It's not enough to inspire, to overcome great odds you must face them together!

It’s funny how I often can’t think what I should write about and then something random will trigger an interesting thought.

This week it’s an unexpectedly funny & fascinating 6-part series (I, II, III, IV, V, and VI) examining the ’siege of Gondor’ sequence from Peter Jackson’s film ’The Return of the King’ and asking how realistic it is. You may be wondering what any of this has to do with software companies. I promise it does become clear in time!

The author, Brett Devereux, is a military historian, and he uses that perspective to ask questions about weapons, formations, tactics, and strategy. He also compares the film with the book, part of the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy J.R.R. Tolkien, from which it springs. And this is where things get very interesting.

In case you are not a 'Lord of the Rings' fan the background is this: The eponymous villain, Sauron, throws a vast army of orcs against the city of Minas Tirith, capital of the land of Gondor. The men of Gondor are, even as they summon their allies, heavily outnumbered and facing an enemy using weapons of terror. Gondor is expected to lose.

The Jackson films, being that film is a visual storytelling medium, tend to focus on spectacle. Jackson’s means of conveying the threat of Sauron is as an overwhelming force of arms. But Tolkien, who survived the fighting in the 1st world war (unlike most of his friends), has a different perspective as Devereaux explains:

For Jackson, the siege of Minas Tirith and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is in many ways an alternating contest of tactics, machines and weapon systems … This is a very modern and very mechanistic view of war.

Tolkien’s vision of war is more nuanced, shaped by personal experience. War machines matter, but chiefly as a means of degrading the will of the enemy. The great contest is not between engines or weapons, but between the dread of Mordor and the courage of men.

Some of us may be struggling against great odds. Anyone who rightly sees a company like Google as their opponent is involved in the kind of titanic struggle against impossible odds that the men of Gondor would have recognised in Sauron the great.

Against such odds “superior weapons” are not what helps you to prevail. You can’t “kill” Google in the field. But that does not mean that you have to lose. I’ll come back to this theme in a future article, but for more, you could do worse than read how the young Microsoft fought the incumbent-IBM in the 1980s.

When engaged in such a struggle, the real battle is, perhaps, not over territory but over hearts and minds:

That focus on morale gets to a truth about warfare: the winner of a battle is not the one that kills the most, but the one who makes the enemy run away. And the winner of a war is not the side which kills the most, but the side which can break the will of the enemy to fight.

For a concrete example of this, Devereaux presents the Battle of Delium (424BC) between Athens and the Boeotians (no, I’d never heard of them either):

The Athenian right wing was initially victorious, smashing the Boeotian left – it looked as though Athens would carry the battle. But as the Athenians struggled to reform to sweep the Boeotian center, a relatively small Boeotian cavalry detachment, which had been hidden behind a hill, rode up. It was not so large a force the Athenians could not have defeated it, but the Athenian soldiers thought it a fresh army (not realizing it was just part of the army they were already fighting) and panicked. The victorious Athenian right disintegrated into a rout almost instantly and Athens lost the battle on the very cusp of victory. Morale effects often outweigh physical ones.

Without any intention of denigrating the experience of those who fought in the Great War, I do sometimes use the metaphor of being an officer in the trenches to describe how entrepreneurship can feel:

You’re under a constant barrage of artillery. Before you lie the enemy machine guns and almost certain death. But each day you must put your tin hat on, blow your whistle, and go over the top. I’ve known many entrepreneurs for whom this metaphor seemed apt, perhaps it resonates with some of your own experiences?

The questions then become: In the face of such odds, what makes you go over the top? And why should anyone follow you?

For you, as a leader, it’s often about your mission. You can face the guns of the enemy if, behind them, is something you desperately want. Ambition and drive can encourage us to do ‘dangerous’ things, take personal risks, and sacrifice, to achieve our ends.

The mission is also essential to the people who follow you. But, there is something more. Devereaux and Tolkien point to the role of the 'heroic leader' -moreover how the heroic leader creates 'unit cohesion':

"the bonding together of soldiers in such a way as to sustain their will and commitment to each other, the unit, and mission accomplishment, despite combat or mission stress."

You have to have a strategy, yes, but when doing something challenging, it is unit cohesion that allows armies, and businesses, to win. Even the most exceptional leader cannot do it alone. We can see it in the example of Athens above, as the Athenian right flank panic with victory in their grasp.

You can create unit cohesion in your own business by having an inspiring mission, by living your values, and by being an example to others who want the same kind of change.

Do you have any example where you have seen a great leader inspire in this way? Or perhaps you disagree? I'd love you to join the discussion.