Leadership

What Wartime Service Taught These Historic Leaders

What can leaders learn from executives who served their country during wartime? Drawing on a series of case studies, Robert Simons shares lessons from the experiences of Walt Disney, Dwight Eisenhower, and Robert McNamara.

Featuring Robert Simons. By Avery Forman on November 8, 2024.

Walt Disney’s time in Paris during the waning days of World War I helped shape him into a visionary entrepreneur who would ultimately build a beloved international brand. Dwight Eisenhower and Robert McNamara discovered the importance of humility and how to motivate subordinates from their service during military conflicts.

As countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom honor their veterans this month, Harvard Business School Professor Robert Simons reflects on how service during wartime shaped the executive skills of these corporate icons. He has been writing a series of biographical case studies for his MBA class, Changing the World, that includes several protagonists whose management chops are battle-tested.

There’s a discipline in the military that is sometimes lacking in commercial organizations, and [leaders] can get themselves in trouble as a result.

“[These leaders] learned a tremendous amount from the mission focus and discipline that came from the military,” says Simons, a Baker Foundation Professor and Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus. “There is a sense of duty to serve, duty to others, duty to make a difference, and willingness to sacrifice.”

Simons says the command-and-control format and life-or-death pressure of the military impart important lessons fast. “We are often at our best when we are stressed. In business, we call that stress-testing, and in the military, the elite units are constantly stress-testing [people] to ensure readiness, to ensure you’ve got the capability of responding,” he explains. “There’s a discipline in the military that is sometimes lacking in commercial organizations, and [leaders] can get themselves in trouble as a result.”

Simons collaborated on the cases—23 and growing—with HBS Research Assistant Shirley Sun. Here, Simons discusses three leaders whose service left a powerful mark, leading to their own success. Business leaders might learn some important lessons from their experiences, he says.

Dwight Eisenhower: Welcome input to remain competitive

The son of a dairy worker on a rail stop in western Kansas, Eisenhower felt passionate about military history and football from a young age. He was determined to escape his father’s line of work in the local creamery and applied for officer training, receiving a nomination to the US Military Academy at West Point.

When a knee injury cut his college football career short, Eisenhower jumped to being a “cheerleader,” gathering the Corps of Cadets before games to rally their support and studying football strategy with such intensity that he was ultimately asked to coach the academy’s junior varsity team.

I do think in successful businesses there is both a sense of strategy and how you allocate resources to get the maximum impact.

His humility allowed Eisenhower to play a long game—working under other officers and learning how to bring out the best in people. In a training camp in Georgia during World War I, Eisenhower created a miniature battlefield replica and slept out in the open with his men as they practiced their strategic maneuvers. In that early officer role, he adopted a leadership strategy that he would carry all the way to the White House: He asked his subordinates to share their criticisms of the camp and their suggestions for improving it.

Appointed to work under the Army’s top officer, Douglas MacArthur, Eisenhower immersed himself in a detailed analysis of World War II as it began in Europe and Asia. His competitive spirit infused how he approached the grueling, 18-hour days: “My ambition in the Army was to make everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to other duty,” Eisenhower wrote at the time.

Simons says Eisenhower’s humility was evident during the D-Day invasion of Normandy, a bold maneuver that would ultimately turn the course of the war in the allies’ favor. Eisenhower prepared to win, Simons says, but kept a second speech ready to deliver to his men if the gambit failed.

The rest is history: Eisenhower went on to become president of the US, using the skills he developed in the military to lead the nation. He left office more popular than when he started. And during his tenure, Eisenhower leaned on “the Gang,” a group of corporate leaders who had become advisers, to bring their business skills into his administration, saying, “I must learn the value of a dollar.”

“Military is all around preparedness for war and the ability to compete successfully against an enemy,” Simons says. “I do think in successful businesses there is both a sense of strategy and how you allocate resources to get the maximum impact, and a very healthy respect for competition to boost your game.”

Walt Disney: Take time to laugh, even under stress

An avid cartoonist, Walt Disney was also drawn to the ethos of service and patriotism during World War I. In 1917, at age 16, he told his parents he would be enlisting in the Army, saying, “I don’t want my children asking me, ‘Why weren’t you in the war? Were you a slacker?’”

He quickly learned he was too young to serve, so he joined the Red Cross and went overseas as an ambulance driver. In Paris, he found purpose in chauffeuring military command officers around the city to meetings. Disney brought to this endeavor a keen sense of fun and theater: He covered his green military vehicle in cartoon figures, making it a moving beacon for the American entrepreneurial spirit while having some fun amid a bleak war.

Disney had this mission of bringing happiness and joy to people. You saw this in Disney from a very young age.

He also used his time in war-torn Paris to turn his artistic skills into an entrepreneurial hustle, working with a friend to turn new German helmets into “war souvenirs” by painting them to look battle-worn. The rest is business lore: He never gave up on his cartoons, working relentlessly to improve them, ultimately turning out Mickey Mouse and creating the Disney enterprise.

“Disney had this mission of bringing happiness and joy to people. You saw this in Disney from a very young age,” says Simons. “His entrepreneurial flair, very visibly seen on the streets of Paris, highlighted his playfulness and his feeling of duty to serve during that time.”

Robert McNamara: Make sure the numbers are accurate

Widely criticized for his by-the-numbers approach to the Vietnam War as US Secretary of Defense, Bob McNamara’s pioneering use of statistics during World War II and leadership skills at Ford Motor left a mixed legacy, says Simons.

Brainy and drawn to economics and logic, at age 24, McNamara was the youngest professor ever hired at HBS, shortly after getting his business degree there in 1939. When HBS temporarily shut down to support the war effort during World War II, McNamara was asked to design and teach a statistical control class for Army officers. Unable to serve because of poor eyesight, McNamara wanted to be close to the action in 1943 and helped man the US Office of Statistical Control in London, where he applied the statistical methods he had honed at HBS to monitor troop and supply movements, measure the effectiveness of bombing raids, and track the number of US casualties.

After the war ended, McNamara’s military connections brought him to Ford, where he used the skills he’d learned during the war to quickly move up the ranks. There, he followed the numbers more than his emotions and grew the business under strict financial controls. McNamara had held the top job at Ford for only two months when President John F. Kennedy tapped him to run the Department of Defense. McNamara agreed, saying at the time that he wanted to “bring efficiency to a $40 billion enterprise.”

With the US supporting South Vietnam, McNamara made it clear during his first trip there that he wanted to see numbers improve in categories such as guns on the battlefield, attacks against the North, and enemies captured and killed. But the pressure to hit the numbers caused his commanders to report falsely positive figures that made the military appear more successful than it was, with tragic results Simons says. McNamara realized the problem too late; he lost the job and went on to successfully lead the World Bank, but not before lamenting his “overconfidence” in the numbers.

“On the plus side, McNamara did tremendous good in terms of helping the organizations he led improve efficiency, but on the negative side, he misused those same tools in a way that was very problematic in the military,” says Simons. It’s important to “learn as much from your failures as from your successes” and challenge the hubris that “you have all the answers and can compress everything into summary statistics.”

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What Wartime Service Taught These Historic Leaders

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