Embrace the Dark side of Leadership to Unlock Unwavering Loyalty When I was sixteen, I worked at a deli chain.  Two of my managers stand out in my mind now.  First, there is the one who sometimes comped me a free cup of chili on my lunch break – Dave.  Then there’s Jeff, who fired…

When we win a victory, we feel good.  Why?  One reason is that our brains adjust our self conceptions accordingly.  We start to think of ourselves as more competent, able, fortunate.  And such a person wins more, right?  Wins make us believe we’re going to keep winning, and this is one of the greatest feelings….

How do we stack the deck in our favor? Sulla was a master of the battle tactic of digging trenches.  It was once of the strategies he used in the Social War to defeat Samnite rebels, and he used it in Greece to defeat superior foes as well.  When the hostile Roman commander Fimbria threatened…

No matter what day of the year it is, you could be in the dead of “winter.”  Customers stop calling, there are no more regular season games; your friends and business associates all seem busy with other projects, they don’t have time for you.  Budget managers are in a “wait and see” mode.  Nothing seems…

How do you make sure good ideas win? Once upon a time the Spartan elders of the gerousia liked a proposal but didn’t like the proposer.   They wanted to take the bill to the general Spartiate assembly to be voted and ratified, but the man who came up with the idea did not live…

Everyone thought Callisthenes was a lucky man.  He was victorious.  He got the girl.  What went wrong? Sometimes when we think we have won, we are not in the clear yet. Aristocleia was the most beautiful young woman in the town of Haliartus, and she had two suitors.  One of them was a local boy,…

How should we train for the things we want to do end up doing? Philopoemen went on to be a famous commander (and trainer) of the army of the Achaean League. (He is also the last Greek, chronologically, that Plutarch biographized.)  Philopoemen was also a contrarian: “From his very boyhood he was fond of a…

A scholar once called Sparta “the state swayed beyond all others by the fear of the gods.”  They consulted oracles for the god’s guidance about whether to go to war, which man to make king, and which laws to adopt. Many Spartans exploited this fear of the gods in their countrymen – they realized, for…

Socrates had more ways out than most people realize. When the famous Athenian philosopher was put on trial, in 399 B.C., for allegedly “corrupting the youth” and introducing “new gods” into the city, his friends did everything they could to get him acquitted. One of these friends was Lysias. Lysias had already lost his brother…

“When the suitors could not corrupt Penelope,” the philosopher Bion once said, “they seduced her handmaidens.  So it is with philosophy.  When unworthy men cannot attain to the Queen, they settle for other disciplines.”  He probably had in mind, as “handmaidens,” the study of rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, poetry, perhaps even dance, finance, generalship, music, ……