In my previous posting I said X is the letter in the Leadership Alphabet Game I’m most looking forward to posting. Why? Because the winning X-word is XENOPHON, not a mystical telecommunications device, but a Greek historian and philosopher who was a contemporary of Plato. After joining Cyrus the Younger’s mercenary army and following its defeat in Persia, now Iraq, the survivors (called the Ten Thousand) chose him to be one of their leaders in its return journey to Greece.[i]
Following his return from Persia, Xenophon wrote Anabasis, an autobiographical narrative documenting the journey of the Ten Thousand. Later, he wrote Kyropaidaia, or Cyropaedia, a fictive history of Cyrus the Great.
I decided to read Anabasis and Kyropaidaia because I’m a fan of Peter Drucker. In The Practice of Management, while addressing leadership, Drucker notes, “The earliest writers on the subject, in ancient Greece or ancient Israel, knew all that has ever been known about leadership. The scores of books, papers and speeches on leadership in the business enterprise that come out every year have little to say on the subject that was not already old when the Prophets spoke and Aeschylus wrote. The first systematic book on leadership: the Kyropaidaia of Xenophon—himself no mean leader of men—is still the best book on the subject.”[ii]
(For those who were paying attention, in my D-word posting I said, “To those, I’d add Drucker—Peter F. Drucker, considered by many to be the Father of Modern Management; his writings influenced my approach to leadership.” I included the sentence because I knew Xenophon would be my X-word in the Leadership Alphabet Game.)
Unlike The Art of War and The Prince, but similar to Shakespeare’s writings, leadership lessons in Xenophon’s writings must be deduced from his narrative. Where Sun Tzu and Machiavelli indicate what a leader should do, Xenophon shares what he did in The Expedition (Anabasis) and what Cyrus does in The Education. Readers must draw leadership principles from stories Xenophon tells through his writings. Where Sun Tzu and Machiavelli are concise, Xenophon is expansive.
Numerous translations of Xenophon’s writings exist, as do multiple titles. I relied on Robin Waterfield’s translation of Anabasis (The Expedition of Cyrus[iii]) and Project Gutenberg’s EBook Anabasis, by Xenophon, translated by H. G. Dakyns[iv], plus three translations of Cyropaedia (The Education of Cyrus[v] translated and annotated by Wayne Ambler, Cyrus the Great[vi] edited by Larry Hedrick, and Project Gutenberg’s EBook Cyropaedia: The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon translated by H. G. Dakyns[vii]).
Many times, in reading The Expedition of Cyrus and The Education of Cyrus, I heard echoes from Sun Tzu. Although I can’t prove it, Cyrus’s education surely included Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. His father asked Cyrus if the person hired to educate him in how to be a general “taught any arts that might become especially strong allies for the works of war.”[viii] His father wanted Cyrus to assure him that he had learned the arts of war, the strategies and tactics required to be successful.
The approach Cyrus uses to defeat the enemy reminds me of Sun Tzu’s saying: “Generally in war the best policy is to take a state intact; to ruin it is inferior to this. To capture the enemy’s army is better than to destroy it; to take intact a battalion, a company or a five-man squad is better than to destroy them.”[ix] Perhaps Cyrus learned how to use deception from people who studied Sun Tzu’s sayings.
Xenophon’s role in The Expedition of Cyrus emerges following the death of Cyrus the Younger by the Persians. Stranded in the desert, a thousand miles from home, Xenophon “inspired the despondent Greek soldiers and led them through the mountains of Kurdistan and the snowy Armenian plateau to the sight of ‘The sea! The sea!’, and then along the coast of the Black Sea to the fringes of the Greek world.”[x]
After reading Xenophon’s two major works, I concur with Drucker’s assessment. Practically everything touched on in Leadership Principles and Practices is addressed by Xenophon. To identify and elaborate on each leadership principle in Xenophon’s writings would yield a separate book. In the next seven postings, I focus on leadership principles from The Expedition of Cyrus and The Education of Cyrus.
Next: Leadership ABCs—X (Part 2)
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[i] Christopher J. Tuplin, “Xenophon: Greek historian,” Encyclopædia Britannica. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Xenophon.
[ii] Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management, Harper & Row, New York, NY, 1954, pp. 158-159.
[iii] Xenophon: The Expedition of Cyrus, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2005.
[iv] See https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm#link2H_4_0003.
[v] Xenophon: The Education of Cyrus, translated and annotated by Wayne Ambler, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2001.
[vi] Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War, edited by Larry Hedrick, Truman Talley Books, New York, NY, 2006.
[vii] See https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2085/2085-h/2085-h.htm.
[viii] Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great, p. 50.
[ix] Samuel B. Griffith, Sun Tzu: The Art of War, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1963, Chapter 3, lines 1 and 2.
[x] Xenophon: The Expedition of Cyrus, p. vii.
