Small Unit Leadership by Dandridge Malone

Not quite sure why I picked this out for my Amazon list...I think it's because I was trying to avoid rubbishy guru driven leadership books but not wanting to go quite academic about it. Indeed I've done quite a lot of 'leadership' training over the years, some of it good, some of it bad and most of it irrelevant.

I think part of it was being in a mass melee last summer and towards the end of the four hour engagement seeing our lines break after a disastrous spell poorly handled by the field commanders of a mixed group of units. It was the first time I saw a contingent properly move from coherence to panic to breaking. I stood in the middle of it and found myself powerless as around me (and a couple of others) an entire body of several hundred people simply collapsed and ran - for no directly discernible reason and in a way that cost us dearly. There was a paucity of leadership on the field that day - particularly towards the last third of the engagement but that didn't explain (well not in a straight line) why the field was over run.

This book made me both laugh out loud and carries with it some pretty interesting ideas and thoughts about leadership. Laughs are provided because I'm a civilian reading a book for soldiers and the language is truly meant for them and not me. Setting that aside (and that it's thirty years old) it's a pretty decent practical manual for the basics of leading people in achieving task oriented activity. I emphasise the practical nature of the guide - it refers frequently to more scholarly work and makes no bones about it being a manual for use in the field. That's fine because it's often practice that's more difficult than theory.

For instance, we all know it's helpful to encourage the willing but unable but it can be a great reminder on easy ways to actually do that effectively.

I read a review of this by a Major in the British Army and he was pretty sniffy about it (even down to an ad hominem attack on the author's competence). I don't think that's fair - the writer knows his audience and packs some pretty dense ideas into this book - smuggled in in the guise of a plain talking CO trying to talk to his officers. Missing that and the practical nature of the text is a shame as I would probably recommend this to people leading small teams who have goals to achieve and who are under pressure, part of a larger organisation or even on their own.