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MILITARY LEADERSHIP AND THE CULTIVATION OF WISDOM

Conference Paper · November 2011

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.4973.5045

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MILITARY LEADERSHIP AND THE CULTIVATION OF WISDOM

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to consider an aspect of how modern militaries function as ‘holding environments
for knowledge’, particularly with regard to the learning relationship between the minds of their
leaders and the textual sources of military knowledge. The paper derives from PhD research which
examines the phenomenon of the professional military reading list and the impact of professional
reading on the development of the leadership skills necessary for complex organisations and
environments. This paper will examine, and produce some preliminary findings towards the research.

INTRODUCTION

Argyris and Schön (1996, pp.11-13) considered how organisational inquiry, that is the
interplay of thinking and action to solve problems, leads to organisational knowledge, that is
the ever-evolving body of knowledge that guides organisational practice. Asking how
knowledge becomes organisational, they outlined how organisations function as ‘holding
environments for knowledge’. When an organisation is functioning in this way knowledge is
held in, and accessed from three sources: the minds of individual members; the policies,
records, histories, and other texts an organisation develops and accumulates; and in the
“physical objects that members use as references and guideposts as they go about their
business” (Argyris & Schön, 1996, p.12).

This paper seeks to consider an aspect of how modern militaries function as ‘holding
environments for knowledge’, particularly with regard to the learning relationship between
the minds of their leaders and the textual sources of military knowledge. The paper derives
from PhD research which examines the phenomenon of the professional military reading list
and the impact of professional reading on the development of the leadership skills necessary
for complex organisations and environments. This paper will examine, and produce some
preliminary findings towards the research.

We will commence the paper by introducing the broader research from which this paper
derives, briefly outlining the research methodology and framing how we will present data in
the paper. We will then consider the means militaries use to develop their learning
capabilities or ‘organisational wisdom’ through self-development and examine two ‘sub-
questions’ that we have had to ‘converse’ and interact with towards our interpretive inquiry
(Crotty, 1998). These are: the means and ends of professional military education and the
nature of military wisdom.

We will then outline a three-step schema developed to represent the process of organisational
learning in the military. Finally we will conclude by highlighting some of the evidential
hurdles a study of self-development in organisations must negotiate and signalling the further
work to be undertaken.
 3

MILITARY LEADERSHIP AND PROFESSIONAL READING

The research from which this paper derives has its origins in a body of work published as The
Strategic Thinking of Major General Sir Howard Kippenberger (McElhatton, 2008). As the
title suggests, that work asked, and sought to answer, whether the eponymous New Zealand
General was a ‘strategic thinker’. While it has been gratifying to see the case the author made
for the affirmative being upheld by some notable students of strategy (McLean, 2008; Till &
Strachan, 2010), the more important product of that research has been the key questions it
prompted.

Kippenberger was a classic autodidact. While he had tactical experience as a young man on
the Western Front, prior to and throughout WWII he had no formal military education. A
provincial lawyer and officer in the resource impoverished Territorial Force between the
wars, his military education was conducted under the tutelage of the great authors of military
history one-to-one in the privacy of his quiet study in small town New Zealand. A great
leader, he learned his generalship largely through the books he bought, borrowed or stole
(Harper, 1997; McElhatton, 2008; McLean, 2008).

During this research a certain behaviour of notable leaders of the WWII generation began to
emerge. While few were as purely autodidactic as Kippenberger, some degree of formal
officer education being available in most developed nations in the inter-war period, the
notable leaders, commanders, innovators and thinkers of the period were predominantly
voracious, reflective, and critical readers, accomplished and innovative trainers, and, to a
greater or lesser degree, prolific writers (see e.g., Connell, 1964; Dietrich, 1989; Hamilton,
2001; Perret, 1999).

Their mastery of their profession, what we will term their ‘professional wisdom’, seemed to
have been shaped by a complex interplay between their experiences as junior leaders, their
cognitive growth through formal and informal personal development, and their contributions
to organisational learning through training innovation and textual enhancement of the body of
knowledge. While these leaders were ‘mould-breakers’ - exceptional individuals in unique
times – they still present relevant case studies or benchmarks for organisational learning and
development in today’s militaries, ones arguably applicable to any complex organisation. As
Argyris and Schön posited, individual practitioners are centrally important to organisational
learning, “because it is their thinking and acting that influence the acquisition of capability
for productive learning at the organisational level” (1996. p.xxii).

During this earlier research we were introduced to the phenomenon of the professional
military reading list in its New Zealand Army form. Further investigation revealed that
similar formal lists were used across nations and individual armed services as a component of
contemporary professional military education for commissioned and non-commissioned
officers at tactical, operational and strategic leadership levels. The various lists collected
from across the Anglophone and non-Anglophone world recommend long-acknowledged
classics from ancient China and Napoleonic Prussia, to recent releases on insurgency,
peacekeeping and global warming. The lists recommend works from business writers and
 4

philosophers, and some promote the reading of fiction genres like sci-fi as aids to the
development of critical and strategic thinking in the military professional.

So, at the nexus of the consideration of the ‘reader-leaders’ and the reading lists, a research
question began to form: what is the influence of professional reading on the development of
the leadership skills necessary for complex organisations and environments? While this paper
will not attempt to answer this question, it will seek to highlight, and present some
preliminary findings towards, a number of further questions our inquiry has raised. Before
we address these we will briefly introduce our methodology.

METHODOLOGY

Two primary research methods have been employed for the inquiry from which this paper
derives; semi-structured interviews with figures of interest to the research and a documentary
analysis of 67 multi-service contemporary military reading lists from 19 national contexts.

Four categories of interviewee of interest to this research have been identified:

1. Serving military officers of Major rank and above

2. Retired military officers in academic positions
3. Civilian academics working in military or defence related state institutions
4. Civilian academics.
To date, as illustrated in Figure One, twenty-three serving and retired officers, civilian
defence officials and academics, from New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, United
States and the United Kingdom have been formally interviewed towards this research.
Further interviews will be conducted through 2011 and 2012. The interviews have been
predominantly conducted face-to-face, but telephone interviewing methods have been used
and will be a prominent method used for the final suite of interviews.

FIGURE ONE HERE

The documentary analysis for this paper is based on sixty-seven multi-service contemporary
professional military reading lists from nineteen national Anglophone and non-Anglophone
contexts. The lists for this study were predominantly gathered over a three year period, 2007
to late 2010. The lists were sourced through: direct approaches to individual institutions and
individual military contacts in New Zealand and abroad; systematic searches of institutional
websites; and systematic web searches using a variety of phrases related to the phenomenon.

The paper will predominantly use generalised and non-attributed findings from the research
interviews. Where a non-attributed statement or finding is presented from interview sources it
will be cited as (McElhatton, 2011a). Where attributed quotations are used these will be cited
accordingly.

An analytical framework was developed to examine various aspects of the construction,

structure and content of the reading lists. While there is insufficient space in this paper to
outline this framework, data derived to date from the analysis will be presented throughout
the paper and will be cited as (McElhatton, 2011b).
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DEVELOPING LEARNING CAPABILITIES IN THE MILITARY THROUGH SELF-

DEVELOPMENT

Militaries are an ideal focus for a study of the role of professional development and
organisational learning in that they invest more time and resources in training and education
and have a more structured professional development system than other comparable
professions (Huntington, 1957/1981, pp.7-19). This occurs within the professional
development framework strands of Training, Experience, Education and Self-Development
(Bentley, Edwards, Capstick, Beardsley, & Gilmour, 2008). Of all the strands, Self-
development is the most understudied as it depends, by definition, on autonomy and, because
it evolves incrementally, it is even more difficult to track and measure its effect or benefits
(Madigan, 1998).

However, as political and economic changes continue to shape and re-shape professional
education, particularly within public sector professions like the armed services, the self-
developmental strand of the professional development framework is gaining more attention
from educators and, importantly, their paymasters (Simpson, Stahl, & Francis, 2004).
Directed and concentrated professional reading is intellectual self-development in its purest
and most immutable form (McElhatton & Jackson, 2011). There have long existed exemplars
of the military reader-leader, but the model conveyed by Dietrich (1989) of the still-to-
develop George S. Patton is illuminating; his “professional reading was only one of several
pillars of his intellectual development as a soldier, but it may have been the most important
one overall”. Compiling a reading list is a critical step in creating any programme of
professional development (Stohry, 1993).

Globally, professional reading lists are the most prominent resource used to guide leader self-
development in the military services (Lemay, 2010). Contemporary military leaders like U.S.
Marine Corps commandant General Michael Hagee (2005) or former New Zealand Chief of
Defence Force Lieutenant General Jerry Mateparae (Amner, 2006) stress the vital part
professional reading plays in the development of command skills. Many modern defence
forces and/or their individual component services publish professional reading programmes
and lists replete with recommendations for all stages of a soldier’s career.

The rationale for these programmes can be summed up through a quote from former Chief of
the Defence Force in New Zealand, Lieutenant General Jerry Mataparae; “Through reading
we can fill an experiential vacuum… encourage our minds to be flexible…heighten our
understanding of our profession and the circumstances we might face into the future”
(Amner, 2006 p.3). For a former Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps the benefits of their
reading programme are both intellectual and fiscal. “In an era of constrained resources, our
professional reading programme is designed to provide Marines with an intellectual
framework to study warfare and enhance their thinking and decision making skills” (Krulak,
1996).

A common feature of all the lists studied for this research is their focus on leadership. This
focus ranges between lists with an emphasis on the study of “traditional” leadership – i.e.
military figures in context – and a those that adopt a more mixed approach bringing in
 6

literature from, for example, the business management canon. The programmes vary in the
apparent method the compilers have used to construct them; their topic focus; and the back-
end support their institutions provide to make them effective developmental tools.

For our broader research question regarding the influence of professional reading on the
development of the leadership skills necessary for complex organisations and environments, a
study of professional military reading lists presents microcosm of the broader phenomenon of
organisational learning in complex environments, in this case military organisations. The
societal, environmental and educational issues that lie at the heart of organisational learning
can be considered “abstractions based on the concrete experience of people” (Seidman, 2006,
p.7) and therefore the stories people tell about their organisation through interviews and the
pictures they paint through the creation of textual totems like an official organisational
reading list can be used by the researcher as microcosmic representations of the wider whole
being examined.

As we outlined earlier, during the process of inquiry our research question has to date raised a
number of further questions. This process of questions, answers and more questions
constitutes the cycle, or “dance”, at the heart of qualitative research (Ely, Anzul, Friedman,
Garner, & McCormack-Steinmetz, 1991, pp.55-6). Two of these questions relate to the means
and ends of professional military education and the nature of military wisdom.

THE MEANS AND ENDS OF PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION

For Yukl, the essential processes of organisation learning include “the discovery of relevant
new knowledge, diffusion of this knowledge to people in the organization who need it, and
application of the knowledge to improve internal processes and external adaptation” (2009,
p.49). The sources of knowledge, and the processes through which it develops within, and
between, military organisations, has been a focus of this research.

Senior officers from the highest echelons of the U.S. and British militaries have cited “the
erosion in leader development” (Dempsey, 2010, p.6) and “intellectual decay” (Newton,
Colley, & Sharpe, 2010, p.45) as the topic of discourse at the highest levels of militaries
across the world. Leadership development and succession is inextricably linked to
organisational learning. A challenge for leadership at all levels of an organisation is how to
best encourage, facilitate, and sustain a positive, dynamic and productive learning culture
(Yukl, 2009). For organisational learning to flourish, a leader, to be effective, must be a good
teacher (Berson, Nemanich, Waldman, Galvin, & Keller, 2006, p.590). As we have noted
earlier this ‘leader as teacher’ model has been a notable feature of the early 20th Century
military leaders a study of whom prompted this research.

While leadership development and succession is globally an issue for all organisations (Pace,
2010), unlike most public and private sector organisations militaries cannot buy talent to fill
short-falls at its mid and upper-level ranks. The unique nature of the military profession
means that once an armed service accesses a cohort of officers, it must “live with them
throughout a 30-year career span (Wardynski, Lyle, & Colarusso, 2010). Therefore if a
cohort of senior service leaders is ambivalent, or even hostile, to the deeper, more
 7

incremental, less measurable forms of organisational learning that sit within the education
and self-development strands, then the effects can take a generation to fix.

Leader as Thinker and Decider

For the initial part of this research the lens of inquiry has been metacognitively focussed; we
have been ‘thinking about thinking’, assuming that superior modes of thought in and of
themselves were what separated the leadership ‘wheat’ from the leadership ‘chaff’. This focus
on the ‘thinking’ component is a somewhat Clausewitzian approach to the study of military
leadership, one that has as its keystone skill ‘strategic thinking’, pre-eminently an activity of
the mind (Kennedy, 2010, p.16).

Philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz is one of the most enduring, if controversial, military
thinkers of modern times (See e.g. Bassford, 1994; Crevald, 2000; Keegan, 1993; Strachan,
2007). For Clausewitz the attributes of a good soldier include “a sensitive and discriminating
judgment…a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth”, and the importance of memory,
imagination, an inquiring mind and a knowledge set that is “comprehensive rather than
specialized” (Clausewitz, 1832/1976). Clausewitz’s conception of the attributes of the
commander is best understood through his use of the term ‘geist’ (Strachan, 2007), the ‘spirit’
of human enquiry.

This emphasis on the abstractly cognitive is reflected in the U.S. Army’s field manual on
leadership, developed under the sponsorship of military intellectual Major General Eric
Shinseki (1999). Simply titled Be, Know, Do. The manual lays out the Know of leaders at the
three major stages of the military hierarchy – direct leaders, operational leaders, and strategic
leaders. For direct leaders, those in face-to-face contact with men and women in combat,
there are four key conceptual skills; critical reasoning; creative thinking; ethical reasoning;
and reflective thinking. For operational leaders, those in divisional or staff command, three
key conceptual skills now have to develop; establishing intent; filtering information; and
understanding systems. Finally at the pinnacle of the professional officer’s career, the
strategic level, the presenting skills reflect the nebulous nature of the strategic environment;
envisioning; developing frames of reference; and dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity
(Shinseki, 1999).

To return to our research focus - the influence of professional reading on the development of
the leadership skills necessary for complex organisations and environments – an engagement
with the literature presented an emerging model of the ‘leader as reader as thinker’, one
encouraged by the ideas of strategists like Henry Kissinger: “reading books requires you to
form concepts, to train your mind to relationships. You have to come to grips with who you
are. A leader needs these qualities…A book is a large intellectual construction. You can’t
hold it all in your mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalise it”
(Kissinger, quoted in, Hill, 2010, p.298).

However, the emerging ideal of the ‘leader as reader as thinker’ needed to pass Mintzberg’s
(1973) challenge to the classical management theorists, that is to represent how a leadership
phenomenon actually processes. Concerned as we are with an aspect of leader education, it is
 8

apt to consider the purpose of such education. Examining this from a military perspective,
McCausland (2008, p.6) holds that, “while training is more concerned with teaching what to
think and what the answers ought to be, education is all about teaching how to think and what
the questions ought to be”. From this perspective leadership development is an educational
activity that teaches emerging leaders how to think.

However this notion was challenged in an early research interview with New Zealand’s
senior soldier, Chief of Defence Force Lieutenant General R.R. Jones. When put to him that
the emphasis of a long-term professional education programme like that of the military
should be on the development of thinking skills a challenge was presented:

“My own view is I think we are actually approaching this from the wrong angle. The
objective is not necessarily to teach people to think. The objective is to teach people
how to decide. Thinking is the enabler to decisions… The aim of the education
process should be teaching people how to analyze to make decisions or create
opinions which will then inform decisions” (Jones, 2011).

Further engagement with the leadership literature produced within the military environment
drew out this idea that decision making is the keystone skill of military leadership
(McKnight, 2011, p.4). The role the military leader, whether a commissioned or non-
commissioned officer, is trained and educated for is to face and solve problems that will
produce the best possible outcome for their soldiers, their organisation and their nation. Some
of the problems will be routine with the solution apparently obvious; some will be of great
complexity and seemingly impossible to resolve. Regardless, in all such situations military
leaders are required to make a decision, to choose a course of action or inaction (McKnight,
2011, p.4).

Interviews to date and our analysis of the reading lists and the messages overt and covert that
they impart indicate that there is something of an existential muddle within and across the
military profession regarding the means and ends of professionally military education
(McElhatton, 2011a). Modern theories on learning have largely derived from psychological
theories, though increasingly the influence of neurological research, and theories that go
beyond the purely psychological like activity or socialisation or organisational theories, are
making their mark on our understanding of this complex field (Wenger, 2009, p.216).

Neurological research particularly has begun to unlock the relationship between thinking and
decision-making (both bad and good), emotion and reasoning. One paradoxical feature of our
neurological wiring is that not only do we appear to make better decisions when in possession
of less information. but reasoned decision-making can often lead to the least desirable results
(Lehrer, 2009).

Neurological research findings pose a significant challenge to the way we frame both the
means and ends of professional education. It is ironic that while conventional military
command theory views non-reasoned decision-making in information-impoverished
environments as anathema (Snyder, 1993), breakthroughs in neuroscience may be indicating
that the conjunction of a mind finely honed through focussed self-development and an
 9

incomplete information environment might represent the ideal conditions for effective
decision making.

FIGURE TWO HERE

Thus, seeing the development of thinking skills as both the means and end of professional
education risks producing graduates ill-equipped to perform the actual job at hand. As
illustrated in Figure Two, outside of the most hermetic philosophising, thinking is not a
phenomenon in and of itself, but one interbound with activity and environment. Here the
leader functions as Nye’s (1986) ‘thinker and decider’. Seeing theorising and practice as
separate and distinct is false dualism; theory is a form of human practice (Gadamer in,
Boyne, 1988, p.29). The notion of theoretician as practitioner is the basis of the ancient
concept of wisdom.

PROFESSIONAL WISDOM

In 1939, on the cusp of the Second World War, the later Field Marshall Archibald Wavell
delivered the Lees Knowles Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge on the subject of
Generals and Generalship (Wavell, 1941, p.14). Researching for the lectures he had to travel
back to Socrates, of whom the Oracle of Delphi thought there was none wiser (Plato, c.399
BCE/1984, p.69), to find a definition that got to the root of the essential qualifications for
command. For Socrates it was essential that the general had a mastery of logistics and had:
“imagination to originate plans, practical sense and energy to carry them through” (Wavell,
1941, p.14).

For Connelly (2002, p.1), an understanding of military leadership can be reached through a
discernment of great commanders’ ontological, epistemological, and teleological views. This
is done through a hermeneutic engagement or dialogue between researcher and cultural
members or authors of a particular cultural text (Michrina & Richards, 1996), in this case all
the written, verbal and non-verbal symbolic expressions that communicate command.

We can posit that these qualities of military leadership, while variously expressed, are, in
essence and commonality, the foundation of military wisdom, successful leadership at the key
points in the spectrum of command being dependent on what we will call either Tactical or
Strategic Wisdom. At the heart of these, as we have seen, is the ability to make good
decisions1.

This notion of wisdom, like that of leadership, is a term that defies precise definition
(Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 1997; J. S. Nye, Jr., 2008). Philosophers – literally ‘lovers of
wisdom’ – long understood that it resulted from knowledge or theory gained and applied
(Critchley, 2001, pp.1-11); to be wise was to have the habits and skills of applying
knowledge to develop oneself and others (Baltes, 2004, p.8). As Baltes (2004, p.10.) would
1
For students of generalship and command Wavell himself is a key case study, providing us both with profound
thoughts on the subject from his own musings, and fodder for debate from his own decisions and actions as a
Commander-in-Chief: Connell, J. (1964). Wavell: Soldier and Scholar. London: Collins, Lewin, R. (1980). The
Chief: Field Marshal Lord Wavell, Commander-in-Chief and Viceroy 1939-1947. New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux..
 10

have it, understanding the idea of wisdom, and therefore of leadership, must be pursued in
both a scientific and a humanist-intuitive (hermeneutic) manner, or as Kellerman notes,
through, “an area of intellectual inquiry that is interdisciplinary. How can we know
leadership without knowing…history, philosophy, psychology, politics…literature, art, and
so on?” (2010, p.xxv).

This essentially humanistic notion expressed by Kellerman is important because it calls us to

promulgate an antithesis to the thesis current in much of the technocratic dialectic since the
beginning of the digital age. This thesis has it that “change” is sweeping across the world in
“waves of ever-accelerating speed and unprecedented impact” (Toffler, 1970, p.18), that we
live in an environment of historically unprecedented “volatility, uncertainty, complexity and
ambiguity” (Paparone & Reed, 2008, p.66).

Technological Monism

The widespread acceptance of this thesis has important ramifications for organisational
learning and leadership education, no more so than in modern militaries. As Murray (2004,
pp.2-3) has highlighted, the “technological monism” of dominant factions within the U.S.
defence sector has led them to advocate the abandonment of traditional inductive methods of
learning from historical experience in favour of predominantly deductive or assumptive
methods where one can posit the future without reference to the past. The educational stance
of these technophiles is essentially that history, even that of the recent past, has been rendered
irrelevant, and so, not worthy of space in the professional military curriculum.

Linn (2009) has identified this technological monism as the source of leadership deficiencies
in the U.S. military in the post-Vietnam era. The education culture of the professional
military education system had evolved into more of a training and indoctrination culture
which largely produced officers with a technocentric “engineering, business management”
approach to war, and whom, as we have already noted, are dominant proponents of the
deductive methods of learning that downplay the utility of ‘the past’ as teacher.

This education culture was in marked contrast to the inter-war system that produced the
‘greatest generation’ of American military leaders exemplified by Generals Marshall,
MacArthur and Eisenhower. What marked the two separate but inter-related conflagrations
we call WWII was the emergence in many of the combatant nations of an array of
commanders who, while very different in personality and cognitive strengths, had in common
that elusive mix of, “innovating perspectives and skills”, (Janowitz, 1960 pp.150-1)
unconventionality, will, and sheer good luck we call military competence.

In a critique of each generations’ propensity to overstate the relative complexity or turbulence

of their environment to that of generations past, a critique aimed squarely at the futurist
writings of Toffler, Ansoff et al from the 1960s, Mintzberg (1994, p.207) noted;
“environments are always changing in some dimensions and always remaining stable in
others; rarely do they change all at once, let alone continuously”. That the forward-looking
neglect the past is illustrated when we consider the words of a political commentator and
leadership theorist writing of “the great changes and variations, beyond human imagining,
 11

which we have experienced and experience every day”; that Machiavelli (1532/1999, p.79)
wrote this of his contemporary environment should be instructive.

An infatuation with the notion of technological innovation as the prime author of complexity
disables historical perspective. Technological innovation is merely one facet in the
continuously complex struggle and rich tapestry that is the human experiment. Gadamer
(1996 pp.xxiii-xxiv) urges us, “to reinforce an insight that is threatened with oblivion in our
swiftly changing age. What changes forces itself far more on the attention than what remains
the same…the perspectives which come from the experience of historical change are always
in danger of distortion because they forget the hidden constants”. Reading broadly and deeply
helps reveal these hidden constants (Howard, 1961/1993). This is particularly vital in military
thought where the white heat of new technologies too often blind leaders to the ever present
inventive capabilities of the human animal, usually those you are opposing.

By anchoring an ancient concept like wisdom to our modern notions of leadership we re-
emphasise the abiding need for the continuing cultivation of the historically minded skills and
hermeneutic or interpretive perspectives that have characterised effective military leadership
over time. The wholly intellectual component (as opposed to the wholly moral or wholly
physical components to which it is nonetheless inexorably bound) of this is a decision-
oriented quality where, “learning is useful in meeting new situations, not because it provides
a basis for prediction but because a full understanding of human behaviour in the past makes
it possible to find familiar elements in present problems and thus makes it possible to solve
them more intelligently” (Strayer quoted in, Marwick, 1970, p.18).

SOME PRELIMINARY RESEARCH OBSERVATIONS

As early as the 1970s prominent military historians were expressing their concern that a
perception within the services that “the pace of change in technology had rendered the study
of past experience irrelevant” (Collins, 1978, p.ix) was resulting in a denigration of the
importance of history in professional military education. While the debate in military circles
regarding either the dominance of the enduring or the changing character of war continues
(Metz & Cuccia, 2011, pp.4-8), itself a debate about the context of leadership, a study of the
reading lists indicate a steady swing back to the notion that the human past has much to tell
us about the human future (McElhatton, 2011b; R. H. Nye, 1986).

The ‘vintage’ of the texts being presented in the reading lists is significant. Approximately
23% of the key leadership-related texts across the lists were written before the outbreak of
WWII. Three of the most frequently recommended of these, Sun Tzu’s Art of War (c. 400
BCE/1910), Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War (c.395 BCE/1972) and Caesar’s
Commentaries (c.50BCE/2008) have been educating military leaders across the world for
over two millennia. This proportion of vintage texts is consistently maintained across national
and service lists indicating that historical works, pre-dating the digital revolution, are
generally accepted by the world’s militaries as having contemporary authority. This
illustrates a shift in contemporary military thinking about the immutability of lessons from
military history (McElhatton, 2011b).
 12

Importantly for our research is the relative homogeneity of the purely military works
recommended across service, national and linguistic boundaries. While the most commonly
recommended contemporary (i.e. post-WWII) leadership text across the lists2, John Keegan’s
The Face of Battle (1976), is a work primarily about the English experience of war, the work
has transcended the national and is seen to speak to the common human experience of war.
These findings indicate that a common ‘core canon’ of globally acknowledged authoritative
military texts may be discernable (McElhatton, 2011b).

Significantly, the contemporary portion of this emerging canon have Anglophone origins and
spread to the non-Anglophone militaries through translations and their members’ facility of
the English language (McElhatton, 2011b). Prior to this cultural shift, which began sometime
prior to WWII, the predominant body of modern military literature from Machiavelli and De
Saxe, through Jomini and Clausewitz, to Foch and Von Der Goltz, sprang from outside the
English speaking world (Howard, 1965; Luvaas, 1965) and entered the Anglophone body of
knowledge through the translations of British and American scholars. The research interviews
have indicated a worrying trend towards further entrenchment of Anglo-origin dominance of
the professional military literature. From the Anglophone ‘side’, the end of the Cold War
spelled a dramatic reduction in funding for translations into English (Shope, 2011); from non-
Anglophone cultures, particularly Asian, there appears to exist a degree of bias against the
value of their indigenous literature (McElhatton, 2011a) or the development of their own
indigenous methods of, and perspectives on, inquiry (McElhatton & Jackson, 2011).

The reading lists do reflect individual cultural nuances in other ways however. The mingling
of works on philosophy and high literature (e.g. Kant and Goethe) with the more mainstream
military fare on the Bundeswehr list reflects the broader German educational values; the
French military’s unique obliviousness to Anglo-American business management literature in
their list tells us something about that nation’s public sector values and national psyche; the
ambition inherent in the Singapore Armed Forces’ list seems an extension of their national
‘study and succeed’ ethic (McElhatton, 2011b).

Prompted by Colin Gray’s (2009, 2010) assertion that a strategist’s judgement can be greatly
improved by an intense study of a handful of key texts, discussions on ‘canon’ have elicited a
nuanced variance in attitudes towards the idea of ‘core key texts’. Academics in the ‘defence’
space are more inclined to endorse the notion of ‘canon’ and see ‘authority’ as a permanent
state (e.g., Strachan, 2009). Practitioners however are more utilitarian in their reading and
attach to particular works, authors or ‘classic texts’ only the authority they see in the now.
Authorial ‘authority’ is transient (McElhatton, 2011a).

This utilitarian attitude is reflected in the process of compromise used to design the
professional lists. The effective lists – effective as in their ability to engage a professional
2
Twenty-two of the sixty-seven lists cite it, putting it just behind the most cited text, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War,
with twenty-three citations.
 13

reader – inhabit a ‘zone of compromise’ between an ideal and reality. The ideal conceives
professional reading in the military as a quest to get to the heart of the complex phenomena
of war. It is the pursuit of genius. The real however recognises that genius is an elusive and
fleeting thing and its pursuit is stalled by poverty of time, attention deficit, and the average
intellect and pre-education of the average officer. Designing an effective list is an exercise in
ensuring a sufficient spread of texts across the reading challenge spectrum, from conceptually
orientated to more narratively framed works are presented.

Author provenance and ‘authority’ for military audiences are directly related. Quantitatively
and qualitatively militaries recommend to their internal audiences texts by serving and retired
military leaders, and civilian academics working within military/defence institutions, by a
factor of over 3:1 against all other authors including ‘pure’ civilian academics, popular
authors, and journalists (McElhatton, 2011b).

The reading lists provide us with an interesting counterpoint to the broader public relates to
where leadership resides in an organisation. The popular/populist leadership literature comes
in a variety of genres, autobiographies - e.g. Giuliani’s Leadership (2002)- or ‘lessons from
great figures’ - e.g. Axelrod’s Elizabeth I CEO (2000) - being some of the more common.
The popularity of these tomes and their focus on CEOs, top athletes, Prime Ministers etc.
suggest that leadership as popularly understood resides at either the strategic level of
organisations or at the ‘fame’ or ‘big money’ part of society. In contrast, the core or
exemplary military readings on leadership the lists recommend focus on or exemplify the
“sharp end” of military leadership (Hackett, 1983, pp.215-228), that at the tactical or small
unit level.

A final finding relating to organisation learning is important for the success of any self-
development initiative like a professional reading list. Earlier when outlining the initial
reading which prompted this research we mentioned some of the notable WWII-era leaders
and their intense commitment to self-development. During that research a figure relatively
unknown today kept appearing as a pivotal figure in the personal and professional
development of Generals Patton, Marshall and Eisenhower.

U.S. Army General Fox Conner recognised and recruited talented subordinates, and
encouraged and challenged those protégés to develop their strengths and overcome their
weaknesses (Cox, 2010). He was a mentor par excellence. The importance of mentor-teachers
like Fox Conner to organisational learning in the military crops up throughout the research to
date (Allataif, 2011; Jones, 2011; Zakaria, 2011). When a leader embraces the mentor role, a
virtuous cycle of learning develops. Mentoring is the crucial factor that transforms an
initiative like a reading programme from a professional development token to an effective
tool for organisational learning.

In their most developed form, professional reading lists present a curriculum for informal
learning that, it being explored more gradually and incrementally than in the ‘crowded
curriculum’ of formal programmes (Strachan, 2009), present a broader and deeper learning
 14

opportunity for the engaged learner. However, as illustrated by the U.S. Marine Corps
programme, actually monitoring and measuring the impact of the programmes is tricky
(Arvizo, 2010).

While these preliminary observations do not yet fully address the research question, they do
signpost the further analytical work to be completed. The data gathering to date has also
allowed us to examine the process of organisational learning in the military. We will
conclude this paper by outlining this process using a three-step schema

THE KNOWLEDGE CYCLE

So how do organisations like the military learn? Based on our research to date we wish to
propose the following three-step schema for organisational learning in the military. The
schema should be seen as a two-way knowledge flow between tiers as represented by ↔,
where knowledge is constantly travelling up and down between individual, organisational and
meta-environmental levels. The three tiers are, Individual Horizon ↔ the Organisational
Knowledge Generation Cycle ↔ the Meta-Environmental Knowledge Inter-change.

As illustrated in Figure Three, we take from hermeneutics the notion of Horizon - that is the
range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.
Human inquiry is embedded in horizon, the limited perspective of the individual’s history,
language, tradition (Gadamer, 1960/1996). Our horizon shifts over time through the inter-
related and inter-dependent processes of understanding, interpretation and application. We
grow intellectually, expand our horizon, through application or praxis, the practical decision
making that puts knowledge to work (Gadamer, 1960/1996).

Applying this to the individual ‘learner’, we think of narrowness of horizon, of the possible
expansion of horizon, of opening up new horizons etc. – to have horizon means not being
limited to what is nearby but being able to see beyond it – a person who has an horizon
knows the relative significance of everything within this horizon whether it is near, far, great
or small (Gadamer, 1960/1996, p.302). We can illustrate horizon expansion thus.

FIGURE THREE HERE

Horizon expansion occurs through the amalgamation and rationalization of horizon 1 and
horizon 2 to form a new horizon 3 in the individual. During the synthesis of horizons a
critical process occurs where prejudice and presuppositions in each thesis are altered or shed.
The acquisition of horizon involves learning “to look beyond what is close at hand – not in
order to look away from it but to see it better, within a larger whole and in truer
proportion”(Gadamer, 1960/1996, p.305). But how does the military leader do this, especially
considering the ‘experiential vacuum’ much of the preparation for war is conducted in?
Interbound with training, experience, and education, it is through critical engagement with
the experience of past humanity through “the repositories of knowledge captured in past and
present literary works” (Hirai & Summers, 2005 p.90).

FIGURE FOUR HERE

 15

As illustrated in Figure Four, the horizon of individuals is constantly expanding through the
dynamic informational interaction of groups and subgroups involved in organisational
dialogue. In a particular military organisation this dialogue is conducted between the broadly
designated groups of serving officers, retired officers, civilian defence officials, and
academics. The learning producing dialogue is conducted around a tense arena where
doctrine - that is lessons learned – battles dogma – that is lessons forgotten. All the while the
external organisational environment is in constant flux through changes in time and context.

FIGURE FIVE HERE

As illustrated in Figure Five, organisations themselves are part of a Meta-Environmental

Knowledge Inter-change where learning transfers from organisation to organisation through
either the conduits of common language or translation. Organisations in the meta-
environment are able to learn from each other subject to the variables of professionalism,
language and culture, tempered by time and context. Individual horizons navigate the meta-
environment predominantly through the conduit of common language, but horizon breeches
the barriers of language through the act and art of translation.

CONCLUSION

In this paper we sought to consider an aspect of how modern militaries function as ‘holding
environments for knowledge’, particularly with regard to the learning relationship between
the minds of their leaders and the textual sources of military knowledge. We commenced the
paper by introducing the broader research from which this paper derives and then considered
the means militaries use to develop their learning capabilities or ‘organisational wisdom’
through self-development. We examined two ‘sub-questions’ that we have had to ‘converse’
and interact with towards our interpretive inquiry: the means and ends of professional
military education and the nature of military wisdom. We finished by outline our three-step
schema developed to represent the process of organisational learning in the military.

In conclusion it is worth highlighting the evidential hurdles a study of self-development in

organisations must negotiate. Our research is an inquiry that considers assimilative learning –
that is learning by addition (Illeris, 2009), or growth through the gradual build-up of
knowledge and experience. The first hurdle for researching something so incremental as self-
development is actually gathering any empirical data on the topic. The near instantaneous
results of training, in car driving for example, can be clearly observed and measured. Outside
of a longitudinal study, for an inquiry into self-development or assimilative learning we are
limited in our data gathering methods to relying on the opinions of others.

This raises a second hurdle; ascertaining the veracity of what people say they read. There is
something unique about books and book reading that brings out the most interesting
behaviour in adults. Surveys have shown that the cultural cachet associated with reading
literature induces otherwise honest and intelligent people to actively lie about their book
reading, claiming to have read ‘classics’ that they actually haven’t (Brown, 2009). The
flipside of this is the person we’ve all anecdotally known who feigns to be ‘unlettered’, but in
reality is quite the opposite!
 16

Regardless, and despite the pressure on reading from competing and more easily digested
media sources (Young, 2007), a study of professional reading for leaders of complex
organisations is an important organisational learning topic. Further analysis of both the
reading lists themselves and the interviews with their sponsors and audiences will continue to
further tease out our understanding of this phenomenon and its contribution to individual and
organisational wisdom.

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 20

FIGURES

Figure One

Figure One: Interviewees to Date by Type

1
3
Serving Military 65%

Retired Military Now Academics

17%
4 Civilian Academics in Military
Institutions 13%
15 Civilian Academics 4%
 21

Figure Two: Thought and Action in Dynamic Environments

 22

Figure Three: Individual Horizon Formation

 23

Figure Four: The Organisational Knowledge Generation Cycle

 24

Figure Five: The Meta-Environmental Knowledge Inter-Change

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