Decisive Battles, Strategic Leaders

About the Book

Strategic leadership is observed through campaigns of the great commanders from Pharaoh Thutmose at Meggido (1479 BC) to Manekshaw and the Bangladesh War of 1971. The battlefield tactics of Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal, Genghis, Robert Bruce, Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, Gustavus Adolphus, Marlborough, Abdali, Napoleon, Lee, and Giap are examined. The cataclysmic fall of Constantinople, Vijay Nagar, Delhi (1857), and Singapore are described in gory detail. Sun Tzu, Musashi, Mao’s guerilla tactics, Clausewitz and the theories of Liddell Hart, De Gaulle and Fuller, leading to the strategic use of tanks in the German Blitzkrieg are analyzed. The author enters the mind of the strategist to understand how and why a particular battlefield decision impacts the fate of armies and nations. The basic principles of war, business/war and business/games analogy are lucidly presented to provide interesting reading for practicing managers.

About the Author

J.P. Alexander is an alumnus of St. Xavier's School and Wilson College (Bombay); College of Engineering (Pune); Dept. of Management (University of Leeds, UK). He has participated in Management programmes at IIM (Ahmedabad); NITIE (Powai); Tata Mgt. Training Centre (Pune); and trained in Total Quality Mgt. at Kansai Centre (Osaka, Japan). He has also attended the International Purchasing Managers Conference (Venice) and Milan Trade Fair and interned with GEC-Elliot (Rochester); Davidson (Belfast); Stothert&Pitt (Bath), besides making business study visits to Philips (Holland), Mercedes Benz (Stuttgart), Mazda Motors (Japan) etc. He was a Sir Dorabji Tata Scholar; British Council Scholar; Wilson College Scholar and recipient of the Scholarship of the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry. After lecturing in Civil Engineering (College of Engg, Pune), he worked in the public sector in the areas of Marketing, Materials and Management Development. He has been Hon. Secretary of the Kerala Management Association, President of the FACT Sports Association and represented Kerala in the Inter-State Tennis Tournament at Hyderabad in 1976. J.P. Alexander lives in Kochi, India and teaches International Management, Cross-Cultural Management, Organizational Behavior, and Industrial Marketing. He conducts Corporate programmes for managers at middle and senior levels. He has written articles on Management topics and reviewed books of different genres. Widely read in his special field of interest- Military History- he has studied and surveyed many of the sites of battlefields, castles, fortifications and terrain, which are referred to in this work, and has interacted with senior service personnel and experts on the geopolitical, historical and technical aspects of Strategy. A special tribute must be paid to the strategy guru of IDSA, K. Subrahmanyam, whose clarity of ideas influenced a whole generation of thinkers and policy-makers and shaped the course of India's geopolitics for over 40 tumultuous years. Contact, albeit fleeting, with this profound thinker greatly influenced the writer's geopolitical concepts, particularly Subrahmanyam's theory of "Multi-polar" versus the then prevalent "Bi-Polar" world.