to Have Problems: Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars; Appian, The Civil Wars.

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6. Caesar's Famous Fortune: Plutarch, Life of Caesar. 7. Opponents catching up: Edward Coss. 2010. All For the King’s Shilling: The British Soldier Under Wellington. University of Oklahoma Press. Grant Deflates the Magic of Robert E. Lee: Gordon C. Rhea, 2007. The Battles of Wilderness and Spotsylvania. National Parks Civil War Series. 8. "He entered with awkward and uncertain steps..." Ulrich 32. "You are nothing but a thief..." Ulrich 99-100. "Can you imagine yourself..." Marquis Armand de Caulaincourt, 1935. With Napoleon in Russia. William Morrow and Co. Building IKEA: Villette and Vuillermot 9. Genius is How You Look at It: E.T. Bell, 1961. Men of Mathematics; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Two Minuets. K.6; Maynard Solomon. 1995. Mozart. A Life. HarperCollins; Tia Denora, 1995. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius. University of California Press.

Part III. What Made Alexander Great? Arrian. History of Alexander. Plutarch. Life of Alexander. J. B. Bury. 1951. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great. Macmillan. Peter Green. 1992. Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 BC. University of California Press. 1. Launching from the most advanced platform: Xenophon, Anabasis; Collins, Violence. Howard Hughes, Ross Perot, William Shockley: Wikipedia biographies 2. "What do you take me for?" "If I were Alexander..." Plutarch, Life of Alexander. Avoiding the Bureaucratic Ladder, Side-stepping the Credential Queue: Villette and Villermot; Randall Collins, 2002. “Credential Inflation and the Future of Universities,” in Steve Brint (ed.), The Future of the City of Intellect. Stanford University Press. Pitt the Younger: Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 1984.

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3. Target for takeover: R. Ghirshman. 1954. Iran: From the Earliest Times to the Islamic Conquest; Old Testament, Book of Esther; Book of Daniel. Piecing Together the World's Largest Insurance Company: Villette and Vuillermot. "What I was able to do was to recognize the weakness..." Villette 188. "timorous people..." "charming old gentlemen playing golf." Villette 186. "you know more about the company than I do..." Villette 182. 4. A Growing resource beats a stagnant resource: Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, 1978. Atlas of World Population History; H.W. Parke, 1933. Greek Mercenary Soldiers; Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, 1983. Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. Duckworth. 5. Logistics-plus-diplomacy: Donald Engels, 1978. Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army. University of California Press. 6. Winning Troops Have Empowered NCO's: Anthony King, 2013. The Combat Soldier. Oxford University Press. 7. “They had come to a pass blocked with perpetual snows..." Curtius, History of Alexander. The Old and New Management Team: Villette and Vuillermot. "People don't like uncertainty..." Villette 183. 8. Carousers and Workaholics: Plutarch; New Testament, Gospel of Luke; Gospel of John.

Part IV. Eleven Principles of Winning Big Scientific, intellectual and artistic worlds, network dynamics: Randall Collins, 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies: a Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Harvard University Press.