Shane Parrish@shaneparrish
Holy cow.
I’ve been reading the Rockefeller archives, and found this gem, where John D. Rockefeller comments on Napoleon Bonaparte.
"It is hard to imagine Napoleon as a business man, but I have thought that if he had applied himself to commerce and industry he would have been the greatest business man the world had ever known.
My, what a genius for organization! He also had what I have always regarded as a prime necessity for large success in any enterprise - that is a thorough understanding of men and ability to inspire in them confidence in him and what is of equal importance, confidence in themselves. See the men he picked as Marshalls, and the heights to which they rose under his inspiration and leadership.
It is by such traits as these, that men get the world of the world done. It is all a battlefield. Bonaparte, without the able marshals he had about him, would not have been the master of his age. he went into a battle with the knowledge that his marshals could be depended on - that in a given situation they could be relied upon do to the necessary thing. Their devotion to him, coupled with their enthusiasm - that’s another great attribute - and the qualities which his influence upon them brought out, won the fight.
Another thing about Napoleon was his virility - his humanity. I mean humanity in the broad sense, of course. He was a human being, and virile because he came direct from the ranks of the people. There was none of the stagnant blood of nobility or royalty in his veins. There’s where he had the advantage over the the monarchs of Europe to begin with. He could think quicker and along more individual and original lines than any of them. And being from the people, he was in close touch with the people.
The men with whom he had to combat didn’t understand either him, or the people and it is always hard to successful control what you don’t understand. Napoleon didn’t play the game, as the saying goes, as they understood it. And then, coming direct from the people he had the sympathy; he appealed to their imagination; Europe had not yet been education to the fact that it could get along without any kings at all, and the French people, I believe, reasoned that if they have to have king to rule them, it was better to have a king of their own kind and from their own ranks, than from the breed which had ruled them for a thousand years. In an age when the people had been but recently released from slavery and had not acquired the art of governing themselves, leaders of their own kind were few, and that made it easier for Napoleon to rise to the heights which he attained.
A Napoleon would be impossible in our day. Democracy has educated us away from such a think. There are too many able and ambitious rivals to hold in check one who aimed too high."
