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Issue No. 651 of Your Weekly Staff
Meeting (July 11, 2025) chronicles the first month of World War 1—a stunning
Pulitzer Prize-winning account, The
Guns of August. Plus, click here for
recent eNews issues posted at John
Pearson’s Buckets Blog, including my recent review of Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience.
And, check out the 20 management buckets
(core competencies).
In
1914, taking a page from the Volunteer Bucket—and fearing the
Germans would capture Paris at the start of World War 1—the French
military inspired taxi drivers to transport 6,000 troops “to the
hard-pressed front.” Proudly, 600 taxis lined up for the 60-kilometer
trip (twice!), with each taxi carrying five soldiers. It was “the last
crusade of the old world,” wrote Barbara Tuchman. (Pictured: “Renault Taxi de la
Marne” or “Marne Taxi”—a
hackney carriage automobile manufactured by the French automaker
Renault.)
“The
Best Book on Management—and Mismanagement”
In 2021, when I reviewed Becoming Trader Joe, by Joe Coulombe, the
chain’s founder, I was stunned to read what he said about The Guns of August. “It’s the best
book on management—and, especially, mismanagement—I’ve ever read.” So, of course, I
had to read it. For my Northern Hemisphere readers, it’s the perfect
summer read, but bring a pen!
The Guns of August:
The Pulitzer
Prize-Winning Classic
About the Outbreak
of World War I
by Barbara W. Tuchman (1962)
In March 2024, the “Five Best” weekly
column in the Wall
Street Journal named The
Guns of August one of the “Five Best on Geopolitics.”
Adm. James Stavridis summarizes this classic: “Tuchman’s theme is simple
if chilling: that endless miscalculation, faulty communication, false narratives
and plain stupidity, coupled with almost willful
obstinance—all preventable—caused millions of deaths.”
Also last year, Elon Musk recommended 11 audiobooks—and
you guessed it: The Guns
of August was on the list. Plus, the book was selected by the
Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time. Are
you a listener—not a reader? No problem. Listen to the book on Libro (just over
19 hours).
Author Barbara
Tuchman (1912-1989) won two Pulitzer Prizes. She was a
superb writer and researcher. But oh,
my—this warning: the 2004 paperback is 640 pages! And honest,
I read every word except for the 80 pages of sources and notes. On most
pages, I underlined one or more arresting insights. You’ll leverage
many of the book’s teachable moments at your weekly staff meetings. (“Annika—you’re
absolutely right! The Guns of August has
a memorable chapter on how to avoid that mismanagement mess!”)
But here’s my dilemma: my meager attempt to review a Pulitzer
Prize-winning book will be totally inadequate. Where to start? And where to stop? (Tom
Pryor, a faithful eNews reader sent this wisdom recently from
Ecclesiastes 6:11, “The more the words, the less the meaning.” That would
apply to me—but apparently Barbara Tuchman never got the memo.)
So…let’s
start with a quick overview—since your WW1 history might be a bit
rusty. And sadly, even the casual reader will find immediate points of
relevance to 2025: Iran, Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Russian, India, Pakistan.
(Lord, we pray for peace.)
Here are two short
videos to remind you about World War 1:
View WW1 Oversimplified, Part 1 (6 min.) on
YouTube.
View WW1 Oversimplified, Part 2 (7 min.) on
YouTube.
I mentioned that the
book by Trader Joe’s founder inspired me to read The Guns of August. In my review of Becoming Trader Joe, I wrote that
Coulombe’s book checked all 20 boxes in my Management Buckets filing
system. Ditto The
Guns of August! So here goes:
Note:
In the quotes below, I do not always identify which nation or which
general messed up. (Read the book!) Apparently political and military
mismanagement infects all nations. As Donald Rumsfeld noted in his
book, Rumsfeld’s Rules (per Helmuth von
Moltke the Elder),
“No plan survives
first contact with the enemy.”
THE CAUSE
BONUS CONTENT is posted at John Pearson's Buckets Blog.
#1.
THE RESULTS BUCKET. Foch “…taught the necessity of
perpetual adaptability and improvisation to fit circumstances.
‘Regulations,’ he would say, ‘are all very well for drill but in the hour
of danger they are no more use . . . You have to learn to think.' Another
aphorism he made familiar during the war, ‘De quoi s'agit-il?’ (What is the
essence of the problem?)” (This reminded me of the book, Fall in Love With the Problem, Not the Solution.)
#2.
THE CUSTOMER BUCKET. (Don’t neglect one of your key
customers: your own staff!) The Secretary of the Navy for Germany,
who had served in that role since 1897, and was “the father and builder
and soul of the German Fleet,” was not allowed to see the secret war
plans “for the weapon he had forged.” On July 30 “when the operational orders
were shown to him he discovered the secret: there was no
plan. The navy, whose existence had been a chief factor in
bringing on the war, had no active role designed for it when war came.”
(Read this classic war book
by General McChrystal.)
#3.
THE STRATEGY BUCKET. “…General Ferdinand Foch, was the
molder of French military theory of his time. Foch’s mind, like a
heart, contained two valves: one pumped spirit into strategy; the other
circulated common sense.”
OOPS! Colonel
Grandmaison, “an ardent and brilliant officer delivered two lectures at
the War College in 1911 which ‘had a crystallizing effect.’” However,
“Colonel Grandmaison grasped only the head and not the feet of Foch’s
principles.” Ultimately, the French war doctrine (the 'eight
commandments') was all offense and little defense.”
#4.
THE DRUCKER BUCKET. “The army that had been given him to
command was crumbling under him. He became a cavalry officer and
divisional general and did the thing he knew best. With seven of his
Staff on horses commandeered from some Cossacks, he rode off to take
personal command under fire, in the saddle where he felt at home.” (Note:
Ironically, the “Peter Principle” theory demonstrated here—that a person
rises to their level of incompetence—was not a principle that Peter Drucker
affirmed. Read this.)
#5.
THE BOOK BUCKET. Regarding the Minister for War, General
Sukhomlinov, the foreign minister noted, “It was very difficult to make
him work but to get him to tell the truth was well-nigh impossible.”
Honored with the Cross of St. George as a “dashing young cavalry officer
in the war of 1877 against the Turks…”, the general “believed that
military knowledge acquired in that campaign was permanent truth.”
He was not a lifelong learner and he hated the new “firepower”
innovations compared to the reliability of saber, lance, and bayonet. He
boasted, “As war was, so it has remained . . . all these things are
merely vicious innovations. Look at me, for instance; I have not read a
military manual for the last 25 years.” (This reminded
me of what Gen. Jim Mattis said about the importance of reading. Read Call Sign Chaos, my 2019
book-of-the-year.)
#6.
THE PROGRAM BUCKET. “Unlike General de Langle of the Fourth
Army whom Joffre had just found calm, confident, and ‘perfectly master of
himself’—the one essential duty of a commander in Joffre’s eyes—Ruffey
appeared nervous, excitable, and ‘imaginative to an excessive degree.’ As
Colonel Tanant, his Chief of Operations, said, he was very clever
and full of a thousand ideas of which one was magnificent but the
question was which.” Ruffey was replaced. (Read more on thinking.)
THE COMMUNITY
BONUS CONTENT is posted at John Pearson's Buckets Blog.
#7.
THE PEOPLE BUCKET. The people profiles in The Guns of August—incredible.
(Did I mention the author won the Pulitzer?) “Gluttony for work and a
granite character had overcome lack of a ‘von’ to win for Captain Erich
Ludendorff the right to wear the coveted red stripes of the General
Staff…”
“Deliberately friendless and forbidding…[he] remained little known or
liked.” And this: “…even as he grew in eminence he moved without
attendant anecdotes, a man without a shadow.”
#8.
THE CULTURE BUCKET. Boots, wheels, and hoofs! “During the
day as the boots and wheels and hoofs of the German ranks overran
villages and trampled fields of ripe grain, the shooting increased and
with it the vexation of the German troops, who had been told
that the Belgians were ‘chocolate soldiers.’”
#9.
THE TEAM BUCKET. “Beginning August 7, the mustache, the
eyes and the pointing finger over the legend, ‘Your
Country Needs YOU’ were to bore into the soul of
every Englishman from a famous recruiting poster. For England to have
gone to war without Kitchener would have been as unthinkable as Sunday
without church.” (Read more about
teams in the military.)
Posters across
England in 1914 featured the plea from Field Marshal Lord Kitchener,
Secretary of State for War, “Your Country Needs YOU.” (Picture credit.)
#10.
THE HOOPLA! BUCKET. “Unlike Moltke,
who during his brief tenure as Commander in Chief never went to the front
or visited field armies’ headquarters, Joffrey was in constant and
personal contact with his commanders. Placidly ensconced in the back seat
of his car, he would be driven on his rounds at 70 miles an hour by his
appointed private chauffeur, George Bouillot, three times winner of the
Grand Prix auto race.”
#11.
THE DONOR BUCKET. (If
you’re a donor to your church and nonprofit causes, you may have heard
about “donor fatigue.”
But that's nothing compared to battle fatigue!) “The terrible
trampling of French military hopes in the past month had instilled
caution in the hearts of some. Others were as fervent apostles of the
offensive as ever and had an answer for every counsel of caution. Joffre
was present, listening to their arguments recorded by his aide-de-camp,
Captain Muller. ‘Troops at the end of their strength? No matter, they are
Frenchmen and tired of retreating. The moment they hear the order to advance,
they will forget their fatigue.’”
#12.
THE VOLUNTEER BUCKET. In the book’s “Afterword,” one
paragraph is worth reading multiple times. When Germany was close to
capturing Paris, the French military inspired taxi drivers to transport
6,000 troops “to the hard-pressed front.” They did! “Enthusiastically,
the chauffeurs emptied out their passengers, explaining proudly that they
had to ‘go to the battle.’” Proudly, 600 taxis lined up for the
60-kilometer trip (twice!), with each taxi carrying five soldiers, “the last crusade
of the old world,” as Tuchman termed it. (Now in 2025, my gut tells me
that churches and nonprofits could leverage the Volunteer Bucket even
more creatively. Check out these six books.)
#13.
THE CRISIS BUCKET. Picture this. The British Cabinet has
hurriedly assembled at 10 Downing Street in London. Should Britain
declare war on Germany? The ultimatum deadline:
11 p.m.
“They decided to wait. In silence, each encased in his private thoughts.
They sat around the green table in the ill-lit Cabinet room, conscious of
the shadows of those who at other fateful moments had sat there before
them. Eyes watched the clock ticking away the time limit. 'BOOM!' Big Ben struck
the first note of eleven, and each note thereafter sounded to Lloyd
George, who had a Celtic ear for melodrama, like ‘Doom,
doom, doom!’"
View the
full-length movie, The Guns of August (1964, black &
white), on YouTube (1 hour, 40 minutes).
THE CORPORATION
BONUS CONTENT is posted at John Pearson's Buckets Blog.
#14.
THE BOARD BUCKET. The British had adopted khaki uniforms
after the Boer war, and the Germans had changed from Prussian blue to
field-grey, yet in 1912, “French soldiers still wore the same blue coats,
red kepi, and red trousers they had worn in 1830 when rifle fire carried
only two hundred paces…” and armies had no need for concealment. At a
parliamentary hearing, a former War Minister cried, “Eliminate the
red trousers? Never!”
The result? Messimy wrote after the war, “That blind and imbecile attachment
to the most visible of all colors was to have cruel consequences.”
(Boards, councils, and committees also meander into mismanagement. So
when should boards “stay out of the way?” Read Boards That Lead.)
#15.
THE BUDGET BUCKET. No champagne! “Officers complained
because Moltke refused to allow champagne at mess and because fare at the
Kaiser’s table was so meager it had to be supplemented with private
sandwiches after dinner.”
#16.
THE DELEGATION BUCKET. “With characteristic economy Joffre
replied, ‘You are wrong.’ In his opinion it was not for a generalissimo
to explain but to give orders. It was not for a general to think but to
carry out orders. Once a general had received his orders he should carry
them out with a mind at rest, knowing it to be his duty.”
And this: “One of the causes of the debacle . . . was that general
officers would not direct operations from their proper place in the rear
but led from the front; ‘they performed the function of corporals,
not commanders.’”
#17.
THE OPERATIONS BUCKET. The French military’s organizational
structure created an “unbridgeable gulf” between Operations,
Intelligence, and other sections. “All day Troisiéme read the reports,
handed them around, criticized, disputed, and refused to believe them if
they pointed to conclusions that would require the French to modify their
plan of offensive.” (For more, read Operation Mincemeat and watch the movie about
WW2 trickery.)
#18.
THE SYSTEMS BUCKET. The Germans didn’t lead like Napoleon
on a white horse, but envisioned leadership in the field “from a house
with roomy offices…” Barbara Tuchman paints the picture: “Here in a
comfortable chair by a large table the modern commander overlooks the
whole battlefield on a map. From here he telephones inspiring words and
here he receives the reports from army and corps commanders and from
balloons and dirigibles which observe the enemy’s movements.”
However! “Reality marred this happy picture.” And the
“inspiring words” were “never part of [Schlieffen’s] equipment and even
if they had been would have been lost in transmission.” Why? “Belgians
cut telephone and telegraph wires; the powerful Eiffel Tower wireless
station jammed the air waves so that messages came through so garbled
they had to be repeated three or four times before sense could be made of
them.”
#19.
THE PRINTING (aka COMMUNICATIONS) BUCKET. “On that Sunday,
August 30 . . . the day the French government was warned to leave
Paris, England received a shock since known as the ‘Amiens dispatch.’
Headed with initial exaggeration,
‘Fiercest Fight in History,’ it appeared with awful
impact in a special Sunday edition of The
Times on the front page…"
“Subheads proclaimed, ‘Heavy
Losses of British Troops—Mons and Cambrai—Fight Against Severe Odds—Need
for Reinforcements.’ This last phrase was the key;
although the dispatch was to arouse an official storm, provoke a furious
debate in Parliament, and earned a scolding from the Prime Minister as a
‘regrettable exception’ to the ‘patriotic reticence’ of the press as a
whole, it was in fact published with an official purpose."
#20.
THE MEETINGS BUCKET. Does
this sound like your meetings? “Discussion faltered, pauses
grew longer, the embarrassment became painful, and the meeting broke up
without having achieved any agreement from the British for combined
action.”
When the municipal government of Paris was brought under the authority of
the Military Government: “At 10:00 a.m. Gallieni
assembled his military and civil cabinets in a Council of Defense which
was held with everyone standing up and was over by 10:15.” Tuchman adds,
“Documents providing the legal basis were already drawn up and lying on
the table. Gallieni invited each person to sign his name and immediately
declared the Council adjourned. It was the first and last he held.”
THERE'S MUCH MORE! You’ll find
hundreds of poignant quotes, leadership lessons, and mismanagement
examples when you read all of Tuchman’s 640 pages. Robert K. Massie
wrote the foreword to the 2004 paperback. He notes that the author’s hope
was “that people reading her book might take warning, avoid these
mistakes, and do a little better. It was this effort and these lessons
which attracted presidents and prime ministers as well as millions of
ordinary readers.” (Maybe...send
this book to your favorite world leader?)
The Preface, written by Tuchman in an anniversary edition of the book,
includes her startling comment, “There are no passages I would
wish to change.” Perhaps that’s because, as Massie wrote in the
foreword, “One of the paragraphs Barbara Tuchman wrote that summer took
her eight hours to complete and became the most famous passage in all her
work. It is the opening paragraph of The
Guns of August…”
TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on
the title for The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic
About the Outbreak of World War I, by Barbara W.
Tuchman. Listen on Libro (19 hours, 9
minutes).
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) The insights
from The Guns of August
are as fresh as today’s headlines. I follow Tevi Troy’s columns
and have reviewed his books. Read his Wall Street Journal article
from July 2, 2025, "Denial Runs From Egypt in
1967 to Iran Today." The subhead: "Israel’s
adversaries have a long history of suffering humiliation and defeat and
loudly declaring victory.” Troy discusses truth-telling and mentions
“Baghdad Bob” and the Black Knight scene in “Monty Python and the Holy
Grail.” Read his article and then ask your team members: “Are we
gutsy enough to call out denial and the lack of truth-telling—even in our
leaders and board members?"
2)
General Jim Mattis, former U.S. Secretary of Defense,
writes in Call Sign Chaos, “If you haven’t read
hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are
functionally illiterate—you can’t coach and you can’t lead.” What’s your
reading (or listening) plan this summer?
MORE WAR READS! Download the Table of Contents
for Mastering 100 Must-Read Books, by John
Pearson with Jason Pearson, and note the five books in “Part 14:
Leadership & Management at War.” Also, read my review of
the classic 1949 film, Twelve O’Clock High, where Gregory Peck
plays an Air Force general tasked with rejuvenating an exhausted and
demoralized bomber group in World War II.
SECOND READS: Fresh Solutions From Classic Books
You
have changed—and your problems have changed—since you read
this the first time!
Book #21 of
99: Becoming Trader Joe
For your team
meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10
Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by featuring Book #21 of 99
in our new series, “Second Reads.” The big idea: REREAD TO LEAD! Discover how
your favorite books (and articles) still have more to teach you and the
people you’re coaching and mentoring.
Becoming Trader Joe:
How I Did Business
My Way
and Still Beat the
Big Guys
by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri (June 22, 2021)
In this fascinating book, Trader Joe’s
founder, Joe Coulombe
(1930-2020) gifted us with MBA-level thinking in leadership, management,
retailing, economics, history, and humor—all in 288 fast-reading pages.
Imagine Renaissance Man meets Peter Drucker
meets The Galloping Gourmet.
• Read my review
(Issue No. 494, Nov. 11, 2021).
• Order from Amazon.
• Listen on Libro (7
hours, 32 minutes).
• Management Bucket #1 of 20: The Results Bucket.
(Note: The book actually covers all 20 buckets.)
“Hairballs” is the title of Chapter 10—and the first line cautions, “All businesses
have problems.” Coulombe’s favorite management quote is from Tex Thornton
of Litton Industries: “If
all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions.” The
author writes, “Early in my career I learned there are two kinds of
decisions: the ones that are easily reversible and the ones that aren’t.”
CLICK HERE FOR BOOKS BY
JOHN
 
BATTLE READY!
In Chapter 13, "The Crisis Bucket," we quote Peter Drucker:
“Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any
organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend
on the leader: The job of the leader is
to build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high
morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people
trust one another.” (From: The Daily Drucker)
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