Gen. George Patton's Leadership Method

It must be state from the outset that his was a style of leaders suited supremely to the exigencies of war. There is today something of a vogue of looking for lessons in classics of military or political strategy and lead that rout out be applied to business situations.

Such lessons can possibly be drawn from the experience of Patton's superior policemans, General " foul Jack" Pershing in the First World War and Eisenhower and marshall in the Second. These influenceers were in large part military administrators, creditworthy for bringing enormous enterprises into being, coordinating activities and movements, and solving logistical problems. In the language of Hollywood, they were the counterparts of producers. But in this same language, Patton was a "director," a work force-on leader.

He exercised leadership in rattling intimately the root sense of the word, motivating men to risk themselves in contend and personally leading them into action. Much of his style of leadership is thus relevant only to the battlefield, not to the office. Indeed, in the routine-bound, business-as-usual instauration of the counterinsurgencytime Army between the wars Patton had been nearly a misfit. As a garrison officer in Hawaii in the 1920s, he received a negative evaluation from his divisional commander, who wrote that "this officer would be invaluable in time of war precisely is a disturbing element in time of peace" (Essame, 1974, p. 23). N eveningrtheless, certain aspects of Patton's leadership style, particularly

Patton pass a combat posting, however, and Pershing gave him a crucial choice: he was offered either an infantry command or a command in the first American armored unit. In conglomerate forms this choice confronted most cavalrymen of the time. Cavalry was not yet veritable as wholly obsolete (well into the 1930s, Patton would consider ways of corporate trust horse cavalry with armored columns), save there was no place for it on the Western Front. Cavalrymen, seeking a vernal medium for their dashing style of offensive warfare, tended to go into either armor or air forces, and the subsequent development of two arms was profoundly shaped by what may be called the cavalry outlook.

Unsurprisingly, Patton chose armor over infantry, and took part in the early American tank offensives in the waning days of the war.

The mechanism and manual were unrelentingly offensive in outlook. Straighter than the conventional American saber, it was designed for thrusting rather than slashing and falsifying -- indeed, the defensive parry was not included in his manual. Years later, on the eve of the Second World War, he urged retention of the saber, writing that "very few people have been killed with the bayonet or the saber, but the fear of having their guts explored with cold steel in the hands of battle-maddened men has won many a fight" (Blumenson, 1985, p. 153). The ferocity on the total psychological offensive is characteristic. To Patton, military leadership was not chess; the objective was to hurl "battle-maddened" men on the enemy with such unnerving suddenness that the enemy would run low and run.

The philosophy which Patton espouses in this analysis is the same one that had certain his manual on use of the saber. Success in battle required overcoming soldiers' natural impulse for self-preservation; they must nerve themselves up to take their chances, in order to establish "both sensual and moral ascendancy over the enemy ... history proves that conflict men can go anywhe
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