World War II (1939-1945): Strategies must reflect their unique circumstances But even this seemingly reasonable conclusion is dangerous to apply blindly in every future conflict-as becomes clear only a few decades later, in the lead up to the second World War.” “So you should be more patient, more pliant, more forgiving when conflict has the potential to escalate. “You might take the lesson that, if people are too quick to be aggressive, too quick to push back on others, that will lead to conflict,” Malhotra says.
World War I (1914-1918): Aggression often begets aggressionĪ political crisis sparked by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand led to escalating mobilizations, trench warfare, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and a peace treaty that punished Germany. He says this war also demonstrates the potential impact of leadership transition on strategy, and the pitfalls of negotiated agreements that do not properly account for the interests of each side. He says it also illustrates the need for balancing perseverance and flexibility when implementing a strategy. Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE): Successful agreements support both sidesįought in three phases between Athens and Sparta, the Peloponnesian War featured a failed peace treaty and ended with Sparta’s victory and the eclipse of Athens as a power and a democracy.įor Malhotra, the war raises the question of why some conflicts seem inevitable, even when rivals try to avoid them, and how those value-destroying conflicts might have been averted. Here are some observations from his course’s case studies: The wars Malhotra examines in his “War & Peace” course illustrate the hazards of drawing lessons from too few salient experiences, of failing to properly diagnose the causes of past failures, and the critical importance of seeing a conflict from the other side’s point of view. The book is a science fiction thriller in which a young Cambridge historian is called to Washington to advise the United States president to avert a cataclysmic war.Ĭonsider a conflict from an opponent’s viewpoint It even inspired him to write his fourth book and his first novel, The Peacemaker’s Code, released this month.
The process is crucial in business as well as war and diplomacy because, as Malhotra says in his course syllabus, “being smart and well-intentioned is not enough.”įor Malhotra, who has taught negotiation and other subjects at HBS since 2002, the “War & Peace” course stands out as a favorite. “You try to draw out different principles,” and apply that understanding to the unique challenges you confront. “You don’t want to copy and paste the strategy and tactics” from one war to the next, says Malhotra, the Eli Goldston Professor of Business Administration. So business leaders would do well to consider the cautionary failures and promising successes on the world’s battlefields as they pursue long-term success. After all, leadership challenges, strategic choices, and high-stakes negotiations are constants not only in conflicts among nations, but in the business world, too, he points out. While it may sound like a social studies course, these wars offer an array of lessons for corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. Last spring, he took those lessons into the classroom with a new course, “War & Peace: The Lessons of History for Leadership, Strategy, Negotiation, Policy, and Humanity.” The course provides a detailed exploration of the successes and failures of leadership, strategy, and negotiations in several conflicts, ranging from the ancient Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta, to World War I and World War II, to the Korean War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Along with studying wars, Malhotra has advised nations with intractable armed conflicts, “to help them find a way forward,” he says. Outside the classroom, Harvard Business School Professor Deepak Malhotra’s abiding interest is war and peace–how wars begin and end, how they could have been avoided, and what lessons can be learned from them.