Battlefield Leadership’s battlefield-based Leadership Experiences are specifically designed to allow corporate executives and managers to reflect on contemporary leadership challenges using the battlefield actions and decisions as a metaphor for the dynamics and situations faced in today’s intensely competitive marketplace. After an initial briefing and strategic overview, we spend time on the field together, walking and riding over the very ground contested by military forces and armies of yesteryear. This “staff ride” format is derived from long-standing military practice. More than a century ago, military students of leadership began visiting old battlefields with senior officers, staff members, and facilitators to analyze historic decisions and their consequences. These experiences helped neophytes develop a thorough understanding of fundamental combat leadership practices and fostered team-building by providing leaders and their staffs with a shared experience focused on the problems encountered in actual battle. The method was later expanded to military students in advanced schools so that they could think about future battle challenges and contemporary solutions within the context of significant actions from the past. Later, the method was applied to senior, civilian government leaders, many of whom were from corporate leadership backgrounds and whose government roles had them shaping and directing military policies without the benefit of military experience.

Success with those audiences, and a sense of the direct applicability of “staff ride” lessons to the corporate environment, led to using the method with senior corporate executives who were interested in building strong teams and engendering leadership qualities within those teams. We still use the label “staff ride” for these specialized leadership experiences, keeping in mind that:

History is important and we want to “get it right” but history is only a vehicle for discussion of contemporary concerns;
The staff ride format is a seminar in which people change physical positions often and openly share views on a broad range of issues, and;
The team building which inevitably results from this kind of shared experience may be as important as its substantive content; and,
The battlefield is a source of metaphors.

Napoleon at Waterloo, Moore in the Ia Drang Valley, Winters at Bastogne, or Longstreet at Chickamauga, … any number of other battles and leaders could support the very same leadership learning goals as Gettysburg and Normandy. The battlefield’s simplicity through the hindsight of history helps us meaningfully and realistically appreciate such fundamental leadership considerations as the importance of plans alongside the overriding importance of improvising within the framework provided by these same plans. We ask how information is gathered and how decisions are made, communicated and modified. We contemplate human motivation in the face of tremendous obstacles. We confront the operation of “chance” or “luck” in human affairs. We see leaders of many types in trying situations, and we have the luxury of information and leisure necessary to analyze their performance in a way that is objective and blameless.

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