Skip to main content
Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2022Wow, what a debacle of human folly. The book was a recommendation from a magazine...maybe The Economist. I hadn't been interested in the topic, but the review made it sound like a work of art irrespective (or in spite of) the topic, and I wanted to evolve the very fuzzy painting I had of Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Turns out this is a book I had a hard time pulling myself away from just to execute the basics of life - meals, sleep, work, kids. I have a very poor memory for names and can't think of a book I've read with more names and titles, so I wasn't able to track more than perhaps one tenth of the characters, but I don't think it made much difference to my overall comprehension of the events and dynamics.
Turns out WWI was just a giant wallow in senseless pride and destruction and slaughter. I didn't jump in thinking it was glorious or extremely strategic, but I would never have guessed how much it reflected the petulance, irritability, self-glorification, enmity, spite, pride, aggressiveness, and hunger for power of a microscopically small number of national leaders and royalty. At least by Tuchman's telling, there wasn't really a well-crafted plan among all the participants, belligerents or collateral damage countries. The King of Belgium is clearly the most admirable character and the one with the most military savvy - now there's a dark horse bet - albeit the simplest military strategy to execute. The entire escapade is rife with ineptitude, endless bickering among generals, confirmation bias, throwing good money after bad, and examples of failure of cohesion and leadership. Pity the poor souls thrown into this pit of doom.
I can't recommend this book more highly as a source of leadership training. One has a real-world example of the most complex organizations, a huge threat landscape, leadership impact, and esprit de corps challenges. One sees the outcome of all these dynamics and the underpinnings of successes and failures. The gravity of a lack of teamwork, suppression of inconvenient information, failures of imagination, communication breakdowns, and human emotions are all obvious and easy to learn from. I would expect this is required reading within every military academy the world over, and probably within many top leadership schools. I've read many business leadership books - I can still recall cracking 'In Search of Excellence' back in the 80s or 90s - and this one has them all beat by light years.
