Strategic Genius: What Traits Make a Great Military Leader? Gerhard Scharnhorst and William Slim as Examples, Elements of Courageous and Compelling Leaders, Ecology of Ideas for Cooperative Leadership

This excellent report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. When faced with complex problems, military leaders frequently fail to reach desired strategic outcomes. A leader with years of personal experience and a track record of success often runs headlong into a highly complex operational environment and achieves poor results. These leaders often consider the situation from only a military perspective and, as a consequence, arrive at a simplistic understanding of the environment. This poor understanding frequently pairs well with biased solutions favored by military institutions. Even if they generate an innovative approach, few leaders possess the capability to achieve buy-in from superiors and subordinates to see it through. A leader who possesses a gift for strategic understanding paired with a capacity to realize new approaches would be the elusive strategic genius. What traits make a strategic genius? Though several military theorists such as Lawrence Freedman and Colin Gray warn that such rare genius may not exist, Carl von Clausewitz contends that such a leader is possible but would require a "harmonious combination" of several traits. While the Prussian provides some vague suggestions, his description of genius fails to offer tangible characteristics that are relevant to today's operational environment. Several modern theorists examine how such an individual might think and some offer how this person might lead but few combine these traits to develop the concept of strategic genius as a whole. Looking at both strategic thinking and strategic leadership through an interdisciplinary lens of complexity science, design theory, and history, this monograph examines how a leader's perspective on problems and style of communication can generate strategic genius. Rather than prescribing a set of characteristics, this work suggests that strategic genius requires a unique combination of diverse perspectives on complex and adaptive environments matched with the compelling courage to recognize and resist personal biases and gain institutional buy-in to achieve innovative results.

Rather than searching for how to attain or how to practice strategic genius, this monograph simply asks what is strategic genius? To this end, instead of describing the development of strategic genius, this monograph attempts to describe its characteristics. In short, this work offers the what of strategic genius and only implies how such an ability develops. Rather than separating concepts of strategic thinking and strategic leadership, this monograph attempts to understand the effective combination of both within the same leader. This work uses abductive reasoning (synthesizing contemporary theories) to develop a working hypothesis and then tests this combined theory against two historical case studies.

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