Caption: Statue of Alexander the Great, third century B.C. Istanbul Archaeology Museums.
This past weekend commemorated the birth of Alexander the Great – in 356 B.C. Pella, northern Greece – so I thought I’d offer a meditation on a subject that has often occupied me as a writer and as a manager and that is leadership.
I myself have learned a lot about “leading” from Alexander, who conquered the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. and whom I began reading about when I was a child. But what made him a great leader? What is leadership?…
Read MoreAs fabulous as the Times Journeys’ “The Legacy of Alexander the Great” was thus far, I still wasn’t feeling Alexander. Athens had never been a home to him, even after he sent the city 300 Persian shields – a brutal souvenir of the victorious opening gambit in his quest to conquer the Persian Empire, the Battle of the Granicus. Plutarch – and tour leader David Ratzan – tell us that Alexander signed the tribute “Alexander, son of Philip and all the Greeks except the Spartans,” the Spartans rarely taking part in anything the other city-states, especially archrival Athens, did.
You get the sense that perhaps Alexander was doing a bit of kissing up to the Athenians, who saw him, Philip and the rest of the Macedonians as rough-hewn arrivistes. (It’s the reason that Oliver Stone cleverly had the Greeks speak with British accents in his movie “Alexander” and the Macedonians speak with Irish ones, the idea being that the Greeks looked down at the Macedonians just as the British have looked down on the Irish.) ...
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